Kurt Cobain’s story is the story of a generation. It is the story of a renegade generation, having no home, constantly wandering from one place to the other finding solace in art and drugs to the point that all is lost but years of anguish reduced to art. This story is more than just drugs and music. It is an insight into the hollow blindness of this world that refuses to see Van Gogh that refuses to see Kurt Cobain, which loves Plath more only after she kills herself in a spectacular fashion.
Kurt Donald Cobain was born in a happy and loving family in Aberdeen to Donald and Wendy Cobain. The smiling face of a young Cobain still does rounds, as he was always up and ready to embrace life. He always had an inclination towards arts as he would draw at a young age; listen to the Beatles along with his mom. Kurt was a huge Beatles fan. He would sing along to their songs when he was two years old. As a child, he was drawn to the drums. Along with his grandfather, he would bring out the pans and the spoons and they would beat it as if playing drums. He learnt to play the piano too. His happy childhood could not stay long, as his parents got divorced thus starting the downward spiral of a young child who was so carefree and happy into someone who started being quiet and refused to go out. As a child, Kurt could not understand the fights over money. It is difficult to accept something you can’t understand and thus, after having lived for three months with his mother, he moved out as she started dating- unable to accept her decision. He moved in with his father and things had started seeming good. He started being happy receiving all the love and attention of his father. He made his father promise that he would never remarry, and Donald without understanding the gravity of a child’s words promised him the same. So finally, when one day he brought the stepmother along with her two children home, Kurt was distraught. He was no longer the centre of attraction. This change hit Kurt’s life like an oncoming truck and he ended up on a path where there was no return. He started bunking school and smoking weed. He did things just to rebel against his dad. His father wanted him to be on a wrestling team, so he would go into the trials and lose just to spite his dad. Things took a happy turn on his fourteenth birthday. It started looking better as his uncle asked him to choose his birthday present- a bicycle or a guitar.
Kurt chose the guitar and that is how it all began, the music and the journey of a man who will forever live in the the history of music.
Somewhere in the house, the sounds of Kurt playing guitar still resound like memories from the past. Kurt had found his outlet, for all the anger and the things he couldn’t understand, he would just keep playing the guitar. For once, he had found an identity. Like a perfect sequence of dominos, that fall one after the other for the end game- Kurt met Buzz Osborne, also known as King Buzzo in high school. Now King Buzzo had his own band The Melvins which played punk rock and like any fairytale, he was the one who introduced perhaps the greatest ever musician of his generation to punk rock. I wonder if he knew who he was mentoring at that time. Kurt learned a great deal from Buzz and slowly punk rock became Kurt’s all consuming passion. He would listen to it all day long. He would not go to school or pay attention to his studies. All he wanted to do was listen to music and make his own songs. This led to him slowly realizing that he won’t be able to graduate, and thus he gave up his education completely. At that time, there was nothing that could stand between him and his love for music.
Someone wasn’t happy though and that was Kurt’s mom. She didn’t see his genius at that point and asked him to graduate and get a job or leave her house. This was the beginning of Kurt’s nomadic life as one day, not being able to get a job, he found all his stuff lying in the lawn outside the house. That was final blow to Kurt’s life at home and an angry Kurt took all his stuff and started wandering from one couch to another, often sleeping outside on the roads, like a homeless man.
Then, the second domino fell- a carefully orchestrated plan of destiny. Guess who he met? The name we are going to hear a lot in the coming years. He met Krist Novoselic. Krist didn’t just give him a home but a new direction to his wandering life. It was as if everything had aligned perfectly- two incredibly talented men, looking for a band end up together in one home. They started playing together- Krist on the bass and Kurt on vocals and guitar, and in all they were called a name we all will hear for ages to come, a band called Nirvana. The journey had just begun. The two had no idea what was to come.
With the advent of Nirvana, it was as if Kurt had found his purpose in life. He provided the artistic vision, the leadership, and the base to build Nirvana on. He was really demanding. He didn’t want anything to go wrong- from the practice every day to the rotating drummers, Nirvana had begun making songs. Though, music was not the only love in Kurt’s life as he met Tracy Marander at a punk rock show in Olympia. They liked the same music, had same friends and soon Kurt moved in with her. Life was great. She believed in Kurt, and his vision, paid his bills, took care of him and on days would even feed him as he forgot to eat. In the meantime, Nirvana was rising too- doing shows at colleges and small gigs. Although they didn’t have any money and in order to break through, they needed a demo. Kurt took a job as a janitor and soon they raised 152 dollars and 77 cents. No one in the whole fucking world knew at that point what these 152 dollars would amount to, as they recorded their first demo for six hours straight. The studio guy Jack who was an assistant producer, passed on their tape to Sub Pop. Now Sub Pop was a small Indie label at that time that was on the rise just like Nirvana and they liked what they heard, but before offering a contract to Nirvana, they placed a challenge. The challenge was the brutal Seattle crowd- one performance to decide it all.
On April 24, 1988 Nirvana played their first show at the Vogue Club in Seattle. Kurt was incredibly nervous before the show, to the extent that he was throwing up all over. They got up on the stage and could do little to impress the audience. Only 20 people showed up. Kurt just went backstage and kept on repeating- “We sucked” the whole time holding his head.
But there was one man in the crowd who saw the genius- Jonathan from Sub Pop. They got their fucking deal. Their first song- Love Buzz was to be a single. Kurt was so excited about the song that he would stop the car at the gas station on his way to Seattle and call the radio station to play his song. He used to keep smiling the entire time the song was on. It soon became a local favorite. Nirvana was rising. Kurt was not the only one listening to Love Buzz. All things were happy but Kurt had no idea what he was getting into at that time. Things were going to get really bad.
Sub pop capitalised on Nirvana’s growing popularity, and brought out their first record- Bleach. Bleach sold 30,000 copies. At the same time, Nirvana’s star was shining bright as in the streets of Seattle, a new form of music was emerging which was called Grunge. It was metal. It was rock. It was a mixture of all. Nirvana were stars of grunge. In two years, Nirvana had seen moderate success and the next step was to hit the roads of Europe. Kurt was so happy but he had no idea that fame would come at a price. They did a tour of Europe performing 36 shows in 42 days in a 10 man van with another Sub Pop band called Tad. Sub Pop neither had money nor a vision. There was no tour support and one could easily see the signs that Kurt was not cut out for this life. As happy he was leaving for this trip, during the trip he would just sit in dark rooms staring at walls. His stomach would pain and he would get exhausted fast. It was like beating an iron rod with a hammer. Kurt was the rod. It was nearing its breaking point and on the 32nd show in Rome, it did. The show was not coming out great. Their songs sounded like crap and Kurt just couldn’t take it. He broke down on stage and started banging his guitar in frenzy. He tore apart the drums and beat his head against the speakers. He started screaming and howling. The situation went down too bad too fast. He climbed the stack of 30 feet tall speakers and threatened to jump and kill himself. The band tried to calm him down and get him down but the crowd had gone mad shouting “Jump. Jump. Jump.” Eventually they got him down, but the cracks had started showing. We could see that not everything was alright with Kurt. There was depression hiding behind perfectionism.
He survived the last 5 shows and returned to Olympia to Tracy, but the girl he had sorely missed in Europe seemed like a stranger. We don’t know it was the changes in Kurt or something else, but they broke up after 3 years.
It was not long after Kurt found Toby Vale- a drummer for a riot punk band Bikini Kill. There is one thing Toby will always be known for, and we will soon come to know about it.
Toby Vale was something of what you call a poet’s muse. She was a drummer. She was the quintessential independent, rebel, riot girl who challenged Kurt and this feeling completely took over Kurt. He was obsessed with her. But like all tragedies, they broke up after a few months and Kurt fell into severe depression. There was something shining in all this darkness though. All this emotional tumult, ended up in Kurt turning it into music. It was during this time that Kurt wrote a song that needs no introduction- Smells like Teen Spirit. We all heard the song but never knew the story behind it. So when Kurt was dating Toby, during one of their parties, Kathleen Hall- Toby’s band mate spray painted on Kurt’s bedroom wall that he smelled like teen spirit. Teen Spirit was a women’s deodorant at that time. He could never forget the words and he went on to write the song for Toby. Although, in all of this music wasn’t the only way he was coping with his heartbreak and in 1990, he started doing heroin. Kurt’s life was taking a tragic turn and no one was there to see that. Heavy drug use and severe depression had clawed their way into Kurt’s life and were even strangling the one thing he loved- his music.
In 1991, they landed a major label- Geffen Records and found their first permanent drummer and the last piece to Nirvana- Dave Grohl. When Smells like Teen Spirit came out, it exploded really huge. It was everywhere, in every corner. Kurt had put his finger on the precise spot of what the generation was going through. The riotous video, the anger, the angst- it was the recipe for music that resounds with generations to come. It topped the MTV charts, toppling Michael Jackson from the throne. Kurt became a symbol for the generation. Everyone was dressing like him. They were copying his hair style, his looks, everything. But Kurt had no idea- phasing in and out on his drugs. He didn’t even remember half his life. While the nation adored Kurt, Kurt had found his object of adoration- Courtney Love. She was the lead singer of the punk group called The Hole. They were like two destructive lovers, bonding over drugs and childhood trauma.
Times were changing. With Kurt’s growing fame, the media closed in on everything he did and soon his drug problem was not limited to himself. Kurt began to hate the glaring lights, and the world. Kurt and Courtney were the king and queen of pop culture. Their photos did rounds in newspapers, magazines. Everyone wanted to know everything about them. They were always on drugs. Things took a turn when Courtney became pregnant. They married and decided to stop doing drugs. While Courtney was able to, perhaps because she was the one carrying the child, Kurt was facing a hard time. He admitted himself into rehab at the same hospital where Courtney was supposed to give birth. In all of this, there were still moments of joy and the day their daughter was born, Courtney dragged Kurt from the Chemical Dependency Ward right to her room to see the birth. Things were going great. The only times Kurt was really happy was with his daughter.
But soon, things took an awful turn. An article in the Vanity Fair allegedly claimed that the couple took drugs and the child was not taken care of. The Social Services came in and took their daughter away. It was after seven months of legal battle that Kurt got his daughter back- the only daughter who made him happy. The fame and the cameras were taking their toll. Kurt would often snap at journalists and end up in fights. Meanwhile Global came out with an article that allegedly claimed that Courtney took drugs while she was pregnant. All of this just wasn’t what Kurt wanted. The media just wouldn’t stop. Kurt and Courtney did interviews as a happy family. They wanted to be seen as one, really desperately but the past just wouldn’t let go.
The third album, In Utero came out. While Never Mind was Toby’s record, In Utero had Courtney written all over it. The cover had a heart shaped box in its symbol that Courtney had gifted to Kurt. Nirvana was reaching heights of stardom, and finally they were called to Kurt’s dream- MTV Unplugged. They had to do an acoustic performance, something very different from grunge. Kurt was taking it very seriously and was incredibly nervous. During his last song- “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?”, at the end, he just looked down, took a breath as if a man who had finally done it. He had been there and performed his most beautiful performance. He looked up and screamed the last two words and that was the first time he was proud of himself. He was asked to perform an encore later on but he refused to. He said, “Nothing can top that.” He believed that people are going to see Nirvana differently after Unplugged. There was a certain delicacy in him, of a man really trying to be different but was unable to. Kurt was in a freefall. When In Utero came out, all of it just accelerated. The tour, the glaring lights, the large crowds- he couldn’t just take it. He didn’t want the fame. He went deeper into drug abuse. This is the point in the story when music recedes and heroin becomes the focus of the story.
In a hotel in Rome, he took 50 Rophynol pills along with alcohol and wrote a three page suicide note. When Courtney found him, he was extremely pale, bleeding from the nose. He went into a coma for 20 hrs but survived. It was all over the news. Kurt had tried to kill himself. It was him trying to kill himself, that people really started taking notice and considering it a problem but it was too late perhaps. Nirvana had to cancel the tour. He was sent back home, talked to by all his close friends but all of it fell on deaf ears. He was sent to rehab but jumped the wall after two days and remained on the run. When he finally did resurface, time and drugs had done their work. It was too late.
On April 8th, 1994, he killed himself with a shotgun. He had ingested a lethal dose of heroin before killing himself. With Kurt, an era just died. It was silence. The original title of In Utero was I Hate Myself and I Want to Die.
On April 10th, mourning was held and Courtney read out his suicide note to a large crowd.
He had written- “It’s better to burn out than fade away.”
Kurt’s story just leaves me numb for a while. It seems like something we still don’t understand where we can’t see depression behind the glaring lights of stardom. Kurt’s smiling face as a child and his broken voice, taking deep breaths at the end of Unplugged still make me smile, that in this life dominated by drugs and tragedy, there were still moments of happiness. I don’t know if anything could have saved him or not. With great genius often comes a numbing sadness, like a trade we do with art. At the end, for all that Kurt was, he still lives in us defining generation after generation and if I could say something I would say, Kathleen was right. He does smell like Teen Spirit.
