He died on this day in 1994.

Thoughts on his life and/or music?

he might still be around making music in some form if Nevermind had never happened. i don't get the sense that someone as heartfelt and insightful he was is built to handle super-stardom at the level that he and that band reached in such a short amount of time. i know alot of people pick at him for biting the Pixies and the Melvins, but pretty much every great work of art is greatly influenced by something else so while i didn't think very highly of Nirvana when they were out. (my mind was too segregated at that time to appreciate his talents.) i think his sense of songwriting and expression makes him one of the more noteworthy artists to come around in the last 30 years or so.

RIP

when she told me.

Whenever I listen to Nirvana's Unplugged LP, it gives me goosebumps.

RIP Kurt Cobain.


*CROCKA*

word booty.

HSUBAKCITS

www.smokingsection.net



http://i140.photobucket.com/albums/r9/chowyunskinny/Gold%20Chef/iron_chef.jpg

well actually it might've been the day after he died cuz that's when his body was discovered.

Anyway, I remember all the tvs in the bar were on mute but they were all on different channels and each one of them had pics of Kurt on it. I knew something was up so I ran downstairs to the SAm Goodys (we didn't have Internet yet in those days lol) and asked the cashier "did something happen to Kurt Cobain?" and he told me everything. I was crushed.

I was coming out of a club with two girls I knew and one of them mentioned "what a shame it was that guy had killed himself" ('Teen Spirit' had been the last song of the night).

Freaked me the FUCK out.

Huge talent.

RIP

What the blood claaat ???

I mean the follow-up to Nevermind was a disappointment to some (I'm think personally Kurt loved that), but they got back some cred and probably even some new fans with the Unplugged performance. Also he was talking a lot around that time about wanting to grow as an artist, such as do more outside work (Hole), possibly end Nirvana, but most importantly become more than grunge or what grunge was known as at that time (Comparing to what he wanted to do with how the Beatles went from just pop to so much more).

Not that you don't wonder where most musicians that die young would have gone musically but Kurt especially since he was seen as the voice of generation x and was never comfortable doing what was expected.

THE BEST EVER.. LOVED HIM.. cried so hard when he killed himself...
what a loss
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Be Good or Be Good @ It..
Peace...
Magnificent001

:^/

that Kurt Cobain was actually among us & in the public eye, probably because his existence bookended my adolescence with near-perfect symmetry (blew up in '91 then was gone by spring of '94 when I was graduating high school).

I recall where I was the first time I saw the video for 'Smells Like Teen Spirit'.....Buffalo, New York at my great aunt's house over Thanksgiving & they introduced it on 120 Minutes as a World Premiere sometime after midnight. The rest of the fam was sleeping upstairs in a small house with a TV by the stairs in the living room where I was sleeping on a pullout couch (strategically so I'd be able to stay up late & watch TV). As the song kicked in I started feeling compelled to turn the volumne up slightly, then slightly more, then MORE until halfway through the song I'm sure it was at a level that would be considered 'blasting' in a quiet house. Soon after my old man was rushing to the top of the stairs in his Jockeys yelling at me to turn it down & go to sleep. Damage was already done though, that song was already ingrained in me from that point forward (even if overplay has dulled the power it once had).

The day that January when Kurt OD'd in Rome & was rumored to be dead I remember walking the halls in between classes & getting actually taunted about it by a couple of the dyed-in-the-wool classic-rockists who were constantly battling me (who knew as much or more about their Zep/Stones as them) on any rap or modern-day rock I was checking for......'You're boy's fucking dead, Bomb!' dude was shouting at me & I didn't know whether to haul off & punch him in the face, laugh it off not believing or slip out somewhere to go find out for real. Luckily it turned out not to be his fate (at least not right then but there was always a weird sense of time-running-short inevitability along with his seeming invincibility, like a rock version of Pac in some way).

Him not dying in Rome led to us being able to see the now-famous Unplugged episode, which I recall watching with my mom (a huge Beatles fan) who for the first time could actually make sense of the noisy shit she'd been hearing & the band I'd been championing during my borderline juvenille-delinquent high school existence. I recall being proud that on some level his talent was visible to old folks but at the same time almost scared/put-off by it, same way I don't know how to react to the kids who came later & swear by that Unplugged album which to me was a nice different look but really didn't sum up the loud/abrasive/confrontational essence of the band best displayed in stuff like their '91 Reading Festival or New Year's Eve Live & Loud performances.

I plainly remember where I was in April of '94 when I found out he was dead for real like it happened yesterday. I was at the Hallahan house house in Dungarvan, Ireland during spring break from school (one of my best friends growing up was originally from Ireland & through his old man we ended up gettin hooked-up with free Air Lingus plane tickets plus put up by his aunt/uncle in their place with four of us Americans plus his 12 cousins).

For those unfamiliar, Irish people are the biggest collection of bullshitters of any ethnicity on earth (for example earlier in that week his Uncle Dano had fooled my friend John into thinking he'd won the Irish lottery by reading the numbers off the ticket he was holding-out in too-plain view while pretending to read the results from a newspaper......he let us jump around the kitchen thinking we'd won a million pounds or so for a good five minutes before telling us).

So when my boy's cousin Audrey came up to me & said 'Bomb, ya man is dead' I already had my guard up without even fully grasping who she was referring to yet. But I did against my better judgement ask for clarification & in that mellifluous Irish accent that at that moment sounded menacing she said 'ya man, Kurt Cobain. He's dead. Shot heemself in the fooking head with a shotgun!'.

I didn't buy it but at the same time felt compelled to head downstairs from the upstairs bedroom area (where the rooms all looked like barracks because as I mentioned they had 14 kids, plus were putting up four of us U.S. visitors) to the kitchen. Auntie Cellie was the one person in the family who didn't seem full of shit so I came downstairs to ask her & as she labored over a dinner fit for an army she seemed to acknowledge that what Audrey was saying was true, I still insisted they put on the radio & as it came on they were playing "Something In The Way".....uh-oh, bad sign. When that song finally 'hmmmmm'-d out some BBC host came on to acknowledge that they'd confirmed via Seattle police that the body found on the estate dead of a self-inflicted shotgun wound was in fact Kurt Cobain.

My man was, indeed, really dead this time.

The rest of events that followed that spring/summer of 1994 (that night taking full advantage of the ability to drink booze at 18 to a level that left me throwing while up in a gutter by a curb after a late-night post-pub grub session in which I carwalked for a full two blocks of cobblestone streets, the weird Courtney Love reading of the suicide note over a PA system to a park full of mourners, coming back to the states at the end of that week to regale all the folks who'd never left the country with tales of Irish countryside, the girl I'd been in love with for the prior year finally finally acquiescing to my advances, graduation, cop chases, clashes with the folks over my then completely unforseeable & fucked-up future, etc) went by in a surreal haze that sort of runs together but amzingly several of those little moments involving a self-loathing rock-icon from Aberdeen, Washington stand out.

I don't know what any of that really means. I don't even really listen to Nirvana much anymore (or at least I didn't for a long stretch, now I can sorta go back & enjoyed the shit out of the Bleach reissue last year), nor is it a group I even feel I could ever objectively comment on or divorce myself from the personal enough to evaluate their musical merits.

But this day 18 years ago was sort of the end & the beginning of a lot of things (hard to believe I'm now a 36-year-old posting this from my own office in LA on a hip-hop website started by the Philly cats on Kurt's old label who I was going to see play the Middle East on Chestnut to a crowd of a couple hundred or so shortly after this).

I'm sure a lot of people who are passionate about music have those same sort of post-markers from their adolescence (when music is usually at its most heightened level of importance because everything thing is more dramatic/important/etc when you're a restless teenager trying to navigate that awkward terrain between childhood & adulthood) but the way Kurt Cobain's time in the public eye so closely shadowed the tenure of my own adolescence puts this dude in a space that no other artist will ever be able to occupy.

And for that fact I'm both slightly saddened (the way thinking about how young you used to be gives you that wave of nostalgia & longing) but at the same time incredibly relieved because while it's cool to experience/be-enthralled by music/musical-idols it's also a completely ridiculous & sometimes dangerously false premise to truly invest that much emotion in people that you will never actually know.

The guy who penned a song called 'I Hate Myself & Want To Die' seemed to know get that more than anyone while at the same time end up falling prey to the same old rock-mythology bullshit.

I guess such is the defeatist dichotomy of a man who coined the phrase 'practice makes perfect but nobody's perfect so why practice?'.

Oh well.....18 years later right/wrong or in between, that's still my man.

RIP Kurt C.

.

You're a talented writer man.

>You're a talented writer man.

strangely enough, this is almost exactly how I got clowned when Layne Staley died. I was an unabashed Alice in Chains stan and everyone knew it.

somehow made 34/35 seem reasonably old (sorta like ODB) because the later years of inactivity/addction had sorta primed you for it.

I remember having a bugged-out conversation (back in that same era as what I spoke on in the above Cobain stuff) with an ex-junkie who worked at the local seafood market where I part-time-gigged sometimes during high school for cash, in the back deveining shrimp standing up for 8-10 hours at a time listening to FM radio.

Dude went into a monologue explaining to me why Dirt was 'such a heroin album' that he seemed to be almost relapsing while explaining it with that shrimp-cleaning tool in his hand. I could tell just from the look in his eye & creepy grin on his face that he had been to some places I would never visit for fear of not being able to leave.

But anyway, back to Layne, I could never quite get with Cantrell's stuff after that because it didn't have *that voice*. Dude had an almost otherworldy haunt to his vocals that I've never really heard anyone else be able to do despite many attempts.

I loved most of their harder hits (Man In The Box, Would, Rooster) but a joint like 'Nutshell' cuts even deeper for me if in the right moment.

"If I can't be my own, I'd feel better dead" is one of those "no matter how much loot I get I'm staying in the projects, forever" or "hope I die before I get old" bold-faced declaratations that can either become self-parody or self-fulfilling prophecy for an artist later down the line depending on how their lives play out.....but in that moment, they're all delivered with conviction.

Man, ol boy was onto something with his synopsis of "Dirt". The lyrics on some of those cuts like "Rain When I Die", "Down in a Hole", "Sickman", "Junkman" and "Dirt". Also, you're dead on with that lyric you quoted. "Nutshell" is my favorite AIC song. I have the Unplugged DVD and I prolly watch it twice a week. It was an amazing performance, but at times it's hard to watch for me. The applause from the crowd when the guys came out one by one for the performance of Nutshell and the roar when Layne walked out, to Layne forgetting the lyrics to "Sludge Factory", to him looking generally frail and sick and singing kinda funny becasue he had no front teeth. It makes up the beauty and ugliness of that whole show.

>Man, ol boy was onto something with his synopsis of "Dirt".
>The lyrics on some of those cuts like "Rain When I Die", "Down
>in a Hole", "Sickman", "Junkman" and "Dirt". Also, you're
>dead on with that lyric you quoted. "Nutshell" is my favorite
>AIC song. I have the Unplugged DVD and I prolly watch it
>twice a week. It was an amazing performance, but at times
>it's hard to watch for me. The applause from the crowd when
>the guys came out one by one for the performance of Nutshell
>and the roar when Layne walked out, to Layne forgetting the
>lyrics to "Sludge Factory", to him looking generally frail and
>sick and singing kinda funny becasue he had no front teeth.
>It makes up the beauty and ugliness of that whole show.
>
Yup, recorded at the Brooklyn Academy of Music where three years later I saw Questlove lead a band featuring The Roots plus Vernon Reid & others perform 'Party At The End of Time: A Tribute To Prince's 1999' where they covered the whole 1999 album with a different lead singer for each joint (including Joan Osborne on Little Red Corvette, Prince Bee on Free, Corey Glover on Lady Cab Driver & Bilal on International Lover).......after that show Young Bomb (jaw protruding from an E pill ingested earlier) saw Kamal outside & said 'Yo Klangskwad! (old OKP's know that reference). 'That was the funkiest orchestra ever constructed' to which he laughed & said 'thanks brotha' while I'm sure hoping to God his ride would get there already.

But back to Layne, yeah he was in rough shape already by then, I remember much being made of those gloves he rocked for that with the fingers open (which was apparently to hide needle marks, never knew if that was actually true, it could go either way).

>that Kurt Cobain was actually among us & in the public eye,
>probably because his existence bookended my adolescence with
>near-perfect symmetry (blew up in '91 then was gone by spring
>of '94 when I was graduating high school).
>
>I recall where I was the first time I saw the video for
>'Smells Like Teen Spirit'.....Buffalo, New York at my great
>aunt's house over Thanksgiving & they introduced it on 120
>Minutes as a World Premiere sometime after midnight. The rest
>of the fam was sleeping upstairs in a small house with a TV by
>the stairs in the living room where I was sleeping on a
>pullout couch (strategically so I'd be able to stay up late &
>watch TV). As the song kicked in I started feeling compelled
>to turn the volumne up slightly, then slightly more, then MORE
>until halfway through the song I'm sure it was at a level that
>would be considered 'blasting' in a quiet house. Soon after my
>old man was rushing to the top of the stairs in his Jockeys
>yelling at me to turn it down & go to sleep. Damage was
>already done though, that song was already ingrained in me
>from that point forward (even if overplay has dulled the power
>it once had).
>
>The day that January when Kurt OD'd in Rome & was rumored to
>be dead I remember walking the halls in between classes &
>getting actually taunted about it by a couple of the
>dyed-in-the-wool classic-rockists who were constantly battling
>me (who knew as much or more about their Zep/Stones as them)
>on any rap or modern-day rock I was checking for......'You're
>boy's fucking dead, Bomb!' dude was shouting at me & I didn't
>know whether to haul off & punch him in the face, laugh it off
>not believing or slip out somewhere to go find out for real.
>Luckily it turned out not to be his fate (at least not right
>then but there was always a weird sense of time-running-short
>inevitability along with his seeming invincibility, like a
>rock version of Pac in some way).
>
>Him not dying in Rome led to us being able to see the
>now-famous Unplugged episode, which I recall watching with my
>mom (a huge Beatles fan) who for the first time could actually
>make sense of the noisy shit she'd been hearing & the band I'd
>been championing during my borderline juvenille-delinquent
>high school existence. I recall being proud that on some level
>his talent was visible to old folks but at the same time
>almost scared/put-off by it, same way I don't know how to
>react to the kids who came later & swear by that Unplugged
>album which to me was a nice different look but really didn't
>sum up the loud/abrasive/confrontational essence of the band
>best displayed in stuff like their '91 Reading Festival or New
>Year's Eve Live & Loud performances.
>
>I plainly remember where I was in April of '94 when I found
>out he was dead for real like it happened yesterday. I was at
>the Hallahan house house in Dungarvan, Ireland during spring
>break from school (one of my best friends growing up was
>originally from Ireland & through his old man we ended up
>gettin hooked-up with free Air Lingus plane tickets plus put
>up by his aunt/uncle in their place with four of us Americans
>plus his 12 cousins).
>
>For those unfamiliar, Irish people are the biggest collection
>of bullshitters of any ethnicity on earth (for example earlier
>in that week his Uncle Dano had fooled my friend John into
>thinking he'd won the Irish lottery by reading the numbers off
>the ticket he was holding-out in too-plain view while
>pretending to read the results from a newspaper......he let us
>jump around the kitchen thinking we'd won a million pounds or
>so for a good five minutes before telling us).
>
>So when my boy's cousin Audrey came up to me & said 'Bomb, ya
>man is dead' I already had my guard up without even fully
>grasping who she was referring to yet. But I did against my
>better judgement ask for clarification & in that mellifluous
>Irish accent that at that moment sounded menacing she said 'ya
>man, Kurt Cobain. He's dead. Shot heemself in the fooking head
>with a shotgun!'.
>
>I didn't buy it but at the same time felt compelled to head
>downstairs from the upstairs bedroom area (where the rooms all
>looked like barracks because as I mentioned they had 14 kids,
>plus were putting up four of us U.S. visitors) to the kitchen.
>Auntie Cellie was the one person in the family who didn't seem
>full of shit so I came downstairs to ask her & as she labored
>over a dinner fit for an army she seemed to acknowledge that
>what Audrey was saying was true, I still insisted they put on
>the radio & as it came on they were playing "Something In The
>Way".....uh-oh, bad sign. When that song finally 'hmmmmm'-d
>out some BBC host came on to acknowledge that they'd confirmed
>via Seattle police that the body found on the estate dead of a
>self-inflicted shotgun wound was in fact Kurt Cobain.
>
>My man was, indeed, really dead this time.
>
>The rest of events that followed that spring/summer of 1994
>(that night taking full advantage of the ability to drink
>booze at 18 to a level that left me throwing while up in a
>gutter by a curb after a late-night post-pub grub session in
>which I carwalked for a full two blocks of cobblestone
>streets, the weird Courtney Love reading of the suicide note
>over a PA system to a park full of mourners, coming back to
>the states at the end of that week to regale all the folks
>who'd never left the country with tales of Irish countryside,
>the girl I'd been in love with for the prior year finally
>finally acquiescing to my advances, graduation, cop chases,
>clashes with the folks over my then completely unforseeable &
>fucked-up future, etc) went by in a surreal haze that sort of
>runs together but amzingly several of those little moments
>involving a self-loathing rock-icon from Aberdeen, Washington
>stand out.
>
>I don't know what any of that really means. I don't even
>really listen to Nirvana much anymore (or at least I didn't
>for a long stretch, now I can sorta go back & enjoyed the shit
>out of the Bleach reissue last year), nor is it a group I even
>feel I could ever objectively comment on or divorce myself
>from the personal enough to evaluate their musical merits.
>
>But this day 18 years ago was sort of the end & the beginning
>of a lot of things (hard to believe I'm now a 36-year-old
>posting this from my own office in LA on a hip-hop website
>started by the Philly cats on Kurt's old label who I was going
>to see play the Middle East on Chestnut to a crowd of a couple
>hundred or so shortly after this).
>
>I'm sure a lot of people who are passionate about music have
>those same sort of post-markers from their adolescence (when
>music is usually at its most heightened level of importance
>because everything thing is more dramatic/important/etc when
>you're a restless teenager trying to navigate that awkward
>terrain between childhood & adulthood) but the way Kurt
>Cobain's time in the public eye so closely shadowed the tenure
>of my own adolescence puts this dude in a space that no other
>artist will ever be able to occupy.
>
>And for that fact I'm both slightly saddened (the way thinking
>about how young you used to be gives you that wave of
>nostalgia & longing) but at the same time incredibly relieved
>because while it's cool to experience/be-enthralled by
>music/musical-idols it's also a completely ridiculous &
>sometimes dangerously false premise to truly invest that much
>emotion in people that you will never actually know.
>
>The guy who penned a song called 'I Hate Myself & Want To Die'
>seemed to know get that more than anyone while at the same
>time end up falling prey to the same old rock-mythology
>bullshit.
>
>I guess such is the defeatist dichotomy of a man who coined
>the phrase 'practice makes perfect but nobody's perfect so why
>practice?'.
>
>Oh well.....18 years later right/wrong or in between, that's
>still my man.
>
>RIP Kurt C.

another great read.

_______________________________

Slum Village & Mick Boogie – The Dirty Slums Mixtape
Planet Asia- Black Belt Theatre
Trouble - 431 Days

.

I felt as I was there with you Bomb and feel your pain. Thank you for sharing

thanks for sharing and framing your experiences.

and his attitude and passion for what he was saying meant something then and now.

i remember when he passed and felt like the poor guy never got a chance to just live.

still dig the unplugged the best out of his material.

i respected his writing. hit and miss on nirvana and whatnot as a act, however i respected the cat and he died way too young.

props for bringing this here and all the contributions i remember that time in 94 very well sad to say

do you mean lyrics or the music??

but how they said it. Both had a way of saying things in a way that made you feel it. Like Bob Dylan said "The kid's got heart" and that's exactly what made the music so great. It's also why I think that a lot of Nirvana covers come off bland or hokey.

>but how they said it. Both had a way of saying things in a
>way that made you feel it. Like Bob Dylan said "The kid's got
>heart" and that's exactly what made the music so great. It's
>also why I think that a lot of Nirvana covers come off bland
>or hokey.

and when they performed covers, they were great!

I bought nirvana nevermind cassette at a thrift store earlier this year and the only songs that I really like are come as you are and something in the way.....I remember reading an long article on kurt cobain that was in nme back in 2002 and they were saying that not only was he a lost soul but all he wanted was attention and to be loved....and that polly was about an old girlfriend that he used to meet with at a coffee shop. they also said that during cobain first tv appearance in which they played at the closing credits and cobain starts the set by saying "courtney love is the best f*** ever".

"Polly" is based on a true story of a woman who was abducted and turned the table on her abducter by seducing him, then escaping.

well....I want you to know that this info was in nme magazine back in 2002 since u call it inaccurate.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8c0hQviQ2k&t=8m10s
This I take as a lot more credible

Everyone was either sailing ravers, computer-nerds also into techno or just into plain pop. There were some death metal guys in my class who also dug Soundgarden, AIC and Pearl Jam but they hated Nirvana and I remember they were making fun of his death ("I guess his name should be changed to Kurt No-brain now"-still remember that one)-noone else even acknowledged it.

I'm sure that people that went to Schillerska (=the bohemian high school close to mine) were crying in the corridors though...

personally, I felt... something. I was not a fan of Nirvana at that stage and "Nevermind" didn't really change much for me musically even if I liked some songs but at the same time, he was a symbol in a way and it's always something special when those dies. However, Nirvana's impact on *my* surroundings at a technological Highschool where I had no friends was non-existent more-or-less so I can't really remember much beyond reading about it in the paper...

I have the same brand of fender jazmaster guitar that cobain used to play.....not the exact same guitar but the brand.....

i can practically remember the cloud placement in the sky thru my car windshield as the dj said (after i heard the 2nd consecutive nirvana song played on WVUM--something they never did) "again, kurt cobain was found dead in his home in seattle", and can probably paint an "x" on the road of the exact spot my car was.... but where was i driving to? or name something else remotely detailed from the rest of that spring? nope..

I read something that Tobi Vail said I thought was a good way of explaining his artistry.....if you didn't know, Tobi is the chick that dumped him while he was writing Nevermind so alot of those songs are about her.

She said that Kurt told her the most important thing about songwriting was finding a 'voice' or vocal tone for a specific song. In a way....he was kinda like a method actor in his songwriting. Like the outta-breath, heroin voice in 'dumb'. In an extreme form....you could consider Tom Waits in a similar kind of approach.....actually taking on the role of a character in each song. Kurt did this in albeit a much more subtle way. And the way he did it is one of the main things that sets him apart from other songwriters.

Excellent show.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfIK5c7mx2U

and fucking kills it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KtXf7q8eBo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFqujYRPSx4

"Nirvana didn't come to the mainstream...the mainstream came to Nirvana" - Krist N.

Michael Stipe inducts Nirvana into the Rock Hall of Fame

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycRrVDnEYKQ

Joan Jett with Nirvana sings "Smells like Teen Spirit"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sodb4eEZoIY

Lorde, with Joan Jett, St. Vincent, and Nirvana singing "All Apologies"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkQBgf7-Wp0

Other bands do that. And Chad really deserves it. All the major songs (less teen spirit) were already arranged and drum parts sorted out before they fired him. I've heard he's pretty bashful though...so it's possible that he was invited and said no. But he definitely deserved to be up there.

grohl gave him a shout-out (and all the previous drummers as well) during his speech.

I was saying....he should've been on-stage.

And the 'other drummers'? C'mon. They weren't in the band for any sort of significance like Chad. Played a couple shows? In some cases one show? Chad was in Nirvana for years....toured Europe with them....recorded Bleach....I saw him in T.O. with them....made the drum parts for half the songs on Nevermind....to lump him in with Dale Crover and Chad Channing et al? He deserves more than that. If not money, than at least recognition.