>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.