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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.
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