Newsweek - April 18, 1994, "The Poet of Alienation", by Jeff Giles
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He'd come to install an alarm system. The irony is that long
before electrician Gary Smith found Kurt Cobain's body, it was
clear that what Nirvana's singer really needed protection from
was himself. Cobain wasn't identified for hours, but his mother,
Wendy O'Connor, didn't need anyone to tell her that it was her
son who was found with a shotgun and a suicide note that reportedly
ended, "I love you, I love you." The singer had been missing, and
his mother has feared that the most troubled and talented rock
star of his generation would go the way of Jim Morrison and Jimi
Hendrix. "Now he's gone and joined that stupid club," she told the
Associated Press. "I told him not to join that stupid club."
Cobain didn't overdose like Morrison and Hendrix, of course.
But the singer's self-destructive steak seems to have been bound
up inextricably with drugs. In March, while in Rome, Cobain
overdosed on painkillers and champagne. Nirvana's spokespeople
insisted that it was an accident, portraying Cobain and his wife,
Courtney Love, as stable, happy parents who drug days were
behind them. But the truth about Cobain's last months was far
messier than we'd been led to believe. On March 18, Cobain
reportedly locked himself in a room of his spacious Seattle home
and threatened to kill himself; Love is said to have called the
police, who arrived on the scene and seized medication and firearms.
On April 2, the police were summoned once more-this time by
O'Conner, who told them her son was missing. The rumor mill has
it that Cobain and Love's marriage was on the rocks; that his
friends performed an "intervention," and that while Love was
promoting a new album by her band, Hole, Cobain was fleeing a
rehab clinic in Los Angeles. According to the AP, O'Conner's
missing person's report read, in part, "Cobain ran away from [a]
California facility and flew back to Seattle. He also bought a
shotgun and may be suicidal." All these dark machinations will
make for an uneasy legacy-precisely the sort of legacy he didn't
want. "I don't want my daughter to grow up and someday be hassled
by kids at school," he once said of Frances Bean Cobain, now 19
months. "I don't want people telling her that her parents were
junkies."
Which raises a question: what will they tell Frances Bean?
Where her father's career is concerned, at least, the answer is
reassuring. They'll tell her Cobain and his band hated the slick,
MTV-driven rock establishment so much they took it over. They'll
tell her that with the album "Nevermind," Nirvana replaced the
prefab sentiments of pop with hard, unreconstituted emotions.
That they got rich and went to No.1. That they were responsible
for other bands getting rich and going to No.1: Pearl Jam,
Soundgarden, Alice In Chains. That Cobain never took his band
as seriously as everyone else did-that he once wrote, "I'm the
first to admit that we're the '90s version of Cheap Trick." But
that despite his corrosive guitar playing, he wrote gorgeous,
airtight melodies. That he took the Sex Pistols' battle cry
"Never Mind the Bullocks," mixed it with some twenty-something
rage and disillusion, and came out with this lyric: "Oh, well,
whatever, never mind." And finally, that he reminded his peers
they were not alone, though all the evidence suggests that he was.
Cobain was born just outside the desultory logging town of
Aberdeen, Wash., in February 1967. (Yes, he was 27, as was
Morrison, Hendrix and Joplin.) The singer hated being the crown
prince of Generation X, but the fury of Nirvana's music spoke
to his generation because they'd grown up more or less the same
way. Which is to say: grunge is what happens when children of
divorce get their hands on guitars. Cobain's mother was a house-
wife; his father, Don Cobain, was a mechanic at the Chevron
station in town. They divorced when the singer was 8.
Drugs and punk: Cobain always had a fragile constition (he
was subject to bronchitis, as well as the recurrent stomach pains
he claimed drove him to a heroin addiction). The image one gets
is that of a frail kid batted between warring parents. "[The
divorce] just destroyed his life." Wendy O'Conner tells Michael
Azerrad in the Nirvana biography, "Come As You Are." "He
changed completely. I think he was ashamed. And he became very
inward-he just held everything [in]....I think he's still
suffering." As a teen, Cobain dabbled in drugs and punk rock,
and dropped out of school. His father persuaded him to pawn
his guitar and take an entrance exam for the navy. But Cobain
soon returned for the guitar. "To them, I was wasting my life,"
he told the Los Angeles Times. "To me, I was fighting for it."
Cobain didn't speak to his father for eight years. When Nirvana
went to the top of the charts, Don Cobain began keeping a
scrapbook. "Everything I know about Kurt," he told Azerrad,
"I've read in newspapers and magazines."
The more famous Nirvana became, the more Cobain wanted none
of it. The group, whose first album, 1989's "Bleach," was
recorded for $606.17, and released on the independent label Sub
Pop, was meant to be a latter-day punk band. It was supposed
to be nasty and defiant and unpopular. But something went
wrong: Nirvana's major-label debut, "Nevermind," sold almost
10 million copies worldwide. On the stunning single "Smells Like
Teen Spirit," Cobain howled over a sludgy guitar riff, "I feel
stupid and contagious/Here we are now, entertain us." This was
the sound of psychic damage, and an entire generation recognized
it.
Nirvana-with their stringy hair, plaid work shirts and torn
jeans-appealed to a mass of young fans who were tired of false
idols like Madonna and Michael Jackson, and who'd never had a
dangerous rock-and-roll hero to call their own. Unfortunately,
the band also appealed to the sort of people Cobain had always
hated: poseurs and bandwagoneers, not to mention record-company
execs and fashion designers who fell over themselves cashing in
on the new sights and sounds. Cobain, who'd grown up as an
angry outsider, tried to shake his celebrity. "I have a
request for our fans," he fumed in the liner notes to the album
"Incesticide." "If any of you in any way hate homosexuals,
people of different color, or women, please do this one favor
for us-leave us the f--k alone!...Last year, a girl was raped
by two wastes of sperm and eggs while singing...our song 'Polly.'
I have had a hard time carrying on knowing there are plankton
like that in our audience."
By 1992, it became clear that Cobain's personal life was as
tangled and troubling as his music. The singer married Love in
Waikiki-the bride wore a moth-eaten dress once owned by actress
Frances Farmer-and the couple embarked on a self-destructive
pas de deux widely referred to as a '90s version of "Sid and
Nancy." As Cobain put it, "I was going off with Courtney and
we were scoring drugs and we were f--king up against a wall
outside and stuff...and causing secnes just to do it. It was
fun to be with someone who would stand up all of a sudden and
smash a glass on a table." In September '92, Vanity Fair
reported that Love had used heroin while she was pregnant with
Frances Bean. She and Cobain denied the story (the baby is
healthy). But authorities were reportedly concerned enough to
force them to surrender custody of Frances to Love's sister,
Jamie, for a month, during which time the couple was, in
Cobain's words, "totally suicidal."
Tormented rebel: By last week the world knew Cobain had a
self-destructive streak, that he'd flailed violently against his
unwanted celebrity-but the world had been assured those days
were over. Nirvana recently postponed its European concert
dates and opted out of this summer's Lollapalooza tour. Still,
spokesmen maintained that Cobain simply needed time to recuperate
from the overdose in Rome. They offered a tempting picture:
Cobain the tormented rebel reborn as a doting, drug-free father.
Even Dr. Osvaldo Galletta, of Rome's American Hospital, says he
believed the overdose was an accident: "The last image I have
of him, which in light of the tragedy now seems pathetic, is
of a young man playing with the little girl. He did not seem
like a young man who wanted to end it. I had hope for him.
Some of the people that visited him were a little strange, but
he seemed to be a mild sort, not at all violent. His wife also
behaved quite normally. She left a thank-you note."
It'd be nice if we, too, could come away with that image
of Cobain and his daughter. And, in truth, those who knew the
singer say there was a real fragility buried beneath the noise
of his music and his life. Still, there are a lot of other
images vying for our attention just now. Among them is the
image of Courtney Love and Frances Bean Cobain, who are said
to have arrived at their home in Seattle, via limo, late
Friday. Again: what will people tell Frances? Ed Rosenblatt,
Geffen Records president, says, "The world has lost a great
artist and we've lost a great friend. It leaves a huge void
in our hearts." That is certainly true. If only someone had
heard the alarms ringing at the rambling, grayshingled home
near the lake. Long before there was a void in our hearts,
there was a void in Kurt Cobain's.