Here We Are Now (15 page)

Kurt was a rock star in an era when everything in music took time and effort. When Nirvana needed to find a new drummer, Kurt drove an hour to
The Rocket
office, placed a classified ad, and then waited weeks for interested parties to mail him a letter. Making a record was so expensive, with pressing costs and studio fees, that Kurt had to find a record label to help, which required him to write hundreds of letters to labels. Every one rejected him. When Nirvana's first single, “Love Buzz,” was finally pressed by Sub Pop, Kurt took that physical 45-RPM single in hand to Seattle radio station KCMU, drove to a phone booth afterward, used a quarter to dial the station to request his own song, and then sat in his car for a very long time waiting to hear it played. That same radio station is now KEXP, an Internet pioneer with vast numbers of listeners worldwide, where requests can be made on a website and any performance that happened in the station's studio can be found on YouTube or in an online archive and heard anytime. That's an entirely different universe from the one where Kurt, or I, came of age.

There was something about that earlier, slower time in history that helped make Kurt who he was. He owned only a couple hundred records, so it was a small sampling. In that pre-Internet world, he discovered and listened to many of these records on his own, or after reading clips in magazines or fanzines. His tastes were eclectic because he was exposed to music somewhat at random. He saw albums at a secondhand store and bought them many times because he liked the cover, or they were cheap. Consequently, Kurt had no idea that the Knack were considered uncool by most punk rockers. In that innocence, he absorbed their pop sound. He invited a friend over that year, sat him down saying he had a great album to play, and put on
Get the Knack.
The friend thought Kurt was joking. Would that pop influence have soaked in if Kurt read Pitchfork.com and realized how unhip his then-favorite band was? Would Kurt have even written “Smells Like Teen Spirit” if he'd searched the name on Google and realized he was writing an anthem to a teenage girl's deodorant? Would early negative online reviews have scuttled the career of someone with an ego as tremendously fragile as his? And, the biggest question of all, could a band like Nirvana ever exist again, starting as a slow build, a secret discovery, touring in a van as unknowns, writing great songs because there was no money to be made from the Seattle club scene, writing lyrics and journal entries on paper for hours and hours, jumping from college radio to the mainstream and, eventually, long after they'd logged in their ten thousand hours of live performance, four years after they began,
finally
break through and dominate every single radio format? Or would today's Kurt Cobain see a negative review on Facebook and hang it all up after he earned only ten likes?

Kurt had no idea music and culture would change so much, but he knew that to make a lasting impact he had to create a singular vision. He said as much in his journals: “So after figuring out songs like the Troggs' ‘Wild Thing,' and the Cars' ‘My Best Friend's Girl,' I decided that in order to become a big, famous rock star I would need to write my very own songs instead of wasting my time learning other people's, because if you study other people's music too much, it may act as an obstruction on developing your own personal style . . .

“I guess what I'm trying to say is: Theory is a waste of time. Too much practice is like too much sugar.”

Kurt's influence went beyond just fans or music critics or best-of-list makers; he inspired musicians, writers, and artists. Some were novelists, some were painters, but most were musicians. You could craft a book just out of comments other rock stars have made about Kurt.

Noel Gallagher, to
Guitar World
: “The only person I have any respect for as a songwriter over the last ten years is Kurt Cobain. He was the perfect cross between Lennon and McCartney.”

PJ Harvey, to Barney Hoskyns: “As a writer, I had enormous respect for him. He was an incredible writer and an incredible singer . . . He was one of those special people. There was a light inside him that you could see. He had a charisma that went beyond his physical presence.”

Patti Smith, to me: “I loved Nirvana and Kurt. I really could relate to his lyrics; I could feel them. He put every bit of himself into those songs, and that's always the challenge of any artist.”

Pete Townshend, in
The Observer
: “Nirvana's second album,
Nevermind,
was a breath of ‘punk' fresh air in the musically stale early nineties.”

Neil Young, to
Mojo
: “He really, really inspired me. He was so great. Wonderful. One of the best, but more than that. Kurt was one of the absolute best all time for me.”

David Bowie, to
Spin
: “I was simply blown away when I found out that Kurt Cobain liked my work, and I always wanted to talk to him about his reasons for covering ‘The Man Who Sold the World.' It was a good straightforward rendition and sounded somehow very honest. It would have been nice to have worked with him, but just talking would have been real cool.”

Vernon Reid, of Living Color, in
Rolling Stone
: “Cobain changed the course of where the music went. There are certain people where you can see the axis of musical history twisting on them: Hendrix was pivotal, Prince was pivotal, Cobain was pivotal.”

Bruce Springsteen, to
Guitar World
: “[Nirvana] changed everything. They opened a vein of freedom that didn't exist previously. Kurt Cobain did something very similar to what Dylan did in the sixties, which was to sound different and get on the radio. He proved that a guitarist could sound different and still be heard. So Cobain reset a lot of very fundamental rules, and that type of artist is very few and far between.”

Bono, to
Newsweek
: “I remember watching Kurt come through and thinking, ‘God, this music is nuclear.' This is really splitting the atom. They raised the temperature for everybody. Manufactured pop never looked so cold as when that heat was around.”

Bob Dylan, on the radio: “That kid has heart.”

Michael Stipe, to
Newsweek
: “I know what the next Nirvana recording was going to sound like. It was going to be very quiet and acoustic, with lots of stringed instruments. It was going to be an amazing fucking record, and I'm a little bit angry at him for killing himself. He and I were going to record a trial run of the album, a demo tape. It was all set up. He had a plane ticket. He had a car picking him up. And at the last minute he called, and said, ‘I can't come.'”

Dave Grohl, to
NME
: “I still dream about Kurt. Every time I see him in a dream, I'll be amazed and I get this feeling that everyone else thinks he's dead. It always feels totally real, probably because I'm a very vivid dreamer. But, in my dreams, Kurt's usually been hiding—we'll get together and I'll end up asking him, ‘God, where have you been?'”

Krist Novoselic, to me: “[Music] is the most important thing about Kurt; not his death. The details of his death are just lurid . . . Kurt was expressive. His heart was his receiver and his transmitter . . . He expressed himself in a highly creative and compelling way, and it's affected so many people.”

Courtney Love, to me in 1999: “My favorite thing of Kurt's was a sheet he had where he'd written out his top bands, his top fifty. One of the things I liked about him was that he was a collector, but he didn't collect the things I did at all. He had no Bunnymen, no Hüsker Dü. There's no Replacements, no Big Star. It's just Saints, Sabbath. It's Big Black and Black Flag. It's Saccharine Trust and Celtic Frost. It's ‘man music.' His favorite R.E.M. record was
Green
. No way does he go back [into R.E.M.'s catalog] for ‘Perfect Circle,' or ‘Catapult.' There were a couple of things he learned from people in Olympia about ‘cutie music.' That's on there too: [like] Jad Fair.

“He couldn't fucking tell you who Julian Cope was. Once we were driving around Los Angeles listening to KROQ, and ‘Killing Moon' came on, and I love that song. And he said, ‘You just like that romantic music.' And I said, ‘Yeah, and you like Saccharine Trust, punker-boy.'”

Courtney Love, to me in 2000: “I think
Nevermind
made older people feel young. It put them in touch with their sixties and seventies sense of rebellion.”

Me: “My argument has always been that
Nevermind
was a success because the emotion of the songs was so apparent, even without the lyrics.”

Courtney Love: “Exactly. But a lot of things happened subsequent to that album coming out—all the other signings of bands, the stampede, the [Grunge] phenomenon—and people forgot that it really was the songs. And the magic. You connect with an audience when you have magic, when your voice connects with a listener. And Kurt had that magic.”

Courtney Love, to me in 2002, about Kurt's legacy: “In our society, art and celebrity has everything to do with being untapped. Do you think Nirvana would still be vital today? I say abso-fucking-lutely. Janis Joplin was done. Jim Morrison was done. Jimi Hendrix was done. But Kurt, he wasn't done. You are talking about somebody, at twenty-seven, who had barely scratched the surface.”

Courtney Love, to me, 2003, on Frances Bean Cobain: “She's got great karma. And she's just such a great human. And it's really important that she came here [and was born]. And it's really important that she not get the load dumped on her that Sean [Lennon] did. You never know if you are going to like your kids, but I'm honored she's my daughter, our daughter.”

No analysis of Kurt Cobain could ever be complete enough to encompass every aspect of his legacy. The question of any performer's impact is ultimately a personal one. If you were touched or moved in any way by Kurt Cobain, whatever drew you in is the key to what that legacy means to you now. There are as many answers to Larry King's query—“Why did Kurt Cobain matter?”—as there are Nirvana fans.

There is, however, one physical embodiment of Kurt's legacy beyond just his albums, and that, of course, is Frances Bean Cobain. She is a twenty-one-year-old as I write this book. She now controls aspects of Kurt's estate and will have a say in the future how his tangible assets are marketed. She has Kurt's striking blue eyes, and she's gorgeous, a mix of the best features of her two parents. She's lived with a troubled family history and has had to deal with remarkable intrusions to her privacy as well. I've heard a few stories over the years of disrespectful strangers who have literally grabbed Frances and announced they wanted to “touch” Kurt. The first time this ever happened, Courtney told me, was backstage at
Saturday Night Live
, and the person grabbing then-baby Frances was a B-list movie star who you would have thought would have known better. But it has happened in all sorts of places, including once at the ballet when Frances was seven and an elderly, matronly woman grabbed Frances away from Courtney and said, “I want to look into the eyes of Kurt Cobain.” In a
People
magazine piece, Frances called these encounters “creepy” and said she is quick to note to anyone, “I'm not my parents.” She does, however, have a sense of humor and understands irony and serendipity, two of the main ingredients to her father's success.

Last year, Frances was walking through a large comic-book convention wearing a cardigan sweater. A stranger approached her. This happens all the time to beautiful and famous young women, but in this instance the man who approached her clearly had no idea who he was talking to. He probably was trying to hit on her. He looked at her outfit and remarked, “Pretty good Kurt Cobain imitation.”

I didn't see this incident firsthand, so I can only imagine the expression on Frances's face, how her eyes would have skirted around as she tried to comprehend exactly what was being said, whether the guy was a stalker, another creep, or just a random dude trying to get her number. Somehow in my mind I imagine Frances's look at the moment the rich irony of this came to her, and I imagine it would have looked remarkably similar to what I saw on her father's face back in September 1991, pre-fame, pre-Frances, when he and the other members of Nirvana were getting kicked out of their own Seattle record-release party for
Nevermind
for starting a food fight.

This book touches on only a handful of the ways Kurt affected music and culture—the ways I saw as most significant or easiest to track. Kurt appealed to people for many reasons, and continues to do so, and most parts of that are not as quantifiable as Nirvana's album sales, the amount of radio airplay he earned, or the number of sneakers that have his name on them. To most people his impact is personal, and it will be different for everyone.

Over the years many fans, seeking more information on ways they felt they intersected with Kurt, have contacted me. Those have included some who wanted to know more about his left-handedness, and how that variance affected his creativity, but many seem to share some kind of medical issue with Kurt. Often they ask if I know if he was ever diagnosed with some kind of malady they have, for example manic depression (he was never officially diagnosed, as far I know). Sometimes they share one of the issues he most certainly had: scoliosis, irritable bowel syndrome, ADHD, drug addiction. Kurt had so many health problems that his story connects with a panoply of people with similar ailments.

I can't help these people in their quest for further information because Kurt's myriad medical issues were never well documented. I examined some of his medical records that still exist and spoke with a few of his physicians, but given the chaos of his life, it wasn't exactly like he was carting around a file folder of his patient records. Still, I found it fascinating when I discovered that Kurt's stomach problems were so unique, and so pathological, that his case is still discussed in medical schools—minus his name on the records, of course. If Kurt were alive, this fact might give him more satisfaction than his ranking on any rock critic's best-of list: that medical students at this very moment might be pouring over X-rays of his stomach and trying to figure out his ailments. Kurt wrote in his journal once that he wanted his own disease named after him. In a way, that's come true.