Here We Are Now (2 page)

Larry King never would have put it this way, but what I'm seeking to address is the eternal question of history: how do we measure the life of a man?

This is not a biography of Kurt Cobain. I've already done that with
Heavier Than Heaven
in 2001. That book was a third-person narrative of the events of Kurt's life.
Here We Are Now,
in contrast, is my first-person analysis of what that life meant, and how that meaning can be quantified—when it can be at all. There were many places in
Heavier Than Heaven
where I could have inserted myself as a narrator because I witnessed events, or because I was part of them in some slight way. Doing so would have broken the reader's trance of experiencing history, though.
Here We Are Now
is not objective, and it brings forth my own intersections with this tale, before and after Kurt's death, my analysis of that history, and, in some places, the voices of a few other select experts.

I know there are some critics who have already suggested, and certainly will say of this book, that as a society we have talked enough about Kurt Cobain. Maybe. I don't seek to canonize Kurt, glorify him, or portray him as if he were some kind of God of Rock. Doing that is to take away his humanity, and to sketch him as he would never have wanted. As a human being, he often showed incredibly bad judgment and made choices that hurt many people who cared for him, his suicide being the most obvious example. But even Kurt's demons have had an impact on the larger culture over the past two decades; his suicide, for example, has been studied and written about extensively. It is without any doubt the most famous suicide of the last two decades. That suicide, as horrible as it was, had an impact on who “we”—as a culture—“are now.”

At the very least, Nirvana's music touched the generation it was made for. The world has changed much since 1991 when
Nevermind
was released, but the influence of that album has only grown as the years pass. Technology has since turned the music industry upside down, fractionalized genres into smaller slices, and diminished the possibility of any rock act dominating the way Nirvana did. I would argue that no rock star since Kurt has had that same combination of talent, voice, lyric-writing skill, and charisma—another reason he is so significant, two decades after his death. The rarity of that magic combo is also part of the reason Kurt's impact still looms so large over music. There are many reasons for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to include Nirvana, but the catalog of songs Kurt wrote is central to that recognition. Many bands never even get nominated, but Nirvana were nominated the first year they qualified, and they deserve their place on that hallowed ground.

Kurt has become a touchstone as Nirvana's music continues to find an audience with a new crop of teenagers every year. I think some of his enduring popularity is similar to the way every teen I know ends up reading
The Catcher in the Rye
at some point. Kurt and Nirvana are now part of a rite of passage through adolescence, the true “teen spirit.”

I was well past adolescence when Nirvana came on the scene, but their music made me feel young again, alive, full of possibility, and helped me understand some of my own adult angst. The greatest gift Kurt Cobain gave listeners was putting his honest pain into his lyrics. J. D. Salinger did the same thing with his prose in
The Catcher in the Rye
. Both men had demons of different sorts, and they also shared an uncomfortable relationship with fame. And both could proclaim, as Kurt sang on “Serve the Servants” off
In Utero,
“Teenage angst has paid off well.”

“Smells Like Teen Spirit” often comes on my car radio, and during those few minutes I'm a teenager again. Suddenly my Volvo wagon—the same car Kurt drove—turns into a hot rod and I'm screaming, “With the lights out, it's less dangerous.” The two speeding tickets I've gotten over the past twenty years are solely the fault of Kurt Cobain.

The lyrics to “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Nirvana's biggest hit, were difficult to comprehend and were debated by fans long before the official lyric sheet was finally published. To see how important those lyrics still are, type “s-m-e-l” into Google and you'll see that the most common search in the world for those four letters is “‘Smells Like Teen Spirit' lyrics.” Music fans in the UK recently ranked the line “Here we are now, entertain us,” as the third-greatest song lyric in music
history
. The
Here We Are Now
book you hold in your hands seeks to reinterpret that lyric into a statement of where
we,
as a collected body of fans, are now after Kurt's death. He's gone, dead for two decades, but here
we
are now. And in that space and time, how do we measure his significance?

Or, in the words of the philosopher, wise man, and sage sometimes known as Larry King, “Why did Kurt Cobain matter?”

Kurt Cobain sold millions of albums, and the most obvious area where his impact can be quantified is in the music industry. During Kurt's lifetime, four official Nirvana albums were released, and since his death there have been six outtake collections or live albums. Most estimates put total sales of those ten releases at somewhere between thirty million and sixty million copies. Sales of
Nevermind
by itself are twenty million worldwide by conservative estimates, and perhaps as high as thirty-five million according to more generous estimates. With those figures,
Nevermind
would rank as the twenty-fifth best-selling album of all time.

Nevermind
was a remarkable album by any standard. But while most of the world probably heard the album fully for the first time on compact disc, maybe in their living rooms, I heard it initially in my car on a crappy cassette tape. Furthermore, my cassette was missing the first six seconds of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” My tape started in the middle of Dave Grohl's first drum crash. It was abrupt, but a lot about
Nevermind
was abrupt.

I first heard the album in late August 1991 in the parking lot of the Seattle Tower Records store. It was hot, my windows were down, and I was cranking
Nevermind
loud enough that it drew attention. I didn't want attention. My copy was an illicit bootleg advance that had snuck out the back door, so to speak. I rolled my windows up and sweated in the rare Seattle heat, made steamier by the power of the music.

My copy of the album had come from a friend who worked at Tower, and I had just picked it up before putting it into my car cassette deck. The original source of our leaked copy had dubbed it incorrectly, cutting off the start. All my close friends were music freaks, and we regularly traded with other collectors for live shows, outtakes, and early advance copies. We loved music more than anything in life, and we loved the hunt for unheard tunes, and
Nevermind
was juicy prey. Working in the press, I always got advance copies of albums, and in fact my official advance of
Nevermind
would arrive a week later. But that August, I couldn't wait.

There was much anticipation for
Nevermind
. The band's 1989 debut,
Bleach,
had established Nirvana as a band to watch.
Bleach
had sold around thirty thousand copies, which made it a decent college radio hit, but it wasn't enough to earn the group riches or major fame. But Nirvana's live show had gotten better and better, making them stars in Seattle. Their 1990 “Sliver” single had convinced me that Kurt's songwriting had taken a major leap forward from
Bleach
. When they signed to DGC/Geffen Records in early 1991, it was a huge local story because few Sub Pop bands had made the move up the ladder to a major label. At
The Rocket
we had been touting the Seattle music scene for years, but no local band had broken wide nationally since Heart. Nirvana seemed like our best bet.

When I got the tape back to my office at
The Rocket
I began dubbing cassettes of
Nevermind
for my friends. This was certainly illegal, but I justified that decision knowing that all my friends would buy the album when it officially came out on September 24. That was almost a month away, and it would have been torture to wait. My advance cassette with the clipped “Teen Spirit” spread through Seattle like a fast-moving storm, and by week's end there were hundreds, if not thousands, of dubs.

Sometime around 2004, after Kurt had been dead for a decade, I was with a friend at an open house in Tacoma, thirty miles south of Seattle. The house owner had a homemade cassette of
Nevermind
on the shelf, and it looked like my handwriting on the insert. When the listing agent wasn't looking, I put it into the stereo, hit play, and heard the telltale clipped “Teen Spirit.” My early advance tape had flown south.

So much of the story of
Nevermind,
and of Kurt Cobain, has become apocryphal over the years, as his shadow has become bigger than life. Many pundits today suggest they knew in advance that
Nevermind
was going to be a monster hit. But none could have truly predicted the success it had. I certainly didn't have a clue. Listening to it that first time in the parking lot of Tower Records, I loved it, but I thought it too loud, too raw, and too edgy to be a mainstream smash. “Teen Spirit” blew me away, but I couldn't imagine, given where music had been the previous decade, that mainstream radio would play it. To my ears, “Lithium” was the hit on the album, and I thought that “Teen Spirit” would serve only as a kind of advance clarion. I was wrong, of course, but so was DGC/Geffen Records. The label pressed only 46,251 copies of
Nevermind
initially, and that entire first pressing sold out by October. If Geffen had any idea the album was going to be the success it became, they would have made more, since the economy of scale would have lowered their per-disc costs significantly.

A week before
Nevermind
was officially released, a record-release party was held at a Seattle bar. At that party, I put forth the outrageous prediction that the album could sell one hundred thousand copies. That figure was so fantastic, and so outside of what seemed like the realm of possibility at the time, that it earned a quizzical eyebrow raise from Kurt Cobain and the other members of the band. I wasn't the only one forecasting wild success: the guys from Sub Pop Records, who owned a minority interest in
Nevermind,
were touting the same figures. That one-hundred-thousand mark, which was what Sonic Youth's
Goo
had sold in 1990, was considered the upper threshold of the possible for any band playing what we had just begun to call “alternative rock.” Though the term “alternative” was loosely applied to any band that didn't fit into mainstream rock—Tom Waits could end up on an alternative radio chart right next to the Cure, though their music had little in common—the name fit for Nirvana, who were certainly not mainstream.

“Smells Like Teen Spirit” changed alternative rock, and changed even the very definition of what mainstream music could encompass. “Teen Spirit” first became an MTV video hit, then a radio smash, and it continued to gain extraordinary momentum. One of Geffen's top executives said that even the label brass were surprised at how fast it climbed the sales charts. All the label had to do, he said, was “get out of the way.” The single eventually sold more than a million copies, and that was in a pre-download world where music could only be purchased as a physical item, from a store. On radio, the song topped airplay charts.
Billboard
didn't begin to break down “alternative rock” radio play as a separate category until just after
Nevermind,
but applying their sales-to-airplay chart computation to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” puts that particular song as the most-played alternative rock track ever. Even on mainstream Top 40 radio, where R&B usually dominated, the song went to No. 6.

After that initial pressing of
Nevermind
sold out, it took Geffen time to get more copies printed and delivered to stores. For one of the first times in the modern record business, there was an actual shortage of an album, and
Nevermind
became, for a couple of weeks, impossible to find. The album had debuted at No. 144 on
Billboard
's chart, so despite its ultimate success, it was not an out-of-the-box smash. The album didn't hit No. 1 on the
Billboard
Hot 200 sales charts for four months. It would ultimately spend 253 consecutive weeks on the charts, though.

Kurt did not immediately become rich off the album. I examined his 1991 federal tax return, and in that year, with a hit album and a sold-out tour, he earned just $29,541, mostly from concert fees. That's evidence of how slow record labels are to pay royalties, but also illustrates how poor Kurt was prior to
Nevermind
's success. Kurt's paltry income in a banner year also explains why even as a success he was fearful he would be penniless again. He only became rich during the last two years of his life, which is why his fear of scarcity and poverty were ever present. Having been poor for so long, he felt any money he did earn would disappear. Those fears would play a big role in his desire to run away from the world and, ultimately, in his death.

Record sales and airplay are two ways to quantify success in the music business, but those numbers aren't the only measure. Nirvana also changed the music industry because they were an organic runaway success in an era when hit bands were usually heavily shaped, promoted, and marketed by record labels. Before
Nevermind,
it was not uncommon for label brass to pick the songs that would go on a rock album, or to bring in outside musicians to supplement the band in the studio. And while that practice continued in pop, in alternative rock Nirvana, at least temporarily, shifted that. Nirvana's triumph transferred power from the labels to the individual artists, who in the post-Nirvana era had more creative control (for the most part, within rock music). Because of Nirvana, the industry had to rethink where the next rock stars might come from. Labels began to look for talent outside of New York and Los Angeles. Kurt Cobain's success was a breakthrough for bands in Portland, Chapel Hill, Omaha, and countless other places that had been off the radar of the industry. The underdogs were now running the show.