Remembering Kurt Cobain and Teenage Angst’s Big Payoff

I still recall exactly where I was when I heard the news back in April of 1994..

Have several vivid sense-memory moments during the brief time that Kurt Cobain was alive in the public eye.

This could be because his existence bookended my adolescence with eerie levels of symmetry: Nirvana blew in ‘91 as I became a high-school freshman, then blew up with a head shot just before graduation.

But I still recall where I was my first time seeing the ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit' video: Olean, New York (home to Saint Bonaventure University) staying at my great aunt's house over Thanksgiving. 

They introduced Nirvana’s first official music video on 120 Minutes as a World Premiere sometime after midnight. The family was sleeping upstairs.

In a small house with a TV by the stairs in the living room yours truly was sleeping on a pullout couch (strategically so I'd be able to stay up late & watch TV). As the song kicked into gear I was compelled to turn the volume up slightly, slightly more, then MORE until halfway thru I'm sure it was at a level considered 'blasting' in a quiet house. My old man soon rushed to the top of stairs in his tightey-whitey Jockey briefs yelling “turn it off and get to sleep!”. The damage was done tho. That brand had been imprinted on me.

The January ‘94 day Kurt OD'd in Rome and was rumored dead I recall walking the halls in a daze, getting hazed by hard rock bullies who were regularly battled me about any hip-hop, current alt rock or even Prince record that I was checking for......'You're boy's fucking dead, Bomb!' was shouted while passing in the hallway. I didn't know whether to haul off and punch someone or laugh it off in disbelief.

Luckily that date turned out not to be his fate. But existing daily with a figure like Kurt Cobain in the world felt like a forecast similar to Tupac Shakur: a short stay for both was inevitable for sure.

Him not dying in Rome led to us being able to see the now-famous Unplugged episode, which I watched with my Beatle fan mom, who for the first time could make sense of the noisy shit she'd been hearing from a band I'd been championing thru my borderline juvenile-delinquent high school existence. I recall feeling proud on some level his talent was visible to old folks but at the same time made vaguely uncomfortable.

By April of ‘94, Cobain was dead for real. I happened to be staying in Dungarven, Ireland, with the family of one of my childhood best friends.

For the unfamiliar, the Irish comprise one of the highest percentage of bullshitters per capita on Earth. I say that with love.

Why just that week, Uncle Dano had fooled my friend John into thinking he had won the Irish lottery. He did so by reading the numbers off the ticket he was holding-out in plain view while pretending to read the results from a newspaper.

After the last number sealed it, Dano let us jump around the kitchen thinking we were now independently wealthy. Maybe never getting on a plane to America, let alone graduating school in a month.

So when cousin Audrey came to the upstairs barracks and declared 'Bomb, ya man is dead!', my guard was up without knowing who she meant yet. But against my better judgement I ask for clarification. Suddenly her mellifluous tone sounded menacing: 'Ya man, Kurt Cobain. He’s Dead. Shot himself in the fooking head with a shotgun!'.

I still didn't buy it. At the same time felt compelled to head downstairs from the upstairs barracks to the kitchen. Auntie Cellie was the lone person in the family who didn't seem full of shit, so I asked her to confirm as she labored over preparing a dinner fit for an army. She seemed to acknowledge what Audrey said was true. I still insisted they put on the radio. It was playing "Something In The Way". Argh. Bad sign. As the song finally 'hmmmmm'-d out, a BBC host announced the body found in Seattle dead of a self-inflicted shotgun wound was in fact Kurt Cobain.

My man was, indeed, truly dead this time.

The rest of events that followed that spring transpired in a surreal haze. Courtney Love hosted a public mourning on a PA system in Seattle while reading a suicide note with interspersed commentary. My friends and I attended our high-school graduation ceremony. A summer commenced filled with shit jobs and big parties, heartbreak and hilarity. But amazingly several of those moments involving a self-loathing rock-icon I never will meet from Aberdeen, Washington stand out with almost crystal clarity.

I don't know what it means. I don't even really listen to Nirvana much now. Nor is it a group I could ever as a sometime-music-journalism-professional divorce myself from personally enough to evaluate on purely musical merits.

But April 5th, 1994 was a blunt end and fuzzy beginning of lots of things. I'm sure a lot of people who are passionate about music have similar markers from their own adolescence. That’s a time when music is at its most heightened level of importance, because everything thing feels dramatic and important, when you're a restless teen trying to navigate the awkward terrain between child-to-adulthood. In mine, Cobain's time in the public eye so closely shadowed the timeline it puts him in a space that no other artist can ever occupy.

And for that fact I'm both vaguely saddened while mostly relieved. Because it’s cool to be enthralled but it's also a ridiculous and dangerously false premise to invest that much emotion in heroes that you’ll never actually know.

The dude who wrote 'I Hate Myself & Want To Die' seemed to understand that more than anybody. Yet ultimately succumbed to similar rock-star-beautiful-messy martyr bullshit.

A contradiction suitably fitting the dichotomy of a man who coined the phrase 'practice makes perfect but nobody's perfect so why practice?'.

Oh well, whatever, never mind.....22 years later, right, wrong, or likely somewhere in between, that's still my man.

Rest Easy, Kurt C.