I saw them once, at Kansas City’s Memorial Hall...
I saw them once, at Kansas City’s Memorial Hall, which seats about 3,000 (I’d guess). I went with Kevin, his girlfriend-later-wife whose name I got wrong in an earlier version of this essay so I dare not try again, and Heath, who I was never cool with for the stupid reason that he dated one of my high school girlfriends before I did but who ended up being really cool nevertheless.
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ShareHere’s the funny part: I almost didn’t go. I almost didn’t go because I had an early class the next day. That’s right—I almost passed on seeing Nirvana because it was a school night.
Mudhoney and the Screaming Tress opened up, and I thought what pull this guy has.
Between sets, Kurt came out by himself and everyone went ape-shit. He stepped to the microphone and asked if [Name I Can’t Remember] was in the house. Everybody cried here, here! He said I’m serious is [Name I Can’t Remember] here? He wasn’t. Kurt then said, “Well, if you get here tell such-and-such I just want you to know I wasn’t kidding.”
They opened their part of the show with “Radio Friendly Unit Shifter.” Right when the drums kick in, some guy came tearing from backstage and did a stage dive, landing about six rows deep.
I’ve always suspected that that was the guy Kurt was looking for. That he had met him the night before and told him he could open the show with a dive.
*****
Cobain’s death was the greatest thing to happen to MTV since Michael Jackson’s video for “Thriller.” They went into full-on Kennedy Assassination mode. David Fricke (from Rolling Stone) was live looking like a long-lost Ramone and saying things like “he really was the closest thing this generation had to a John Lennon.” He also said something like, “Parents, don’t write this off as some crazy rock star. This is your kids.”
I forget who was on the scene, but MTV News had a team mobilize to the house itself. They interviewed people who had gathered outside. Predictably, there were candles and flowers. Courtney Love herself roamed the grounds. She visited with the mourners, a self-ordained punk rock queen comforting her people. She seemed a little too in her element. Live Through This had been released four days before. She told one person at the scene to “buy my record, it’s a really good New Wave record.” He nodded that he would.
*****
The thing is that all of that stuff above—about drinking beer on Jeff’s front porch and Patrick cracking his head and Dave breaking his arm—I can’t remember if that was before or after the suicide. The whole period is such a blur. I know we had the bug with Nevermind, but I also know that we were thrashing about to “Scentless Apprentice” (none of us believing that it was written by Dave Grohl, the drummer of all people) and that was In Utero, which was closer to his death than it was to Nevermind.
Part of my confusion is that the frenzy I recall is more akin to what we felt after his death than it was to what we felt before. We were always fans, but after he died, our passion reached an obsessive level. This time, it manifested itself in an intense scrutiny of the lyrics.
The specter of death was everywhere. I argued long into the night that “Drain You” was about abortion (I was wrong). The line “... rather be dead than cool” from “Stay Away” suddenly felt prescient. I had a whole thing worked out about “Verse Chorus Verse,” a top-three Nirvana track from the No Alternative collection, whereby the “He” of the song was God and the various actions he performed were the ways He toyed with us (poking holes in a jar, covering us with grass). When Jeff and I realized that the chorus included the line “... you’re in utero,” we damn near crashed his car.
I’m telling you, I know how it sounds—I really do—but this is what it was like.
One of us rushed out and bought the soundtrack to the Beavis and Butthead movie because it had a Nirvana song called “I Hate Myself and Want to Die.”
We were putting together a puzzle that already had all of the pieces in place.
*****
At the Kansas City show, they played “Rape Me,” the opening of which sounds a lot like the beginning of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” The crowd went crazy. They settled down when they realized what it wasn’t.
Later, he played the opening jingle to “Teen Spirit” for real this time but then stopped. Then played it again, then stopped. Then he left the stage.
Novoselic said, “You’d better play that one or they’re going to be really, really mad.”
They did.
At the end of the night, the band all switched instruments—Novoselic on drums, Grohl on guitar, and Cobain on bass. Then they made a racket. They just beat the shit out of everything, broke stuff. Cobain lined up at one side of the stage, Grohl at the other, both with instruments strapped around their necks. They ran toward the center and slammed into each other. The clatter was deafening.
Finally, after 15 minutes of chaos, two-thirds of the band left the stage. Cobain took a non-broken guitar, coaxed from it a piercing sound, and propped it up against an amplifier, which guaranteed that the pierce would be sustained.
He walked center, said, “I’m going to leave this here until everyone goes home. Good night.”
As we, herd-like, shuffled from our seats, the sound of the guitar droned loud and true.
*****
So I’m at a party, an after-party actually, chatting with a couple I didn’t know very well. I had met them earlier that night, and they seemed cool. They had a kid. They may have been the first people I knew who had a kid. It was definitely weird that they had a kid, and we were drinking in their house at three in the morning.
I was prattling on about God knows what, and at some point, the conversation turns to Cobain, and I say “Oh my, what a tragedy! Our generation’s John Lennon! You know that song ‘Drain You’ is really about an abortion?” and so on and so on ad nauseam (and I do mean nauseam).
Well, at some point I finally (and mercifully) shut up, and I turn to the guy—the husband, the father—and I say to him something that I said far too infrequently in those days. I said, “What do you think?”
“About what?”
“About the death of Kurt Cobain.”
“He had a daughter, right?”
“Yeah. Frances Bean.”
“Then I think it’s fucked up.”
And that, as they say, was that.
*****
Now, I’m the one with the kid, and it’s not only weird when people drink in my house at three in the morning, it’s unheard of.
I didn’t need to have a kid for the “He had a daughter” line to land, but doing so certainly drives the point home.
I’ve followed what there is to follow of Nirvana since those frenzied days. I dug “You Know You’re Right” well enough to call my wife in from the next room to check out the video and to make it my first 99-cent purchase from iTunes. Tellingly, I bought the posthumous box set With the Lights Out used, and I was disappointed by it even then. I’ve stayed away from the published journals and notebooks not because I believe them to be a money grab, but mostly because I’m not really interested in that kind of thing.
The truth is that I don’t even know the date on which his body was found. About once a year, I bust out From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah. I suspect it’s around the anniversary. I may not know the date exactly, but it’s in my blood.
Over the years, I’ve felt angry, deprived, and indifferent about the loss of him.
But then I listen with open ears to “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and I hear a line like “And I forget just why I taste / Oh yeah I guess it makes me smile.”
A line that was written before Butch Vig or Kansas City or Frances Bean.
No matter how much anger I try to muster, I hear a line like that, and I just feel sad.
