Serving the Servant: Remembering Kurt Cobain

by Danny Goldberg

there was always a side of Kurt that was hidden, some of it the artistic genius that he literally couldn’t explain and some of it a despair rooted in pain that was too unbearable to expose.

In his journals Kurt wrote, “Punk rock says nothing is sacred. I say art is sacred.”

In 1993, Kurt told journalist Robert Hilburn, “I was a seriously depressed kid. Every night at one point I’d go to bed bawling my head off. I used to try to make my head explode by holding my breath, thinking if I blew up my head, they’d be sorry. There was a time when I never thought I’d live to see twenty-one.” In his book Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana, Michael Azerrad quotes Kurt’s reflection on his childhood: “I used to think I was adopted, that they found me on a spaceship. I knew there were thousands of other alien babies dropped off and I’ve met a few of them. One day we’ll find out what we’re supposed to do.”

The song “Territorial Pissings” on Nevermind begins with a phrase lifted from the sixties song “Get Together,” the most successful version of which was performed by the Youngbloods. In a fierce, garbled voice that seems to mock the hippie anthem Krist sings, “Come on people now / smile on your brother / everybody get together / try to love one another right now.” Many rock critics described the intro as a signal that Nirvana was mocking the peace-and-love era. However, Krist told me they did not mean to impugn the ideals of the song but were bitterly commenting on the abandonment of those ideals by the majority of baby boomers as they got older and more influential. The most complete answer Kurt gave in public about “Get Together” was in an interview in Brazil’s O Globo: “The song speaks of people who join together to be cool and try something new, the ideal contrast to the macho men I’m portraying in ‘Territorial Pissings.’ We didn’t want to be offensive to the guy who wrote it. The idea of being positive and causing change in society and the world was appropriated by the media, who turned it into something ridiculous, a caricature.”

While her husband was overseeing the dismantling of many programs that helped the poor, Mrs. Reagan spent $200,000 on new china for the White House. Reagan was elected by huge majorities. Embattled punks in the eighties, having no mass culture of “resistance” against the administration to plug into, created one themselves. DOA released a song called “Fucked Up Ronnie.” The Minutemen wrote “If Reagan Played Disco,” and there was a hardcore band called Reagan Youth. In 1983, Biafra’s group, the Dead Kennedys, organized a Rock Against Reagan tour. Two years later Thurston characterized Sonic Youth’s Bad Moon Rising album as “a rejection of the smiley face façade of Reagan’s ‘Morning in America’ re-election campaign.” In 1991, after Nevermind was released, Kurt said, “The Reagan years have definitely set us back to where the average teenager feels kind of lost and there isn’t much hope.” Reagan’s vice president and successor, George H. W. Bush, presided over the Gulf War, which seemed to many in the punk culture like a conflict that was launched primarily to protect the interests of oil companies. Kurt and Krist felt isolated when the war had a 90 percent approval rating and spawned ubiquitous yellow ribbons, ostensibly to symbolize support for the troops, but often expropriated by hawks as signifying support of the war itself.

Musical trends are created by teenagers. A “generation” in music usually spans around four years, the length of time it takes to get through high school.

But even Thurston was occasionally torn between adherence to indie ideology and the way he functioned in the real world. In the documentary 1991: The Year Punk Broke, filmed after Sonic Youth were already signed to Geffen, he is shown telling young German fans, “I think we should destroy the bogus capitalist process that is destroying youth culture. The first step is to destroy the record companies.”

(Kurt was almost entirely self-taught and never learned to read music.) Some guitarists (including Duane Allman and David Bowie) who were otherwise left-handed played guitar with their right hand. Kurt, like Jimi Hendrix, wrote with his right hand but played guitar with his left.

The week after “Smells Like Teen Spirit” got its first radio airplay, K hosted the International Pop Underground Convention (IPUC) in Olympia. The manifesto for the conference read in part, “As the corporate ogre expands its creeping influence on the minds of industrialized youth, the time has come for the International Rockers of the World to convene in celebration of our grand independence.—Because the corporate ogre has infected the creative community with the black plague of indentured servitude. Because we are grave diggers who have buried the grey spectre of the rock-star myth. We won’t go away . . . Revolution is the end. Revolution is the beginning. No lackeys to the corporate ogre allowed.”

There are not that many rock-and-roll chords. Every lyricist has access to the same dictionary. Everyone can listen to the same canon. Some elements of the craftsmanship of pop songwriting can be taught, but not the art of getting listeners in touch with their deepest feelings in an instantly memorable way. Some maintain that mass success in rock and roll is mostly a matter of luck, timing, marketing, and intensity of ambition. However, when it comes to Kurt, I think it has more to do with the way Sonny Rollins described the music of John Coltrane in the documentary Chasing Trane: “To play at that level you have to be touched by—whatever.” For my generation the great rock savant was Bob Dylan. Bob Johnston, the producer of the albums Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, said of Dylan, “God didn’t touch him on the shoulder, he kicked him in the ass. There was nothing he could do about it. He’s got the holy spirit on him. You can look at him and tell that.”

However, Kurt was not going to be deterred from pursuing the destiny he had long envisioned for himself and he had no patience for indie-purist guilt trips. He later explained to Azerrad, “A band was in a situation where it was expected to fight in a revolutionary sense against the major corporate machine and I just thought—how dare you put that kind of pressure on me? It’s really stupid.” He was on a different mission.

Rosenblatt’s background had been in the music retail business, which was usually more focused on moving units than art, but he had a poetic soul that allowed him to bond with creative types as well. He told one of the young promo guys, “Movies at their best are larger than life. Music at its best is life itself.” David once told me, “When people come out of Eddie’s office they feel like they’ve had a warm bath,” adding with a fierce gleam in his eye, “I am not a warm bath.”

In the book Classic Rock Albums: Nevermind Kurt is quoted as saying, “I like lyrics that are different and kind of weird and paint a nice picture. It’s just the way I like art.” He was an impressionist who knew that the sound of words in a song was as important as their literal meaning in a dictionary, and he used lyrics to convey feelings as often as he did to make a linear point.

Kurt had self-destructive tendencies but never when it came to his art.

As I got to know him better, I realized that although Kurt was attuned to an aesthetic wavelength that others could rarely fathom until they saw how it manifested in his work, he was genuinely curious to get perspectives he hadn’t thought of yet.

Just as he had figured out a way to uniquely transcend divisions in radio formats, Kurt endeavored to go beyond the pigeonholes that rock journalism had created. “People think I’m a moody person, and I think it’s lame that there are only two kinds of male lead singers,” he complained. “You can either be a moody visionary like Michael Stipe, or a mindless heavy metal party guy like Sammy Hagar.” Once he knew he was becoming famous, Kurt was determined to play both roles.

In St. Louis, security guards were getting rough with some kids who were rushing the stage. After trying to cool down the guards, always difficult in the middle of loud music, Kurt stopped the show and invited a bunch of the kids to stand on the stage while Krist earnestly explained to the audience that “anarchy only works if we all accept responsibility.”

One day he looked at me with a pained expression and earnestly asked, “Wouldn’t any man be upset if people disrespected the woman he loved?”

I had some experience in walking artists through the early stages of fame but nothing to match the meteoric rise of Nirvana. I often felt helpless when I’d see the anguished expressions that sometimes crossed his face for no apparent reason. I think it was dawning on Kurt that the success he had worked so hard for would not erase a lot of the emotional scars that he had lived with since childhood. I was reminded of Peggy Lee’s mournful song “Is That All There Is?”

There is also a theory that the sensitivity that foments creativity is somehow aligned with the aspects of the brain that are prone to an excessive desire for painkillers.

Kurt also had another reason/excuse, chronic, excruciating stomach pain that doctors were unable to help or diagnose. From the first days when we managed Nirvana, Kurt would periodically complain about it. Janet remembers, “We got so many doctors to examine him and no one could come up with a diagnosis. It definitely wasn’t an ulcer.” It was tempting to think that it was psychosomatic, but the pain was real to Kurt and heroin did make it temporarily go away.

I have long felt that one of the worst aspects of heroin is the deadening effect it has on a user’s spirit. The specter of death is always close at hand.

But most of all Courtney was devastated and Kurt wanted his wife to know that he was standing up for her.

I’m so extremely pissed off about the piece of trash journalism that I’d lay anything on the line for the love of my wife and daughter. Sincerely, Kurt Cobain

I was appalled, but I didn’t need to tell Courtney about the conversation because by the time I saw them that night, Kurt and Courtney had already ruled out having any grandparents involved. This was, I felt, a remarkable reflection of how fucked up their own childhoods had been. They felt the least risky choice was Courtney’s half sister Jaime Manelli (Linda Carroll was also her mother).

Cameron also wrote, “The overriding issue here is not that Kurt Cobain is on heroin (or isn’t, or was, or is and is trying to get off) but that his wife is a Grade A pain in the arse. She seems almost universally disliked. ‘The Wicked Witch Of The West’ is one crew member’s assessment, while someone else refers to Kurt being a nice guy BC—‘before Courtney.’” Cameron also referred to Janet as “a cross between wet nurse and human sponge, indulging whims and soaking up all of Courtney’s excess bullshit.” Reflecting on this moment, Kurt later told a British journalist, “A lot of it is simple sexism. Courtney is my wife and people could not accept the fact that I’m in love and that I could be happy, and she is such a powerful and threatening person that every sexist within the industry just joined forces and decided to try to string us up.” Once, while complaining to me about the tabloid interest in the couple, Kurt observed with a bewildered tone, “I don’t even know the name of Bono’s wife.” The ripple effect of the Vanity Fair piece had put Kurt and Courtney in an unenviable category of their own. In much of the media they had become cartoon characters.

Near the end of the set, Kurt walked up to the microphone, asked the audience to quiet down for a minute, and said, “This song is dedicated to my twelve-day-old daughter and my wife. There’s been some pretty extreme things written about her and she thinks everybody hates her. This is being recorded so could you say, ‘Courtney, we love you,’ on the count of three?” The crowd happily obliged, and then Nirvana played “All Apologies,” which would be recorded for In Utero several months later.

Kurt’s public commitment to gay rights made a strong impact in other parts of the gay community as well. Shortly after the benefit the band Pansy Division released a track called “Smells Like Queer Spirit” and on the cover sleeve wrote of Nirvana, “No superstar American rock band has ever before had the guts to take on such an overtly pro-gay stance.”

A few months later Kurt was still milking the Axl Rose story, telling Patrick Chng of the Singapore magazine Big O, “I don’t want to sound pretentious but it’s a crusade to me. I think Guns N’ Roses are promoting the wrong values, like sexism. What are they rebelling against? Rebellion is standing up to people like Guns N’ Roses.”

He saw this kind of activism not as an adjunct of his art but as an integral part of it. In his journals he wrote, “There is a small percent of the population who were BORN with ability to detect injustice. They have Tendencies to question injustice and look for answers. These kids are usually hyperactive uncontrollable brats who never know when to quit.”

(In 2017, Ivanka Trump would be quoted as saying she went through a “punk phase” and had “loved” Nirvana. Kurt would have been mortified.)

Kurt underlined the meaning of the lyric to “In Bloom” in the interview he did for DGC a few months after Nevermind came out: “I don’t like rednecks, I don’t like macho men, I don’t like abusive people.” He told an Italian journalist about “Territorial Pissings,” which was inspired in part by Kurt’s feelings about the way Native Americans were treated in the areas around Aberdeen when he was growing up. “There are references to all those people living in North American reserves; people smashed by the raging Americans’ attacks.” Kurt explained that the song is also about sexism: “At the same time it’s about appreciating women. I’m standing on their side because I hate the violence they suffer, the daily injustices resulting from belonging to a different sex.”

Unlike some of the anarchists in the punk world, Kurt had no problem distinguishing between utopian ideals and electoral choices. He detested many Reagan and Bush administration policies and on more than one occasion told me, “Republicans are evil.”

Kurt voted for Clinton in the general election but as far as I can tell only mentioned it publicly to a journalist in Argentina who asked if he had considered the third-party candidate Ross Perot. Kurt replied, “The guy sucks. He’s rich. I don’t trust him as president. I don’t want to waste my vote. I prefer to make sure Bush doesn’t continue.”

I hesitated for a moment and during the pause Courtney loudly chimed in from her seat in the audience, “If I was going to get an abortion I’d feel a lot less safe if it were a bunch of antichoice Christians.” Neither Prager nor anyone else in the audience had the nerve to disagree.

Kurt was also a proponent of the progressive media group FAIR, which pointed out conservative bias in the mass media, and he always supported Krist’s political interests. The bass player’s family was Croatian, and Bob Guccione at Spin commissioned him to write a piece about the Balkan war. Krist donated the $3,000 fee to a charity that helped rape victims from the war, and Nirvana played a benefit at the Cow Palace in San Francisco for the same cause. When MTV asked Kurt beforehand why he wasn’t planning to proselytize about the cause from the stage, he said, “I don’t think it’s going to be very effective to have a long-winded speech. I think the fact that we’re doing this and the literature that people are going to be able to read is effective enough.” Dave was supportive of all these efforts, and in interviews he added a pro-labor element to Nirvana’s image and pointed out that his mother had been a public school teacher for several decades.

Kurt elaborated on his concept of activism in the Advocate interview: “I was helpless when I was 12, when Reagan got elected, and there was nothing I could do about that. But now this generation is growing up, and they’re in their mid 20s; they’re not putting up with it. . . . I would have rather had Jerry Brown . . . but I’m definitely happy that Clinton’s in. . . . Chelsea seems like a pretty neat person—Birkenstock-wearing kid.” He added, “Amy Carter’s pretty cool too, from what I’ve heard. She’s been seen at Butthole Surfers concerts!”

He also cited the Rock for Choice and No on 9 benefits as moments “that made life worth living,” and then he wrote, “While all these things were very special, none were half as rewarding as having a baby with a person who is the supreme example of dignity, ethics, and honesty. My wife challenges injustice and the reason her character has been so severely attacked is because she chooses not to function the way the white corporate man insists.” Kurt answered critics from Olympia, “I don’t feel the least bit guilty for commercially exploiting a completely exhausted rock youth culture because, at this point in rock history, Punk Rock (while still sacred to some) is, to me, dead and gone.” Most memorably Kurt drew a line in the sand with the rock audience: “At this point I have a request for our fans. 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 fuck alone! Don’t come to our shows and don’t buy our records.”

Always wary of sounding pretentious, Kurt played down the In Utero lyrics to Azerrad: “They are sarcastic one minute and caring the next. That’s how the songs come out. Every song is about things that piss me off, the conflict between good and evil. Some people do evil things to people for no reason, and I want to beat the shit out of them. All I can do is scream into a microphone instead.”

There was a period right after the recording when Kurt wanted to call the album I Hate Myself and I Want to Die.

However, the In Utero artwork immediately triggered resistance from Walmart, the giant retail chain, which was at the time the single biggest outlet for mass-appeal albums. They told the Geffen sales department they would not sell it with that cover, and I was asked if the band could come up with an alternative. I felt that Walmart’s position was absurd. There was nothing violent, erotic, or profane in the artwork. Any medical textbook has similar images of body parts. Nirvana had been acclaimed by critics all over the world and had won the biggest music awards. I assumed that the resistance was politically rooted in the antiabortion movement, for which the fetus was an object of veneration. Bursting with free speech and pro-choice indignation, I told Kurt about the problem and proudly let him know I’d be more than happy to tell the label to back the fuck off. After all, N.W.A’s recent album hadn’t been carried by Walmart and it was still one of the biggest records of the year. To my surprise Kurt disagreed with me. He explained that when he was growing up the only place he could get records was Walmart, and he wanted kids like him to be able to get Nirvana’s new album, so I was to ask Geffen to tell us what changes were needed to get In Utero into their stores.

I later learned that the “control” Nirvana had did not extend to places in the world where they ignored contracts. In a 2018 piece for Discogs, Ben Blackwell described acquiring a Saudi Arabian cassette of In Utero “that completely censored the musculature of the female body depicted on the front cover, almost as if to partially appropriate the chador worn by some Muslim women . . . the face, arms, feet and wings were exposed, but everything in between was blacked out.” Blackwell also found a Saudi cassette of Nevermind in which the local label had airbrushed a white diaper over the baby’s penis. I suspect that Kurt would have been more amused than upset by these releases and happy that some Saudi teenagers were able to hear his music.

I foolishly believed that this horrible close call would somehow awaken in him the need to change his behavior. As I was selling myself this fairy tale, David Geffen called and began the conversation somberly, saying, “Well, there are some people who just can’t be helped no matter what you do.”

Kurt wasn’t having it. He insisted that William Burroughs had been able to function for decades as a junkie and Kurt didn’t see any reason why he couldn’t have a life like that.

And I was thinking about Kurt’s wife. Rolling Stone printed the one quote from my remarks that survives: “I believe he would have left the world years ago if he hadn’t met Courtney.”

I thought it was pretty lame for people to use Kurt’s death as a talking point in their self-serving arguments about the supposed moral superiority of their own choices in life. My own “cautionary tale” is: Don’t do heroin. Don’t become a fucking junkie. And if you are a junkie, do whatever it takes to stop. But even the junkie factor isn’t dispositive. There are mysteries of the mind and spirit. With the possible exception of saints, human beings simply aren’t designed to understand everything about life and death.

Another factor that some people believe increases the odds of suicide is a genetic predisposition. Kurt often talked of having “suicide genes.” He said that his great-uncle Burle and great-uncle Kenneth both shot themselves, and he also thought he had a great-grandfather who stabbed himself. Eric emailed me, “I’m not a big fan of the suicide gene theory. Depression maybe, but I believe that if you hear someone chose that way out, and you have some mental illness, you are given the idea that it’s an option. Families having mental illness passed down through generations yes, but a gene that compels one to go against one’s survival instincts, I don’t buy it. Like many suffering from depression, Kurt would conveniently use anything he could as an excuse for his problems rather than focusing on the responsibility of breaking the cycle.”

It’s morally essential to do everything possible to prevent and discourage suicide, but I still keep coming back to the idea that Kurt had a disease that no one knew how to cure and that he died from it when he was twenty-seven.

The man who wrote of being “stupid and contagious” in 1991 was as famous then as Drake or Rihanna are a quarter of a century later. He gave the world so much in twenty-seven years. Kurt told a journalist a few weeks after Nevermind was released, “People think of life as being so sacred and they feel like this is their only chance and they have to do something with their life and make an impact. As far as I’m concerned, it’s just a pit-stop for an afterlife. It’s just a little test to see how you can handle reality.”

Everett True told me that his favorite piece among the many he published about the band is the introduction to a book of photos published in England in 2001 called Nirvana, in which he wrote, “Here is my take on history books. I hate them. I fucking hate them. I hate anything that means something has ceased to exist. I don’t want to let it go. I don’t like the idea that a moment in time can be captured, stilled, become, in other words, a moment in time. What was Nirvana? A celebration of much that was glorious about our lives.”