Serving the Servant: Remembering Kurt Cobain

by Danny Goldberg

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.