Serving the Servant: Remembering Kurt Cobain

by Danny Goldberg

For me, one of the biggest issues is that sometimes it’s hard to tell where public history ends and where personal memory begins.

Kurt controlled every detail of the production of Nirvana’s recordings. He personally designed the album covers and even many of the T-shirts, and came up with the ideas for the music videos.

“It was punk if you did it your own way,”

In an interview for France’s Best magazine the year after Nevermind came out Kurt said, “I had a tendency to reason in terms of ‘us’ against ‘them.’ Since we’ve been part of a big business, I realize that things unfortunately aren’t that simple. We meet people in huge companies that sincerely love music and are trying to make things evolve. That being said, I understand how kids who like underground think we’re sellouts. I used to reason exactly like them.”

(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.

She had a characteristic many stars did, a way of making anyone she was intent on winning over feel that they were somehow more interesting and fabulous under the spotlight of her attention.

She would often loudly articulate things that he was quietly thinking, and he got off on that. Not everyone else was charmed.

I knew it was something akin to luck that I didn’t have the brain chemistry of an addict or an alcoholic.

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.

“Every junkie’s like a setting sun.”

Sometimes I felt as close to him as a brother and other times he seemed a galaxy removed, barely perceptible.

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

Nick Soulsby

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.”

The whole album took ten days.

Ten days to record “In Utero”. Unbelievable.

“If I accomplish nothing else in my life, at least I made sure that Kurt Cobain saw The Starry Night.”

Whatever it is that is bothering you, you can’t deal with it effectively until you get clean.

Kurt and I said goodbye to each other and his despair sounded undiminished. I felt helpless. It was the last time we spoke.

Good god.

With the possible exception of saints, human beings simply aren’t designed to understand everything about life and death.

Part of the karma of having been able to work with Kurt was becoming the recipient of the rage of others who loved him.

In 2016, there were 44,965 recorded suicides in the United States. More than three-quarters of them were men, and half of them killed themselves with guns. Suicide is also a global phenomenon. More than 800,000 people killed themselves around the world in 2015.

failed belongingness,

He should have stuck around just for his daughter’s sake.”

He gave us quite a lot in a short time. John Lennon had seventeen years of access to recording studios. Prince had thirty-eight; David Bowie had forty-nine. Kurt had only five.