|
"Punk is musical freedom. It's saying, doing and playing what you want. In Webster's terms, 'nirvana' means freedom from pain, suffering and the external world, and that's pretty close to my definition of Punk Rock."-Kurt Cobain "
I first heard Nirvana by accident in July of 1989. I was in New York and dropped into The Pyramid Club on Avenue A in The East Village, a small downmarket club that doubled as a gay/trans-sexual bar as well as a cheap venue for the bands who infested the area. It was hot and crushed, with 200 people or so with a low stage, everything painted black and when Nirvana took the stage it looked like couple of sneakered T shirted denim jeaned members of the audience had picked up guitars. They exploded with a hyper kinetic energy, no lead guitar, just raw slabs of rhythm guitar and the small intense blonde singer’s voice cutting through the chaos with a piercing intensity. They roared. Even off-mic Kurt’s ravaged voice still shaped the bedlam into coherent songs that lasted four minutes before the next one hurtled it out of the way. Their Pixies-inspired quiet/loud/quiet/loud approach was explosive, the hot sweaty audience created a miasmic mosh pit that swept everyone up in its wake. The band jumped all over their guitarist at the end of set ending up as a pile of spent bodies writhing and sweat soaked. As it happened it was the last gig that they would play with the second guitarist Jason Everman who was at the bottom of the pile, while the band, at the end of their first national tour supporting their debut album Bleach cancelled their final four gigs and sacked their drummer. Phew!
So the next day I went out and bought the newly released on Sub Pop Bleach album, recorded for $600 it was murky and shambolic, its metallic riffing and rudimentary song-writing paled in comparison with their live impact, showing potential rather than achievement; in spite of that it went on to sell 350,000 copies and became a popular college radio staple.
After the superior Sliver single recorded by Butch Vig and giving Silverchair one half of their name, they signed to DGC for $287,000 and recorded Nevermind. It immediately sold out its initial 50,000 copies pressing and by the beginning of 1992, the single Smells Like Teen Spirit had climbed into the American Top Ten Due to constant airplay of the song's music video on MTV. Nevermind was selling 400,000 copies a week by Christmas 1991 and in January 1992, Nevermind replaced pop superstar Michael Jackson’s Dangerous as Number One, it also reached the British and Australian Top Ten shortly afterward. By February, the album had been certified triple platinum. Phew. Too much too soon.
The band had signed to do the first Sydney-only Big Day Out with Violent Femmes as the headliner, but by the time that they got here in January 1992 they were the biggest band in the world and usurped everything else on the bill. Unfortunately, to cope with a chronic stomach complaint Kurt had developed a heroin habit and had just come out of rehab when he arrived in Australia still undergoing withdrawal and the return of his stomach problem, so aside from the BDO and other side gigs stages he remained in his hotel room miserable and in pain, huddling from the outside world. Meanwhile the unanticipated thousands squeezed into any available space to witness the white-hot phenomenon that had unexpectedly exploded in their midst. So the string-bean bass-playing doofus Kris Novoselic bumbled his way through monosyllabic radio and press interviews. I remember their roar and the claustrophobic heat of their shows but little else; it was mass hysteria previously unseen since The Beatles.
They returned to America in a depleted state so to meet demand for new recordings, DGC released the odds-and-ends compilation Incesticide late in 1992; the album reached number 39 in the U.S. and number 14 in the U.K. Their next studio album In Utero was released in September of 1993 to positive reviews and strong initial sales, debuting at the top of the U.S. and U.K. charts. While the album and the tour were both successful, sales weren't quite as strong as expected, with several shows not selling out until the week of the concert. As a result, the group agreed to play MTV's acoustic Unplugged show at the end of the year, only playing two of their previous hits and sales of In Utero picked up after its December airing.
Tragically it also marked Kurt’s continued personal decline; a fraught marriage and fatherhood with the deeply disturbed Courtney Love, unwanted tabloid attention, continuing health problems, depression and a raging heroin and pills addiction. Never has a rock star enjoyed his success less, emotionally overwhelmed by the exposure, despising it with disgust and discontent, exorcising his demons on record and in performance.
After less than a week in a rehabilitation centre, Cobain climbed over the wall of the facility and took a plane back to Seattle. A week later, on Friday, April 8, 1994, Cobain age 27 was found dead of an apparently self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head at his Seattle home, leaving this farewell note.
Since then there have been numerous conspiracy theories questioning the circumstances of his death and conjecture as to who may have been involved in his demise. Courtney Love, the volatile, litigious rocker- actress widow with her own sordid history of drug busts, addiction and rehab, suddenly discovered she was broke; in her words she was down to her last $4,000, her acting career long since dried up, while her band, Hole, hasn't had a hit in years. So she took the biggest asset she still has, the back-catalogue of Nirvana's songs which she inherited on her husband's death, and sold 25 per cent of it to a former general manager of Virgin Records for a reported $50m for the right to sell Nirvana's songs for use in movies, television shows and commercials.
Due to the high sales for Kurt Cobain's Journals and the band's best-of compilation Nirvana upon their releases in 2002, The New York Times argued Nirvana "are having more success now than at any point since Mr. Cobain's suicide in 1994.” Cobain was Forbes magazine's top-earning dead celebrity of 2006 - beating Elvis, John Lennon and a whole host of other notables.
Nirvana only released three studio albums and a compilation while Kurt was alive, four albums including two live albums, two compilations and two boxed sets since; every album has achieved muti-Platinum sales status, with Nevermind reaching Diamond (10 million).
If Kurt had died of an accidental or deliberate overdose he would simply have joined an ever growing list of famous dead rock stars that died tragically, but his self inflicted gunshot wound had a self-hating violence about it that makes his demise a dark resignation from a life that was too painful for him to tolerate. He never wanted to be famous, simply to play music and get paid for it, so the sudden attention and acclaim caught him by surprise. Always troubled physically and psychologically, it was the very sensitivity and fragility that made his music so affecting that was also his undoing. His skin was too thin. It’s ironic that the deification and worship that he has engendered since his death is the very thing that drove him to suicide when he was alive.
back
to top
|
