This week marks the 15th anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death in 1994. You could argue that Cobain’s suicide was a generation of late-twentysomethings and early-thirtysomethings’ version of the JFK assassination… and pretty much remained our defining cultural event until 9/11. So, we’d like to hear your stories. Share where you were, what you were doing and how you felt. Maura and I will start the ball rolling with our own anecdotes, as well as a few we gathered from members of Pelican, Throw Me The Statue, and Oxford Collapse.
Maura Johnston, Idolator:
Freshman year of college. I remember we were blaring Q101 throughout the hallways of my dorm’s lower level, where our carrier-current radio station and the dorm’s computer lab (yes, I was online a lot even back then—what do you want, our dorm didn’t have cable) were located. I don’t remember what happened at the exact minute his death was announced, but I do remember sitting in an upstairs lounge after it happened with a friend, kind of bumming out, and the silence was broken by someone whose room was right off the lounge coming out of his room, looking at us, saying “Fuckin’ Cobain, man”—then turning around and going back inside.
Christopher R. Weingarten, Idolator:
I remember hearing it on the local radio station on the way home from school in 8th grade. And the DJs kind of goofed on it, like it was some kind of late April Fool’s gag. I had to run some errand with my mom and the wait to get home and turn on MTV and find out the truth was interminable. Once I did, I found the news crawling at the bottom of the screen-creepily juxtaposed against an episode of MTV Grind.
Trevor De Brauw, guitarist, Pelican:
I remember I stayed home sick from school that day. After school some “punker-than-thou” friends started calling to tell me that Cobain had killed himself and how it had brought all the jocks at school to tears. Although it rubbed me the wrong way to ridicule Cobain’s suicide, I had to admit that the image of jocks and bullies crying over him was pretty ironic.
Dan Fetherston, drummer, Oxford Collapse:
I was home from school. I was in ninth grade. I was in the basement on the phone with a girl. My friend clicked in and said “Cobain blew his brains out.” Then i clicked over again and was like, “Kelly… I gotta go!”
Scott Reitherman, Throw Me The Statue:
I don’t remember where i was aside from being at school one day. I would have been in fifth grade, maybe sixth. I remember being very clued in to the gravity of the situation despite being pretty young. I watched tons of MTV and saw all the grieving and the reading of his last letter by Courtney and all that. That’s the strongest lasting memory of the whole thing, the media portrayals really… Now that i live in Seattle and make music here, and have recorded with people who recorded with Nirvana, I just wish i had better stories of my own.
I was a freshman at Mississippi State, and I had already had a personal backlash and resurrection with Nirvana. I was (gulp) probably more of a Pearl Jam guy after Nevermind broke and went crazy, and I got tired of hearing about them. The one-two punch of In Utero and Unplugged got me back into them, though I remember really digging into In Utero after Kurt died. The guy next to me in the dorms, Eric Fesh, had been jamming “Heart-Shaped Box” for weeks before Kurt died and the day Kurt’s body was found, he locked himself in the room and didn’t leave, playing that song on repeat. I think after a day or two we had to get the RAs to make sure everything was okay.
That night, April 7th, I guess, I went to Biloxi to go see Smashing Pumpkins play, with Red Red Meat, opening. I wish I’d been videotaping that, because the parking lot was bananas. People were crying everywhere and there were candles and poetry readings and bonfires and pretty much everybody was in a Nirvana t-shirt. The Pumpkins played a really subdued set, and Billy Corgan kept his mouth shut for once besides an off-handed remark about casinos. They played all of the slow jams and I think it was the best show I ever saw them play. During the set, half of the crowd was sullen while the other half were out of their minds. My friend Jason had to punch people in the face to keep them away from us (I think he was protecting this cute girl named–no lie–”Cinnamon”). The mosh pits during “Disarm” were huge and completely inappropriate. Girls all around us just sobbed the whole time.
Red Red Meat opened, and I think I was the only person there that enjoyed their set. They were quiet, and it was a tough crowd. People booed around me. They dedicated a song “For Kurt” and I swear I think it was the beautiful “Gauze”, though I could just be remembering it wrong. It was the only time the crowd paid attention to them.
@HomefrontRadio: I agree that it was melodically fairly simple, and the loud-soft stuff was ripped off from the Pixies (as my Pixies fan friends used to whine about), but c’mon, no outsider kids at your high school? I don’t know what high school you went to, but when that thing hit in 1991-1992, it was like manna from heaven for a lot of my outsider-type friends. The “jocks” and stuff didn’t come to the party until much later, if ever. And what’s wrong with music being popular and appealing to lots of people?
@Audif Jackson Winters III: Ha, I remember that Loder-Frickle dicussion where they inflated Kurt as a generational spokesperson. And yet, numerous critics previously scratched their heads over “In Utero” and wrote the band off as “un-commercial” jerks.
I saw Derek Jarman’s Blue at the Film Forum that afternoon. You may have heard about its central conceit: eighty minutes of a featureless blue screen married to Jarman’s ruminations about death and the disease that had claimed his vision and would soon claim his life. Walking out of the theater, I had, like a cold or maybe a hit of cough medicine, this feeling of serenity that was hard to pin down yet hard to shake.
I got home and a friend of mine called. We shot the shit for a few minutes, then he added, as an afterthought: “Oh, by the way, that guy, that rock musician killed himself. What was his name? Kurt…something.” I thought he was kidding. He said it so matter-of-factly, like he was talking about a new TV show. I asked him if he was. No, he wasn’t. I turned on the TV, and…no, he wasn’t kidding.
I went to bed hoping Kurt would appear in my dreams. He didn’t, but Beck did.
Oh God, unless I’m misremembering things, the next day I saw the Raincoats open for Liz Phair: heartbreak followed by anticlimax.
@Lucas Jensen: “…when that thing hit in 1991-1992, it was like manna from heaven for a lot of my outsider-type friends. The ‘jocks’ and stuff didn’t come to the party until much later, if ever. And what’s wrong with music being popular and appealing to lots of people?”
Lucas, how dare you question the bedrock axiom of indie rock alchemy?! Don’t you know that once an artist and/or their music is enjoyed by the masses it turns to shit, regardless of the quality of the music itself? Shame on you.
Cobain never fancied himself a spokesperson for anyone but himself. It’s not fair to saddle him with what a lazy media and blind followers have laid upon his feet all these years. Nirvana and their co-horts, in and out of Seattle, were not the spokespersons for my generation–nobody was up for the job–but they wrote the soundtrack. And after living in the shadow of the classic rockers, punks, and new wavers, etc. we finally had our own music, which I’m proud of and will always cherish. And Nirvana was an important part of that.
this post is HEAVY.
I was at work, heard it on the local classic rock station.
I remember that all my co-workers save one didn’t know who Kurt Cobain was and I had to explain it to him by saying “You know the guy that does the ‘Here we are now entertain us’ song”. Weird sensation to hear such sad news around people who are indifferent to the news.
Freshman year of high school, I was on spring break with my family in DC. Perhaps it was the next day and I had been busy with museums and stuff, but it was front page of the Washington Post.
I remember feeling old for the first time, because I got the news from CNN. I didn’t quite believe it. I lived in New Haven and was heading into NYC for the Raincoats/Liz Phair show at the Academy. I stopped in Times square in a fog, there was dirty snow on the ground still. It finally sunk in when I saw it blinky lightbulbs on one of the news tickers.
The Raincoats and Liz both made mention of it.
People still make fun of me for being affected by it now.
sophomore year of high school. i had already stopped listening to them obsessively, in large part because of the dozens of bands i’d discovered in the previous three years thanks to nevermind’s success as the final push into alt/indie/punk rock (and often directly via namedrops in nirvana features and interviews). i think word had gotten around before school had let out for the day, though i could be misremembering; i definitely watched a lot of mtv that afternoon/evening in a compulsive daze now reserved for coverage of national tragedies and apocalyptic weather events. for some reason i remember the immediate aftermath being a much heavier trip for my sister, though she was two years younger and had only recently started listening to the band in earnest.
I was a sophomore, going to high school in suburban DFW. A reporter from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram came up to get reactions from teenagers at school, but in that pre-Internet, pre-cell phone age, she ended up breaking the news to everyone. Word spread pretty quick after that. A buddy of mine had just gotten his license, and after school, we just drove around in his beat-up Mercury Cougar, listening to KDGE play the more somber Nirvana deep cuts (”Pennyroyal Tea,” “Something in the Way,” etc.) while we wound our way around the cul-de-sacs.
I was a ski vacation with friends in Vermont. The house we rented had no TV, and we found out about his death from a late-arriving friend who’d heard the news on the radio as she was driving. It was the strangest weekend — this huge event occurred, and for four days, there was no news. We finally went for a drive, and a local radio station played “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” “All Apologies,” and the Beatles “Hey Jude,” dedicating it to Kurt. Because we couldn’t watch it all unfold on TV, it just didn’t seem real. Fifteen years later, it still doesn’t.
I had just purchased a used copy of In Utero that day (I know it was well after the album came out, but I just never had my own copy. I was a poor college student then.) Immediately after the purchase, I came back to my dorm. Someone had the tv on and it was playing the news story.
I was in 4th grade, didn’t know him, didn’t care.
I do remember that my after school councilor who I thought was cool came in dressed in black, sobbing and listening to Nevermind on loop all day, trying to convince me of the loss that music suffered that day.
I went off to play basketball, unphased. Call me callus, but he obviously didn’t care enough about his craft to continue making a far more influential career beyond the records the band put out.
ah cookies, I realized that while blabbing about my disregard for the dead, I misspelled some words. self chastising begins….now.
@Invisible Circus: please dont worry about the spelling mistakes, the only people who don’t make mistakes are the people who aren’t trying.
visiting my sister as school in new haven.
someone came in and casually mentioned it, then they all moved on. i was freaking out because there was no one there that actually cared or wanted to talk about it. rough.
I was working for Eastsideweek, the Seattle Weekly’s sister paper (we covered the suburbs). I had written a cover story about the grunge scene–really its collapse–a couple of months earlier for the Weekly (which, due to editorial misjudgment, had been slow off the mark), and was being interviewed myself on the phone by a guy who wrote for a paper in Portland called Paperback Jukebox. We had just gotten started when the receptionist came into the room were I was taking the call with a message from my wife saying Cobain had shot himself. I told the interviewer and we both sort of shrugged it off and tried to go on with what we’d been doing (which sounds callous but I think was really a brief moment of shock). After a minute, though, we both realized there were more important things to do. I went back to my desk, turned on the TV for more info, pulled myself together as best I could, and wrote the obit that afternoon.
A couple of weeks later I got a copy of Paperback Jukebox in the mail. We had never finished the interview and I had forgotten all about it. Their obit for Cobain opened with a transcript of our conversation. It hadn’t even occurred to me the guy was recording it. It felt very weird.
I also have to admit that I’m one of those people who haven’t listened to Nirvana since.
I was in sixth grade in Michigan, on spring break. It was the very beginning of my musical education, in that I was just discovering music, and finding out what kind of music I liked, and I liked Nirvana very much. I had asked for Nevermind for my birthday that January, but my mom bought me Sting’s Ten Summoner’s Tales instead because she didn’t like the song title “Territorial Pissings”. I saved up my money and bought an obscenely overpriced copy of Nevermind at the now defunct Harmony House chain here, went home and had my mind blown. Believe it or not, I had never heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” before that moment. Anyway, I spent the whole spring break week listening to Nevermind over and over. Then, that Friday my dad came home from work and said, “You hear who killed themselves? Your buddy!” I recall being really crushed. When I went back to school a few stoner guys were sad too, but nobody else really cared. My middle school class was into Snoop Doggy Dogg, mostly.
Here’s my blog piece about it:
[adeepershadeofsoul.blogspot.com]
Stated out a great day, actually. Went up to the Bronx with some buddies because we heard about a new place you could buy weed, got grilled in Van Cortland park, went back to the dorm to watch “Dazed and Confused” for the 50th or so time. I didn’t believe it at first, because the first person to walk in and tell us was a notoriously unreliable source, and because the whole OD in Rome or whatever was still fresh in our minds, plus I bought the whole bullshit cover story about how it was an accidental overdose, not a suicide attempt. Second person came in to tell us and it sunk in. Remember seeing Kurdt Loder get choked up on MTV News. Solemn evening with friends, spinning the Nirvana CDs (remember those?), probably smoking more pot.
someone put mtv’s coverage up on youtube. i never saw this, what with the lack of cable and all:
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Like alot of people, I have very distinct memories of hearing about the Rome overdose, but have a hard time specifically placing myself the night I heard that cobain died. Nirvana is important to me because it was the first band that I got really excited about- turning the tv ALL THE WAY UP when Lithium came on. I bought In Utero the day I heard, which I think was the day after. I remember vague images of thier place, seeing a bunch of kids kind of just hanging out, and somehow feeling like I had missed out on something. I’m comfortable with Nirvana being huge and capital “i” Important- they are like Led Zeplin, people can take or leave them, but they left a massive footprint.
I 24 years old when Cobain passed away, and I remember exactly where I was.
I was driving down the Merritt Parkway, somewhere the NY state line, when I flipped on the late, lamented WDRE-FM 92.7 from Garden City, L.I., and heard the DJs speaking in very hushed tones. It took about 10 minutes of driving, and, eventually, the Merritt turned into the Hutchinson River Parkway in New York before I divined who and what they were talking about.
I hadn’t been a huge Nirvana fan, but it didn’t take a genius to realize that a: this was a sad and tragic event and b: it was an event of tremendous cultural significance. I went back not long after and re-listened to a lot of Nirvana and, as is often the case, developed a posthumous appreciation for Cobain that I did not have for him in life.
Since then, other rock passings have affected me more profoundly: Joe Strummer in 2002 and Grant McLennan of the Go-Betweens in 2006.
I’m not sure that Nirvana have left a legacy as towering as, say, The Clash. But I have tremendous appreciation for Cobain’s skills as a songwriter. And it’s easy to tell, from 15 years’ distance, that an era had passed with him.
John Micek, Pop Culture Press
I was working at Details at the time. When I first heard the news, I assumed it was just an overblown rumor, and called up Nirvana’s publicist at Geffen to get official word. I got his voicemail, so I tried a different publicist. She didn’t confirm or deny, just forwarded me to the first publicist (voicemail again). Soon enough, there would be that handyman calling a Seattle radio station and that photograph of Cobain’s body with his wallet helpfully left open to his driver’s license, but I knew the news was bad as soon as I was forwarded to voicemail.
I wrote up my other memories of that day here, and put up my (sometimes callow, but still interesting, I think) 1994 remembrance of Cobain here.
I was at home for my grade school’s spring break. I was in the sixth grade, and had taken our family dog for a walk in the park and had been hanging out with some of the kids from the neighborhood. We all had on our little plaid shirts tied around our waist and I was particularly proud of my ying yang necklace and necklace shaped like an earth with a bell inside of it; I remember hoping my crush would think it was cool.
It was warm and sunny out and we went into the little grocer on the corner to get sodas on our way home and the classic rock station was playing Nirvana, which I thought was weird but since they were so popular, I ignored it. Then a second Nirvana song came on and I got excited, thinking Nirvana was maybe coming to Indiana to perform for us soon!
Back home, I went inside and flipped on MTV to catch Lip Service or Catawalk or one of those stupid shows that was big them and John Norris was sitting on a stage, a grim look on his face. He said, “for viewers who are joining us for the first time, MTV News is sad to report that Kurt Cobain has died from a self inflicted gun shot to the head.”
I was absolutely bummed out and spent the whole day/
I first learned of Nirvana when I saw them open up for Sonic Youth the night before I moved into the dorm to begin college, and the suicide occurred about a month before I graduated, so Nirvana neatly encapsulates my memories of my time as a student. Although I really loved them when I first discovered them– I remember listening to ‘Bleach’ almost everyday of my freshman year and I was pretty thrilled when ‘Nevermind’ got so huge, though baffled at the same time– but I had lost interest by ‘In Utero’ and after (partly for youthful indie snob reasons, but also partly because it was pretty damned tuneless).
I remember walking across campus with my girlfriend (now my wife) on our way to a party and bumping into a friend of mine who was the editor of the arts section in the college paper and the coolest girl I knew. She said, “So: Kurt Cobain…” and I remember saying “What? Did he finally succeed in killing himself or something?” She looked at me kind of shocked and said “Well, yes…” Aside from feeling pretty awful, I also remember thinking to myself “Thank god I’m really into Rocket from the Crypt; I can’t imagine John Reis ever getting up to something like that…” Sometimes indie-snobbishness has its own short-sighted benefits…
I never warmed to ‘In Utero’ and heard ‘Nevermind’ so many times in the end so as to never have to hear it again; I can’t really get all the way through it at this point. I still dig ‘Bleach,’ though– and I still think that ‘Circa:Now!’ is better than anything Nirvana ever released, no matter how ridiculous that might sound…
I did subscribe to Spin back then, however, and I remember considerably more coverage than 2 pages. That might have been the case with the first issue that appeared in the immediate aftermath of his death, but I distinctly remember an issue not long after with a blurry black and white cover and a lengthy article about Nirvana by Gina Arnold (anyone remember her?) that was pretty much devoted to Cobain. Spin was just as much involved in the process of canonization as anything else was; try taking a look at the ‘Spin Alternative Record Guide’ that came out a year later for old time’s sake…
I was 16. I was in the car and my mom was driving me to swimming practice in Pottstown, PA. I heard the news on KYW 1060. I immediately believed that he had been murdered, despite the Roman incident.
What still sticks with me is that feeling of betrayal that seems to go hand-in-hand with suicide. I also remember thinking about how much bigger Pearl Jam would become in Nirvana’s absence.
Then I swam laps for two hours in an overchlorinated YMCA pool!
@GrioirDoibin: Yep, I was gonna point this out: Spin certainly spent more than two pages covering Cobain’s death. Come on–how could it be otherwise? He was basically the mag’s bread and butter.
I had been backpacking across Crete with my college girlfriend, largely out of touch with anything resembling civilization. Having arrived back in town in order to catch a ferry to another island, we were killing time nursing endless coffees at a cafe on the plaza. Needing something to read, I walked over the to the newsstand, where the international edition of Time or Newsweek read in great big type, “DEATH OF A ROCK GOD,” or some such. I immediately assumed that a Beatle or Stone or some such had kicked it, and was completely floored when I opened the mag to find out who it was. It didn’t really register. I liked Nirvana, but I wasn’t a huge fan; mostly, I think, it was that they, like me, came from the Northwest, and we were of similar ages. It just seemed so unlikely, and yet uncanny–one of those “There but for the grace of God go I” moments. Except for the fact that I didn’t have a raging heroin habit or a hit record to my name. But yeah, Greece.
For me, this was a pretty personal thing when it happened - I don’t think I had any clue how huge it was culturally, until all the magazines started chiming in. (Magazines! If this had happened yesterday, I’d have said “blogs.”)
(Fun fact: I watched the OJ-and-AC-White-Bronco car chase at the same job mentioned above, on a mounted-to-the-ceiling TV, as it was happening. Everybody - bartenders, wait staff, rich-as-f*ck patrons, etc. - stopped what we were doing, eyes glued to the screen.)
When was the last time I saw 72 comments on an idolator post? Damn.
I was home from school. I forget why. It was 10th grade. My parents had only broken down and bought cable a couple years prior so I was still in my All-MTV-and-Nickelodeon All-the-Time phase. I remember distinctly standing in the living room when Kurt Loader came on–and it wasn’t yet 10 minutes to the hour!–and broke the news.
I remember feeling nothing. Just staring at the TV in odd fascination. I didn’t like Nirvana–mainly because all the popular GapGirls did, and I wanted to be different.
The next day I went to school and there was this ninth grade girl all grundged out with burgundy-dyed hair, and she had a little tape recorder to her ear, playing Nevermind and she was sitting down, rocking back and forth, in a corner in the hallway next to the lockers. I remember thinking to myself: “Weird.”
@King of Pants:
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This just about sums it up. Except Courtney Love was in the mix and she’s fucking crazy, I’m sure that didn’t help things.
I liked Pearl Jam, Mother Love Bone, Alice In Chains and Soundgarden way more than Nirvana.
Wow, what an amazing thread. I wish I had time right now to read all of these - I will eventually.
I was playing guitar for the Lemonheads in ‘94, and we shared management with Nirvana. I only met Cobain once in passing back in ‘90, but I was a huge, longtime fan. The Lemonheads were on a break from touring, and I was home (Bloomington, Indiana) working on a record which wasn’t going very well. I’d brought over an engineer from London who was costing a fortune, so we were doing 14-hour days in the studio trying to get it all done. We knocked off at around 3:00 a.m. the night before, and when I went in late the next morning the news had broken and the intern told me. I immediately called off work for the day and we went straight to the bar to commiserate.
I spent the following summer and fall on a long Lemonheads tour, and Cobain’s death really colored the experience. It was on everyone’s mind - we even had several members of Nirvana’s crew working for us. Courtney made her first public appearance after his death at our show. It was a sad and confusing time to be playing rock.
I was in 9th grade at the time and though I don’t remember exactly the details of my day, I do vividly recall it was late at night when I saw a Kurt Loder break the news. Even though I was too young to understand the gravity of what I was hearing, I immediately knew this was a big deal.
I was a senior in highschool- and a big Nirvana fan- having seen them at a free WFNX concert when I was in 9th grade and then on the In Utero tour that year.
The death was a little unbelievable to me - I remember feeling nothing, although I had tickets to see Pearl Jam that night and didn’t bother going- I remember seeing Blind Melon on Letterman that night…
When it all hit me was that summer at Lolapalooza (which Nirvana was supposed to headline) - before the Breeders went on ALL APOLOGIES played over the system and the crowd got very silent for the begining and then pretty much exploded with the crashes and crunches of the song- it was the best tribute I can imagine- Breeders, Beasties, tribe called Quest, and Pfunk all were fantastic- the Smashing Pumpkins were not.
@mike a: I don’t remember Cat Power, though she opened up for one or two Guided By Voices concerts around this time, and I COULD NOT STAND HER, SUCH A DRAG. Still can’t tolerate her much.
I had gotten into The Raincoats a few years prior via Wanna Buy A Bridge?. They dedicated “The Void” to Cobain and it was, as they say, really really fucking heavy.
Liz Phair was just…awful. A terrible case of nerves, I thought. She got shook by this drunken heckler who kept shouting WHY DON’T YOU SING ABOUT ZUCCHINI or something like that.
It was my 15th birthday, and my older sister was driving me back from THE WIZ were she had just bought me a few CDs for my birthday, and I heard it on the radio. I cannot recall exactly which CDs I got that day.. though I suppose if i scrutinized the late 93 early 94 releases I could figure it out.
I was pretty bummed about it.
@Dickdogfood: yup, that was the show I attended as well, and my impressions exactly. Cat Power opened up - just Chan playing a few songs and hurriedly leaving the stage. No one knew who she was or anything. Added to the strangeness of the whole night.
Later that night I attended a pretentious party on the Lower East Side. Cobain was all anyone wanted to talk about.
@raycummings: I remember where I was when I heard about Layne Staley. I was doing my radio show in college and my co-host made the comment that “now he truly is the Man In the Box”. The rest of us groaned and that pretty much ended any talk about it. It’s actually a really sad story.
@raycummings: Yes, Layne deserves some props too. Especially since his former bandmates have recently decided to carry on w/o him.
one of these years, we need a post like this for layne staley.
not that as many people will comment or anything
I was in college, my one short year of school before I dropped out. Strangely, the week before there were (local?) rumors that Eddie Vedder had died. So, naturally, I thought Cobain’s death was a hoax too. That day, I got food poisoning from the cafeteria and spent the next few days in bed. I watched the MTV coverage pretty much non-stop in my dorm room. Mostly what I remember is the memorial with Courtney reading his suicide note and a lot of Kurt Loder reportage.
@Chris N.: I totally agree.
I was going Go-Carting with a friend, in the morning when we were getting ready his Mum yelled out “Kurt Cobain committed suicied”. Though I was shocked by the news, my friend just replied “Ha! What a Dickehead!” and that was that. I looked up to my friend to much to put forward my opinion and had to wait until the next day to develop my reaction, which was a mixture of shock and general gloom. I remember wizzing around in my Go Cart just thinking of Kurt and what the gravity of it all meant. Strange day.
We weren’t listening to Nirvana much at the time, we were fans but they were a mainstream band in Australia and by the time In Utero came out I was far more into old Sonic Youth and a host of lesser known and even lesser remembered bands of the time.
@John P Strohm: Btw, John, you kinda win at alt-rock memories here: “I was playing guitar for the Lemonheads in ‘94, and we shared management with Nirvana.”
Not saying it’s a contest or anything, but your perspective is pretty unique.