Idolator

I was at the school paper's office where I was a staff writer. I was going to school at Queens College at the time. I remember people thought I was kidding.

I was TAing a writing course and after class ended, one of my students mentioned that he'd heard the news on the radio. I expressed disbelief but that was soon corrected...

I was on spring break circa 6th grade , sitting at home with my brother goofing off and watching MTV all day when the Kurt Loder newsflash came on. It's funny, most other people seemed to be in school that day, but I think spring break in my district was always later than it was in a lot of other places. I remember when Kurt attempted suicide in Rome before that I told a friend that if he died I was going to build a shrine to him or something (c'mon, I was 12), but when it really happened a month later I didn't do anything like that. I loved In Utero but in general Nirvana was never a big deal to me, there were a lot of other bands I liked more.

I was in eighth grade, and home from school when I heard the news on MTV -- I remember Kurt Loder talked to David Fricke for a while. My brother and I watched all afternoon. I think my mother was a little perplexed by the John Lennon comparisons, but they made sense.

I was home rather than at work that day -- sick, maybe. (I was 31 that year.)

I was flicking channels on TV and CNN was reporting that a dead body, not yet identified, had been found inside the Cobain home. I was hoping it wasn't actually him, but I didn't really expect that it would turn out to be someone else. I kept flicking back to the news channels every so often to see if there was any update. I don't think it took all that long before they confirmed it was him.

They weren't my favourite band, but I had two or three of the albums, and I liked that Kurt was always supporting less well-known bands and that he liked messing with the heads of homophobes and other schmucks. He seemed like the kind of person who would have a really interesting musical career, and not be content with churning out albums of the same old thing over and over. It's a shame that didn't happen.

I was a sophomore in college, and as I remember, it was a pretty overcast day. I'm sure I had multiple conversations on the topic, but the only one I really remember was with my neighbor that I happened to run into in the student union. He was a huge music fan, and was really into the whole grunge scene. Like, so much so that he was normally too cool to admit to still liking Nirvana. He was seriously distraught. And I remember being in his room later that night with some others listening to Nirvana's albums from start to finish, talking about how pointless the whole thing was. Oh, and that drugs were bad, with our 80s-era "just say no" teachings kicking in.

I was in Boston, at a pizza place on the corner of Harvard & Comm with a buddy. Just as we were getting up to leave, we overheard some stringy, gross dude talking to a friend. He said, "Just another dead junkie, man. Just another dead junkie."

We didn't get what the hell he was talking about until we went back to my place, and turned on MTV. (Weird. There was actually a time when we watched MTV on purpose.) They were showing Nirvana's "Unplugged" in the middle of the afternoon, which we found kind of odd. Then the crawl. Then MTV News. Another dead junkie.

The next day, bastion of tasteful media The Boston Herald ran a huge cover picture of Cobain goofily posing with a shotgun in his mouth. I cut it out, and hung it on our front door. Viva punk rock. Viva being a 20-year-old dick. Viva Cobain.

I'd gotten up that morning--my day off from work washing dishes at Pam Sherman's, a bakery-cafe at Lake and Hennepin in Uptown, Minneapolis--and cleaned my apartment. I was doing laundry as well and decided to go to my mom's for the night, in the suburbs. I was about to call her when I picked up the phone and heard it stutter--my friend Eric had called and left me a message saying that Kurt Cobain had died. I turned on MTV and "Come as You Are" was playing. I went across the street to the Cheapo Records store; the clerks were somber. Then I walked to Pam Sherman's and the front door was locked. I went to the back entrance: on it were directions to the nearest unemployment office. The owner had come in the night before and had the locks changed. I never got paid for my last three weeks of work.

Strangely enough, I have more vivid memories of his Rome overdose a month earlier, since I heard about in the car while driving home with my mom, paired with the news that John Candy had just been found dead (it wasn't a good day...).

As for his death a month later, I was in my last year of high school and my main memory is of MuchMusic airing the MTV Unplugged in a loop over the weekend following the news, as well as the corridors of my highschool being filled with the sound of people singing Nirvana songs mournfully (particularly "All Apologies" and "Rape Me").

I was in 9th grade and at home when I flipped the channel and saw Kurt Loder. I remember putting my face in my hands and crying a lot. Sobbing. I sat in the rocking chair with my feet propped up on this chest and watched MTV all night.

I was in college, and came back to my room after dinner to discover Kurt Loder on MTV breaking the news. I immediately went to the campus radio station (where I was a DJ), and my friend who was on the air at the time gave me the dubious honor of announcing it on the air. Followed, of course, by playing "All Apologies." I was heartbroken.

As years have rolled on, I'm less and less sympathetic toward him. The music hasn't kept its personal resonance for me, and now all I really see is a sad, confused guy who left his little girl in the permanent care of Courtney Love.

I was in my moms car on the way to school, freshman year of high school. We had a half day and all of my friends hung out playing chess all afternoon, sitting in silence while WFNX played Nirvana A-Z. I went to see the lemonheads at Merrimack College the very next night, and Cobain's death gave the whole thing a weird vibe.

I was in kindergarten. I remember watching TV with my mom when on the news they showed some guy with long hair and a guitar and said he'd taken too many drugs and then killed himself. (I'm not sure how much even I understood the concept of suicide at the time, that someone would shoot themselves on purpose.) I think my mom (by no means a grunge fan, but not culturally unaware) may have said something along the lines of "well, that was inevitable."

The next day at school, another kid told me that one of the Beatles was dead, too. I didn't believe him, but the kid insisted some crazy guy had shot him in front of his house. So that became my perception, as a little kid: if you played rock music, you would die.

(Like Throwdini, I'm pretty sure the "just say no!" messages factored in with that, too.)

By the time I was old enough to be developing my own taste in music, Nirvana and Cobain had been so thoroughly canonized that I never could get any personal connection with them (which, in adolescence, was the most important thing for my music). I understood, intellectually, that the punky/altish stuff I liked might never have come to my attention without them, but to this day, their music leaves me cold. I can listen to "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and hear what would have made it seem so different in '91 (and what would have made it a hit), but I can't say I really like the song. My tastes ultimately went in a poppier direction, I'm afraid if I admit that most grunge sounds like aural sludge to me, I'll lose what limited cred I have.

@Chris N.: You're right about the permanent care of Courtney Love." Totally a dick maneuver.

I was home from college, I don't remember why. I was clothes shopping at a strip mall in NoVa and heard it over the radio. I was so shocked that I went outside to find a pay phone (none of us had cells back then) and called a friend to turn on the tv and confirm. I remember feeling like the wind had been knocked out of me.

I was at home, and in 7th grade at the time. That week was when my parents were getting divorced and they were both crying every time I saw them, so I pretty much had that ordeal on my mind. Cobain's suicide was a bummer, but compared to family problems I remember thinking it really wasn't worth me getting emotional over.

Royal Oak, MI. Hanging out in the offices of a now defunct alt-monthly mag. The publisher came into the editorial offices to deliver the news. We thought he was joking at first. We were all stunned. Even the too-cool-for-school editor was bummed out. We walked the few blocks over to Play It Again Records, an amazingly awesome record store that no longer exists, natch.

There were maybe a dozen people there, all just kind of wandering around in a daze, talking about what had happened and what it all meant.

It sounds cheesy now, but at the time it was all very profound for a bunch of Midwestern music dorks.

Royal Oak, MI. Hanging out in the offices of a now defunct alt-monthly mag. The publisher came into the editorial offices to deliver the news. We thought he was joking at first. We were all stunned. Even the too-cool-for-school editor was bummed out. We walked the few blocks over to Play It Again Records, an amazingly awesome record store that no longer exists, natch.

There were maybe a dozen people there, all just kind of wandering around in a daze, talking about what had happened and what it all meant.

It sounds cheesy now, but at the time it was all very profound for a bunch of Midwestern music dorks.

Royal Oak, MI. Hanging out in the offices of a now defunct alt-monthly mag. The publisher came into the editorial offices to deliver the news. We thought he was joking at first. We were all stunned. Even the too-cool-for-school editor was bummed out. We walked the few blocks over to Play It Again Records, an amazingly awesome record store that no longer exists, natch.

There were maybe a dozen people there, all just kind of wandering around in a daze, talking about what had happened and what it all meant.

It sounds cheesy now, but at the time it was all very profound for a bunch of Midwestern music dorks.

Royal Oak, MI. Hanging out in the offices of a now defunct alt-monthly mag. The publisher came into the editorial offices to deliver the news. We thought he was joking at first. We were all stunned. Even the too-cool-for-school editor was bummed out. We walked the few blocks over to Play It Again Records, an amazingly awesome record store that no longer exists, natch.

There were maybe a dozen people there, all just kind of wandering around in a daze, talking about what had happened and what it all meant.

It sounds cheesy now, but at the time it was all very profound for a bunch of Midwestern music dorks.

Royal Oak, MI. Hanging out in the offices of a now defunct alt-monthly mag. The publisher came into the editorial offices to deliver the news. We thought he was joking at first. We were all stunned. Even the too-cool-for-school editor was bummed out. We walked the few blocks over to Play It Again Records, an amazingly awesome record store that no longer exists, natch.

There were maybe a dozen people there, all just kind of wandering around in a daze, talking about what had happened and what it all meant.

It sounds cheesy now, but at the time it was all very profound for a bunch of Midwestern music dorks.

@katesilver: Yeah, I remember the lengthy commentary on MTV by Loder and Fricke. I was not a fan of Nirvana at the time, and I remember, even as a 16 year old, thinking some of the comparisons Loder and Fricke were making were ridiculous, and that the instant commentary on Cobain's musical legacy were hyberbolic.

That said, some part of me knew what a big deal it was. The actual moment I heard about the news was driving home from crew team practice with my sister. We turned on the radio, and it was playing "All Apologies." Then the DJ came on with an earnest, quiet voice and alluded to the suicide. My sister immediately pulled the car over and we got out of the car. I don't know what we did once we were standing there.

haha, Q101. Anyway, I was in grade school. I was bummed, so was my older brother. My parents didn't really seem to get why, which is weird because they're English and enough English musicians they liked had died untimely deaths.

I remember learning about it on TV once I got home from school (junior year) and then picking up the phone and spending the rest of the evening talking to friends on the phone while still watching everything, and hearing Courtney give her odd speech.

Later my sister called from college to see if I was upset or whatever, since she knew I liked the band. She had this funny story about people telling her about it throughout the day and for whatever reason she kept thinking they were talking about Kurt Loder, so they would be like "isn't that terrible?" and she would be like "I dunno. I guess?" and they would scowl. Finally she burst out to someone "Why is everyone so upset about some fucking MTV VJ offing himself?!?!?" and they set her straight, and she felt bad.

I was between jobs, sitting at home watching MTV in the middle of the afternoon when Kurt Loder flashed in with the news. I was stunned for a minute, then went out to the driveway where my brother was working on his motorcycle and told him. We each smoked a cigarette, talked a little about Nirvana, and then I went back inside and moped around well into the night.

I'd just gotten back into Nirvana in December of 1993, about 4 months before Kurt died. They were so completely overexposed at the time I just couldn't take it anymore, but I did go see them play live because The Breeders were opening. I figured I would hang around for the whole show because I bought the ticket and had driven the two hours to get there. They came out and played what was (and remains) one of the most amazing live shows I've ever seen. Even towards the end, Kurt was completely committed to the whole thing. I wish I could go back and relive that 90 or so minutes...not because of the music or whatever, but because of the sheer joy that filled a hall of about 6,000. I haven't been in the middle of anything like that very often in my life.

@brasstax: I wish I could go back and relive that 90 or so minutes...not because of the music or whatever, but because of the sheer joy that filled a hall of about 6,000. I haven't been in the middle of anything like that very often in my life.

It would have been interesting to see that final American tour. I had seen them two years previously shortly after Nevermind had come out and he already looked very withdrawn and unsure about the whole thing -- Novoselic ended up doing most of the talking onstage. Stellar performance in any event.

What was it, junior year of college? Anyway, I was at my friends' apartment and we got a call from one of their exes with the news. And then watched MTV the rest of the day. Later that day, we went to a movie at the college theater, and John wore his FUDGE PACKING CRACK SMOKIN' SATAN WORSHIPPIN MOTHER FUCKER T-shirt which garnered a small amount of attention.

What I hated, and still do to this day, was this sort of bizarre nod from the Rolling Stone contingent with the paradigm that Now We Had Our Dead Rock Star. I always remember that Spin had two pages on his death, while Rolling Stone dedicated an entire issue, so very eager to usher him into their paradigm. At the time, I wondered why Spin didn't do more if Kurt was So Fucking Important; now, I admire their tactful restraint.

Kurt was never the voice of anything besides his own narcissistic yapping about the alternative scene and his role in it. He could never get beyond being a skinny weird kid who got beaten up in high school. It became his armor and it became his livelihood. "Teenage angst has paid off well", but if he became bored with it, he never became old. Or, rather, he never grew up.

With everyone who judged him for abandoning Frances Bean, at this point I can no more judge him than I would judge Britney Spears for topping herself off in some manner: fundamentally flawed people who nothing more of being their own media caricature. If Courtney Love can be faulted for anything (that there's any evidence for), it was for her delusional belief that her little alternative-rock scene, and all the petty bullshit and bizarre high-school role-playing involved, was in any way real, because it provided a role for Kurt to play (remember Kurt & Courtney on the cover of Spin as king & queen of the alterna-prom?) but also crystallized into boundaries he wouldn't be able to transcend. This? This blog right here? The indie scene? Pitchfork? Hell, even TMZ and celebrity-as-reality-show? Thank Godmother Courtney.

Anyhoo, a decently talented rock star who hit it big offed himself because he couldn't deal with the prejudices and expectations of his own scene-fueled head. This is the real lunacy of the whole situation: that, ultimately, everything that might have driven him to suicide was just bullshit.

I was at work at a country club, it was spring of junior year of high school, and the jackass tennis pro breezed into the kitchen (i was a busboy) and said "hey, didja hear? the nirvana guy offed himself!" with a laugh before leaving just as suddenly.

i didn't believe it, cuz the ODing in rome thing had just happened, but when confirmation came in, i was in a really bleak mood for a few weeks; i'd been a pretty huge fan.

I was 21, already married nearly a year and working either at a Barnes & Noble in Springfield, NJ or an auto parts warehouse in Elizabeth, NJ. I wouldn't start writing about music for money until late '96, so I was still pretty much only listening to stuff I wanted to listen to, and that didn't include Nirvana at all. The only Seattle stuff I liked (and this holds true to the present day) was everything by Tad, Mudhoney's Superfuzz Bigmuff and Early Singles and the self-titled album, and Soundgarden's Badmotorfinger. I always wonder where I was the day the meeting was held that crowned Cobain as some kind of genius. I seem to always miss that meeting - I missed the ones for Eminem and Conor Oberst and Ryan Adams, too.

I was walking down the stretch of 48th St in Manhattan populated with music stores when I overheard something about Cobain being dead. I had a cassette Walkman w/radio and immediately tuned it to the all-news WINS, where I heard the "Smells Like Teen Spirit" two-note guitar part from the verses and the news report confirming it. I do remember some DJ goofing on it another station and then walking into Sam Ash and hearing this hippie keyboardist I knew who worked there almost rejoicing over KC's death.

When I got home, I went for a long walk w/one of my best friends and both wondered at length why he'd done it. (I've since become one of the conspiracy nuts that disbelieves Cobain killed himself; if only because a lot does not add up.)

Btw, April 5th was also the 7th anniversary of Layne Stayley's passing.

I was 21, already married nearly a year, and working - either at a Barnes & Noble or an auto parts warehouse. I wouldn't start writing about music for money till '96, so I was still only listening to stuff I wanted to listen to, and that didn't include Nirvana. I don't know where I was the day the meeting declaring him a genius was held, but I always seem to miss those things - I missed the ones for Eminem, Conor Oberst and Ryan Adams, too.

Double post, of course.

@KikoJones: "Btw, April 5th was also the 7th anniversary of Layne Stayley's passing."

Yeah, but he wasn't found for another 15 days afterward. Eew.

I was driving home from working at the Acme and saw a couple of friends at a stoplight. They told me what happened and we pulled over into a parking lot to talk about it. I was in complete shock.

Later that day, I went to work at a local Christian Contemporary radio station where my best friend Brian also worked. We were both big Nirvana fans. I remember showing up and he had tears in his eyes. He got on the air, made a short comment about what had happened and how he felt, and played Amy Grant's "I Will Remember You", which was the closest airable "Christian" song he could find to play that contained some sort of appropriate sentiment. It was really sad and surreal and very earnest. A listener called into tell him how touching she thought his tribute was even thought she wasn't entirely sure who it was for.

I called my dad from the radio station and told him what had happened and how bummed we were. I remember him just not getting it at all; even intimating that if Kurt died from a drug overdose, then he probably wasn't that great of a person anyway. Parent's just don't understand.

Despite the fact that I wrote a book about the guy, there's nothing romantic about my where-were-you-when-you-heard story. I was in an office, wearing a tie; college was nearly a year over, and I was already well acquainted with The Man. The first time I saw the headline it was an all-CAPS headline on the market newsfeed at the bank where I worked.

It was a depressing day: apart from watching MTV that evening--Kurt Loder and endless repeats of Unplugged with my then-girlfriend--it was perfectly uneventful.

People keep saying what a sharp, sudden shock Kurt Cobain's death was. For me, it was a slow-motion, prolonged misery, played out over months and years.

It's weird: I was 16 years old, in high school, owned Nevermind on a frequently-played cassette and had gotten In Utero as a Christmas present -- and when I saw the news on evening TV, it didn't really register. Not in the same way that it did for anyone else, really; I don't remember talking about it breathlessly with my classmates, though I guess there was a brief "man that's messed up" period before we moved on, and that was more or less that. I did buy that week's copy of People with Cobain on the cover, largely because I found it a weird place for him to be eulogized. But I didn't have MTV or a bunch of diehard music-geek friends (or at least diehard Nirvana fans) to discuss it with, so it just kind of sat at the back of my mind for a while until Ill Communication and Mellow Gold (purchased belatedly that summer) came around to jostle it out.

However, I do remember listening to the first third or so of the local alternative station's impromptu Nirvana A-Z that night. I wasn't familiar "Dive" before and, upon hearing thought Kurt was singing "die with me", which I found kind of chilling.

I was working at VH1 in 1515 Broadway when this particularly annoying temp ran around telling us about how Kurt Cobain had just died. I didn't believe him; Kurt had already tried this once a month earlier, after all, so this was probably another false alarm. When I got home, it was all over the news. I was surprised how upset I was about it.

Ironically, I was slated to interview the Raincoats the next day - a band that had reformed in large part due to Kurt's Incesticide liner notes. It was an incredibly awkward interview; we were all too distracted to really make much sense. That night they played at the Academy opening for Liz Phair and were brilliant. I kept thinking, "man, he should have just flown to NYC to see the Raincoats instead."

I was driving home to Michigan from Chicago and just reaching that point in Indiana where the Chicago radio starts to fade in and out. I was listening to Q101 as well when they cut in and announced that someone was found dead in the Cobain household. I remember the DJs were going on about what a waste it would be if it did turn out to be Kurt. I was devastated and I had to pull my car over so as not to outdrive the radio waves in order to find out just what was going on.

It was an awful, awful day for me and I remember it like it was much more recent than 15 years ago.

I don't know where I was the day the meeting declaring him a genius was held, but I always seem to miss those things.

It was pure media hype. I hated how the cut and paste lyrical ramblings of a Junkie were seized upon as being 'The Voice Of A Generation', and 'Here we are now / entertain us' was actually considered as meaning anything more than 'Get Up (Before The Night Is Over)'.

I was in High School at the time, and can attest that Nirvana wasn't listened to by lone outsider types. It was music for the popular kids, who'd been listening to 'You Can't Touch This' and 'Ice Ice Baby' just a couple of years before.

Both those songs are largely built on simple, 2-bar hooks, which, if you look at a lot of Nirvana singles, are much the same thing: 2 bars of melody repeated 4 times for the verse, (or in the case of teen spirit, 2 bars followed 2 bar inversion), then another repetitive loud bit, (play the chorus of 'Spirit' on a piano and you'll see how laughable the 'melody' is - 2 note interval, repeated higher x4. It was basically moronically simple music for the mass market, packaged with a faux-rebel pose.

Apparantly this was repeatedly referred to as being Beatles-level melodic genius to the mainstream media, even though the only thing in their catalogue that approaches that level of dopey simplicity is 'Love Me Do'.

Early '92 was all about XTC's 'Nonsuch' and Crowded House's 'Woodface' to me. Nirvana has no more relevance or importance than MC Hammer in my eyes.

Some dude in the dorm bathroom told me.

I didn't care much. He didn't care much. No one I knew cared much. We actually might have laughed a little bit- although i think that was at his Rome OD a month or so previous.

HomefrontRadio nailed it, actually.

I was, no shit, in a car driving away from a police station in Athens, Georgia, from which a friend and I stole a big life-size (human-size?) cardboard cutout of McGriff the Crime Dog. This was not at all the kind of thing I did by habit, but we went in there to get a copy of a report about my friend's recent bike accident, and this thing was just standing there in the lobby, all but unguarded when the woman at the front desk went into the back (as she often did). The idea of stealing McGriff from an actual police station was too delicious to pass over. So we did, and after feeling like we'd gotten more or less far enough away, the news of Cobain came on the radio.

I was in college with Maura. The most vivid memory I have of that day was Maura and I coming out of the side door of our dorm and running into Erica and Ross and telling them what happened. It's also possible that I was with Ross, and Erica and Maura told us. It was a chilly day.

For the record, I was not the guy who said "Fucking Cobain, man." I believe that was Mightybob, or maybe that guy who had OCD.

sophomore year of college, i lived in Center City Philadelphia and was i guess the equivalent of a city hipster kid then. I heard a lot of Nirvana everywhere i went and never considered myself a fan, i was more into lo-fi hip hop and trip-hop and bill laswell dub and phish. i remember i was walking with two friends and met up with a third outside McGlinchys pub on our way to our weed dealer and the third friend blurted out "hey man kurt cobain was just found dead - he shot himself in the head!" And I remember I burst out laughing and said "Really?!? Of course he did! I guess he actually meant it all, huh?" My friends I was with looked at me with strange looks, in hindsight I guess I was being a little bit over-insensitive to seem like a you-can't-faze-me cynic, but that was my response. In the years since I've missed his musical contributions and mostly feel sad that he's Led Zeppelin-ed his band and his music - that is to say every single track in his catalog has been so thoroughly played and overplayed that we can't have a new Nirvana experience ever again, and that's just too bad.

I was in High School at the time, and can attest that Nirvana wasn't listened to by lone outsider types. It was music for the popular kids, who'd been listening to 'You Can't Touch This' and 'Ice Ice Baby' just a couple of years before.

Yeah, man, all those jocks were fuckin' all over the "Sliver"/"Dive" single.

Guys, I think the fact that Nirvana crossed over to both of those audiences had a little something to do with their popularity.

@Christopher R. Weingarten: =8-O

This is memory is so vivid to me:

I was in my hometown of Nogales, Mexico, at Nana Licha's house, in her bedroom, of course watching MTV Latino. Then they did the "we now interrupt our regular programming..." thing, and Ruth, one of the VJ's appeared, telling the news, followed by 2 videos from Nirvana.

It was a real shock to me because, literally I got into Nirvana just weeks before the suicide. I was 14, used to only listen to mexican pop music, and when I discovered them I was like "OMG, THIS IS THE BEST BAND EVER", in my mind I obviously became their biggest fan, unaware that there were millions of us in the world; and just some weeks later Kurt had died.

I came home from my junior high school and saw Kurt Loder announce that the "body was confirmed to be that of Kurt Cobain." My first response was "He really did it," since Kurt previously OD'd a few months before.

When I returned to school the next day many classmates were already calling him, "Kurt Blowbrain" and "Kurt No-brain" as if Kurt's death was slapstick. A school dance DJ later pretended he saw his ghost, as if he saw Elvis.

Freshman year in college, I was driving back from Cedar Rapids (I went to school in Iowa) and as I pulled in the parking lot, I ejected the tape I was listening to and the radio came on. All I heard was the tail end of a news bit that said something about it being a suicide, but no name was mentioned. I just assumed it was Cobain, turned out it was...

Why Spin ran only two pages and Rolling Stone ran a big package:

I wasn't working at either magazine at the time, but I would guess it had much more to do with lead times than varying levels of restraint or taste. RS could turn around an issue for the following week and be timely, whereas Spin didn't want to overplay a story that would be old news a month or more later.

In England, this is why the music weeklies ran fairly dignified coverage and the monthly Q went with the screaming headline WHY KURT COBAIN HAD TO DIE--sensationalism was all they had left after the story got saturation coverage.

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.

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."

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.

@King of Pants:

>

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 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.

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.

@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.

@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.

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:

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.

@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.

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.)

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.

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.

@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.

@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.