biography about kurt cobain

Kurt Cobain

• Born February 20 , 1967 · Aberdeen, Washington, USA
• Died April 5 , 1994 · Seattle, Washington, USA (suicide by gunshot)
• Birth name Kurt Donald Cobain
• Height 5′ 9″ (1.75 m)
• Kurt Cobain was born on February 20 1967, in Aberdeen, Washington. Kurt and his family lived in Hoquiam for the first few months of his life then later moved back to Aberdeen, where he had a happy childhood until his parents divorced. The divorce left Kurt's outlook on the world forever scarred. He became withdrawn and anti-social. He was constantly placed with one relative to the next, living with friends, and at times even homeless. Kurt was not the most popular person in high school as he was in public school. In 1985 Kurt left Aberdeen for Olympia where he formed the band Nirvana in 1986. In 1989 Nirvana recorded their debut album Bleach under the independent label Sub-Pop records. Nirvana became very popular in Britain and by 1991 they signed a contract with Geffen. Their next album Nevermind became a 90s masterpiece and made Kurt's Nirvana one of the most successful bands in the world. Kurt became trampled upon with success and found the new lifestyle hard to bear. In February 1992 Kurt married Courtney Love , the woman who was already pregnant with his child, Frances Bean Cobain . Nirvana released their next album Incesticide later that year. The album appealed to many fans due to the liner notes, which expressed Kurt's open-mindedness. In September 1993 Nirvana released their next album, 'In Utero', which topped the charts. On March 4, 1994, Kurt was taken to hospital in a coma. It was officially stated as an accident but many believe it to have been an unsuccessful suicide attempt. Family and friends convinced Kurt to seek rehab. Kurt was said to have fled rehab after only a few days from a missing person's report filed by Courtney Love . On April 8th Kurt's body was found in his Seattle home. In his arms was a shotgun, which had been fired into his head. Near him laid a suicide note written in red ink. It was addressed to his wife Courtney Love and his daughter Frances Bean Cobain . Two days after Kurt's body was discovered people gathered in Seattle, they began setting fires, chanting profanities, and fighting with police officers. They also listened to a tape of Courtney reading sections of the suicide note left by Kurt. The last few words were "I love you, I love you". - IMDb Mini Biography By: Tony Russomanno <[email protected]>
• Spouse Courtney Love (February 24, 1992 - April 5, 1994) (his death, 1 child)
• Children Frances Bean Cobain
• His unclean hair and unshaven appearance
• Raw agonizing voice
• Smashing instruments and stage equipment after shows
• Garbled,Incomprehensible Singing
• Shoulder-length blonde hair
• Said he eventually wanted to experiment with filmmaking. He even wrote a script for a horror movie.
• The last movie he watched before his death was The Piano (1993) .
• During a Nirvana concert, he witnessed a girl being groped in the audience. Without missing a beat, he threw his guitar to the ground (a Martin D-18E electric guitar, one of the rarest electric guitars ever made and worth a significant amount of money), dived into the audience and angrily confronted the man who groped the woman. Upon returning to the stage, Cobain and the other band members openly mocked the man as he was being forcibly led out by security.
• Died at 27 years old, making him a member of the "27 Club"; The 27 Club is a group of prominent musicians who died at the age of 27. Other members include Rolling Stones co-founder Brian Jones , guitarist Jimi Hendrix , singer Janis Joplin , guitarist Alan Wilson , The Doors frontman Jim Morrison and Amy Winehouse .
• John Lennon 's song "In my Life" was played at his funeral.
• Wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person you are.
• I'm not well-read, but when I read, I read well.
• I'm not a death rocker, and I don't wear black.
• I'd rather be hated for who I am than loved for who I am not.
• I think people who glamorize drugs are f**king *ssholes and if there's hell they'll go there.

Contribute to this page

• Learn more about contributing

More from this person

• View agent, publicist, legal and company contact details on IMDbPro

More to explore

Recently viewed

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Kurt Cobain: What to Read and Watch, 25 Years After the Nirvana Leader’s Death

By Gavin Edwards

• April 5, 2019

Twenty-five years ago, on April 5, 1994, Kurt Cobain died at the age of 27 , a victim of suicide. He left behind the epochal rock music he made as the singer and guitarist for Nirvana, piles of journals and artwork, and a final note that didn’t clear up the contradictions of his short life. Which was probably how he wanted it: The previous year, he had painted on the wall of his rented Seattle home, in large red block letters , “None of You Will Ever Know My Intentions.”

Many Nirvana biographies rehash the basics of Cobain’s story or peddle conspiracy theories that he was murdered, but there are also plenty of ways to go deeper. Here’s what to read, listen to, watch and explore:

‘Journals’ ( Riverhead )

With nearly 300 pages of photo replicas of Cobain’s personal journals and letters (and doodles, sketches and song lists), this 2002 book is funny, painful and shockingly intimate: a guided tour of the singer’s own churning psyche. “Its hard to decipher the difference between a sincere entertainer and an honest swindler,” Cobain wrote. Here’s what The New York Times’s Neil Strauss wrote when the book came out.

‘Come as You Are’ ( Three Rivers )

This deeply reported 1993 biography by Michael Azerrad, first published while Cobain was alive, was the original bible for Nirvana fans. Its strongest passages evoke the life of young Cobain in Aberdeen, Wash., a child of divorce who would sometimes spend the weekend killing time at a local logging company where his father worked: “He would get into his dad’s van and listen to Queen’s ‘News of the World’ over and over again on the eight-track. Sometimes he’d listen so long that he’d drain the battery and they’d have to find someone to jump-start the engine.”

‘Heavier Than Heaven’ ( Hachette )

Charles R. Cross, formerly the editor of the Seattle music paper The Rocket, covered the Nirvana story from early on — and conducted over 400 interviews for this thorough, definitive 2001 biography. Cobain’s widow, the musician Courtney Love, granted Cross extensive interviews and access to Cobain’s archives, including arcana such as a visual assignment he completed during his final stay in rehab: “For ‘surrender,’ he drew a man with a bright light emanating from him. For ‘depressed,’ he showed an umbrella surrounded by ties.” Read The New York Times review .

‘Takeoff: The Oral History of Nirvana’s Crossover Moment’ ( Cuepoint )

When Nirvana’s “Nevermind” hit No. 1 soon after its 1991 release, it shocked the band members and their grunge cohort, who had assumed that at best, the group would be underground heroes. Its multiplatinum success also opened the doors for many Nirvana-bes. This oral history by Nick Soulsby tells that story from the viewpoint of Nirvana’s college-rock peers, such as Gary Floyd of opening act Sister Double Happiness remembering Nirvana’s “road manager telling everyone backstage one night the CD had hit 1 million sales that day. They seemed almost embarrassed.”

‘The Dark Side of Kurt Cobain’ ( The Advocate )

Cobain loudly and frequently declared himself as an ally of gay people (and women, and people of color), so it was fitting that he gave one of his best interviews in this 1993 cover story with The Advocate, telling Kevin Allman, “I’ve always been a really sickly, feminine person anyhow, so I thought I was gay for a while because I didn’t find any of the girls in my high school attractive at all.”

‘Kurt Cobain, The Rolling Stone Interview: Success Doesn’t Suck’ ( Rolling Stone )

In Cobain’s last major interview, he informed David Fricke that he had wanted to call Nirvana’s “In Utero” album “I Hate Myself and I Want to Die,” “but I knew the majority of the people wouldn’t understand.” He insisted that the suicidal sentiment was only a joke: “I’m a much happier guy than a lot of people think I am.”

‘Never More’ ( The Village Voice )

After Cobain’s death, Ann Powers filed a raw dispatch from Seattle, reporting how the tragedy affected his friends and the neighbors who had never met him. “The kids I found who did mourn Cobain, hovering behind police lines at the house where he’d died or building shrines from candles and Raisin Bran boxes at the Sunday night vigil organized by three local radio stations, seemed to think of him more as a lost friend than as a candidate for that dreaded assignment, role model.”

Live Videos

‘Nirvana — The Moon, New Haven 1991’

On Sept. 26, 1991, just two days after the release of “Nevermind,” Nirvana played a great, sweaty show at a tiny club in New Haven — and miraculously, it was captured on this remarkably high-quality amateur video. The set featured just a few songs from the unfamiliar “Nevermind,” leaning heavily on the band’s 1989 debut, “Bleach.” Cobain, the bassist Krist Novoselic, and the drummer Dave Grohl all performed with joy and abandon, looking more at home in a filthy black room with a low ceiling than they ever did in arenas.

‘Live at Reading’

In the summer of 1992, when Nirvana played this storied U.K. festival, the band was divided by arguments over royalties and reports of Cobain’s heroin habit. Responding to the mood, Cobain came onstage in a wheelchair, wearing a hospital gown and a blond wig, and began the set with an out-of-tune cover of Bette Midler’s “The Rose.” At the end of the show, the group systematically destroyed its equipment. In between, almost as an afterthought, it delivered an hour and a half of full-blast rock.

‘Drain You’

When Jimmy McDonough, the author of the 2002 book “Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography,” wanted to show Young a live Nirvana performance after Cobain died, this 1993 clip from an MTV “Live and Loud” concert was the one he chose. “When you see the way he was,” an impressed Young said, “there’s no way he could ever get through the other end of it. Because there was no control to the burn. That’s why it was so intense. He was not holding back at all.”

‘Nirvana — Munich, Germany’

Nirvana’s last concert, on March 1, 1994, at a cavernous airport terminal that had been converted into a club, was an ordeal for a burned-out Cobain: He wanted to end the band, he wanted to divorce Love, he wanted to score drugs at the Munich train station. But the show (rendered here with just the first 10 minutes of video but a full 80 minutes of audio) was one final scream of pain, ending with “Heart-Shaped Box.” “Hey, wait, I got a new complaint,” Cobain sang, never meaning it more.

‘Kurt Cobain — Different Vocals’

This video collects live moments when Cobain dramatically altered his usual performances of familiar songs for various punk-rock reasons such as needing to shout over out-of-tune instruments (on “Come as You Are”) or just wanting to mess with a TV countdown show that was forcing him to mime playing his guitar (on “Smells Like Teen Spirit”).

‘MTV Unplugged in New York’

Playing acoustically for 44 minutes, Nirvana paid tribute to influences ranging from David Bowie to the Meat Puppets, and showed the delicate beauty behind its distorted guitars. And with the final song, a cover of Leadbelly’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night,” Cobain gave one of his greatest vocal performances; it felt powerful enough to bring the curtain down on all of human existence.

Documentary Footage

‘Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck’ ( Amazon )

Cobain’s daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, served as executive producer on this authorized documentary feature directed by Brett Morgen. Mike Hale wrote in his Times review in 2015, “Mr. Morgen was given access to Cobain’s archives — ‘art, music, journals, Super 8 films and audio montages’ — and his exhilarating, exhausting, two-hour-plus film, both an artful mosaic and a hammering barrage, reflects years of rummaging through that trove.”

‘One of Kurt Cobain’s Final Interviews’

In this 26-minute WatchMojo interview from 1993, filmed with the Seattle waterfront as a backdrop, Cobain was bearded and scabby, smoking one cigarette after another. He was also relaxed and thoughtful, laughing at questions about his rock-star status that on a different day would have made him bristle. He explained, “Either I’ve accepted it or I’ve gone beyond insane.”

‘8 Fragments for Kurt Cobain’

The poet Jim Carroll, famous for the autobiographical book “The Basketball Diaries” and the autobiographical song “People Who Died,” wrote and performed this poem after Cobain’s death, trying to make sense of the senseless. It begins, “Genius is not a generous thing/In return it charges more interest than any amount of royalties can cover/And it resents fame/With bitter vengeance.”

‘About a Boy’ ( Penguin )

The death of Cobain haunts Nick Hornby’s second novel, shattering some of its characters and binding some of them together. The 12-year-old Marcus tries to make sense of the news he sees plastered all over the front pages of the evening papers: “He wondered if his mum was O.K., even though he knew there was no connection between his mum and Kurt Cobain because his mum was a real person and Kurt Cobain wasn’t; and then he felt confused, because the newspaper headline had turned Kurt Cobain into a real person somehow.”

‘Skip to the End’ ( Insight )

This evocative 2018 science-fiction graphic novel by the writer Jeremy Holt and the artist Alex Diotto tells the story of a grunge band called Samsara (clearly inspired by Nirvana) and a guitar that functions as a time-travel device. The metaphor works not only because of the urge Nirvana fans have to create an alternate timeline where Cobain survived, but because recorded music is itself a time-travel device, teleporting people both to the moment when it was made and the moment when it first touched a listener’s soul.

‘Last Days’ (Streaming Services)

The filmmaker Gus Van Sant was a kindred spirit to Cobain: an independent artist from the Pacific Northwest who somehow wandered into the cultural mainstream. So it seemed natural in 2005 when he made a movie about (a thinly fictionalized version of) Cobain, played by Michael Pitt. In her Times review , Manohla Dargis called the movie a “mesmerizing dream” and said “Mr. Van Sant’s refusal to root around in Cobain’s consciousness, to try to explain why and how he created, suffered and died, is a radical gesture, both in aesthetic and in moral terms.”

How The New York Times Covered Nirvana

In 1991, Karen Schoemer was supposed to interview Cobain; he didn’t show up, so she wrote about “Nevermind” instead . Novoselic provided a few quotes: “We just want to play,” he said, “and put out what we consider good records.” A few months later, Simon Reynolds dissected some of the album’s songs: “‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ could be this generation’s version of the Sex Pistols’ 1976 single, ‘Anarchy in the U.K.,’ if it weren’t for the bitter irony that pervades its title.”

In 1992, Schoemer mused on Nirvana’s set on “Saturday Night Live,” a performance that she said “showed an astounding lack of musicianship” while later acknowledging that the band had released “quite simply, one of the best alternative rock albums produced by an American band in recent years.”

Also in 1992, The Times was fooled by a former Sub Pop receptionist when a reporter called to talk about grunge culture. The resulting glossary of terms she provided — “harsh realm,” “lamestain” and “swingin’ on the flippity-flop” — did enter the pop-culture lexicon, but not the way The Times had planned . The receptionist, Megan Jasper, is now the label’s chief executive.

A year later, Jon Pareles interviewed Nirvana on the cusp of releasing “In Utero,” as Cobain complained about “Nevermind” sounding too “clean.” “Ugh,” he said. “I’ll never do that again. It already paid off, so why try to duplicate that? And just trying to sell that many records again, there’s no point in it.” Pareles also reviewed Nirvana at the Roseland Ballroom , the band’s first New York show in two years.

When Cobain died, Timothy Egan wrote our obituary and Pareles wrote an appraisal that discussed how “Nirvana was the band that brought punk-rock kicking and screaming into the mass market.”

Neil Strauss later wrote about the songs written about Cobain : “Perhaps the most touching song about Cobain was written by a 10-year-old friend of his, Simon Fair Timony. Titled ‘I Love You Anyway,’ it is performed with the former Nirvana members Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic joining Timony’s band, the Stinky Puffs.”

In 2004, Thurston Moore wrote a first-person piece about his relationship with Cobain and Nirvana’s rise.

Find the Right Soundtrack for You

Trying to expand your musical horizons take a listen to something new..

Vampire Weekend on its new album . (It’s not a “doom and gloom record.”)

Shakira ’s family came apart. Then her music soared.

Black pop artists have long gone country. Here’s a brief history .

Tyla avoids a bad romance, and 9 more new songs on the Playlist .

How do you become the U.K.’s buzziest new band ? The old-fashioned way.

Kurt Donald Cobain Biography

Kurt Donald Cobain (February 20, 1967 – c. April 5, 1994), was an American musician, best known for his roles as lead singer, guitarist, and songwriter for the Seattle-based rock band Nirvana.

Cobain formed Nirvana in 1987 with Krist Novoselic. Within two years, the band became a fixture of the burgeoning Seattle grunge scene. In 1991, the arrival of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” marked the beginning of a dramatic shift of popular rock music away from the dominant genres of the 1980s (glam metal, arena rock, and dance-pop) and toward grunge and alternative rock. The music media eventually awarded the song “anthem-of-a-generation” status,[1] and, with it, Cobain was labeled a “spokesman” for Generation X.

During the last years of his life, Cobain struggled with drug addiction and the media pressures surrounding him and his wife, Courtney Love. On April 8, 1994, Cobain was found dead in his home in Seattle, the victim of what was officially ruled a self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head. In ensuing years, the circumstances of his death became a topic of fascination and debate. Life and career

Early life Kurt Cobain was born to Donald and Wendy Cobain on February 20, 1967 in Aberdeen, Washington and spent his first six months living in the village of Hoquiam, Washington before the family moved to Aberdeen.[2] He began developing an interest in music early in his life. According to his Aunt Mari, “He was singing from the time he was two. He would sing Beatles songs like ‘Hey Jude’. He had a lot of charisma from a very young age.”[3]

Cobain’s life changed at the age of seven when his parents divorced in 1975, an event which he later cited as having a profound impact on his life. His mother noted that his personality changed dramatically, with Cobain becoming more withdrawn.[4] In a 1993 interview, Cobain said, “I remember feeling ashamed, for some reason. I was ashamed of my parents. I couldn’t face some of my friends at school anymore, because I desperately wanted to have the classic, you know, typical family. Mother, father. I wanted that security, so I resented my parents for quite a few years because of that.”[5] After a year spent living with his mother following the divorce, Cobain moved to Montesano, Washington to live with his father, but after a few years his youthful rebellion became too overwhelming and he found himself being shuffled between friends and family.[6]

At school, Cobain took little interest in sports. At his father’s insistence, Cobain joined the junior high wrestling team. While he was good at it, he despised it. Later, his father signed him up for a local baseball league, where Cobain would intentionally strike out to avoid having to play.[7] Instead, Cobain focused on his art courses. He often drew during classes, including objects associated with human anatomy. Cobain was friends with a gay student at his school, sometimes suffering bullying at the hands of homophobic students. That friendship led some to believe that he himself was gay. In one of his personal journals, Cobain wrote, “I am not gay, although I wish I were, just to piss off homophobes.”[8] In a 1993 interview with The Advocate, Cobain claimed that he used to spray paint “God is Gay” on pickup trucks around Aberdeen. Cobain also claimed he was arrested in 1985 for spray-painting “HOMO SEX RULES” on a bank.[9] However, Aberdeen police records show that the phrase for which he was arrested was actually “Ain’t got no how watchamacallit”.[10] As a teenager growing up in small-town Washington, Cobain eventually found escape through the thriving Pacific Northwest punk scene, going to punk rock shows in Seattle. Eventually, Cobain began frequenting the practice space of fellow Montesano musicians the Melvins.

In the middle of tenth grade, Cobain moved back to live with his mother in Aberdeen. Two weeks before his graduation, Cobain dropped out of high school after realizing that he did not have enough credits to graduate. His mother gave him a choice: either get a job or leave. After a week or so, Cobain found his clothes and other belongings packed away in boxes.[11] Forced out of his mother’s home, Cobain often stayed at friends’ houses and sneaked into his mother’s basement occasionally.[12] Cobain later claimed that when he could not find anywhere else to stay, he lived under a bridge over the Wishkah River,[12] an experience that inspired the Nevermind track “Something in the Way”. However, Krist Novoselic claimed that Cobain never really lived there, saying, “He hung out there, but you couldn’t live on those muddy banks, with the tides coming up and down. That was his own revisionism.”[13]

In late 1986, Cobain moved into the first house he lived in alone and paid his rent by working at a coastal resort twenty miles from Aberdeen.[14] At the same time, Cobain was traveling more frequently to Olympia, Washington to check out rock shows.[15] During his visits to Olympia, Cobain started a relationship with Tracy Marander.

Nirvana For his 14th birthday, Cobain’s uncle gave him the option of a guitar or a bicycle as a gift; Cobain chose the guitar. He started learning a few covers, including AC/DC’s “Back in Black” and The Cars’ “My Best Friend’s Girl”, and soon began working on his own songs.[16]

In high school, Cobain rarely found anyone to jam with. While hanging out at the Melvins practice space, he met Krist Novoselic, a fellow devotee of punk rock. Novoselic’s mother owned a hair salon and Cobain and Novoselic would occasionally practice in the upstairs room. A few years later, Cobain tried to convince Novoselic to form a band with him by lending him a copy of a home demo recorded by Cobain’s earlier band, Fecal Matter. After months of asking, Novoselic finally agreed to join Cobain, forming the beginnings of Nirvana.[17]

During their first few years playing together, Novoselic and Cobain were hosts to a rotating list of drummers. Eventually, the band settled on Chad Channing, with whom Nirvana recorded the album Bleach, released on Sub Pop Records in 1989. Cobain, however, became dissatisfied with Channing’s style, leading the band to seek out a replacement, eventually settling on Dave Grohl. With Grohl, the band found their greatest success via their 1991 major-label debut, Nevermind.

Cobain struggled to reconcile the massive success of Nirvana with his underground roots. He also felt persecuted by the media, comparing himself to Frances Farmer, and harbored resentment for people who claimed to be fans of the band but who completely missed the point of the band’s message. One incident particularly distressing to Cobain involved two men who raped a woman while singing the Nirvana song “Polly”. Cobain condemned the episode in the liner notes of the US release of the album Incesticide: “Last year, a girl was raped by two wastes of sperm and eggs while they sang the lyrics to our song ‘Polly’. I have a hard time carrying on knowing there are plankton like that in our audience. Sorry to be so anally P.C. but that’s the way I feel.”

Marriage Courtney Love first saw Cobain perform in 1989 at a show in Portland, Oregon; the pair talked briefly after the show and Love developed a crush on him.[18] According to journalist Everett True, the pair were formally introduced at an L7/Butthole Surfers concert in Los Angeles in May 1991.[19] In the weeks that followed, after learning from Grohl that she and Cobain shared mutual crushes, Love began pursuing Cobain. After a few weeks of on-again, off-again courtship in the fall of 1991, the two found themselves together on a regular basis, often bonding through drug use.[20]

Around the time of Nirvana’s 1992 performance on Saturday Night Live, Love discovered that she was pregnant with Cobain’s child. A few days after the conclusion of Nirvana’s Pacific Rim tour, on Monday, February 24, 1992, Cobain married Love on Waikiki Beach, Hawaii. “In the last couple months I’ve gotten engaged and my attitude has changed drastically,” Cobain said in an interview with Sassy magazine. “I can’t believe how much happier I am. At times I even forget that I’m in a band, I’m so blinded by love. I know that sounds embarrassing, but it’s true. I could give up the band right now. It doesn’t matter, but I’m under contract.”[21] On August 18, the couple’s daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, was born. The unusual middle name was given to her because Cobain thought she looked like a kidney bean on the first sonogram he saw of her. Her namesake is Frances McKee of British band The Vaselines and not Frances Farmer as is sometimes reported.[22]

Love was somewhat unpopular with Nirvana fans; her harshest critics said she was merely using him as a vehicle to make herself famous.[20] Critics who compared Cobain to John Lennon were also fond of comparing Love to Yoko Ono. Rumors persist that Cobain wrote most of the songs on the breakthrough album Live Through This of Love’s band Hole, partially fueled by the 1996 appearance of a rough mix of “Asking for It” with Cobain singing backing vocals. However, there is no specific evidence to support the assertion.

At the same time, one song by Hole was discovered to be a song originally written by Nirvana. The song “Old Age” appeared as a B-side on the 1993 single for Beautiful Son, credited to Hole. Initially, there was no reason to believe it was anything other than a Hole-penned song. However, in 1998, a boombox recording of the song performed by Nirvana (with significantly different lyrics) was surfaced by Seattle newspaper The Stranger. In the article that accompanied the clip, Novoselic confirmed that the recording was made in 1991 and that “Old Age” was a Nirvana song, leading to more speculation about Cobain’s involvement in Hole’s catalog. Nirvana had even attempted to record “Old Age” during the sessions for Nevermind, but it was left incomplete as Cobain had yet to finish the lyrics and the band had run out of studio time. (The incomplete recording appeared on the 2004 compilation With the Lights Out, credited to Cobain.) As for Hole’s version, guitarist Eric Erlandson noted that he believed Cobain wrote the music for the song, but that Love had written the lyrics for their version.[23]

In a 1992 article in Vanity Fair, Love admitted to using heroin while (unknowingly) pregnant. Love claimed that Vanity Fair had misquoted her,[24] but her admission created controversy for the couple. While Cobain and Love’s romance had always been something of a media attraction, the couple found themselves hounded by tabloid reporters after the article was published, many wanting to know if Frances was addicted to drugs at birth. The Los Angeles County Department of Children’s Services took the Cobains to court, claiming that the couple’s drug usage made them unfit parents.[22] Two-week-old Frances Bean Cobain was ordered by the judge to be taken from their custody and placed with Courtney’s sister Jamie for several weeks, after which the couple obtained custody, but had to submit to urine tests and a regular visit from a social worker. After months of legal wrangling, the couple were eventually granted full custody of their daughter.

Drug addiction Throughout most of his life, Cobain battled chronic bronchitis and intense physical pain due to an undiagnosed chronic stomach condition.[25] This last condition was especially debilitating to his emotional welfare, and he spent years trying to find its source. However, none of the doctors he consulted were able to pinpoint the specific cause, guessing that it was either a result of Cobain’s childhood scoliosis or related to the stresses of performing.

His first drug experience was with marijuana in 1980 at age 14. Cobain’s first experience with heroin occurred sometime in 1986, administered to him by a local drug dealer in Tacoma, Washington, who had previously been supplying him with Percodan.[26] Cobain used heroin sporadically for several years, but, by the end of 1990, his use had developed into a full-fledged addiction. Cobain claimed that he was “determined to get a habit” as a way to self-medicate his stomach condition. Related Cobain, “It started with three days in a row of doing heroin and I don’t have a stomach pain. That was such a relief.”[27]

His heroin use eventually began affecting the band’s support of Nevermind, with Cobain passing out during photo shoots. One memorable example came the day of the band’s 1992 performance on Saturday Night Live, where Nirvana had a shoot with photographer Michael Levine. Having shot up beforehand, Cobain nodded off several times during the shoot. Regarding the shoot, Cobain related to biographer Michael Azerrad, “I mean, what are they supposed to do? They’re not going to be able to tell me to stop. So I really didn’t care. Obviously to them it was like practicing witchcraft or something. They didn’t know anything about it so they thought that any second, I was going to die.”[28] Cobain also overdosed on the same night, after performing on Saturday Night Live.

Cobain’s heroin addiction worsened as the years progressed. Cobain made his first attempt at rehab in early 1992, not long after he and Love discovered they were going to become parents. Immediately after leaving rehab, Nirvana embarked on their Australian tour, with Cobain appearing pale and gaunt while suffering through withdrawals. Not long after returning home, Cobain’s heroin use resurfaced. Prior to a performance at the New Music Seminar in New York City in July 1993, Cobain suffered a heroin overdose. Rather than calling for an ambulance, Love injected Cobain with illegally acquired Narcan to bring him out of his unconscious state. Cobain proceeded to perform with Nirvana, giving the public no indication that anything out of the ordinary had taken place.[29]

Cobain’s final weeks and death Following a tour stop at Terminal Eins in Munich, Germany, on March 1, 1994, Cobain was diagnosed with bronchitis and severe laryngitis. He flew to Rome the next day for medical treatment, and was joined there by his wife on March 3. The next morning, Love awoke to find that Cobain had overdosed on a combination of champagne and Rohypnol (Love had a prescription for Rohypnol filled after arriving in Rome). Cobain was immediately rushed to the hospital, and spent the rest of the day unconscious. After five days in the hospital, Cobain was released and returned to Seattle.[30] Love later stated that the incident was Cobain’s first suicide attempt.[31]

On March 18, Love phoned police to inform them that Cobain was suicidal and had locked himself in a room with a gun. Police arrived and confiscated several guns and a bottle of pills from Cobain, who insisted that he was not suicidal and had locked himself in the room to hide from Love. When questioned by police, Love admitted that Cobain had never mentioned that he was suicidal and that she had not seen him with a gun.[32]

Love arranged an intervention concerning Cobain’s drug use that took place on March 25. The ten people involved included musician friends, record company executives, and one of Cobain’s closest friends, Dylan Carlson. Former Nirvana manager Danny Goldberg described Cobain as being “extremely reluctant” and that he “denied that he was doing anything self-destructive.” However, by the end of the day, Cobain had agreed to undergo a detox program.[33] Cobain arrived at the Exodus Recovery Center in Los Angeles, California, on March 30. The following night, Cobain walked outside to have a cigarette, then climbed over a six-foot-high fence to leave the facility. He took a taxi to Los Angeles Airport and flew back to Seattle. Over the course of April 2 and April 3, Cobain was spotted in various locations around Seattle, but most of his friends and family were unaware of his whereabouts. On April 3, Love contacted a private investigator, Tom Grant, and hired him to find Cobain. The next day, a person claiming to be Cobain’s mother filed a missing person report. The report stated that Cobain “may be suicidal” and had purchased a shotgun.[34]

On April 8, 1994, Cobain was discovered in the spare room above the garage at his Lake Washington home by Veca Electric employee Gary Smith. Smith arrived at the house that morning to install security lighting and saw him lying inside. Apart from a minor amount of blood coming out of Cobain’s ear, Smith reported seeing no visible signs of trauma, and initially believed that Cobain was asleep. Smith found what he thought might be a suicide note with a pen stuck through it beneath an overturned flowerpot. A shotgun, purchased for Cobain by Dylan Carlson, was found at Cobain’s side. Cobain’s death certificate concluded Cobain’s death was a result of a “self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head.” The report estimates Cobain to have died on April 5, 1994.

On April 10, a public vigil was held for Cobain at a park at Seattle Center which drew approximately seven thousand mourners.[35] Prerecorded messages by Krist Novoselic and Courtney Love were played at the memorial. Love read portions of Cobain’s suicide note to the crowd and broke down, crying and chastizing Cobain. Near the end of the vigil Love arrived at the park and distributed some of Cobain’s clothing to those who still remained.[36] Cobain’s body was cremated.

Musical influences Cobain was a devoted champion of early alternative rock acts. His interest in the underground started when Buzz Osborne of the Melvins let him borrow a tape with songs by punk bands such as Black Flag, Flipper, and Millions of Dead Cops. He would often make reference to his favorite bands in interviews, often placing a greater importance on the bands that influenced him than on his own music. Interviews with Cobain were often littered with references to obscure performers like The Vaselines, The Melvins, Daniel Johnston, The Meat Puppets, Young Marble Giants, The Wipers, Flipper, and The Raincoats. Cobain was eventually able to convince record companies to reissue albums by The Raincoats (Geffen) and The Vaselines (Sub Pop). Cobain also noted the influence of the Pixies, and commented that “Smells Like Teen Spirit” bore some similarities to their sound. Cobain told Melody Maker in 1992 that hearing Surfer Rosa for the first time convinced him to abandon his more Black Flag-influenced songwriting in favor of the “Iggy Pop / Aerosmith” type songwriting that appeared on Nevermind.[37]

The Beatles were an early and important musical influence on Cobain. Cobain expressed a particular fondness for John Lennon, whom he called his “idol” in his journals. Cobain once related that he wrote “About a Girl” after spending three hours listening to Meet the Beatles!.[38] He was heavily influenced by punk rock and hardcore punk, and often credited bands such as Black Flag and the Sex Pistols for his artistic style and attitude.

Even with all of Cobain’s indie influences, Nirvana’s early style was influenced by the major rock bands of the ’70s, including Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Kiss, and Neil Young. In its early days, Nirvana made a habit of regularly playing cover songs by those bands, including Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song”, “Dazed and Confused”, “Heartbreaker”, and made a studio recording of Kiss’ “Do You Love Me?”. Cobain also talked about the influence of bands like The Knack, Boston, and The Bay City Rollers.

There were also earlier influences: Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged concert ended with a version of “Where Did You Sleep Last Night”, a song popularized by blues artist Lead Belly, whom Cobain called one of his favorite performers. Critic Greil Marcus suggested that Cobain’s “Polly” was a descendant of “Pretty Polly”, a murder ballad that might have been a century old when Dock Boggs recorded it in 1927.

Cobain also made efforts to include his favorite performers in his musical endeavors. At the 1991 Reading Festival, Eugene Kelly of the Vaselines joined Nirvana onstage for a duet of “Molly’s Lips”, which Cobain would later proclaim to be one of the greatest moments of his life.[39] In 1993, when he decided that he wanted a second guitarist to help him on stage, he recruited Pat Smear of the legendary L.A. punk band The Germs. When rehearsals of three Meat Puppets covers for Nirvana’s 1993 performance for MTV Unplugged went awry, Cobain placed a call to the two lead members of the band, Curt and Cris Kirkwood, who ended up joining the band on stage to perform the songs. Cobain also contributed backing guitar for a spoken word William S. Burroughs recording entitled “the “Priest” they called him”.[40]

Where Sonic Youth had served to help Nirvana gain wider success, Nirvana attempted to help other indie acts attain success. The band submitted the song “Oh, the Guilt” to a split single with Chicago’s The Jesus Lizard, helping Nirvana’s indie credibility while opening The Jesus Lizard to a wider audience.

Legacy In 2005, a sign was put up in Aberdeen, Washington that read “Welcome to Aberdeen – Come As You Are” as a tribute to Cobain. The sign was paid for and created by the Kurt Cobain Memorial Committee, a non-profit organization created in May 2004 to honor Cobain. The Committee also planned to create a Kurt Cobain Memorial Park and a youth center in Aberdeen.

As Cobain has no gravesite, many Nirvana fans visit Viretta Park, near Cobain’s former Lake Washington home, to pay tribute. On the anniversary of his death, fans gather in the park to celebrate his life and memory. In the years following his death, Cobain is now often remembered as one of the most iconic rock musicians in the history of alternative music.

Gus Van Sant based his 2005 movie Last Days on what might have happened in the final hours of Cobain’s life. In January 2007, Courtney Love began to shop the biography Heavier Than Heaven to various movie studios in Hollywood to turn the book into an A-list feature film about Cobain and Nirvana.

Books and films on Cobain Prior to Cobain’s death, writer Michael Azerrad published Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana, a book that chronicled Nirvana’s career from its beginning, as well as the personal histories of the band members. The book explored Cobain’s drug addiction, as well as the countless controversies surrounding the band. After Cobain’s death, Azerrad re-published the book to include a final chapter discussing the last year of Cobain’s life. The book is notable for its involvement of the band members themselves, who gave interviews and personal information to Azerrad specifically for the book. In 2006, Azerrad’s taped conversations with Cobain were transformed into a documentary about Cobain, titled Kurt Cobain About a Son.

In the 1998 documentary Kurt & Courtney, filmmaker Nick Broomfield investigated Tom Grant’s claim that Cobain was actually murdered, and took a film crew to visit a number of people associated with Cobain and Love, including Love’s father, Cobain’s aunt, and one of the couple’s former nannies. Broomfield also spoke to Mentors bandleader Eldon “El Duce” Hoke, who claimed that Love had offered him $50,000 to kill Cobain. Though Hoke claimed that he knew who killed Cobain, he failed to mention a name, and offered no evidence to support his assertion. Broomfield inadvertently captured Hoke’s last interview, as he died days later, reportedly hit by a train while drunk. In the end, however, Broomfield felt he hadn’t uncovered enough evidence to conclude the existence of a conspiracy. In a 1998 interview, Broomfield summed it up by saying, “I think that he committed suicide. I don’t think that there’s a smoking gun. And I think there’s only one way you can explain a lot of things around his death. Not that he was murdered, but that there was just a lack of caring for him. I just think that Courtney had moved on, and he was expendable.”[41]

Journalists Ian Halperin and Max Wallace took a similar path and attempted to investigate the conspiracy for themselves. Their initial work, the 1999 book Who Killed Kurt Cobain? argued that, while there wasn’t enough evidence to prove a conspiracy, there was more than enough to demand that the case be reopened.[42] A notable element of the book included their discussions with Grant, who had taped nearly every conversation that he had undertaken while he was in Love’s employ. In particular, Halperin and Wallace insisted that Grant play them the tapes of his conversations with Carroll so that they could confirm his story. Over the next several years, Halperin and Wallace collaborated with Grant to write a second book, 2004’s Love and Death: The Murder of Kurt Cobain.

In 2001, writer Charles R. Cross published a biography of Cobain titled Heavier Than Heaven. For the book, Cross conducted over 400 interviews, and was given access by Courtney Love to Cobain’s journals, lyrics, and diaries.[43] However, neither Dave Grohl nor Cobain’s mother contributed to the book.[44]

In 2002, a sampling of Cobain’s writings was published as Journals. The book is 280 pages with a simple black cover; the pages are arranged somewhat chronologically (although Cobain generally did not date them). The journal pages are reproduced in color, and there is a section added at the back that has explanations and transcripts of some of the less legible pages. The writings begin in the late 1980s, around the time the band started, and end in 1994. A paperback version of the book, released in 2003, included a handful of writings that were not offered in the initial release. In the journals, Cobain talked about the ups and downs of life on the road, made lists of what music he was enjoying, and often scribbled down lyric ideas for future reference. Upon its release, reviewers and fans were conflicted about the collection. Many were elated to be able to learn more about Cobain and read his inner thoughts in his own words, but were disturbed by what was viewed as an invasion of his privacy.[45]

References â–ª Azerrad, Michael. Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana. Doubleday, 1994. ISBN 0-385-47199-8. â–ª Cross, Charles. Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain. Hyperion, 2001. ISBN 0-7868-8402-9. â–ª Summers, Kim. “Kurt Cobain”. All Music Guide. Accessed on May 9, 2005. â–ª Kitts, Jeff, et al. Guitar World Presents Nirvana and the Grunge Revolution. Hal Leonard, 1998. ISBN 0-79-35900-6X.

Notes 1. ^ Garofalo, p. 447 2. ^ Azerrad, p. 13 3. ^ Gaar, Gillian. “Verse Chorus Verse: The Recording History of Nirvana.” Goldmine Magazine. February 14, 1997. 4. ^ Azerrad, p. 17 5. ^ Savage, Jon. “Kurt Cobain: The Lost Interview”. Guitar World. 1997. 6. ^ Azerrad, p. 22 7. ^ Azerrad, pp. 20-25 8. ^ Cobain, Kurt (2002). Journals. Riverhead Hardcover. ISBN 978-1573222327. 9. ^ Allman, Kevin. “The Dark Side of Kurt Cobain”. The Advocate. February 1993. 10. ^ Cross, p. 68 11. ^ Azerrad, p. 35 12. ^ a b Azerrad, p. 37 13. ^ Cross, Charles R. “Requiem for a Dream.” Guitar World. October 2001. 14. ^ Azerrad, p. 43 15. ^ Azerrad, p. 46 16. ^ Azerrad, p. 22 17. ^ Azerrad, p. 45 18. ^ Azerrad, p. 169 19. ^ True, Everett. “Wednesday 1 March”. Plan B Magazine Blogs. March 1, 2006. 20. ^ a b Azerrad, p. 172. Courtney Love: “We bonded over pharmaceuticals.” 21. ^ Kelly, Christina. “Kurt and Courtney Sitting in a Tree”. Sassy Magazine. April 1992. 22. ^ a b Azerrad, p. 270 23. ^ LIVE NIRVANA SESSIONS HISTORY: Spring 1991-Fall 1992. LiveNirvana.com. 24. ^ Azerrad, p. 266 25. ^ Azerrad, p. 66 26. ^ Azerrad, p. 41 27. ^ Azerrad, p. 236. 28. ^ Azerrad, p. 241 29. ^ Cross, p. 296-297 30. ^ Halperin, Ian & Wallace, Max (1998). Who Killed Kurt Cobain?. Birch Lane Press. ISBN 1-55972-446-3. 31. ^ David Fricke, “Courtney Love: Life After Death”, Rolling Stone, December 15, 1994. 32. ^ Seattle Police Department (1994). Incident Report – March 18. Retrieved on March 13, 2006. 33. ^ The Seattle Times (1994). Questions Linger After Cobain Suicide. Retrieved on March 13, 2006. 34. ^ Seattle Police Department (1994). Missing Person Report. Retrieved on March 13, 2006. 35. ^ Azerrad, p. 346 36. ^ Azerrad, p. 350 37. ^ Cobain, Kurt. “Kurt Cobain of Nirvana Talks About the Records That Changed His Life”. Melody Maker. August 29, 1992. 38. ^ Cross, p. 121. 39. ^ Cross, p. 195 40. ^ Cross, p. 301 41. ^ Miller, Prairie. “Kurt and Courtney: Interview with Nick Broomfield”. Minireviews.com. 1998. 42. ^ ;Halperin & Wallace, p. 202 43. ^ Heavier than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain. HyperionBooks.com. 44. ^ vanHorn, Terri. “Cobain Book Shows Singer’s Life ‘Heavier’ Than Most Imagined”. MTVNews.com. September 10, 2001. 45. ^ Hartwig, David. “Nirvana releases a hit and miss.” Notre Dame Observer. November 19, 2002.

Source: Wikipedia

Share this:

• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)

93 responses

He will live in our hearts 4-ever

bitch to long

Kurt was the best and still is long live Nirvana.

greetings. kurt cobain long live you.

R.I.P. Kurt Cobain 1967 – forever

Come as you are, we will always love you.

“A human is only relly dead if nobody remembers him” Kurt Cobain shall live forever!

To figure out who killed him or if he killed him self ,they should have traced the finger prints on the gun!!!!I still believe CL did itShes a bitch either or.But anyway,……Kurt….:) Oh Kurt:) Do you Know how much i love you?I do.I love you more than anything in the world!!!I miss and love you and will always.<3 Lets hope we'll all soon know the truth.And if ibecome famous,I wobt be embarressed to say that i still have a crush on you…More like im in love with you.And i know you want me to stop talking about you.But i cant and will never get over you:(And i know your dead,you want us to get over it.Just like your tombstone said ,"Stop Talking About Me You Worthless Piss Fuckheads,Im Dead,Get over it"-Kurt Cobain.And i will try babe:) I love you:) i woul do any thing to make you be alive.I would kiss you if i could:)bye .i love you soooo much

mr cobain is an inparation to millions! anyonw who cant see that should go die in a whole…………..with crocodiles!

i learned so much about kurt…..i didnt know what i do now im doing a chosen speach on him in oral comunication and this site has helped me alot i LOVE nirvanas music….rip kurt

and i agree long live kurt!!!!

and i find all of your spelling very hard to master bate too

does anyone know who wrote this because I’m writing a paper and I need an author

FIrst of all, there is no author because whoever wrote it knows it is full of lies so they are either too embarrassed to admit it , or they are afraid of being sued for plagarism. Second, There was absolutely NOT a mutual romantic feeling between Kurt and HER!! Kurt was quoted as saying he couldn’t stand her at first, she was just an annoying, loud mouthed, groupie that showed up a lot. Yeah, he did eventually start to like her, but that was only for the drugs she was supplying him with. She made sure he had plenty, actually too much, she needed him drugged up night and day, to the point where he could hardly even think for himself. It all fit in her plan , she controlled every aspect of his life. She made sure he had no more friends of his own, only her friends were allowed to hang around, she told everyone her friends wre Kurts friends, when in reality, they were actually paid to keep a very close eye on Kurt at all times. She forged all kinds of documents with his name, she got pregnant on purpose to trap him so that he had to marry her. I could go on, but I’ve explained all of this so many times, just don’t believe ANYTHING C.L.or her endless list of sidekicks, such as : Everett True; Charles Cross; Christopher Sanford;, etc…..

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

• Search Search Please fill out this field.
• Sweepstakes

Your complete Kurt Cobain reading guide: Journals, biographies, and more

David Canfield is a Staff Editor. He oversees the magazine's books section, and writes film features and awards analysis.

Reading to remember

On the 25th anniversary of Kurt Cobain 's death, HarperCollins ' Ecco published Serving the Servant , a fascinating biography of the Nirvana frontman by none other than Danny Goldberg, the band's iconic manager. ( Available for purchase. ) The book works to reframe Cobain's legacy by blending Goldberg's memories with information and files that have previously not been public. As Cobain is remembered, it's vital reading—though hardly the only book out there worth your time. Here, EW has rounded up the essential Cobain reading list.

Journals by Kurt Cobain

Arranged in close chronological order and kept in their rawest form, Journals is a necessary read for any Cobain fan: a collection of his writings, from scrapped notes and letter drafts to wild sketches and shopping lists, which offer unparalleled access into his interior life. The No. 1 New York Times best-seller was originally published in 2002. "The publication of this unintentional autobiography of the famously talented and infamously troubled artist is a vast leap in the mythologizing and marketing of Kurt Cobain," EW wrote at the time of release. "And the journey from Cobain's hands to a store near you involves healthy measures of the serendipitous and the surreal."

Heavier Than Heaven by Charles R. Cross

Charles R. Cross' definitive biography of Cobain traces his life story via more than 400 interviews and intimate access to the Nirvana frontman's private journals and lyrics. Despite its breadth and close sourcing, Heavier Than Heaven drew criticism for Cross' subjective account of Cobain's final hours.

Love & Death: The Murder of Kurt Cobain by Max Wallace and Ian Halperin

This 2004 best-selling book, co-written by Ian Halperin and Max Wallace, arrived as a controversial work of investigative journalism. Drawing on dozens of hours of conversation audiotapes obtained by the authors, Love & Death makes the argument that Cobain was murdered, with his then-wife Courtney Love a potential conspirator. The book is a product of a rigorous decade-long process for Halperin and Wallace.

Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck by Brett Morgen

A companion to the HBO documentary of the same name, Montage of Heck includes extensive interviews, gorgeous animation stills, and previously-unseen photography as filmmaker Brett Morgen put on screen. It doesn't shed a ton of new light on Cobain, but it's perfect reading for those who've yet to check out the heartbreaking, illuminating documentary.

Godspeed by Barnaby Legg & Jim McCarthy & Flameboy

This explicit, starkly visual homage to Cobain combines biographical details with interpretations of the artist's internal struggles. Barnaby Legg and Jim McCarthy constructed their story accordingly, while the vivid, nightmarishly provocative art came courtesy of Flameboy.

Kurt Cobain: The Last Session by Jesse Frohman & Glenn O'Brien & Jon Savage

Get inside of Cobain's final photoshoot with Nirvana, which took place in August 1993. In The Last Session , 90 stunning photographs present a dazzling final visual memory of the man, capturing him in a plethora of extreme, intense emotional states.

• facebook-rs

He Wrote the First Nirvana Bio. 30 Years Later, He Has a Few Changes

• By Brian Hiatt

Brian Hiatt

For a music journalist in the Nineties, there could have been no better phone call. Not long after Michael Azerrad hung out with Kurt Cobain for Nirvana ’s first Rolling Stone cover story, Courtney Love reached out to ask him if he wanted to write a book about Nirvana. He agreed, and after nine months of breakneck work, he managed to get Come As You Are out in 1993, just in time to coincide with Nirvana’s Nevermind follow-up, In Utero .

Thirty years later, Azerrad (also the author of the beloved indie/punk history Our Band Could Be Your Life ) has a new version of his Nirvana book out. The Amplified Come As You Are more than doubles the length of the original edition with new material from Azerrad’s interviews, fact-checking, and fresh revelations.

Azerrad looked back on the book, the making of In Utero (which is also out in a new 30th anniversary edition), and more in an interview that also appears in a recent episode of Rolling Stone Music Now .

(To hear the full interview, go here for the podcast provider of your choice, listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify , or just press play above.)

Editor’s picks

The 250 greatest guitarists of all time, the 500 greatest albums of all time, the 50 worst decisions in movie history, every awful thing trump has promised to do in a second term.

There’s been a lot of books about Nirvana, but yours was first, which made things harder in some ways. That meant you had to lay down a lot of this story for the very first time. I did have the advantage of talking to all the people in the band, which subsequently no one else did. That was a coup. That was a very helpful thing for constructing this story. But yeah, I didn’t have the benefit of years and years of articles about the band and many other interviews and several other books and just the power of the internet to search for YouTube clips and all those things when I was writing the original Come As You Are .

The downside of that was I really depended on the people telling me these stories to tell the truth, and sometimes they did not always do that. And I had to write the book in nine months, so I didn’t have time to fact-check a lot of stuff, and that’s partially what inspired this new edition. Kurt supposedly wanted to dispel all the myths when he talked to you, but actually in many cases, he was trying to add to them. He disavowed the idea that he followed music journalism. But I could tell from our conversations and just the way he spoke about rock music that he’d read quite a bit of music journalism. He understood that all the great artists constructed myths about themselves that kind of enhanced their image, or in today’s parlance, their brand. Kurt was really aware of that, and he put it in action with me, for sure. It was only 30 years later that I got a chance to debunk some of it.

Dave Grohl Almost Dedicated a Doja Cat Song to Josh Homme, But Decided to Write Him One Instead 

Dave grohl rips through a roaring cover of paul mccartney's bond theme 'live and let die', four decades into her career, kim gordon is still exploding our expectations.

Another thing I think that we learned for the first time in your new edition of the book is that there were these two British writers who were working on a Nirvana book that caused a lot of upset in the Nirvana camp. In your first edition, Kurt admitted to calling them up and basically threatening their lives. And now we learn that Come As You Are started as an attempt by Kurt and Courtney Love to preempt that book. When Courtney called me about this, I said, “Oh, that’s great. But can I talk to Kurt about this?” And she hands the phone to Kurt. I had already done a Rolling Stone cover story about Nirvana, focusing on Kurt. We already were familiar with each other. I said, “Hey, what’s up, what’s the story with this book?” And he told me, “We want you to write a biography of Nirvana.” And I said, “It can’t be authorized.” He knew exactly what authorized meant, that the subject has basically final cut over the book. And he said, “No way. That would be too Guns N’ Roses.” He said, “Just tell the truth, and that would be better than anything else that’s been written about us.” So I took that as my marching orders. That’s how it started. 

Especially in this enhanced version, you have a really unvarnished take on In Utero . I’m not sure how many people realize how many of the best songs on In Utero were written way beforehand. Some of the best songs on In Utero were older songs written as early as 1990, I think. And some of the newer ones were just jammed into existence, or started with a drum beat by Dave, and Kurt thought, we can kind of trick this out and make it into a song. Kurt was fighting a heroin addiction. He was also a new father. They’d moved house a couple of times. They were touring. There was all that ruckus about the Vanity Fair story [that accused Courtney Love of using heroin while pregnant]. There was a lot of stuff distracting him from being able to sit down and focus and write songs. It wasn’t just drugs, although that was certainly a major factor.

You mention that Kurt said in a sing-song voice that “Dave is the most well-adjusted boy I know.” It feels like there’s sort of a mix of condescension and perhaps even envy in that. I think Kurt partly was mocking Dave for being, you know, fairly together and normal. He’s a popular, well-adjusted guy, he really is. I think partly Kurt was making fun of that because he wasn’t a freak like Kurt. And I think Kurt was a little bit jealous of Dave because Dave did have his act together.

Using “ Serve the Servants” as an album opener feels like an example of Kurt’s brilliance and savviness — he knew how apropos and quotable “teenage angst has paid off well, now I’m bored and old” would be as the first thing you hear on this particular album. He thought a lot about these things. He may have worn torn jeans and not washed his hair very often, but he was very meticulous as an artist. And that’s a really great example. The very beginning moments of In Utero are Dave clicking his sticks to cue in the rest of the band to start the song. That’s something that’s usually cut out of a professional recording, but they left it in as a very clear signifier that this was something raw and real. And then that huge, dissonant, gorgeous, ugly guitar chord that begins the song. It’s so beautiful. That’s a mission statement right there. And that all happens in the space of, like, five seconds. You already know what the whole record’s gonna be like just from that.  

You also solve the mystery in the new book of what the chorus line means. It refers to feeling obligated to do whatever music-industry types asked or forced them to do,

“Dumb,” which is a great, catchy song, was written all the way back during the summer of 1990. I got the sense that they didn’t want to include songs like that on Nevermind because especially Kurt was so acutely self-conscious of appearing to sell out for their major-label debut. Instead of “Dumb,” they would have, like, “Territorial Pissings” to broadcast their hardness and their lack of capitulation to the major-label ogre.

 But it’s got some pretty interesting lines in it. He calls himself “the king of illiterature.” Kurt was extremely self-conscious about not being educated and cultured. He first got a taste of taking it to the next level by moving to Olympia, Washington and hanging out with all these affluent, cultured kids from the Evergreen State College. And he realized he was really curious and he wanted to leave the provincialism of his life in Aberdeen behind and become a more cultured, artistic person. Those kids taught him a lot. Then soon Courtney, who’s another extremely cultured person, taught him a lot. And the people in Sonic Youth taught him a lot.

“Tourette’s,” appropriately for the song title, doesn’t have real lyrics. Kurt was obsessed with psychological and neurological disorders. He claimed he had narcolepsy and manic depression. I don’t think he thought he had Tourette’s, but that was maybe sort of a fantasy of him just losing his mind and being someone out on the street who stands on a corner and wears shaggy, shabby clothes. He was caricaturing the idea that he was being driven to a point where he would just swear uncontrollably. 

As honest as he was with you in these interviews, he ducked your question about the inspiration for  “All Apologies.” In writing this book, I learned the difference between honest and candid. Honest means you’re telling the truth and candid means you’re saying stuff that’s pretty intense, but may or may not be true. I think Kurt was more candid than honest sometimes.

You write that it was a breakup song in a version from 1990 and then was seemingly updated due to there being a lot going on in his life. I do speculate about that song in The Amplified Come As You Are , where I did not in the original. When he sings, “aqua seafoam shame,” maybe it’s a reference to being in a hospital with those bland aqua/seafoam-colored walls, and he’s feeling shame because he’s there due to his drug habit. I may be reading too much into that, but it makes sense to me.

In the original mix, the bass sounded a little bit more like a tuned bass drum, like more thump-y. And then a couple other songs he said, “I think the vocals could be louder.” And those turned out to be the songs that they raised the vocals on. This all happened before anyone else heard the album. So I think that the ensuing brouhaha was just a bunch of BS as far as I can tell. 

It became a national story because of the power of the idea of selling out in the Nineties. Now you complain that someone is selling out and no one knows what the heck you’re talking about. But in 1993, that was a huge deal for someone who had championed independence and underground values to appear to cave to the major-label Man. So it was a really big deal. People thought, “Oh, we’re catching the world’s biggest band out on a major hypocrisy.”

Yeah, the amount of psychological torment Kurt and others put themselves through over that stuff is not to be underestimated. In that moment, it was everything. Kurt really wanted to be accepted by the indie nation. And even at the height of his fame and success, he was really insecure about being exiled by them. Some of his friends in Olympia started the label Kill Rock Stars — and he was a rock star. He was acutely conscious of what they thought. He wrote “Fugazi” on the toes of his sneakers. He wrote the name of the head of Matador Records, Gerard Cosloy, on his bedroom wall. He was very aware of these people and their arbiter-like status, and he wanted to make sure that he was accepted by them and not rejected because he had become so famous and sold so many records. That he was selling lots of records was antithetical to the community that he came out of and still worshipped. It was a really difficult thing for him to deal with.

Sean Combs' Homes Raided as Part of Sex Trafficking Investigation

Team biden roasts 'feeble, confused, tired' trump after unhinged presser, a brief look at diddy's history of controversies and allegations, fergie chambers is heir to one of america’s richest families — and determined to see the u.s. fall.

To really progress, Kurt might have had to get over his aversion to craft. He did work somewhat on instinct. He would often use chords that didn’t belong technically in the key of the song. I shouldn’t presume to say whether he knew he was breaking the rules or not, but he certainly did come up with some genius moves like that. Maybe he would have found an arranger, some sort of collaborator who could help walk him down a new musical path. I don’t know. 

When you wrote the original book, did you have a sense of Dave either starting to be a greater creative force in the band, or maybe even of a guy who has some talents that can’t be contained by Nirvana? There’s a lot of instances of Dave saying that he was a little frustrated about being boxed in as just the drummer. And, as we know, he’d already written and recorded and sung his own album . He was certainly capable of being a front person, even just temperamentally. But he also said he was in awe of Kurt’s songs and that he felt it was best that he keep his own songs to himself. For someone as alpha-male and charismatic and completely talented as Dave, I could see that would be frustrating after a while. And that’s only natural. Completely understandable and also borne out to a completely astonishing degree by what actually happened.

Keith Urban Will Join 'The Voice' Season 25 as a Mega Mentor

• Country King
• By Tomás Mier

Future, Metro Boomin, The Weeknd Star in a Cybertruck Fever Dream

• Ridin'

Shakira Channels Selena, Plays a Mechanic in 'Entre Parentesis' Video With Grupo Frontera

• (Irreparable)

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band Are Playing on the Beach in Asbury Park. Here's How It Happened

A brief look at diddy's history of controversies and allegations.

• History Rhymes
• By Andre Gee

Most Popular

James marsden, taran killam and stars who signed brian peck letters of support "devastated" drake bell, says dan schneider, blake lively apologizes for mocking kate middleton 'photoshop fails' after princess reveals cancer diagnosis: 'silly post' has 'me mortified', body language experts believe this is the reason kate middleton was alone in her cancer announcement video, james madison’s record $53m in student fees tops all public schools, you might also like, steven spielberg calls shoah foundation ‘more crucial now than ever’ in accepting usc university medallion on behalf of holocaust survivors, here’s how amazon’s fight against counterfeits is going, the best yoga blocks to support any practice, according to instructors, mark wahlberg says martin scorsese ‘had issues’ with his hair extensions on ‘the departed’ set, mlb franchise valuations interactive data viz.

Rolling Stone is a part of Penske Media Corporation. © 2024 Rolling Stone, LLC. All rights reserved.

Kurt Cobain: unseen family photographs of Nirvana’s broken idol

L et’s start at the end: April 5 1994. Kurt Cobain was alone when he died, in a greenhouse above a garage at the back of his home in Seattle. In his hand was a shotgun; in his bloodstream, a cocktail of heroin and Valium; by his side, a rambling suicide note, scrawled in red ink, a pen stabbed through its centre. “This note should be pretty easy to understand,” wrote its “miserable, self-destructive, death rocker” author, before quoting a Neil Young lyric: “It’s better to burn out than to fade away.” He was 27 years old.

Three decades on, Cobain’s death remains one of the great tragedies of rock ’n’ roll. He was so young, so beautiful, so talented; a hypersensitive soul whose raw, emotionally intense music, made with his grunge power trio Nirvana , had pierced the heart of popular culture and earned him a permanent position in the cultural pantheon. He left behind just three albums. Listen to the first, Bleach, and you can still hear the sound of three young American punks making a noise so wildly uncompromising that they would surely never have dreamt of the mainstream stardom that lay ahead, ready to engulf them. On its release, by the indie label Sub Pop in June 1989, Bleach drew a murmur of critical interest, sold 40,000 copies – and left the charts unbothered. 

Yet, it did enough to catch the attention of the major label Geffen, which threw its corporate ­muscle behind the band’s more tautly honed second album, Nevermind, on which Cobain’s existential rage and des­pair seemed to embody the angst of an entire ­gen­er­ation. Released in September 1991 – and featuring the band’s unimprovable lineup of Cobain, bassist Krist Novoselic and drummer Dave Grohl – it stormed the charts on the back of an era-defining opening track, the slacker anthem Smells Like Teen Spirit, to shift more than 30 million copies around the world and place it among the 50 bestselling albums of all time. 

Two years later, Nirvana followed it up with what would prove to be their final studio album. In Utero found Cobain reacting against his unexpected fame and fortune by amping up the sludgy brutality and emotional ennui – but the album still went on to sell 15 million copies, making it surely the most wilfully uncommercial album ever to hit such heights. To his adoring public, the troubled Cobain represented a pure shot of authenticity amid the shiny plasticity of pop culture; a hero for their times.

And yet his death went unnoticed for nearly 36 hours. On the day he died, his wife, Courtney Love , was in Los Angeles with their 19-month-old daughter, Frances Bean, preparing the latest album by her band, Hole. The previous week, Cobain had checked into a drug-rehabilitation centre in the city; he had overdosed on Rohypnol in Rome a month earlier, and was locked in an ongoing battle with heroin addiction. But on April 1, Cobain scaled the facility’s perimeter wall and made his way back to Seattle. Over the next few days, there were various sightings – both by friends who took drugs with him and those who tried to persuade him to stop – followed by a brief period when the world’s most famous rock star seemed to have dropped off the face of the Earth. 

The news of his death finally broke on April 8, when an electrician arrived to install an alarm at his home and made a gruesome discovery. And there begins the afterlife of Kurt Cobain, 30 years (and counting) in which his fame, meaning and influence have grown only greater. 

“I remember it was a school day; a normal, sunny day, kids running around the house, when it came on the TV news,” recalls Amy Lee, who in 1994 was a budding 12-year-old musician. Only months later, at a Christian youth camp, she would meet Ben Moody, the aspiring guitarist with whom she went on to form the multimillion-selling American rock band Evanescence. “I felt it so hard, I was crying, watching in total disbelief. In Utero was the first album I ever had and Nirvana were my favourite thing in the whole world. So it was like I had just fallen in love – and he was dead. It was so shocking to me, but it made me dive deeper into the music and start listening to the lyrics [as written] from the perspective of somebody who was crying out in pain.”

The violent manner of Cobain’s death marks it out as perhaps the most striking act of self-­destruction by any musical superstar; a bullet to the head has a savage finality that goes beyond the messy, druggy slipping away of so many other members of rock’s so-called “27 Club” – Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and, more recently, Amy Winehouse among them – each one dead before their 28th birthday. “I want to say that what impacted me most about Kurt Cobain was his music: that raw, unpretentious, unfiltered expression of his authentic self. I would like to really believe that it would have been just as powerful if he had lived,” says Lee. “But his death shook up everything. It opened all kinds of doors for me: about expressing my own deepest, darkest feelings; about being willing to go all the way.”

If Nirvana were huge before Cobain died, they have become legendary since, their influence exerting a global, cross-generational grip. “Some artists are so big that they are already part of the lore before you even get into the music,” says Joel Smith, of Univer­sity, an emerging young British rock band from Crewe. “And I feel like I knew Kurt Cobain before I’d even heard Nirvana.” As for so many of his peers, for Smith – who, now 21, wasn’t yet born when Cobain died – the briefness of Nirvana’s existence and the relative scarcity of their music only adds to the band’s mythic allure. After all, he says, “there’s only so much space an artist can actually take up until the songs don’t mean as much as they used to. Due to unfortunate circumstances, Nirvana got a perfect trilogy.”

From that concise discography, a worldwide industry has sprung. There have been Nirvana live albums, compilations and box sets, documentaries and even a Kurt Cobain opera (2022’s Last Days, itself a reinterpretation of Gus Van Sant’s 2005 film of the same name). Publishers have poured out a torrent of photo­books, biographies and critical appreciations, including Cobain’s own Journals, released in 2002, a collection of writings and drawings culled from his handwritten notebooks. To the dismay of his surviving bandmates, Cobain has also featured as a play­able character in a video game, 2009’s Guitar Hero 5. Last year, a Fender Stratocaster guitar he smashed on stage sold at auction for nearly $600,000 (£472,000).

And still the public appetite for Cobain and the band he led seems far from sated. “I see people come to our shows who are obsessed with them, even more than when I was younger,” Smith says. “If you’re online, browsing music channels, you can’t miss Nirvana.” Since the dawn of the digital era, Smells Like Teen Spirit has been streamed nearly two billion times, making it (along with Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody) one of two tracks from the 20th century to retain a place today in Spotify’s chart of the top five rock songs of all time.

What is it about Nirvana’s music that continues to seduce each new generation that encounters it? As a songwriter, Cobain found a way to combine the economy and pop structure of what he called “jangly” bands – such as the Beatles and REM – with the heavy power of classic rock, and a fierce art-punk energy reminiscent of Sonic Youth and the Pixies. It is a potent blend, one that led Courtney Love to describe her husband as a combination of “Johnny Rotten, John Lennon, Led Zeppelin and Leonard Cohen”. 

The band assembled to bring these songs to life could hardly have been bettered: Novoselic’s bass lines are liquid and mesmerising; Grohl’s drums, frenzied yet direct; the attacking fuzz of Cobain’s rhythm guitar is perfectly complemented by his fluid lead motifs. Much was made of the way Nirvana would shift restlessly between quiet and loud, but that is just one of the many dichotomies embedded in their music, which also flips between intimacy and expansiveness, melancholy and fury, profundity and meaninglessness. So melodiously and emotionally rich are Cobain’s songs that they sound every bit as wonderful stripped of their rock bravado and carried by the singer’s fractured voice on MTV Unplugged in New York, a posthumously-released acoustic set, recorded live before a television audience, which went on to sell more than seven  million copies. 

Cobain admitted that, with Smells Like Teen Spirit, he was “trying to write the ultimate pop song” – an ambition that would have been considered deeply uncool among Seattle’s slacker grunge scene. It goes some way towards explaining why Nirvana’s songs have endured while so many of their contemporaries faded fast (Alice in Chains, Stone Temple Pilots, Mudhoney) or mutated into worthy heritage rock acts (Pearl Jam, Soundgarden). Later bands that have attempted to follow Nirvana’s blueprint – Bush, Nickelback and, ultimately, Dave Grohl’s subsequent outfit, Foo Fighters, among them – have found commercial success without getting anywhere close to the depth of feeling Cobain’s work conveys. 

Thirty years after his death, it’s not unusual to catch a world-conquering singer-songwriter of a later vintage and a different stripe doffing their cap to Cobain. Lana Del Rey, who was nine when Cobain died, describes his music as “my primary inspiration”, while 22-year-old Billie Eilish recently revealed that she looks to Cobain – and his suicide note – to understand the terrifying loneliness of fame. “It’s horrifying, the most tragic s--- I’ve ever heard. In the letter, he’s like, ‘I have everything in the world, and I absolutely hate it.’ He was so ashamed that he wasn’t enjoying it. And I get why he was feeling that way. It’s just not what you think it’s going to be.”

Cobain was no saint. There was an angry, whiny and highly volatile side to his character, and he certainly did not always treat the people around him with respect. As a teenage high-school dropout, he had been a wanton vandal; as a band leader, he exercised total authority over his fellow musicians; as a narrator of his own life story, he was highly unreli­able; and as an avowed family man, he ultimately abrogated all responsibility to those closest to him. 

Yet, unusually among rock stars of his era, he also embodied attitudes that now appear ahead of their time. His songs addressed sexual assault and toxic masculinity long before that term entered the vernacular. He wrestled openly with self-hatred, depression and other mental-health issues (as a child, he was prescribed Ritalin). And he was both an advocate for women’s rights and a champion of female musicians, outspoken in his support of the Riot Grrrl ­movement that arose alongside grunge, all reasons why he ­continues to resonate down the decades.

Amy Lee recalls a moment from her first school dance, “feeling completely alone, while they’re playing trite pop songs that I hated”. Then Heart-Shaped Box from In Utero came on, “and I remember standing in front of the amplifier like a total weirdo, with my eyes closed, just wanting to live inside the song. That’s the power of the sound, the words, his voice – everything about it sucked me in. I heard Kurt sing, and I was completely changed.”

“Everyone we knew growing up was into Nirvana,” adds Mollie McGinn, a 24-year-old member of the Northern Irish duo Dea Matrona. “I feel like their influence is everywhere in our generation, maybe even more than the Beatles, because they embody that angsty, honest, true-to-yourself, authentic vibe. It’s so important to speak right from the heart now, and nobody did that better than Kurt Cobain.”

Family Values: Kurt, Courtney, & Frances Bean is out on June 4 (powerHouse, £28.99)

Sign up to the Front Page newsletter for free: Your essential guide to the day's agenda from The Telegraph - direct to your inbox seven days a week.

• Coronavirus New
• Politicians
•      

Kurt Cobain

• Quick facts
• Birth date: 20 Feb, 1967
• Age: 53 yrs
• Occupations: Guitarist Singer-songwriter Singer Lyricist Composer Musician Diarist Writer
• Citizenship: United States of America
• Birth place: Aberdeen
• Genre: Grunge Alternative rock
• Voice type: Tenor
• Instruments: Guitar Electric guitar Voice
• Pseudonym: Kurdt Kobain
• Gender: Male
• Description: American singer, composer and musician
• Imdb id: Nm0001052
• Spouse: Courtney Love[1992-1994]

Kurt Cobain was known as American rock star and grunge musician. He is most famous for being the lead singer of the legendary grunge rock band, Nirvana . His life came to a tragic end when he committed suicide in 1994.

Kurt Donald Cobain was born on February 20, 1967, in the little logging town of Aberdeen, Washington. As a young boy, Cobain was artistic and had an ear for music. He had a younger sister named Kim but the two were taken away from each other when their folks got separated. At age nine, Cobain went to live with his father who eventually remarried, which put more strain on their relationship.

Starting in 1988, Cobain's melodic desire started pushing his career ahead. His band created the name Nirvana and released their first track "Love Buzz" on a little record label. In 1989 Nirvana released their first album collection, Bleach, which did not succeed in making a major connection with the music fan

As the band carried on, 1990 turned into a decisive year for Cobain and the remainder of Nirvana . They released their classic album, Nevermind which created a whole new genre of rock called Grunge Music and cemented the band’s place in music history.

Personal Life

Relationships.

Cobain met female rocker Courtney Love at a Portland dance club in 1990. She was fronting her own band called Hole. In February 1992 Cobain and Love got married and had a little girl , Frances Bean .

The relationship was based on shaky ground, as both were drug addicts. At one point, social services took steps to remove their little girl after Love 's Vanity Fair interview revealed that she confessed to shooting up heroin while watching Frances .

In 1993, the Seattle police needed to separate a brutal debate at the couple's home. The two were battling about Cobain's weapons at the house.

On April 5, 1994, in the guest house behind his Seattle home, a 27-year-old Cobain ended it all. He set a shotgun into his mouth and discharged, slaughtering himself in a split second. He left a suicide note in which he tended to his numerous fans just as his better half and young girl. While his passing was formally led as a suicide, paranoid ideas and theories have flowed that Love may have had something to do with his demise. There have been conspiracy theories that Love had Cobain killed for financial reasons.

biogs you may want to read

March 26, 2024

Life Story of Famous People

Short Bio » Rock Singer » Kurt Cobain

Kurt Cobain

Kurt Donald Cobain was an American singer, songwriter, guitarist and musician. Kurt Cobain was the founder of Grunge band Nirvana . He was the front man of the band. Kurt Cobain was one of the greatest rockstars the world has ever seen. He was the main reason for Nirvana’s success. It is unfortunate he committed suicide at the age of 27.

Kurt Cobain was born on February 20, 1967. He was born in Aberdeen, Washington. He was born to Wendy Elizabeth and Donald Cobain. He was of Irish, English and German descent. Kurt Cobain had a musical background. He was a talented kid. He was described to be a happy child. His parents divorced when Kurt Cobain was 7 years old. Since then he changed a lot.

He formed nirvana with schoolmate Novoselic. They formed nirvana in 1987. The band released songs in the next couple of years. They attained worldwide fame after including drummer Dave Grohl . The band became a major hit in 1991 with the release of Nevermind. With the success, they became the pioneer of Grunge music. He was the main songwriter for the band. He co-wrote classics like Smells Like Teen Spirit, Come as You Are, Lithium and All Apologies. Smells Like Teen Spirit is regarded as the band’s best song. Kurt Cobain’s death ended the Seattle grunge band Nirvana. The band sold multi million copies of their songs. Kurt Cobain has made a mark on history. Nirvana had a small yet memorable run.

Kurt Cobain was addicted to drugs. Particularly he was addicted to heroin. Kurt Cobain met Courtney Love in 1990. Courtney Love, herself is a musician. The couple grew close through their mutual interest in drugs. They eventually married in 1992. Love gave birth to Frances Bean Cobain in 1992.

Duff McKagan said he met Kurton a flight. Duff also said Cobain was happy to see him. That was not a normal feeling due to Nirvana and Guns n Roses’ history. Their front men Axl Rose and Cobain hated each other. In April 8, 1994, Kurt Cobain was found dead at his home. She shot himself with a shotgun. It was reported he died three days earlier. The death was confirmed as a suicide. Cobain was under heroin influence at the time.

More Info: Wiki | IMDb

Fans Also Viewed

Published in Guitarist and Singer

More Celebrities

The Destructive Romance of Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love

That was a quote taken straight from the infamous 1992 Vanity Fair story on Courtney Love, written by Lynn Hirschberg, who would go on to depict the Hole frontwoman as an obnoxious, rabble-rousing, image-obsessed opportunist who reveled in being the newly anointed Mrs. Cobain.

READ MORE: Kurt Cobain: The Inspiration and Meaning Behind Nirvana's Hit 'Smells Like Teen Spirit'

Cobain and Love got married just months after they started dating

It was just a year before the bombshell article that Love and Cobain crossed paths (There are varying reports that they briefly met in 1989 and 1990, but were officially reacquainted in 1991). Nirvana was at its peak, and Cobain was confused and depressed with the meteoric fame that came with his music. When Love re-entered his sphere, she had allegedly pursued him with dogged determination and according to numerous sources , was the one who introduced him to heroin.

Mirroring Cobain's life, their courtship was intense and brief. After four months of dating, Love was already pregnant with their daughter when they decided to wed in Honolulu, Hawaii, on February 24, 1992. The bride wore a dress previously owned by Hollywood actress Frances Farmer, while Cobain wore green flannel pajamas.

After the wedding, Cobain went into a funk. Despite Nirvana's soaring popularity, the frontman had no desire to tour and further retreated into himself.

“We went on a binge,” Love confessed to Vanity Fair in 1992. “We did a lot of drugs. We got pills and then we went down to Alphabet City and Kurt wore a hat, I wore a hat, and we copped some dope. Then we got high and went to SNL. After that, I did heroin for a couple of months.”

In 2015 Love, who at the time was promoting Montage of Heck , a biopic of Cobain, would later add: "He wanted to stay in the apartment and do heroin and paint and play his guitar. That's what he wanted to do."

They attempted to get clean before the birth of their daughter

But interlaced among the drug-fueled binges were moments of laughter and sincere affection. In never-before-seen video footage from Montage of Heck , Cobain is seen joking with Love in the bathroom, while another moment captures Love teasingly climbing on Cobain's back while singing a tune. The couple also made intermittent attempts at getting clean. In March 1992 they enrolled in separate detox programs but within days, they would check out and dive back into their addictions. (In Vanity Fair , friends told the publication that Love did heroin while pregnant.)

By the time their daughter, Frances Bean , was born that August, Cobain had briefly considered quitting the band so he could focus on fatherhood. But he didn't. And despite his good intentions, he couldn't quit his drug habits, either.

In additional footage revealed in the film, Cobain's descent into self-destruction becomes more evident. In one scene, he suddenly walks out of Frances' first birthday party. In another, he's nodding off while she's getting her first haircut. "Kurt, you don't want your daughter to see you behaving like this, on drugs," Love screams off camera. "I'm not on drugs!" Cobain claims. "I'm tired."

Cobain attempted suicide more than once

Despite their love for their daughter, the couple's marriage was also unraveling, exacerbated by their drug use. Love would later admit that the reason Cobain attempted suicide in Rome in early March 1994 was because she was considering having an affair. "He must have been psychic or something," she told TVGuide.com . "I almost did one time, and he knew it. ... I have no idea how he knew it. The plan didn't ever go anywhere. Nothing happened, but... the response to it was he took 67 Rohypnols and ended up in a coma because I thought about cheating on him. I mean, f-ck."

But Cobain's problems weren't just with Love – he was never able to quell the inner demons that stemmed from his lonely youth nor could he embrace his newfound celebrity, which he felt delegitimized his music. His world was caving in on him, and he couldn't take the pressure.

Isolated and inconsolable and under the tight grip of addiction, Cobain killed himself by a gunshot wound to the head at his Seattle home on April 5, 1994. He was 27.

“He is considered to be the rock star who didn’t want fame, the weak pathetic guy who was taken over by this controlling female, and yadda yadda," Love told Loudwire in 2015. "It kind of f--ked me up... He’s a hard act to follow. I love him and I always will.”

SIGN UP FOR THE BIOGRAPHY.COM NEWSLETTER

Rock Musicians

Elvis and Priscilla’s Turbulent Relationship

2024 Grammys: The Major Winners and Takeaways

Tracy Chapman

Sinéad O’Connor

How Austin Butler Landed the Part of Elvis

11 Rare Vintage Photos of Lou Reed

Elvis Presley’s Family Tree

Elvis Presley

How The Rolling Stones Were First Formed

Bruce Springsteen

The Meaning Behind “In the Air Tonight”