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Early on, Cobain showed an interest in art and music. He excelled at drawing, so much so that his talents were even apparent in kindergarten. He soon learned to play piano by ear and enjoyed a kiddie drum kit his parents had given him. At his father’s urging, Cobain also played little league baseball. He sometimes spent time with his little sister Kim who was born in 1971, but both Cobain children had to deal with their parents yelling and fighting as their marriage became increasingly stormy. After his parents divorced when he was nine, Cobain became withdrawn. He went to live with his father after the divorce. On the weekends, he would visit his mother and his sister. When his father remarried, Cobain resented his stepmother Jenny and her two children. One of the bright spots of this difficult time was a present he received from his uncle Chuck—a guitar. Although the instrument was fairly beat up, it inspired Cobain to learn to play and it offered him a respite from his unhappiness at home. Alienated and angry, he believed that his father always took his stepmother’s side and favored her children and his half-brother Chad who had been born in 1979. Cobain began experimenting with drugs in his mid-teens, and he pushed himself farther away from his father. In 1982, Cobain left his father’s place and bounced around from relative to relative for several months. He then went to live with his mother who was with her boyfriend Pat O’Connor at the time. (They later married.) Attending high school in Aberdeen, he impressed teachers and students with his artistic talents. Cobain seemed to have odd tastes in subject matter, drawing a sperm transforming into an embryo for one project, according to Heavier than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain by Charles R. Cross. Cobain’s life changed when he started listening punk rock. Discovering a local punk band, the Melvins, he befriended Buzz Osbourne, a member of the group. Osbourne introduced him to some other punk bands, such as the Sex Pistols. The Melvins often practiced in a space near drummer Dale Crover’s house and a lot of fans, including Cobain, came to these sessions and hung out. As high school progressed, he was doing more drinking and drugging. Cobain also got into fights with his mother who was also drinking a lot, and he could not stand his stepfather. Cobain spent much of 1984 and 1985 living in various places. He spent time living with friends when he could and sleeping in apartment building hallways and a hospital waiting room when he did not have any other place to crash. In July 1985, Cobain was arrested for spray painting buildings in town with some of his friends. His friends got away, but Cobain was caught and taken to the police station. He later received a fine and a suspended sentence for his actions. Several months later, Cobain started his first band, Fecal Matter. They recorded a few songs together at his aunt Mari’s house, but they never played any gigs. The next year Cobain was in trouble with the law again after being found wandering around an abandoned building drunk at night. As a result, he ended up spending several days in jail. Cobain started playing music with bassist Krist Novoselic who was two years older than him. They knew each other from Novoselic’s younger brother Robert and from hanging around The Melvins. A local drummer named Aaron Burckhard soon joined in. Their first gig was a house party in 1987. This same year, Cobain started going out with Tracy Marander, his first serious girlfriend. The two eventually were living together in Olympia. Although they struggled financially, the couple seemed to enjoy the rock and roll lifestyle. Cobain spent a lot of his time exploring different creative outlets—writing, painting, drawing, and making collages. In 1988, Cobain was able to make some of his rock ambitions come true. He finally settled on the name Nirvana for the group. They made their first single, “Love Buzz,” which was released by the small independent label Sub Pop Records. By this time, Burckhard was out and Chad Channing had taken over drumming duties. Nirvana’s popularity in the Seattle music scene was growing, and they released their debut album, Bleach, in 1989. While it failed to make much of a splash, the recording showed signs of Cobain’s emerging talent as a songwriter, especially the ballad “About a Girl.” Their signature sound, which included elements of punk and heavy metal, was also apparent on the album. Cobain felt mistreated by Sub Pop, believing that the company devoted more resources toward promoting other acts such as Soundgarden and Mudhoney. While his band was struggling to make it, Cobain made a fateful connection in his personal life. In 1990, Cobain met his match in an edgy rocker named Courtney Love. The two met at a show at the Portland, Oregon nightclub Satyricon. While they were interested in each other, their relationship did not get off the ground until much later. That same year, he got a chance to know some of his rock and roll heroes when the band toured with Sonic Youth. Nirvana was going through some internal changes at the time. Their friend Dale Crover filled in on drums as Cobain and Novoselic had kicked out Channing. After the tour, they finally found a replacement in Dave Grohl who had played with Washington, D.C. hardcore band Scream. Despite their antiestablishment and punk tendencies, Nirvana made the leap to a major label in 1991 when they signed with Geffen Records. That same year, they released Nevermind, which spearheaded a music revolution. With the raw edges of punk and the blistering guitars of metal, their sound was labeled “grunge” for its murky and rough qualities. The single "Smells Like Teen Spirit"—like many Nirvana tracks—modulated between the soft and the thrashing. And Cobain was equally convincing as he sang the song’s mellow chorus and as he screamed its final lines. It proved to be the group’s biggest single and helped take the entire album to the top of the charts Minggu, 13 April 2008 Kurt Cobain Biography (1967-1994) Early on, Cobain showed an interest in art and music. He excelled at drawing, so much so that his talents were even apparent in kindergarten. He soon learned to play piano by ear and enjoyed a kiddie drum kit his parents had given him. At his father’s urging, Cobain also played little league baseball. He sometimes spent time with his little sister Kim who was born in 1971, but both Cobain children had to deal with their parents yelling and fighting as their marriage became increasingly stormy. After his parents divorced when he was nine, Cobain became withdrawn. He went to live with his father after the divorce. On the weekends, he would visit his mother and his sister. When his father remarried, Cobain resented his stepmother Jenny and her two children. One of the bright spots of this difficult time was a present he received from his uncle Chuck—a guitar. Although the instrument was fairly beat up, it inspired Cobain to learn to play and it offered him a respite from his unhappiness at home. Alienated and angry, he believed that his father always took his stepmother’s side and favored her children and his half-brother Chad who had been born in 1979. Cobain began experimenting with drugs in his mid-teens, and he pushed himself farther away from his father. Kurt Cobain 20 February 1967, Hoquiam, Washington, USA Date of Death5 April 1994, Seattle, Washington, USA (suicide) Birth NameKurt Donald Cobain Mini Biography Kurt Cobain was born on February 20 1967, in Hoquaim, a s mall town southwest of Seattle. Kurt later moved 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 and at times even homeless, forcing him to sleep under a bridge. Kurt was not the most popular person in high school, getting picked on by "jocks" and being labeled as "queer". 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 Nirvan a one of the most successful bands in the world. Kurt became trampled upon wit h 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 tak en 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 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". Spouse Trivia Daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, born. Ashes were scattered in McLane Creek- Olympia, a handful wer e scattered under the willow at the front of 171 Lake Washinton Boulevard, Seattle, another handful was givern to a Buddhist to make a tsatsu - a memorial sculpture. Guitar and vocals for the legendary alternative band Nirvana. Although Cobain's death was officially ruled a suicide, certain aspects about his death have led to speculation that he was murdered: - He had entirely too much heroin in his system at the time of his death to have been able to operate a shotgun. He would have been incapacitated within seconds of injecting it. - The so-called "suicide note" may have been a letter to his fans expressing his desire to quit both Nirvana and the music business altogether. - One of Cobain's credit cards was being used a few days before AND AFTER his death. After his death, many musicians recorded tribute songs to him. Some of the better known of these include R.E.M.'s "Let Me In", Patti Smith's "About a Boy", Neil Young's "Sle eps with Angels", and Cher's "The Fall". His songs have been covered by Tori Amos, Sinéad O'Connor, Herbie Hancock, and Branford Marsalis. His most famous song, "Smells Like Teen Spirit", was voted by Rolling Stone Magazine and MTV as the 3rd best pop song out of 100 of all time. Was of Irish, English, German, and French ancestry. Sister: Kim. Half-sister: Brianne O'Conner. Half-brother: Chad Cobain. He's hailed by many as the most influential artist since the Second World War. His lyrics portray a musical virtuosity. According to his widow, Courtney Love, Cobain left behind 109 unreleased, recorded songs when he died in 1994. Some are just song fragments, some music "collages", and about eight are acoustic numbers that Love deems good enough for release. One song, "Stinking of You", which he wrote with Love, includes the line "Stinking of you... I don't care if my life is shattered, it's my point of view..." His most popular songs include "About a Girl", "Been a Son", "Negative Creep", "Aneurysm", "Dive", "Sliver", "Smells Like Teen Spirit", "Lithium", "In Bloom", "Polly", "Something in the Way", "Heart-Shaped Box", "Rape Me", "Dumb", "Pennyroyal Tea", "All Apologies" and "You Know You're Right" (written and recorded shortly before his death but not officially released until October 2002). The Nirvana song "Scentless Apprentice" is based on a book called "Perfume" by Patrick Süskind. The original title for "Heart-Shaped Box" was "Heart-Shaped Coffin." Recent biography is written by Charles Cross, an influental icon in the Seattle music scene. The biography, "Heavier Than Heaven", is said to be the most comprehensive biography of one of the most mysterious artists in music history. His death is referred to in the lyrics of the Badly Drawn Boy song "You Were Right". Played a trick on the MTV brass when he began Nirvana's appearance at the 1992 MTV Video Music Awards by singing "Waif me", a take-off on the song "Rape Me". He then quickly switched to playing "Lithium", the song the band had agreed to play in the show as a compromise with MTV executives. Cobain had wanted to sing the then-new song "Rape Me", while MTV's bigwigs wanted the band to lead off the show with their signature song, "Smells Like Teen Spirit". The two sides settled on a mid-show rendition of "Lithium". Named 12th greatest guitar player of all-time by Rolling Stone magazine in 2003. Usually wrote left-handed, but in time learned how to write right-handed as well. Samples of Cobain-penned song lyrics: "I'm a negative creep and I'm stoned" ("Negative Creep," 1989)... "She keeps it pumpin' straight to my heart" ("Aneurysm," 1990).. "And I forget just why I taste/oh yeah, I guess it makes me smile/I found it hard, it's hard to find/oh well, wha tever, nevermind" ("Smells Like Teen Spirit," 1991)... "My heart is broke/but I have some glue/help me inhale/and mend it with you/we'll float around/and hang out on clouds/then we'll come down/and have a hangover" ("Dumb," 1993)... "I'll keep fighting jealousy/until it's fucking gone" ("Lounge Act," 1991)... "The animals I've trapped/have all become my pets" ("Something in the Way," 1991)... "Things have never been so swell/I have never failed to feel pain" ("You Know You're Right," 1994)... "All in all is all we all are" ("All Apologies," 1993). Was runner-up for Best Songwriter of 1994 in "Rolling Stone" magazine's annual critics' poll. He ranked between Freedy Johnston and Sam Phillips, who placed 1st and 3rd in the poll, respectively. The song "Mighty K.C." by For Squirrels was written about him. Had disbanded Nirvana (his rock group) and was in the process of divorcing Courtney Love at the time of his death. He wrote a song for his friend Mark Lanegan, who sang for the Screaming Trees. The song was never recorded because Mark said not only would it be like digging up the grave of an old friend, but the song simply didn't fit with the rest of the "Dust" album in a lyrical sense. At the Video Music Awards in 1992, Nirvana was originally supposed to play "Smells like Teen Spirit". Kurt refused and they ended up playing "Lithium". He is mentioned in the song "Californication" by Red Hot Chili Peppers. Cher composed the song "The Fall", after learning about his suicide. The song is included on her album Not. Comm.ercial, which was for sale only on the Internet. His mom was 19 and his dad was 21 when he was born. Loved all seafood. Obsessed with vinyl, he had a substantially expensive record collection. His parents divorced when he was 7. Nirvana were voted the 27th Greatest Rock 'n' Roll Artists of all time by Rolling Stone. Is mentioned in the song "Innocent" by Our Lady Peace At one time sang in the choir at a Baptist church Daughter Frances Bean looks almost exactly like him. She has the distinct blue eyes, and nose. Posthumous album "Nirvana: Mtv Unplugged" earned him and Nirvana a 1995 Grammy. It was the only Grammy they won. His suicide marked the end of the Grunge era. His songs have been covered by bands ranging from Evanescence to hard rock supergroup Velvet Revolver to female Japanese duo Cibo Matto. Was a left-handed guitarist and a right-handed drummer. His 3 favorite films are Paris, Texas (1984), - as stated on the "Nevermind - It's An Interview" CD; Over the Edge (1979); and Rear Window (1954). Suffered chronic stomach pain from stomach ulcers and back pain from scoliosis (curvature of the spine). The song "About a Girl" was about his one-time girlfriend Tracy Marander. He wore blue-plaid pajamas and a woven Guatemalan purse to his wedding with Courtney Love. Drew Barrymore is the godmother of his daughter Frances Bean Got his first guitar at age 14. Son of Donald Cobain and Wendy Fradenburg. Grandson of Leland Cobain and Iris Cobain née LaBrot and Charles Fradenburg and Peggy Fradenburg née Irving. His parents married in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho on July 31, 1965. They had a son and a daughter while they were married to each other. Kurt, born February 20, 1967 and Kimberly, born on April 24, 1970 They divorced in 1976. "Thank you all from the pit of my burning, nauseous stomach for you letters of concern over the past years. I don't have the passion anymore and so remember, it's better to burn out than fade away" (addressed to Nirvana fans in his suicide note) Has been voted as "the greatest rock'n'roll hero of all time" by the readers of "NME" magazine (10 May 2006). Has said in interviews that he always wanted to give acting a try and be in a movie. Said he eventually wanted to experiment with filmmaking. He even wrote a script for a horror movie. Nirvana won the 1993 Brit Award for International Breakthrough Act. Surpassed Elvis Presley to become the world's top-earning dead celebrity. The late Nirvana front man raked in £26.3 million from beyond the grave during 2006, according to US business website Forbes.com. John Lennon's song "In my Life" was played at his funeral. Ranked #49 on VH1's 100 Sexiest Artists. The last movie he watched before his death was The Piano (1993). Bob Dylan, a fan of Nirvana, counted "Polly" as his favorite song by the band. Very frequently changed up the words or the order of lines or verses of his songs when performing them live, rarely if every singing them the same from show to show. Personal Quotes 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. Id rather be hated for who I am than loved for who I am not. I think people who glamorise drugs are f**king ***holes and if there's hell they'll go there. [To 'Weird Al" Yankovic', when asked for permission to do a parody of "Smells Like Teen Spirit"] "It isn't going to be about food, is it?". "I stared into his eyes and told him that I thought he was a respectable human. I did tell him straight out that I think his band still sucks." - on his encounter with Pearl Jam lead singer Eddie Vedder. I'm not gay, but I wish I was just to piss off the homophobes. If I went to jail, at least I wouldn't have to sign autographs. The music comes first. Lyrics are second. (When asked how he writes his songs.) A complete biography of Kurt Cobain, lead singer of Nirvana and grunge superstar. Kurt Donald Cobain was born on February 20, 1967 in Hoquaim, Washington. His auto mechanic father and cocktail waitress mother relocated their family to the small logging town of Aberdeen, Washington not long after he was born. Shortly after the birth of his younger sister Kim, his parents divorced and Kurt moved in and out of the houses of various relatives. With little contact with his parents and the frequent moves, along with his chronic respiratory illness, the seven-year-old Kurt became anti-social and withdrawn. As a teenager, Kurt was drawn to punk and heavy metal music; the Melvins, The Sex Pistols and Joy Division were a few of his favorite bands. Cobain managed to finish high school despite being a social outcast and moved to Olympia shortly after graduating with childhood friend Krist Novoselic. Kurt worked a variety of odd jobs, from a janitor to a lifeguard, but the only thing he stuck with was music. In 1986 Cobain and Novoselic started Nirvana with drummer Chad Channing and they soon began to play locally. Their signature punkish music spread throughout the region and eventually took on the name “grunge.” The overnight success put a large strain on Cobain. Already emotionally fragile, Kurt started worrying about how his how music was being received and he hated how uncontrollable his future was. Kurt still carried the respiratory illness from his childhood, added with a severe stomach ulcer and colon problems he developed after stardom, his fame and fortune did nothing for the misery inflicted upon him by his poor health. Cobain succumbed to the pain in the early 1990s and began using heroin. On February 24, 1992, Kurt married his pregnant girlfriend Courtney Love, frontwoman of the punk band Hole, in Hawaii. On August 18, Frances Bean Cobain was born and less than a week after, “Incesticide” was released. Also that August, Kurt was hospitalized for heroin abuse. In September, things starting looking up for Kurt. Nirvana played at the MTV Music Awards, where they received two awards, Best Alternative Video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and Best New Artists. In 1993, Nirvana realized their high acclaimed album “In Utero.” The lyrics to the songs revealed the personal side of Kurt Cobain, displaying his struggles and hardships through life. Nirvana also completed a session for “MTV Unplugged” in November of 1993 and began a European tour that winter. The band canceled the tour after twenty shows though, due to Cobain’s respiratory problems. On March 4, 1994, Kurt Cobain took fifty sleeping pills with a bottle of champagne and was rushed to the hospital for emergency treatment. The incident managed to stay out of the media and was ruled an accident although it was obviously not. Cobain checked into a rehab clinic in Los Angeles immediately after his release from the hospital, but he only stayed a few days. On April 5, 1994, an electrician saw what he thought was a mannequin in the guest house but soon discovered it was the body of a young man. Kurt Cobain left a long suicide note addressed to his wife and daughter explaining that he could not handle his life any longer. Rumors circulated that Love had arranged Cobain’s death, but they have not been substantiated. Kurt’s death hit his multitude of adoring fans heavily, three of them committing suicide themselves. Nirvana made a large impact on the concept of popular music, wiping out the teen bop sound of the 1980s and bringing underground music to the mainstream. The sound of Nirvana was fresh and original and it came along right when the times were in need of change. Remember, it’s better to burn out than fade away,” Kurt stated in his suicide letter, but it seems unlikely that he or his music will do either anytime soon. Kurt Cobain Biography We'll Always Remember NIRVANA - FANS FURY AT COBAIN'S CONVERSE SHOE LINE NIRVANA - GROHL CAN'T LISTEN TO NIRVANA Former NIRVANA drummer DAVE GROHL never listens to his old band's music, because it reminds him of the pain he felt when frontman KURT COBAIN died. Even 13 years after Cobain committed suicide in 1994, Grohl finds it an "effort" to listen to hits like Smells Like Teen Spirit and Lithium on the radio. He says, "I immediately remember what it was like the day we recorded - the food or the f**king snowstorm. It's like opening a box of old pictures, and I don't like to do that too often." NIRVANA - COBAIN'S CONVERSE SHOE LINE Late NIRVANA rocker KURT COBAIN is to be commemorated in a series of shoes from footwear manufacturer Converse. The shoes, which so far include a pair of Converse One Tops and several pairs of Converse High-Tops, feature Cobain's autograph and select drawings and writings first published in 2002's Journals scrawled on them. Morbidly, the black Converse One Tops are the same shoes that Cobain was wearing when he shot himself dead at his Seattle, Washington home in April 1994. The footwear line, which is being launched to help celebrate Converse's 100th birthday, has the support of Cobain's widow Courtney Love. COURTNEY LOVE - LOVE LAUNCHES LEGAL ATTACK AFTER IDENTITY THIEVES BUY HOUSE WITH COBAIN'S DETAILS COURTNEY LOVE is fuming after identity thieves used her late husband KURT COBAIN's social security number to buy a $3.2 million (GBP1.6 million) property. The Nirvana rocker committed suicide in 1994 but still managed to purchase a New Jersey home last year (07) - much to Love's surprise. Identity thieves have also managed to open 188 credit cards in Love's name, and have embezzled as much as $69 million (GBP34.5 million) from the couple and the trust fund of their daughter, 14-year-old Frances Bean - and Love is desperate to bring the criminals to justice and reclaim the cash. Love handed over paperwork and bank statements to Los Angeles Police Department officials on Wednesday (05Mar08), almost four years after she first went public with her fears that money had been illegally taken from her daughter's trust fund. She says, "I knew it had been going on since when I went cuckoo - bananas - in 2003. It was fraud after fraud. But nobody believed me until now. I did a check on my deceased husband's social security number and he has a house in New Brunswick, New Jersey. He bought it last year. "I would like to know how. He should probably get his ass back home if that is the case." In 2004, she initially claimed she had been swindled out of a $40 million (GBP20 million) fortune, leaving her daughter with nothing from her inheritance. The documents, filed on Wednesday (05Mar08), show that 188 fraudulent credit cards, mortgages and loans have been taken out in Love and her late husband's names. Love says, "I have 26 pages covered in the word fraud, I have about 18 Amexes (American Express cards) and a new nine Amexes have just been found - all fraud. "I've never had more than one Amex - let alone 27 (sic). "(On) any given day... you can find me on a private plane from Tucson to Dallas, tooling around London... and LA - and four C Cobains on a Virgin flight to (London airport) Heathrow all on the same day." The star has employed forensics financial investigation company KROLL - the firm she claims "found Saddam Hussein's hidden assets" - to look into the embezzlement, and has an Orange County, California FBI agent ready to take on her four-year investigation when the issue "gets press". Kurt Cobain Sadly Coming To A Foot Locker Near You Converse already went ahead and co-opted the image of sacred counterculture icons like Hunter Thompson and Sid Vicious for their new ad campaign, "All Your Dead Heroes Are Our Marketing Tools." Now they've decided to go for the gusto: they're producing a limited edition series of Kurt Cobain Converse. It's all approved by the estate of the tragic Nirvana front man—i.e. Courtney Love—but um, really? "I feel stupid, and contagious," indeed. Pics of the lyrics-encrusted shoes [via Ad Age/ The Daily Swarm] after the jump. Kurt Cobain and a dream about pop By disconnects, I mean that the story Cross tells us reorients us to what was important about Cobain's life and his death. In a couple of ways it's different from what we thought -- or were, in effect, led to think -- at the time. Cross charts, painfully and for the first time, how Cobain's heroin addiction informed and then dominated the band's day-to-day activities during the period in which most of us cared about them. This is in contrast to the band's first serious chronicler, Michael Azerrad, whose 1993 book, "Come As You Are," was written with the cooperation of the group; despite that access, Cobain's friends apparently covered up the star's problems. Cross has the benefit of the passage of time and the apparent desire of many around the band to finally set the record straight. It was known that Cobain used heroin; one or two major magazine articles and Azerrad's book during Cobain's lifetime talked about it. Still, it seemed like most of the press -- and MTV -- and even we fans just didn't want to know. It's a little sobering, in fact, now, to watch again MTV's coverage of Cobain's death, and see the channel's agreeable news anchor, Kurt Loder, tell viewers that Cobain had only "experimented" with heroin. You can see various Rolling Stone types bending over backward to assure us that Cobain had said he'd cleaned up. (There's a certain breed of journalist that is always rushing to tell us that celebrities have stopped doing something they, the journalists, had never told us about in the first place.) In the year before his death, Cobain barely toured; the band canceled a lot of shows; controversy swirled around virtually every public appearance the group managed to make. There was a report of an "accidental overdose" in Italy. It all seems plain in retrospect. The second disconnect had to do with the band's status in -- and Cobain's function as the de facto avatar of -- a world of self-consciously indie rock that had sprung up in America in the 1980s. ("Indie" refers to bands who recorded for independent record labels, those companies unaffiliated with the handful of multinational record distributors. At the time, this type of music and these bands were also identified as "college rock.") In this, purity counted for a lot, and the epithet "major label" was a routine slur. The indie critique dominated much critical discussion in the late 1980s and early 1990s and in some ways continues to whimper along today; Nirvana wasn't the first of the celebrated indie bands to go to a major, but that didn't make it any easier. Nirvana was criticized for signing with Geffen records, part of, at the time, the huge MCA conglomerate; for remixing -- sweetening the production -- on "Nevermind" in general and specifically the sound of what would become the band's first hit single, "Smells Like Teen Spirit"; and finally, doing similar sonic manipulation of two radio-friendly songs on its last Geffen studio album, "In Utero." All three of these controversies are covered in Cross' book, but not breathlessly. The casual reader won't miss them because it is plain, in retrospect, that history has passed these concerns by. But together the two points are something of a cautionary tale, a reminder that in pop culture things really aren't all they seem. The tempest in a teapot of the day dissipates; the jut-jawed statement of principle by the talking head of the moment will soon be forgotten. Does anyone really care, at this point, that "Smells Like Teen Sprit" -- now routinely cited as one of the great singles of rock history -- was made to sound good on the radio? And what's wrong with sounding good on the radio, anyway? In the unappetizing story of Kurt Cobain, we can see something that puts all that into perspective -- we now know that the self-destruction that we saw was exactly what it looked like, and it eventually came back to haunt us. Cobain's friends and loved ones didn't exactly sit back and watch -- they held confrontations and interventions. Yet, still, his coterie, over and over again, protected him -- and the press, for the most part, went along. Our age is supposed to be a media-saturated one. Privacy is gone, people claim; cameras and nosy reporters are edging into everyone's lives. So how did Kurt Cobain die right before our eyes? By the early '80s, punk had come and gone. Then what came to be called post-punk -- new onslaughts of still rough-edged but more complex bands, like X, from Los Angeles, or Gang of Four, from England -- came and went as well. Besides a fluke or two like the Clash, with "Combat Rock," none of these bands sold any records. Punk was going to change everything. When it didn't, corporate radio, corporate labels and the corporate press settled into complacency. Besides a few super-duper stars like Bruce Springsteen and Michael Jackson, there was a large group of second-rank multiplatinum artists to keep folks occupied: Call it the Live Aid era, with Sting, Phil Collins, Mark Knopfler and Eric Clapton, from England, joining a bunch of rootsier but presentable Americans like Tom Petty and John Mellencamp to function together as rock's reigning royalty. There were exceptions, like Prince, but that was the status quo of the time. Then things got worse. In the latter half of the decade a new wave of lite heavy metal alchemized and hit the charts. Even the best of these groups -- Guns N' Roses, say -- were obviously bozos. They looked absurd, and their music was almost comically derivative. The worst were almost unspeakable. (Remember Sebastian Bach, from the group Skid Row, who appeared on stage with a shirt that said "AIDS: Kills Fags Dead"?) There is bad popular music in any era. (I'll see your REO Speedwagon and raise you a Def Leppard.) But even as Huey Lewis and the News was selling 9 million copies of "Sports," a roiling group of people across the country were adhering to a slightly more elevated set of rock verities, at least as they saw them. R.E.M., the most high profile and ultimately the most successful of these bands, found it in tunefulness, chiming guitars and relatively straightforward business dealings. Others -- a lot of others -- found it in terrifically high volumes, intermittent personal hygiene, various species of what they imagined was antisocial behavior, and, sometimes, actual sonic experimentation. This period is chronicled in a new book by Azerrad, "This Band Could Be Your Life," which profiles, fanzine style, 13 of the groups from this period. The bands include Black Flag, the greatest of the violent Los Angeles hardcore bands; Sonic Youth, the intelligent New York art rockers; the Replacements, the tuneful, alcohol-drenched Minneapolis combo; and many others. His choice of subjects is unerring, and he got admirable access to the groups he chose. But I got tired of the book after a few chapters. While the intro and outro aren't bad, the meat of the book is superficial. It doesn't paper over conflicts or financial problems between the bands and their labels, for example, but there's still a way in which the book accepts at face value the band members' view of themselves. In the Black Flag chapter, Azerrad makes a lot of references to the pressure Greg Ginn, the group's founder and bassist, had running his label, the celebrated SST, but you never got a sense of its finances, or how much Ginn was making versus his band mates. In the end, did Ginn end up with a hefty chunk of cash? How are the other group members doing? The Black Flag story is a truly amazing tale, full of violence and absurdism; Ginn actually ended up in jail for violating a court injunction in a legal fight with MCA. (Now that is indie.) But Azerrad is also a little credulous, as when he says the Los Angeles Police Department was listening in on the label's phones and stationing undercover officers around its offices. It may be true, but the assertion isn't sourced, and it sure sounds like stoner rocker hyperbole. ("And, man, the police were, were, wiretapping us!") A more enterprising reporter would have sourced the charge, gotten comment from the LAPD, or tried to find out if wiretapping warrants were ever issued or carried out. Still, the story is an inexorable one: These bands soon began popping up on, and then dominating, critics' end-of-year 10-best lists and building up decent (if uniformly tiny by mainstream standards) tour followings, but couldn't get a break from radio, or, for the most part, MTV. And it wasn't clear, at least at first, if they wanted it. The new indie rock had different concerns, including a distrust of technology, and affinity for a lot of things the corporate masters didn't like: American roots music in some cases, and, most broadly, a commitment to volume, dishabille, contrariness generally, and "authenticity." Ah, authenticity. It wasn't seriousness, exactly -- irony in a fairly watered-down form existed in the work of the wacky Camper Van Beethoven and, certainly, in the psychedelic ferocity of the Butthole Surfers. But bands were for the most part expected to be honest and feel honestly. They were supposed to care about their true fans -- since the members of the bands, it was assumed, were true fans themselves -- and not be in it for the money, exactly. The everyman stance wasn't a posture. The band members, with a few prominent exceptions, were lowlifes every bit as foul as the members of the audiences that came to see them, and they suffered -- came from broken homes, were abused, felt like losers and despaired -- in just the same way. Some of these groups had singers who howled in fury, like Black Flag's Henry Rollins or Cobain himself; others were just, well, losers. But the message was the same. Anyway, as time went on, many of these groups found themselves cluttered in a few small benchmark labels across the country, like Sub Pop in Seattle, Touch and Go in Chicago, SST in Los Angeles, Twin-Tone in Minneapolis, Matador and Homestead in New York and many others not as well known. The idea was that they could forge a community and make music without the benefit of the big bad major labels or the big bad national press. They listened to each other on college-rock stations, slept on couches in a nationwide network of fan houses, saw one another's tiny posters on telephone poles and read about one another in a network of national fanzines. Indie rock was in effect a series of concentric circles, with each successively larger circle representing an inevitable dilution of the select. Whichever one you stood in, you scowled at the bigger ones. Were you a true indie rock fan, really? At the time, you could hear scenesters disparage Matador, the coolest and contrariest label of the era, as being hopelessly compromised. What most bands did was draw imaginary lines in their minds: We'll put handbills up, but not posters. We'll do interviews, but never say anything serious. We'll show up for the concert, but go on late to make clear we're not eager-beavers. We'll do some college radio interviews -- and act bored to be there -- but not mainstream ones, and if we do do mainstream radio, we'll act even more bored! And we'll talk to major-label people, if they insist, but get drunk and act like the fuck-ups we are when we meet, the better to have tales with which to regale our fans from the stage that night. And sometimes, to reward our really cool fans, we'll have secret shows, so the uncool people can't get in. Some of the bands did silly things, but the indie-rock movement in America in the 1980s was something to see. Dozens of great records by great artists came out of it. But in the end, as the years went by, it turned out that the labels, the fans and the fanzine writers exulting in the indie-rock-band lifestyle found themselves deserted by the actual indie-rock bands -- almost all of the best of which eventually departed for major labels. You can say they were greedy, call them sellouts, think they were misguided. But the thing that drove Kurt Cobain, and the other indie bands, was a dream about pop. Money entered into the equation, of course, and why not? But something else was going on as well. As the 1980s went on, you could feel an interest building in something. It wasn't interest in a new type of music, exactly. But there was an odd sense of a thirst for something ... different. If you were one of these musicians, you could smell that need, and suddenly visualize yourself in a different world, one where kids everywhere jammed to your music, their hearts feeling that they would burst. The most honest of these musicians admitted that they felt that way as a kid, and that it was a feeling that had driven them to the point they were at. The artists who went to the major labels could feel something hungry, almost animalistic, out in the wilderness, something alive that wanted their music. One of them was named Kurt Cobain. The outlines of Cobain's life were well known before Cross' biography. He grew up in a crummy logging town, Aberdeen, in western Washington state. His parents divorced when he was 9. By the time he was 15, he was a lowlife, long-haired, trouble-causing kid from a broken home with a lot of broken emotions and a healthy interest in the scatological and anatomical. He started his interest in rock early on, roadie-ing for a sludge-rock ensemble called the Melvins. He eventually formed his own combo; he paired up, luckily, with a gangling kid named Kris (later Krist) Novaselic on bass; the two became best friends. A few years later -- after recording their first record as Nirvana -- they lucked out and found the astonishing drummer Dave Grohl. (Grohl now fronts the band Foo Fighters.) Cobain and Novaselic played under the name Fecal Matter but, in an early concession, you might say, to commerciality, ultimately christened themselves Nirvana. They went on to suffer a few years of the casual indignities -- poorly attended gigs, resounding apathy from even the smallest record labels -- kids in bands with big ideas are fated to go through. Cobain finally caught the eye of Jonathan Poneman and Bruce Pavitt, who owned and ran Sub Pop records. Sub Pop, based in nearby Seattle, was a household name in the rock underground of the time for releasing albums by grunge groundbreakers Soundgarden and Mudhoney. Cross does a good job of explaining the label's odd finances and clever marketing practices. The best of the latter was the Sub Pop singles club, which had underground kids shelling out cash monthly for releases in the moribund 7-inch format. As for the former, at the time it recorded Nirvana's first album, "Bleach," the label, in the midst of a money crunch, got the band to pay its own recording costs. Ah, the purity of indie rock. (The band borrowed the cash for the fabled $600 bill from a friend and never paid him back.) The band's first album contained a lot of enthusiastic noise, but also a giddy cover song -- the obscure but irresistible "Love Buzz" -- and one oddly Beatlesque tune, "About a Girl." (Playing covers was another theoretical minefield for indie bands. Many rejoiced in blasting through unexpected schlock classics on stage. But adding covers to albums of otherwise original music by unknown bands was an old major-label trick to get some easy airplay.) Enter Geffen, which in the late 1980s and early 1990s had one of the industry's canniest A&R departments; the company had unloaded about 20 million Guns N' Roses albums on unsuspecting American teens. The label, presciently, had signed Sonic Youth; for Cobain, that made the label legit by association, and he said, frankly, that he was frustrated, as the band toured the country, when fans told him that his album wasn't available in stores. (Both bands technically ended up on a Geffen imprint called DGC.) A collection of B-sides and such, "Incesticide," was released, contrarily, a few days before Christmas 1992. (Most Christmas releases come out in October, to allow plenty of buying time.) It featured an extraordinary original song, a neck-snapping bit of childhood-separation fear called "Sliver." ("Grandma take me home!/Grandma take me home!" the head-snapping chorus repeats; thematically, it could have appeared on "Plastic Ono Band," John Lennon's primal scream album.) But aside from some fun covers, there wasn't much else of interest on the album. A Vanity Fair profile of the couple appeared the month the baby was born; it gleefully compared Cobain and Love's marriage and lifestyle to the fateful one of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen. (Love had even had a bit part in the film "Sid and Nancy.") The most damning passage was Love's admission that she'd done heroin after she knew she was pregnant. The pair denied the story, but ended up losing custody of their child for a time. They demonized the writer, Lynn Hirschberg, for a year; Cobain explicitly threatened to kill her several times. After Cobain's death Love admitted that the allegation had been true. For the band's studio follow-up to "Nevermind," Cobain chose Steve Albini, an acerbic fanzine writer, recording artist and producer, to safeguard the group's purity after the Andy Wallace "Nevermind" remixing contretemps. The album, "In Utero," begins with the line, "Teenage angst has paid off well/ Now I'm bored and old," and contains Cobain's most beautiful songs: "Heart-Shaped Box," "Dumb," "All Apologies" and "Pennyroyal Tea." But Albini clashed with Love -- he later called her "a psycho hose beast" -- and paid Cobain back for his largesse as the album neared release by telling a reporter that Geffen was forcing the band to make changes in the record's sound. The truth was probably somewhat different, but the Albini charge eventually found its way into Newsweek and forced the band to take out a full-page ad in Billboard saying it wasn't true. But Cobain had bigger problems. His heroin addiction had put him into a downward spiral. The Cobain-Love marriage, with an infant daughter in the mix, became a disgusting melange of gutted hotel rooms, domestic-abuse police calls, stints in rehab, and lots and lots of heroin. Cobain walked out of a Los Angeles rehab center on Friday, April 1, 1994, and disappeared. Love and his friends and family spent agonizing days looking for him. He shot himself in a greenhouse behind his suburban Seattle home on Tuesday, April 5; his body was found three days later. Heroin didn't kill Kurt Cobain. Cross tries his best to draw together the various threads that contributed to his demise: The addiction; an obvious but, it seemed, fully undiagnosed depression; and a mysterious and seemingly untreatable stomach ailment that troubled him chronically. (Azerrad says that Cobain's mom had had a similar ailment when she was younger; neither author goes out of his way to figure out what in the end the ailment might have been.) Cross, who's written previous books on Bruce Springsteen and Led Zeppelin, has spent his career in Seattle; his editorship of the music magazine the Rocket let him watch Nirvana's career from the beginning and gave him unique access to the major characters of his story. His book is a rare thing -- a rock biography that's strongly written, looks at the world through open eyes and doesn't assume its audience is full of idiots, yet retains an unspoken but always present moral grounding. His research makes for careful judgments, the narrative throughout seems persuasive, and he leaves few questions in the reader's mind. He has an eye for the absurdities of the rock-star lifestyle. Love is one of his best sources, and she perhaps comes off here better than a lot of the people who hate her would prefer. But he does pause from time to time for an elegant skewering, as when he mentions Cobain's professed fondness for the writings of Camille Paglia. "This was one of the many influences Courtney affected," he writes. Later we see Love go into her own rehab -- a special star-friendly version called "hotel detox." And his sources say the things that hurt: At the final intervention of Cobain's life, Cross notes how most of the friends and managers there really couldn't face Cobain, couldn't actually deliver the condemnations and threats they were supposed to. It raises the possibility that Cobain's circle never really did the one thing that might have saved his life: Articulate a threat to publicly disassociate themselves from the star en masse, and point out, in the process, that he'd become exactly the sort of excess-driven rich rock icon his music was supposed to have been an antidote to. Instead, Cobain could point to his own wife, a junkie as well. Indeed, the confrontations never had an effect and the rehabs didn't either. The ironies, by contrast, got richer. At his last stint, Cobain arrived at the facility right after Eagle Joe Walsh had left; he hung out in the center with Gibby Haynes, from the Butthole Surfers. In the punk world, no group was lamer than the Eagles, and no underground band had more raunchy credibility than the Buttholes, as they were known. Cross doesn't say whether Haynes and Cobain reflected on the clichés they had become. Cross' book isn't perfect. I wish he referred to the characters by their last names. Use of first names -- Kurt and Courtney, Krist and Shelli -- I think diminishes the subjects. And while he's generally admirably detached, you can see him, once in a while, lose perspective. The tale of how Cobain and Love nearly lost custody of their daughter is told with too much sympathy for the Cobains. They were junkies, and not gentle ones, either. Love did do heroin after knowing she was pregnant. The arrangement they finally adopted, hiring a friend with no child-raising experience as a nanny, doesn't speak much for their judgment either. (They couldn't bring an outsider into their druggy world; it was just another bit of enabling for the pair's self-destructive lifestyle.) Cobain at the time was barely able to show up for a sound check, much less raise a kid. His behavior after the article was published -- brandishing guns and threatening to kill Hirschberg -- merely underlines the point that his judgment was impaired. And finally, once or twice Cross skates over a more interesting story. The Albini-"In Utero" contretemps, for example, is mentioned only in a short paragraph in the book. Clippings I have from the period tell a more complex story. It was a terrible embarrassment to Cobain, yet he was always unapologetically honest about what exactly did happen. Albini seems to have had an agenda to keep the band from going too soft; one of the producer's assistants, in a Chicago magazine profile of Albini, once described Albini doggedly trying to stop the band from adding ornamentation to the songs: "Kurt would say, 'I want to do a guitar overdub,' and Steve would explain to him for a half-hour why it wasn't a good idea, using all these weird technical terms. And Kurt would say, 'Well, that may be so, but I still want to do a guitar overdub.' And Steve would explain to him again why he shouldn't do it. The last line of any of these lectures is always, 'But you're paying me, so I'll do what you want. I have to put in my two cents because you're paying me.' But his two cents turns out to be, you know, five hundred dollars." Cobain himself at the time forthrightly explained that he, not the label, had a problem with "In Utero": "I just could not put my finger on it," he said. "I called up Steve, and I basically asked him for some advice, like 'Why don't I feel the same emotion I did on "Nevermind" or "Bleach"?' It took me a long time to realize the vocals weren't loud enough, and the bass guitar was almost impossible to hear." This rings true to this listener; whether Cobain actually told Albini that Geffen was threatening not to release the album (perhaps as a way to cover up his own opinion), we'll never know. For his part, Cobain in later interviews at the time acknowledged that his Geffen A&R person didn't like the tracks, but went out of his way to reiterate his own displeasure with them and to say, "There was never any sense of a threat like, 'We're not going to put this record out,' because they can't." (The band had the rock equivalent of final cut on its releases.) In the end, Nirvana brought in R.E.M. producer Scott Litt, who remixed "All Apologies" and "Heart-Shaped Box." The story is a illustration of the indie mentality gone wild. Cobain is certainly the most uncompromising major star in rock history; and yet here he was forced to fight a rear-guard action to defend his purity -- forced, humiliatingly, to take out a big ad, backed by his big major label, trying to limit the damage being done to his reputation. The irony is that the argument can be made that what Cobain needed at the time was someone to help him tone down the album even more. In Albini's defense, it must be said that others of the album's softer songs -- "Dumb," for example -- sound just fine. But in the end "In Utero" is an irritating work of brilliance, with unforgettably wrenching and passionate songs like "Heart-Shaped Box" and "Dumb" desperately gasping for air between too many tracks (far more than on "Nevermind") whose unrelieved clamor and sophomoric lyrical ugliness ("Her milk is my shit/ My shit is her milk") seem little more than sops to the rock underground. Was Cobain really that good? Was he really that important? A lot of "Bleach" is noisy and boring; too many songs on "In Utero" are, too. But Cobain's lyrics -- naive and sophomoric but sometimes containing unaccountably beautiful poetry rife with disturbing body-part imagery -- can have a rare force; when mixed to his instinctual understanding of dynamics and strangely unforgettable way with a guitar riff, the mixture could produce songs of almost unprecedented gorgeousness and power. "Smells Like Teen Spirit," the song that kicked off the "Nevermind" selling spree, accomplishes something other songs try to do but don't achieve, which is at once wear its influences on its sleeve and turn them into dust. There's lot of the spacious, disturbing sound of the Pixies in "Teen Spirit"; its potency comes partially from the way that that aural space mixes with the song's dense central riffs, which are right out of the Blue Oyster Cult's "Godzilla." Beyond that, there's a very heavy bottom, vaguely reminiscent of the one in Jimi Hendrix's cover of "All Along the Watchtower." That mixture, Grohl's brutal drumming, and the song's crushing dynamics -- where the ominous casualness of the verses are pulverized by the assault of the chorus -- make the backing track articulate and persuasive to this day. Having accomplished that setting, Cobain then did something else that very few rock acts care to do: He told his audience something it didn't want to hear. Did the moshing kids -- and the moshpit at a Nirvana concert had a churning ferocity -- see themselves in the chant: "With the lights out, it's less dangerous/Here we are now, entertain us/I feel stupid and contagious"? It's one of the most bruising critiques of the rock mass audience since "Like a Rolling Stone." Did the dancers feel the sting of his mocking words: "Our little group has always been/And always will until the end"? And yet, much more than Bob Dylan, Cobain plainly includes himself in his indictment. Not yet a star, he still seemed horrified by that audience; it was something he plainly saw himself part of as well, as stupid and contagious as his fellows, in the song's closing litany of "A mulatto/ An albino/ A mosquito/ My libido/ A denial/ A denial/ A denial ..." In the end, Cobain used his uncommon charisma and neck-snapping command of a rock riff to become a star. The story would be only mildly interesting if that's all that had happened. But because he was a peculiarly uncompromising, particularly arresting star who happened to make a very good record at the end of a decade in which an odd unprecedented cultural pressure had been building, something else happened as well. Nirvana and Cobain ended up effectively yanking an entire industry leftward and opened up '90s rock into a dazzling kaleidoscope of unconventional artists. Their influence has only something to do with grunge, which has become more or less a footnote in the history of rock. Nirvana was bigger than grunge rock. The word "epochal" is misused a lot when it comes to rock 'n' roll, and particularly rock 'n' roll albums. But remember that, when "Smells Like Teen Spirit" hit radio, many major radio stations wouldn't play it. It was too loud, too aggressive and too confrontational for the average AOR station's sound. It seems almost implausible now, but many stations were actively hostile to the new "alternative" bands. Through an odd chain of circumstances I was interviewed on a big St. Louis AOR station the morning after the 1992 Lollapalooza show, which featured the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Soundgarden and Pearl Jam. It took me a while to realize that the morning zoo gang on the station considered the show a massive punch line. Yet the force of "Teen Spirit," and "Nevermind," was unrelenting. The album sold 100,000 copies a week for much of the year. Sure -- Garth Brooks or Shania Twain do that too, but they're not purveying confrontational music. Radio began to crack under the pressure -- and soon, some of those hostile radio stations didn't exist anymore. In many cities, conservative AOR outlets were supplanted, and in some cases handily replaced, by a new crop of alternative stations; within a year or two after the release of "Nevermind," even bellwether AOR stations were wounded, as, punch line or no, the Chili Peppers, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden became staples of AOR programming for the rest of the decade. You can sneer at a movement that puts J. Mascis on the charts, and sure, in the end, a couple of media conglomerates merely had to do a few format revisions. I'm with you on both points. But there was one twist: That thirst those bands could sense. It wasn't for something in particular. It was for something different. The stations, and the record companies, had to accept that odd was selling, and so they went looking for odd. A lot of bad bands got record contracts, but a lot of good ones did as well; and this openness brightened the pop palette of the '90s in all sorts of ways. To pick an obvious one, consider whether the Breeders, Liz Phair, Hole or Belly would have received airplay or MTV attention before 1992. In other words, the band forced the industry to institutionalize openness. Nirvana didn't do it alone, of course; besides the 10 years of experimentation that came before them, the architects of rap, too, had strikingly pushed the boundaries of pop; and so, of course, had R.E.M., who by the time of "Nevermind" were a refreshing, if not sonically daring, presence on radio. But for the decade of what is now known as the post-"Nevermind" era, the record companies, and radio, were forced to look for the next new thing. This unaccustomed state of affairs created new outrages, of course -- with industry people and too many journalists running around declaring that the next Big Rock Thing was, say, "electronica," whatever that was, or "post-rock," whatever that was. And from today's perspective, 10 years on, we can see rap was the truly revolutionary cultural form, that boy bands will always be with us, and that crossover country can still generate more record sales than just about anything. And let's even stipulate that at least part of what Nirvana represented was merely a great resentful roar of masculine rawk, and who cares about that anyway? But that is to overlook the metaphor that Nirvana, to this day, represents: The assault can be made, and that revolution in pop can be accomplished. There's a case to be made that this battle, this ongoing reinvention and revitalization, is one of the things that makes rock 'n' roll what it is. The Clash wrote a song, "Hitsville U.K.," about this phenomenon: "The mutants, creeps and muscle men/ Are shaking like a leaf/ It blows a hole in the radio/ When it hasn't sounded good all week." In songs like that, rock imagines its future. Today, things are calmer, and even the adventurous acts -- Beck and Moby come to mind -- have perfected the art of industry game-playing without really seeming to. But now we know that in the background there are always some new rough beasts running around, and not even Kurt Loder is going to stop them from coming. In this way, Cobain is an odd rock martyr. The indie rock world that spawned him was in almost all its practices charmingly innocent; it worked as long as it did because, in the end, few people cared for the anti-pop music so many of them purveyed. When a few people with that dream of pop entered the equation, it heightened a few of the contradictions of the world, but it still stood. But Kurt Cobain was fated to discover that the train he'd gotten on couldn't be stopped. The corporate rock world, which he joined voluntarily, simply has no reason to halt it once it's going; there's not even really a way to describe such an act. And Cobain was ambivalent about it anyway. One day he was enraptured with his success; the next night he was horrified. It's not clear if his images of how stardom should be simply didn't connect with the realities of it, or if in the end he did understand what was happening but felt guilty about it. If the band Nirvana can be a metaphor for a victory that transcends its time, Cobain's life is a metaphor for the one key theoretical weakness in the indie rock ethos: You can't be semi public. There was a patina of falsity in the rock world at the time. To a young and overearnest would-be rock star, it's pathetic to repeat, night after night, a shtick that begins "Hello, Seattle/Dubuque/Tallahassee!" and ends with your biggest hit, just before the encore. A lot of professional musicians do that, night after night, and, after they become famous, they take the next step, and the step after that. And soon the star is smiling for the talk shows, telling People magazine that it was time to get back to his roots for the new album, and, no, he and Jennifer Aniston are just close friends. Then you hook up with a beer company for tour sponsorship, bringing in a few outside songwriters at the suggestion of your label and all of a sudden you're Aerosmith, or Mick Jagger. Cobain never could deal with the compromises. He never was able to grow up to understand that even if you're sick of playing your hit, it's even more pathetic to go out and collect people's money and not play it. And to have contempt for that uncomplicated desire, which of course is a species of the one he himself had as a kid, is to have contempt for oneself. Cobain had made the decision to put himself in a position to go large, but never, apparently, figured out what that meant. He was perhaps the frailest star ever to face such intense public interest. Cross' book is spotted with more than enough examples of Cobain being something, one suspects, he didn't want to be. He learned to smile and lie in public, and he knew, deep inside, he had become a different person. He said so in his suicide note: "The worst crime I could think of would be faking it and pretending as if I'm having 100 percent fun. Sometimes I feel as if I should punch a time clock before I go out on stage." Later he wrote of "the hateful death rocker I have become." Kurt Cobain Kurt Donald Cobain (February 20, 1967 – c. April 5, 1994), was an American musician who served 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 - Main article: Nirvana (band) 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.[6] 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.[16] 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.[17] According to journalist Everett True, the pair were formally introduced at an L7/Butthole Surfers concert in Los Angeles in May 1991.[18] In the weeks that followed, after learning from Dave 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.[19] 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."[20] 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.[21] Love was somewhat unpopular with Nirvana fans; her harshest critics said she was merely using him as a vehicle to make herself famous.[19] 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.[22] In a 1992 article in Vanity Fair, Love admitted to using heroin while (unknowingly) pregnant. Love claimed that Vanity Fair had misquoted her,[23] 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.[21] 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.[24] This last condition was especially debilitating to him emotionally, and he spent years trying to find its cause. 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 13. 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.[25] 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."[26] 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."[27] 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 resumed. 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.[28] Cobain's final weeks and death - Main article: Death of Kurt Cobain 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.[29] Love later stated that the incident was Cobain's first suicide attempt.[30] 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.[31] 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.[32] 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. On April 8, 1994, Cobain's body 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 resting on Cobain's chest. Cobain's death certificate stated that his death was a result of a "contact perforating shotgun wound to the head," and concluded his death a suicide. The report estimated 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.[33] 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 chastising Cobain. Near the end of the vigil Love arrived at the park and distributed some of Cobain's clothing to those who still remained.[34] 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.[35] 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!.[36] 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.[37] 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".[38] 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."[39] 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.[40] 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. 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.[41] 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 Cross 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.[42] In 2008, writer Robin Shannon published Cemeteries of Seattle which feature Kurt Cobain's memorial benches as well as a tribute from Noveselic.
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Wikipedija Nirvana je bio američki rock sastav koji su osnovali pjevač i gitarist Kurt Cobain i basist Krist Novoselic u Aberdeenu, Washington 1987. godine. Nirvana imala velike promjene bubnjara a najpoznatiji bubnjar bio je Dave Grohl, koji se pridružio sastavu 1990.. Sa velikim hitom "Smells Like Teen Spirit" sa njihovog drugog albuma Nevermind (1991.) Nirvana je postala planetarno popularna, a ujedno je i "stvorila" podvrstu alternativnog rocka - grunge. Frontman Nirvane, Kurt Cobain često je bio proglašavan "predstavnikom generacije" sa Nirvanom kao glavnim glazbenim sastavom Generacije X. Ali Cobain nije volio to što mu se poklanja toliko pozornosti u medijima, smatravši da poruke sastava i umjetničko izražavanje ljudi pogrešno tumače. Nirvana se raspala zbog smrti frontmena i vođe sastava Kurta Cobaina u Travnju 1994. godine, ali unatoč prestanku rada, popularnost sastava nije pala. Čak štoviše, iz godine u godinu mnogi mlađi naraštaji otkrivaju glazbu i pjesme koje pisao jedan od najvećih glazbenika u povijesti glazbe. 2002. godine, pjesma "You Know You're Right" - nedovršeni demo sastava osvojio je top liste radio postaja širom svijeta. Od njihovog prvog nastupa, prodali su više od 25 milijuna albuma samo u Sad-u i preko 50 milijuna u svijetu.Zadnji dani Kurta Cobaina R.I.P. U Rimu, ujutro 4. Ožujka Courtney Love je pronašla Cobaina onesviještenog u njihovoj hotelskoj sobi. Cobain je odmah prevezen u bolnicu, gdje je doktor ustanovio da je Cobain negativno reagirao na miješanje lijekova koji su mu bili prepisani za bolest sa alkoholom. Ostatak turneje je otkazan, uključujući dio u Ujedinjenom Kraljevstvu. Sljedećih tjedana, Cobainova ovisnost o heroinu je uzela danak, te je Cobain nagovoren na rehabilitaciju. Nakon manje od tjedan dana provedenih na rehabilitaciji, Cobain se popeo preko zida ustanove i sjeo na avion za Seattle . Tjedan dana poslije, u petak, 8. travnja 1994. godine, Kurt Cobain je pronađen mrtav u svojoj kući u Seattleu, trajno se razdvojivši od Nirvane. U krvi mu je pronađena količina heroina dovoljna za četiri predoziranja i rana od sačmarice na glavi. Poslije Nirvane Preostala dva člana Krist Novoselic i Dave Grohl ostala su glazbeno aktivna. Dave Grohl je frontman i gitarist grupe Foo Fighters s kojima je imao velike uspjehe u svijetu. Također, Grohl je povremeno bubnjao sa mnogim sastavima, ali Foo Fightersi su mu sada glavni projekt. Krist Novoselic je osnovao sastav Sweet 75 i zamijenio je basista u sastavu Flipper. Novoselic je postao i politički aktivist. Osnovao je udrugu JAMPAC za podršku glazbenih prava. Napisao je i knjigu "Of Grunge and Government: Let's Fix This Broken Democracy", koja govori o njegovim glazbenim iskustvima i političkim pogledima. Albumi i proširene verzije * Bleach * Blew * Nevermind * Hormoaning * Nevermind: It's An Interview * Incesticide * In Utero * MTV Unplugged in New York * From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah * Nirvana * Sliver: The Best of the Box Tko zeli procitati cijeli tekst => http://hr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_(sastav)