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None of the artists whose lives we have followed thus far left a suicide note. In the absence of clear evidence of intent, their death certificates record verdicts of accidental or natural death. Yet this doesn’t tell the whole story. In prolonged abuse of themselves, Jones, Hendrix, Joplin and Morrison evinced a death wish as surely as if they had put a gun to their heads. ‘Essentially, people who are heavily abusing substances – I don’t care what the substance is, whether it’s alcohol, or heroin, or whatever – it’s a self-destructive, suicidal act. And when they continue to do that, they frequently end up very successful at it.’ This is the view of David Burr, who staged the final intervention in the life of Kurt Cobain, the only one of the Big Six whose death is recorded as suicide.
It is widely recognised, however, that suicide statistics are artificially low. Where there is an element of doubt the authorities tend to ascribe death to accident or misadventure. There is the desire to give the deceased the benefit of the doubt, and to spare the feelings of family members, for suicide carries a stigma. Yet in many cases the circumstantial evidence of suicide is strong. Of the 27 Club deaths we have looked at so far, those of Al Wilson of Canned Heat and Jim Morrison’s partner Pamela Courson may well have been suicide, though both are recorded as accidents.
Other 27 Club deaths that look very much like suicide, but are not recorded as such, include that of the Russian singer-songwriter Alexander ‘Sasha’ Bashlachev, who was obliged to work underground during the Soviet era, performing his music for friends at private gatherings and circulating his music on cassette tapes. It was a difficult life, and he suffered the additional problem of writer’s block. Bashlachev became depressed, apparently making several suicide attempts before plunging from the ninth floor of his Leningrad apartment building in 1988, aged 27.
After Kurt Cobain, the most notable confirmed suicide on the long list is Peter Ham of Badfinger, one of the bands the Beatles signed to their Apple label in the 1960s. Paul McCartney wrote Badfinger’s hit ‘Come and Get it’, while Ham and his partner Tom Evans were talented songwriters in their own right, composing ‘Without You’, which was a smash for Harry Nilsson. Despite their success Ham and Evans did not receive the royalties they expected and became embroiled in disputes with management. As is the case with suicides, Ham reached a point where death seemed to be the only solution to his problems. He met Tom Evans in a pub on the evening of 24 April 1975, three days before his 28th birthday, and told him: ‘Don’t worry, I know a way out.’ Fortified with drink, Ham went back to his home in Woking, Surrey, wrote a note in which he expressed his bitterness towards his manager, and hanged himself in his garage. His girlfriend found his body. In a macabre coda, Evans hanged himself seven years later.
The curious case of Richey Edwards of the Manic Street Preachers, whose life we have touched upon, is a mystery that points towards suicide. The Manic Street Preachers were a band closely associated with suicide. Their 1989 début single was ‘Suicide Alley’. Three years later they returned to the subject when they released a cover of ‘Theme from M*A*S*H’, a.k.a. ‘Suicide is Painless’. Edwards struggled with problems common to the 27s. He had mental-health issues, including depression and eating disorders. He drank excessively and, as mentioned, he self-harmed, once cutting his arm with a razor during a discussion with a journalist. Edwards subsequently suffered a nervous breakdown and was admitted to the Priory Clinic, at branches of which Brian Jones and Amy Winehouse were also treated. He went missing in February 1995 after checking out of a London hotel to drive home to Cardiff. His car was found near the Severn Bridge, which is sometimes used for suicide leaps. Although Edwards’ body was never found, he was declared ‘presumed dead’ by a court in 2008, when his family decided the time had come to wind up his estate. He was 27 when last seen alive. It is assumed that he jumped to his death and his body was washed away in the river.
Richey Edwards and Kurt Cobain had much in common. Both were born in 1967, dying within ten months of each other at the same age. Both were post-punk anti-heroes, complex, sensitive young men who attracted a following of similar people who empathised with them as outsiders. Furthermore, Edwards and Cobain flirted with suicide in both word and deed before committing the act.
In his last round of interviews in 1993, while promoting Nirvana’s In Utero album, Kurt told Everett True of Melody Maker: ‘I want to kill myself half the time.’ In a contemporaneous interview with Rolling Stone he blamed his mental-health issues on his stomach pain, five years of which had made him, in his own splendid phrase, ‘as schizophrenic as a wet cat that’s been beaten’. There was dark humour here, but Kurt appeared to be serious when he said his stomach pain had been so bad that he wanted to kill himself ‘every day’ and ‘came very close many times’. He said he had turned to heroin to dull the stomach pain. He claimed to be off smack now, and was feeling better, due to prescribed medication, an improved diet and that he had something to live for: his daughter Frances, whom he adored. ‘I’ve never been happier in my life,’ he told Rolling Stone, adding that he was only joking when he’d said he originally wanted to call the new album I Hate Myself and I Want to Die. ‘Nothing more than a joke.’ By his subsequent actions we know that this denial was the darkest joke of all.
Nirvana recorded In Utero in Minnesota in February 1993 with producer Steve Albini, who takes a purist view of the punk rock/grunge subculture, arguing that it is uniquely different from other music genres, being made up of people such as Kurt who did not fit into tidy society. ‘I’m not just saying that they were odd people with similar music tastes, I’m saying that these were street people, recent immigrants, petty criminals, the insane, the very people who are categorically lonely outsider weirdos. Those people were the people who turned up at punk shows, and the only thing that they had in common was that literally they couldn’t get along in the straight world.’ When Kurt called Albini to say Nirvana wanted to work with him he sounded wasted, barely coherent. But he was fit and focused at the studio, and he had strong songs, many of them autobiographical, notably ‘Serve the Servants’ in which he commented with admirable concision in twenty lines on pop success, his feelings about his father, his parents’ divorce and the public’s perception of his wife, Courtney Love.
The band cut the album fast, in just two weeks, agreeing with their producer that they’d done good work. Then Steve Albini heard that Geffen Records thought the songs sounded too raw, which was when In Utero became as much of a hassle as Amy Winehouse’s Frank. Albini was disgusted by the experience. ‘All the shit they had to deal with, all of the people around them, like every single person that I interacted with that was not actually in the band, was a piece of shit,’ he says. ‘The three band members in Nirvana I admired, and I take my hat off to them for putting up with the bullshit they had to put up with. All of the other people around them, all of their management, all of their hangers-on, all of the people who were trying to profiteer through them, all the people who were trying to use them as a leg up on their own careers, all the dope-dealers who were exploiting them, all the asshole functionaries in the music business that were on a power trip by being involved with Nirvana – fuck all of those people one hundred per cent.’
Interestingly, Kurt bowed to record-company pressure, compromising on both the sound of In Utero – which was remixed to sound more mainstream – and the CD artwork, which was toned down for distribution in supermarkets. The fact that somebody who had always prided himself on his artistic integrity gave in to commercial pressure is open to interpretation. Steve Albini saw Kurt as a sell-out. ‘I think that the record company told him what they would put up with, and then he complied. I wasn’t involved in any of those decisions, but there’s no such thing as a compromise in that situation. If you say, “This is my record,” and the record company says, “We’re not putting it out like that”, that’s not a compromise, that’s a capitulation.’ Others might see a maturing artist who had become pragmatic. Or maybe Kurt didn
’t care anymore. Having made an effort to stay clean long enough to record the album, he had already returned to heavy drug use. In those circumstances the mixing of In Utero was not his top priority.
Kurt and Courtney were renting a house on Lakeside Avenue NE in Seattle, overlooking Lake Washington, a vast body of water on the east side of the city. They had regained custody of their daughter, Frances, though they had help to look after her. Their choice of nanny was curious. They hired Courtney’s teenage roadie and fellow drug-user Cali De Witt, who was surprised to get the job. ‘Officially, all of a sudden, I’m the nanny. I don’t realise what that means until [Frances] is put on my lap to see how she likes me,’ he told Everett True, for his book about Nirvana. ‘I felt like I needed taking care of, and I’ve got this baby.’
Kurt overdosed twice at Lakeside Avenue in 1993. The police were called to the property after an incident in May, and Kurt was taken to hospital. The following month Courtney, Kurt’s mother, Krist Novoselic and others staged an intervention, during which Kurt was confronted with his drug problem and warned about the consequences of his behaviour if he continued to use heroin. Kurt brushed this intervention aside as he had the previous attempt. It was difficult to threaten him with consequences when he held all the power. In other bands, a musician with a heroin habit might be told he would be sacked unless he cleaned up. If Kurt was fired, Nirvana would cease to exist.
A few days after the failed intervention police were called to a domestic dispute at the Lakeside Avenue house that threatened to turn violent. Kurt and Courtney were arguing about Kurt’s drug use and gun collection. Kurt was arrested for assaulting his wife, and officers confiscated hand guns and a semi-automatic rifle. Charges were later dropped. Kurt had become obsessed with guns. He said he bought the weapons for self-protection, which was surely nonsense. In truth, he knew that a bullet in the head was one of the surest ways of killing himself, if and when he made that fatal decision.
Death and violence were suddenly all around. In July 1993, Mia Zapata, singer with the Seattle band the Gits, was raped and murdered on her way home from a Seattle night club. She was 27, becoming the first of three 27 Club deaths in the Seattle music community in the space of eleven months. This is a striking coincidence. In Zapata’s case, death was by homicide. The other two would be drug-related, reflecting the prevalence of drugs on the Seattle scene and bearing out one of the most common patterns in this history. Nirvana performed at a show to raise money to investigate Zapata’s death.
Kurt’s would, of course, be one of those three 27 Club deaths. Like Janis Joplin before him, he was flirting with death on a daily basis, increasingly careless of his life. He overdosed in New York in July while promoting In Utero, an incident that could easily have been fatal. He was unhappy with life in general, despite what he told journalists, at loggerheads with his record company and band, and dreading the prospect of touring to promote the new album. ‘He said he was kind of getting tired of the contract requirements,’ says his uncle, Chuck Fradenburg. ‘They had him on some kind of schedule where he had to go from town to town, and he didn’t get much sleep … He said he was not getting much rest, and he was getting tired of the pressure.’
Yet Kurt was still capable of good work. In Utero is a strong album, and he was still growing as an artist. The band’s appearance on MTV Unplugged in November 1993 was a triumph. Kurt’s performance of Leadbelly’s ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night?’ is riveting. Yet, like Brian Jones, Kurt was easily overwhelmed with self-doubt and indeed jealousy. He had started to suspect that Courtney was cheating on him. But drugs were by far the biggest problem. He and Courtney went to a rehab facility in Arizona at Christmas. Kurt was warned that if he didn’t quit heroin he would die. But he didn’t believe he could quit, as he confessed to Uncle Chuck. ‘He said [to me], “I know I can’t get off. I’m stuck on that.” I said, “That’s too bad.”’
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The Seattle mansion Kurt and Courtney purchased for $1.4 million (£800,503) in January 1994, and where Kurt killed himself five months later, loomed above Lake Washington Boulevard East, like the house in Psycho. The property was nine miles south of their previous rental, four miles east of downtown, in one of the most affluent areas of Seattle, a place of big, beautiful homes with landscaped gardens and mature trees. Until ten years or so ago Jimi Hendrix’s father had worked for local residents, cutting their lawns and clipping their hedges as part of his landscaping business. The house Kurt and Courtney bought was built in 1902 in a commanding position above the lake. Its elevation, Gothic windows and tall chimneys, gave it the look of a haunted house even before it became stained with Kurt’s blood. ‘That’s probably why they were moving in,’ chuckles friend Eric Erlandson.
The Cobains didn’t own enough possessions to furnish a 7,000-square-foot mansion. They occupied parts of the house in the manner of squatters, moving in a beat-up sofa, setting up musical equipment in empty rooms, pinning bed sheets over windows where they wanted to sleep, trying to make a demarcation between the parts of the house in which drugs were used and the rooms where little Frances slept, ate, bathed and played. Kurt was proud of his house, which he showed off to family and friends, and he met his neighbours. ‘I talked to him a couple of times,’ says Dr Jim Pritchett, who lived opposite. He regarded his new neighbour with a professional medical eye while they chatted. ‘He was kind of a quiet, sickly guy … Even though he was young, he didn’t look healthy.’ Despite the phenomenal success of Nirvana, Kurt and Courtney didn’t buy their house outright. It was purchased on a mortgage and Kurt soon became anxious that he might lose the property. This anxiety – not entirely rational – grew into a major concern.
There was another cause of worry in January when Kurt’s grandmother, Iris Cobain, fell ill. Kurt visited her in hospital, with an armful of orchids. It is a curious coincidence that both Kurt and Amy Winehouse had such a close relationship with their paternal grandmothers, Grandma being the family member whose advice carried most weight with them. During this hospital visit Don Cobain telephoned to speak to his mother and Iris insisted that Kurt have a few words with his father. ‘[Iris] called Kurt over and said, “Here, now you take this. Now you get together with your dad.” And they talked real friendly, at least to listen to Kurt,’ recalls Leland Cobain. ‘Kurt said he was going to get in touch with his dad, and they was gonna sort it all out and get friends again.’ If Kurt had lived perhaps he and his father would have been reconciled. In his latter interviews Kurt showed a more mature attitude towards his parents. But, as it turned out, there wasn’t time for a rapprochement.
Nirvana went into the studio again that month. One important new song emerged, ‘You Know You’re Right’, in which Kurt wailed about his pain and sang with colossal irony that life had ‘never been so swell’. This powerful song shows Kurt was still filled with the rage that had defined his career. But his recording career was now over. ‘You Know You’re Right’ was his swansong.
A couple of days later Kurt flew to Europe with Nirvana. He didn’t want to tour. He felt depressed and unwell and would have cancelled if the financial implications hadn’t been onerous. At a photo call in Paris, he posed with a gun to his head, making a joke of an act he was contemplating for real. He turned 27 on 20 February 1994, on a day of travel between gigs, shortly after which came his second wedding anniversary. Although Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl had their partners on tour with them, Courtney Love hadn’t shown up yet and Kurt’s suspicion and jealousy grew.
When the tour reached Germany, Kurt rowed with Courtney on the phone, after which he reportedly discussed the possibility of divorce with his lawyer. When Nirvana played Munich on 1 March they ended the show with ‘Heart-Shaped Box’, a song Kurt had written about Courtney. The next two dates were cancelled, allowing an overwrought and strung-out Kurt to take a break from the tour.
He flew to Rome and checked into the luxurious Excelsior Hotel where he planned a romantic reunion with Courtney. She was flying in with F
rances from London, having done promotional work for the new Hole album. Kurt bought flowers and champagne for the hotel suite, and collected special gifts for his wife, including a stone he had stolen from the Colosseum because Courtney was interested in Roman history.
Kurt wanted to make love with Courtney when she arrived at the Excelsior, but she was tired and fell asleep. She woke in the night to find Kurt unconscious on the floor of their room having taken an overdose of Rohypnol. He had swallowed sixty tablets and left a suicide note in which he accused his wife of not loving him anymore, adding that he would rather die than go through a divorce like his parents. He was taken to hospital to have his stomach pumped, and was in a coma for several hours. The doctors couldn’t say what state he would be in if and when he regained consciousness.
An overdose of prescription medication is a popular but uncertain suicide method. It is difficult to obtain lethal drugs. It is equally difficult for the layman to judge how many tablets constitute a lethal dose, which is affected by many factors including the potency of the drug (itself affected by its age and the conditions in which it has been stored), body size, personal tolerance, and whether or not one has been drinking or using other substances. People who toss back a random handful of pills hoping, in the words of Keats, to ‘cease upon the midnight with no pain’ are often disappointed. The body can reject the medicine, by vomiting. Even if the would-be suicide manages to keep the drug down, death is not necessarily quick, painless or sure. There may be violent and prolonged convulsions. Most alarming of all, perhaps, is when the victim is revived only to be left with brain or liver damage.
With many people who take an overdose, there is also a sense that they are not entirely serious. An overdose of pills can be a suicidal gesture, a dangerous way of seeking attention, but a gesture nonetheless. While Kurt had taken a large overdose of a fairly powerful sedative, he had done so in the hotel room in which his wife was sleeping, therefore hedging his bets that Courtney would wake up, find him and call for help, which was what happened.
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