by Mark Yarm
Nirvana doing an Unplugged at the time that they did it and making a video for “Heart-Shaped Box,” that didn’t make a lot of sense to me, because it seemed clear to me that Kurt was pretty disillusioned by the situation that he was being put in. It felt like, If he’s so unhappy, he shouldn’t be doing this kind of stuff.
MARK ARM I was thinking, I’m going to come back and try to talk to Kurt if I can. I don’t think I could have done anything, though. I didn’t realize things were at such a severe point for him.
DUFF MCKAGAN I was flying from L.A. up to Seattle, to home. And I get on the plane and Kurt gets on the plane and sits next to me, and we took off and he and I started talking. He told me, “I just took off from Exodus.” We talked, y’know, we were drinking.… We got to Seattle, we went to baggage claim, and he was pretty down. And a friend of mine, this guy Eddie, met me at baggage claim in Seattle. Kurt and Eddie went out to have a smoke, and my friend Eddie came back in. I said, “Hey, man, maybe we should take him over to the house tonight.” … So Eddie went back out to get Kurt, and right at that moment his car had picked him up. And he was gone.
LARRY REID I didn’t know Kurt real well. The last conversation of any substance I had with him was backstage at this show they played at the Seattle Center Coliseum, in September 1992. His baby was like two months old. Someone brought up Jesse Bernstein. I was really closely associated with Bernstein, who was sort of the poet laureate of the grunge scene. He was this second-generation Beat poet who was really engaging and just crazy as the day is long. He’d killed himself the year before by slitting his own throat.
Kurt said something like, “That’s the way I wanna go: Live fast, die young,” or words to that effect. I’m paraphrasing. And I just started yelling at him. I think he must’ve used the word romantic, because I remember saying, “There’s nothing romantic about it at all!” Then I said, “Yeah, you die and it’s fine, but you leave nothing but hard feelings. You’ve got this beautiful young baby, and you’ve got a lunatic wife …”
He just sort of sheepishly wandered off.
STEPHANIE DORGAN I was so pregnant, I was just taking naps all the time, and I just feel like I heard that gunshot. I don’t want to be dramatic—I’m not sure—but it’s a really pretty quiet neighborhood and you hear something but you just never put it into context. It would have been in the afternoon a couple of days before they found him. His house was not very far; we were up back behind them. It was totally possible. Again, I don’t know. Memory and imagination are next to each other in our brains. That’s a fact.
VAN CONNER I was good friends with Dylan Carlson. Him and Mark had been lookin’ for Kurt for days. Some P.I. guy had started callin’. Courtney had taken off because of that intervention shit. I ended up driving Mark and Dylan around on-and-off for a couple of days. We went to all these different locations, mostly around the U District. We went everywhere but Kurt’s house, which was where he was, it turned out.
AMY FINNERTY I was at work at MTV. The girl who worked there who was responsible for answering the fan phone line said somebody just called and said, “A body has been found at Kurt Cobain’s house.” I was hoping and praying that it wasn’t him, but when someone says, “There’s a body there,” what do you think, right?
ALICE WHEELER At first, nobody knew it was Kurt. We all thought it was Dylan. I don’t know why, because now it seems like there were more warning signs for Kurt. A friend of a friend was on police ride-along in the neighborhood where Kurt lived—I think it was a couple of days before he went to rehab—and they went to his house because Courtney had called. Kurt had locked himself in the bedroom with a shotgun or something. And Dylan was the one who had bought him the shotgun.
DYLAN CARLSON (Earth singer/guitarist) We used to go shooting together. He said he wanted the gun for protection. He had the cash.… He insisted on me buying him the gun.
BOB WHITTAKER I was in Seattle, and my friend David called me in the morning, saying, “Is it true?” I said, “What?” He goes, “They’re saying on the radio that Kurt’s dead.” I said, “Oh, my God, I don’t doubt it.”
I hung up the phone and the next call was from Nik Hartshorne, who was the King County coroner. Nik had been doing all the wrongful deaths in Seattle. We had a lot of mutual friends, and he used to go to shows all the time. We’d had drinks recently, and he asked, “How’s Kurt doing?” I said, “Not very good. I wouldn’t be surprised if he paid you a visit soon.” This was three days before they found him.
When I talked with Nik on the phone I said, “Jesus, I just heard. Are you getting stuck with the autopsy?” And he said, “I just got done.” And then he said, “I wish we wouldn’t have had that conversation the other day.”
KURT LODER (MTV News live broadcast, April 8, 1994) Hi, I’m Kurt Loder with an MTV News special report on a very sad day. Kurt Cobain, the leader of one of rock’s most gifted and promising bands, Nirvana, is dead.… Cobain’s body was found in a house in Seattle on Friday morning. He was dead of an apparently self-inflicted shotgun blast to the head. Police found what is said to be a suicide note at the scene, but have not yet divulged its contents. Cobain, who was 27, had reportedly been missing for about six days, according to his mother.
NILS BERNSTEIN The day Kurt’s body was found was horrible. It was total media insanity right off. But in a way, having to deal with the logistics of this media onslaught made it so no one had to just stand around and bum out. There were news crews who somehow got up to the roof deck around the penthouse and then tried to get up to the next level, literally scaling the walls of this building, so they could film inside the Sub Pop office. They were trying to shoot us, as if … what would we have been doing? The next day there was a TV reporter and camera person hiding in the bushes at my home.
When you live it and then you see how it’s covered, you’re like, Wow, that’s not accurate, or Oh, the feeling of this was different from how they portrayed it. It makes you wonder, was the Civil War really like people say it was, or is the way we think about it the way that five people who were never part of it to begin with said it was? Was it told by guys who just wanted to be cool ’cause they felt like pussies for not going? It makes you question history.
KERRI HARROP That morning, we had to make the decision: Should we open the Sub Pop Mega Mart? “Okay, yeah, I’ll go over and I’ll open the store.” So around 11, I went over across the street to the store, and already there were people waiting outside, which was something that never, ever happened. Ten people followed me into the store, which automatically packed the place.
And the first guy in, some twentysomething, asks, “Do you have any Nirvana vinyl?” I was so sickened at the thought, and I looked at him and said, “No, we don’t.” Which we did. You know what, if you didn’t have Bleach on vinyl by now, why the fuck do you need it now? It was so gross to me.
Within like 10 minutes, the store is a madhouse, and by now there’s two or three local news teams there, they want to do interviews. If you’re looking for some dramatic reaction for your 5 o’clock news bite, I’m not gonna give it to you. So I called Jonathan: “Jon, it’s crazy over here, what should I do?” And he’s like, “Close the store.”
JANET BILLIG I’d had a skiing accident and I’d just had a second surgery on my knee in New York. My friend Theo showed up. It was ironic that I was so doped up on drugs, I don’t remember finding out that Kurt had died. Theo is screaming at the doctor, “You gotta sign her out!” and he’s like, “I can’t.” Theo, who’s a big tattoo guy, is like, “I’m taking her!”
AMY FINNERTY So I went to the hospital to get Janet. I was supposed to go pick her up and take her home, and I’m racing all over the place searching for her. I finally find some nurse and I say, “I’m searching for Janet Billig, where is she?” She said, “She just walked out the front door and got into a cab.”
I took a cab to her apartment and I walked in and there’s poor Janet, straight out of surgery, half out of it, and she said, “Come
and sit down.” I sat down and I said, “I have to tell you something,” because I wasn’t sure she’d heard anything. And she said, “Kurt’s dead.” I said, “Are you sure? Are you sure?” That sort of denial. She said, “I’m sure. Kurt’s dead. We have to go to Seattle.” We got on the next plane.
KURT LODER We must have gone on the air very quickly. Amy Finnerty was there. She was in tears, and Dave Grohl called; I talked to him briefly off-air. Going live is very expensive, but you had to for this band. I’ve heard over the years, “That was the first time I heard about it.” It’s remarkable that television would be the first place you would hear about something, because it took television so much longer to get up and running than it did for radio to do the same. When people say it was the first place they heard the news, I don’t know how to feel about that. I don’t have any feelings about that.
CHARLES R. CROSS It was a complete onslaught. There were TV reporters stopping by The Rocket office. It was like the Lindsay Lohan paparazzi situation that you might see now, but multiplied by having Tabitha Soren outside the building.
There was one point where the receptionist said, “Larry King’s producer is on line three,” and I’m just so exhausted, I don’t want to deal with it, and I go to pick the phone up to tell them I can’t talk to them, and instead I’m on the radio live with Larry King. There’s Larry King’s booming voice: “TELL ME, WHAT IS GRUNGE MUSIC?”
BRYN BRIDENTHAL I just jumped in, with Jim Merlis and Dennis Dennehy, and we handled it. We were the center that the media came to. I don’t think that I even looked up or peed or had a drink or anything until about 11 that night.
The first thing I did when I got back to my hotel room was call Axl, because I was afraid of how the news might impact him. He was such an emotional roller coaster, I was afraid that Axl would hurt himself. He felt things really deeply, and he felt a real connection there, even though there was no connection from the other side. I think he had a lot of empathy for Kurt.
I was on the phone with Axl until about 3 in the morning. Ultimately, it was okay, but I don’t remember what was said because I’d had so many hours and hours of those kinds of conversations with him. One time, I got off the phone with him and my teeth were chattering and I felt like I was energy inside his head. We were just talking on a level that wasn’t in the here and now, that was just pure energy—an out-of-body experience, except that my body acts like it’s freezing or something. It was just so intense.
KURT DANIELSON We were opening for Soundgarden in Paris. And then I heard this rumor—word was going around that Kurt had tried to kill himself or had killed himself. Nobody knew if it was a repeat of what had happened in Rome or if this was the real thing. So I called my sister, who’s married to Van Conner. Van wasn’t able to confirm right away, but he called back and did confirm the news.
KIM THAYIL We were onstage. I go to the side of the stage, grab a beer or whatever, change my guitar, sit down for a bit, towel off—maybe it’s a drum solo—and Gary from TAD goes, “Hey, they found a body at Kurt’s house. It hasn’t been identified yet, but the rumor is that they think it could be Kurt.” I thought, It’s okay, it’s not Kurt. It sounds terrible, but it must have been some weird drug incident, somebody else maybe OD’d at Kurt’s house. I told myself that.
So I’m playing the next song, and all of sudden I just felt that chill, I just felt the blood and warmth go out of me. It’s an empty feeling that I’m talking about. It was entirely a visceral experience. For some reason, at that point I knew, in spite of my hopefulness, that he was dead.
BEN SHEPHERD And we were all playing the encore, we’re all rocking out—me and Chris were particularly having fun together that show. Looked around at the crew, everyone around’s kind of dour and worried-looking. And they make this corridor for us to walk through to go to the dressing room, and it’s like, instantaneously, they shut the door behind us and everyone was there. The guys from TAD and the rest of the crew and stuff. Kurt Danielson told us. Chris turned to me and said, “I’m sorry,” and then he started crying and held me. I was just in shock.
JOSH SINDER We’d just got done doing an interview for a TV show. We were laughing and having a really good time, and then we went back to the club. Tad had his own camera rolling when we found out backstage. The camera is on Kurt Danielson’s face and he says, “They just found Kurt’s body …” On the tape, the camera just points to the ground. And everyone’s real silent for a second.
KIM THAYIL I’ve never seen so many big, hairy, usually rowdy guys in tears and crumbling.
BEN SHEPHERD The thing for Soundgarden was every time there was some personal gain, it was always balanced out by something really dark. We were in Europe when we found out that Superunknown was number one in America. Then Kurt dies.
SUSAN SILVER I wasn’t with Soundgarden. The guys found out after they got offstage. And the tour manager said they were beside themselves: “They’re freaking out, they’re destroying the dressing room!” And I said, “Just let ’em go, man.”
KURT DANIELSON No, no. I told everybody before the show, because we all knew about it when we were onstage. I felt it was necessary that these guys find out from the right person at the right time. And actually, it made for a better show, because we were able to dedicate it to Kurt, and I thought that was important.
I’ve got severe back problems—I’ve crushed two vertebrae just thrashing around so much onstage—and my back had gone out on me that day. I remember being onstage in Paris, in all this pain, and I knew that Kurt had killed himself, and I felt like somehow that all this pain I was experiencing was putting me in a place where I could understand him somehow. Of course, I was drinking a lot, just to try to kill the pain, which didn’t work at all.
I remember being in a trance and feeling like I was totally detached, like having an astral-projection experience. I suddenly found myself above the stage, watching myself onstage, being above the crowd and kind of floating around up there. And somehow I felt a unity with Kurt. It’s really hard to describe—I’ve never really tried to describe it before. I felt like Kurt was there somehow.
JASON EVERMAN I was in basic training, and one of my drill sergeants came into the barracks at 6 in the morning, standard basic-training bullshit: get down, do push-ups. So everyone in the bay is doing push-ups, the drill sergeant is walking around yelling at everybody. Then he goes, “Yesterday, the singer for Nirvana blew his head off.” As he said that, he looked right at me. And he didn’t know who I was—I tried to keep that under wraps, because all of the sudden it’s not Jason, it’s, “Oh, that guy, he used to play with Nirvana.”
I don’t know why the drill sergeant looked at me. It was kind of interesting. The news didn’t surprise me, though. I think anyone with intelligence has grappled with suicide. I was dealing with other stuff at the time—basic training, being a jackass—but I was a little sad. But it’s not like I had a lot of time to dwell on it.
DALE CROVER We got off the plane from London in New York, and the first thing our road manager tells us when he met us was, “Kurt Cobain just killed himself.” It wasn’t a surprise, because he had already OD’d recently.
In London, we’d done some demos for Stoner Witch, and we were doing a record—a bunch of weird stuff—at the same time. We were going to call the record Kurt Cobain. Yeah, in big letters: KURT COBAIN. And in small letters, underneath: Melvins. A big joke. If he hadn’t died, we probably would’ve named it that, and Kurt probably would’ve been okay with it, too. But after he died, we were just like, “People will think it’s some tribute thing.” That one ended up being called Prick, but not because of him, just because we liked the title.
MARK DEUTROM Our tour manager goes, “Do you want me to send some flowers? What do you want me to do?” Buzz just barked at her: “I’m not going to send any fuckin’ flowers! We’re going to play a show.” She asked if we wanted to cancel the show, and he just kind of laughed at her like, Man, you don’t get it. We’re going to play
a show. That’s how we do it. I think it was Buzz channeling his rage. What better way to salute somebody than doing the most life-affirming thing possible, which is playing?
BUZZ OSBORNE I could believe it, but I couldn’t believe it. Whenever you’re dealing with people in your life that are junkies, their death never surprises you—you’re always pretty much preparing for it. It fucking blows, you know? We had a show that night, and we played it anyway. I wasn’t about to stop my life as a result of that stuff. The best thing I can do is be a living example of how that stuff doesn’t work.
GRANT ALDEN My girlfriend at the time and I had a vacation planned on the Olympic Peninsula the next day. When we drove through Aberdeen, there was no sign that Kurt Cobain had lived or died. I still think that those church billboards should have said something. There should have been a kind word for that family, and there was nothing. Why not? Well, what they say out here is, “He got above his raising.” He was white trash, he got to be a star; he moved away and then he did drugs and he died. They didn’t approve of him alive, they didn’t approve of him dead.
KRIST NOVOSELIC We were these young people from southwest Washington, ill-equipped. We didn’t have the emotional support and the experience at all to deal with this. And we were just whisked away—whisked, whisked up into it, and it went up and up and up and up, like the spaceship Challenger. And then it exploded. It’s like, Dave and I landed, right? But Kurt didn’t.