Yet to accept that the entire Seattle Police Department was in on a “fraud,” you must also accept that Dr. Nikolas Hartshorne was in on a “fraud,” too. Dr. Hartshorne was the King County medical examiner who worked on the investigation and conducted Kurt’s autopsy. I knew who Dr. Hartshorne was—he’d been the longtime boyfriend of a person I worked with at The Rocket. He was a brilliant doctor who cared very much that Kurt’s investigation be handled carefully and methodically. His words to me were that if anything whatsoever had been suspicious in the circumstances of Kurt’s death, he would have “gone to the end of the earth to investigate it.” And Kurt’s death, Dr. Hartshorne told me, was, without a doubt, suicide. He also leaked me documents and information related to Kurt’s death as I was doing research because he wanted to make sure I knew every aspect of how it was investigated.
Dr. Hartshorne died a year after Heavier Than Heaven came out. He was a base jumper, leaping from the sides of mountains as a hobby when he wasn’t excelling in his professional life. There is so much conspiracy hubbub on the Internet about Kurt’s death that it disturbs me, but nothing offends me more than reading that Dr. Hartshorne’s death is yet another part in “the chain” of the “massive cover-up.” Dr. Hartshorne had completed 501 successful base jumps and, apparently, we are to believe that on the 502nd jump the conspiracy rolled in, blew the wind in a new direction, and took his life.
But back before Dr. Hartshorne died, I questioned him several times about why the toxicology report showed a level of heroin that might have been fatal for others but didn’t kill Kurt. He told me that longtime hard-core addicts can build a tolerance that creates a wide variance on what a lethal dose is, or how long it would take for such a dose to cause the onset of death. He also referred me to experts who were meeting in Seattle that next week for the annual international convention—imagine this—of public health workers trying to prevent heroin overdose.
I attended that convention. I asked many of the world’s experts these questions, and they confirmed what Dr. Hartshorne had told me. One medical examiner told me there was a case of a man who had taken twice the heroin Kurt did and was still able to ride a bicycle in a laboratory. A dose of heroin that might kill a normal person wouldn’t necessarily cause the death of a serious addict. This one particularly awful piece of science also helps explain many rock ’n’ roll relapse deaths. Addicts gets clean for a long period of time, get the drug out of their system, and then relapse and use the same dose they previously used during their addiction—which is now fatal. But Kurt never got clean enough to lower his tolerance.
At that overdose convention, I saw a presentation that did more to change my attitudes and moral judgments about drug addiction, and the world’s approach to solving it, than anything else. A man took the stage and began a ten-minute slide show that started with photos of babies, then Boy Scouts, cheerleaders, two kids at a prom. It went on to show graduation photos, weddings, and families. As I watched, I had no idea what linked these people of different ages, races, and genders. It froze on a photo of a beautiful young girl, and the man stepped to the front of the stage and spoke. “Every person you’ve just seen was loved, had a family, a father, a mother, friends, some had sons, some had daughters, and all had dreams,” he said. “And everyone you just saw was someone who died in the last calendar year of an overdose of heroin, including this last one, my daughter Megan. Most of these deaths could have been prevented if we stopped looking at drug use as a moral problem and began looking at ways we can save lives with public health decisions based on science.” By the time the man was done talking, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house, even among these scientists.
The man was from Australia, and part of his presentation was how harm-reduction centers there—clinics where addicts can use drugs with medical supervision—had lowered overdose deaths, cut down on transmission rates of AIDS and hepatitis C, and given officials access to addicts so they could get treatment information into their hands, none of which is possible when someone is using in an alley. His daughter had, unfortunately, not been in a city where such a clinic was available.
“We are not going to save a single life until we stop our moral judgments about heroin addiction,” he said. “We need to start finding solutions based in science, based on policies that work, based on harm reduction, and not based on moralism.”
Kurt Cobain’s photograph did not appear among those that passed by during the slide show—this was a few years after his death. Several, though, were of slight, blond-haired, blue-eyed boys. They looked almost exactly like him.
SIX
THE LAST ROCK STAR
Legacy & Blue Eyes
In many ways, Kurt Cobain was the last rock star. I don’t mean that to diminish the numerous other great musical talents of the last twenty years, but there has not been any single performer in rock ’n’ roll since with Kurt’s combination of raw talent, charisma, ambition, and, most important, songwriting genius. There are dozens of bands that have produced classic albums, and Adele, for example, is a superstar of immense talent and voice. But Kurt had both a certain kind of rock-star bearing and a lyrical gift, and rarely are the two combined. Kurt also had a darkness that was a key element of his lyrical gift. Krist Novoselic once told me that to understand Kurt you had to understand that there was also something wrong with him, something abnormal, and it was one of the keys to his artistry. “The music was this dark, angry, beautiful, rageful thing,” Krist told me. “It had beauty, but there was something not quite right about it. It was kind of disturbed. That’s what separated him from all the other people of the era—he was an artist, and they weren’t.”
When Kurt died twenty years ago, I expected there would be many stars who would come along and vault onto the list of the all-time greats, maybe leapfrogging Kurt. For a variety of reasons, that hasn’t happened, but that dearth also magnifies Kurt’s place in history and plays a role in his legacy. His death, however tragic and ill-timed for a thousand reasons, was good timing in one particular way: he exists on a spot on the timeline of rock ’n’ roll greats, just before the last punctuation point.
This may be in part because Kurt died at the start of so many major shifts in the music industry, just as technology was transforming the entire world. It’s not just that Kurt Cobain overshadowed his peers and those who came after, but that the very playing field has changed. The last twenty years in the music industry, with the advent of MP3s, downloading, and streaming, have represented a rapid shift in the way people buy and experience music. Nevermind is one of the last rock records to end up in the collection of nearly everyone a certain age, bought as a cohesive whole—as an album, which now seems like a radical concept itself—in record stores. Today most music is sold electronically, it’s sold as songs mostly, and total music album sales are now a fraction of what they were two decades ago. Only one rock band made it to the top-ten album sales chart for 2012, and that was Mumford and Sons, who sold 1.5 million copies of Babel—compare that to Nevermind, which sold ten million copies in just one watershed year. Nevermind’s impact, both commercially and artistically, would have been significantly diminished if fans had been able to purchase a few tracks on iTunes and skip buying the entire album. Genres of music are fractionalized now to the degree that the same rock record blasting from every radio station seems an impossibility. Had his career launched ten years later, Kurt’s kind of fame, which combined celebrity and artistry, probably wouldn’t have happened. In today’s YouTube era, when sudden fame comes as much for being outrageous as it does for the quality of the songs a musician crafts, Kurt would have been adrift.
Kurt was not of these modern times. Most of Kurt’s own music collection was on cassette tapes, some of them recorded off the radio after waiting for the perfect song to come on, then trying to hit the record button at just the right moment. He spent months of his life in his crappy little apartment watching hours of MTV, trying to record a clip of a video onto his VCR or waiting to just w
atch something by his favorite band of the moment. To even find music in his youth, Kurt had to dig through musty bins of vinyl albums in record stores, looking for one particular album that seemed impossible to find, or he had to borrow an album from a friend. He drove all the way to Seattle once when he was a young teen to search for an album he’d heard on the radio and looked through several secondhand stores until he finally located it: it was an REO Speedwagon record that just a few years later he would have been incredibly embarrassed to have owned. In all these instances, Kurt had to interact with other humans, record-store clerks, or his buddies to buy or borrow records, which created a sense of community. Kurt couldn’t go to Amazon and download a song instantly—he had to search the physical world. And in the physical world, he found lasting connections. He’d first met Krist Novoselic in high school, but their friendship—the most lasting musical connection of Kurt’s life—was formed when Kurt went into the Aberdeen Burger King, where Novoselic worked, to drop off a cassette tape for Krist. An online transfer of MP3s would not have created that one momentous meeting, the casual conversation (“Hey, what kind of music do you like?”), the eye-to-eye connection, and the lifetime friendship that ensued and went on to create Nirvana.
Kurt was a rock star in an era when everything in music took time and effort. When Nirvana needed to find a new drummer, Kurt drove an hour to The Rocket office, placed a classified ad, and then waited weeks for interested parties to mail him a letter. Making a record was so expensive, with pressing costs and studio fees, that Kurt had to find a record label to help, which required him to write hundreds of letters to labels. Every one rejected him. When Nirvana’s first single, “Love Buzz,” was finally pressed by Sub Pop, Kurt took that physical 45-RPM single in hand to Seattle radio station KCMU, drove to a phone booth afterward, used a quarter to dial the station to request his own song, and then sat in his car for a very long time waiting to hear it played. That same radio station is now KEXP, an Internet pioneer with vast numbers of listeners worldwide, where requests can be made on a website and any performance that happened in the station’s studio can be found on YouTube or in an online archive and heard anytime. That’s an entirely different universe from the one where Kurt, or I, came of age.
There was something about that earlier, slower time in history that helped make Kurt who he was. He owned only a couple hundred records, so it was a small sampling. In that pre-Internet world, he discovered and listened to many of these records on his own, or after reading clips in magazines or fanzines. His tastes were eclectic because he was exposed to music somewhat at random. He saw albums at a secondhand store and bought them many times because he liked the cover, or they were cheap. Consequently, Kurt had no idea that the Knack were considered uncool by most punk rockers. In that innocence, he absorbed their pop sound. He invited a friend over that year, sat him down saying he had a great album to play, and put on Get the Knack. The friend thought Kurt was joking. Would that pop influence have soaked in if Kurt read Pitchfork.com and realized how unhip his then-favorite band was? Would Kurt have even written “Smells Like Teen Spirit” if he’d searched the name on Google and realized he was writing an anthem to a teenage girl’s deodorant? Would early negative online reviews have scuttled the career of someone with an ego as tremendously fragile as his? And, the biggest question of all, could a band like Nirvana ever exist again, starting as a slow build, a secret discovery, touring in a van as unknowns, writing great songs because there was no money to be made from the Seattle club scene, writing lyrics and journal entries on paper for hours and hours, jumping from college radio to the mainstream and, eventually, long after they’d logged in their ten thousand hours of live performance, four years after they began, finally break through and dominate every single radio format? Or would today’s Kurt Cobain see a negative review on Facebook and hang it all up after he earned only ten likes?
Kurt had no idea music and culture would change so much, but he knew that to make a lasting impact he had to create a singular vision. He said as much in his journals: “So after figuring out songs like the Troggs’ ‘Wild Thing,’ and the Cars’ ‘My Best Friend’s Girl,’ I decided that in order to become a big, famous rock star I would need to write my very own songs instead of wasting my time learning other people’s, because if you study other people’s music too much, it may act as an obstruction on developing your own personal style . . .
“I guess what I’m trying to say is: Theory is a waste of time. Too much practice is like too much sugar.”
Kurt’s influence went beyond just fans or music critics or best-of-list makers; he inspired musicians, writers, and artists. Some were novelists, some were painters, but most were musicians. You could craft a book just out of comments other rock stars have made about Kurt.
Noel Gallagher, to Guitar World: “The only person I have any respect for as a songwriter over the last ten years is Kurt Cobain. He was the perfect cross between Lennon and McCartney.”
PJ Harvey, to Barney Hoskyns: “As a writer, I had enormous respect for him. He was an incredible writer and an incredible singer . . . He was one of those special people. There was a light inside him that you could see. He had a charisma that went beyond his physical presence.”
Patti Smith, to me: “I loved Nirvana and Kurt. I really could relate to his lyrics; I could feel them. He put every bit of himself into those songs, and that’s always the challenge of any artist.”
Pete Townshend, in The Observer: “Nirvana’s second album, Nevermind, was a breath of ‘punk’ fresh air in the musically stale early nineties.”
Neil Young, to Mojo: “He really, really inspired me. He was so great. Wonderful. One of the best, but more than that. Kurt was one of the absolute best all time for me.”
David Bowie, to Spin: “I was simply blown away when I found out that Kurt Cobain liked my work, and I always wanted to talk to him about his reasons for covering ‘The Man Who Sold the World.’ It was a good straightforward rendition and sounded somehow very honest. It would have been nice to have worked with him, but just talking would have been real cool.”
Vernon Reid, of Living Color, in Rolling Stone: “Cobain changed the course of where the music went. There are certain people where you can see the axis of musical history twisting on them: Hendrix was pivotal, Prince was pivotal, Cobain was pivotal.”
Bruce Springsteen, to Guitar World: “[Nirvana] changed everything. They opened a vein of freedom that didn’t exist previously. Kurt Cobain did something very similar to what Dylan did in the sixties, which was to sound different and get on the radio. He proved that a guitarist could sound different and still be heard. So Cobain reset a lot of very fundamental rules, and that type of artist is very few and far between.”
Bono, to Newsweek: “I remember watching Kurt come through and thinking, ‘God, this music is nuclear.’ This is really splitting the atom. They raised the temperature for everybody. Manufactured pop never looked so cold as when that heat was around.”
Bob Dylan, on the radio: “That kid has heart.”
Michael Stipe, to Newsweek: “I know what the next Nirvana recording was going to sound like. It was going to be very quiet and acoustic, with lots of stringed instruments. It was going to be an amazing fucking record, and I’m a little bit angry at him for killing himself. He and I were going to record a trial run of the album, a demo tape. It was all set up. He had a plane ticket. He had a car picking him up. And at the last minute he called, and said, ‘I can’t come.’”
Dave Grohl, to NME: “I still dream about Kurt. Every time I see him in a dream, I’ll be amazed and I get this feeling that everyone else thinks he’s dead. It always feels totally real, probably because I’m a very vivid dreamer. But, in my dreams, Kurt’s usually been hiding—we’ll get together and I’ll end up asking him, ‘God, where have you been?’”
Krist Novoselic, to me: “[Music] is the most important thing about Kurt; not his death. The details of his death are just lurid . . . Kurt was expressive.
His heart was his receiver and his transmitter . . . He expressed himself in a highly creative and compelling way, and it’s affected so many people.”
Courtney Love, to me in 1999: “My favorite thing of Kurt’s was a sheet he had where he’d written out his top bands, his top fifty. One of the things I liked about him was that he was a collector, but he didn’t collect the things I did at all. He had no Bunnymen, no Hüsker Dü. There’s no Replacements, no Big Star. It’s just Saints, Sabbath. It’s Big Black and Black Flag. It’s Saccharine Trust and Celtic Frost. It’s ‘man music.’ His favorite R.E.M. record was Green. No way does he go back [into R.E.M.’s catalog] for ‘Perfect Circle,’ or ‘Catapult.’ There were a couple of things he learned from people in Olympia about ‘cutie music.’ That’s on there too: [like] Jad Fair.
“He couldn’t fucking tell you who Julian Cope was. Once we were driving around Los Angeles listening to KROQ, and ‘Killing Moon’ came on, and I love that song. And he said, ‘You just like that romantic music.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, and you like Saccharine Trust, punker-boy.’”
Courtney Love, to me in 2000: “I think Nevermind made older people feel young. It put them in touch with their sixties and seventies sense of rebellion.”
Me: “My argument has always been that Nevermind was a success because the emotion of the songs was so apparent, even without the lyrics.”
Courtney Love: “Exactly. But a lot of things happened subsequent to that album coming out—all the other signings of bands, the stampede, the [Grunge] phenomenon—and people forgot that it really was the songs. And the magic. You connect with an audience when you have magic, when your voice connects with a listener. And Kurt had that magic.”
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