Lyrically, the verses were tightly crafted, with a haunting, tormented chorus of “You know you’re right.” The first verse was a list of declarations beginning with, “I would never bother you / I would never promise to / If I say that word again / I would move away from here.” One couplet—that could only come from Kurt Cobain—went: “I am walking in the piss / Always knew it would come to this.” The second verse shifts to statements about a woman—“She just wants to love herself”—and closes with two lines that have to be sarcastic: “Things have never been so swell / And I have never been so well.” The plaintive wail in the chorus couldn’t be clearer: “Pain,” he cried, stretching the word out for almost ten seconds, giving it four syllables, and leaving an impression of inescapable torment.
Near the end of the session, Kurt looked for the black cat, but it had vanished. It was early evening when they finished, and the band celebrated by going out to dinner. Kurt seemed elated and told Robert Lang he wanted to book more time when they returned from Europe.
The next day Kurt phoned his father. They talked for over an hour, the longest conversation between the two Cobain men in over a decade. They discussed Iris and her prognosis—the doctors had sent her back to Montesano—and their respective families. Don said he wanted to see Frances, and Kurt proudly recited all the latest things she could say and do. As for their own strained relationship, they avoided reviewing their disappointments in each other, but Don was able to utter the words that many times earlier had eluded him. “I love you Kurt,” he told his son. “I love you too, Dad,” Kurt replied. At the end of the conversation, Kurt invited his father to come see his new house when he returned from tour. When Don hung up, it was one of the few times Jenny Cobain had ever seen her usually stoic husband weeping.
Two days later Kurt flew to France. The first show had Nirvana scheduled to play a variety show. Kurt came up with a solution that allowed him to save face: They purchased black pinstripe suits—he called them their “Knack outfits.” When the show began, they performed straight-ahead versions of three songs, but dressed in their attire it had the same effect as a comedy skit. In Paris, the band did a photo session with photographer Youri Lenquette; one of the pictures showed Kurt jokingly putting a gun to his head. Even this early in the tour, those close to him noticed a change in Kurt. “He was a mess at that point,” Shelli Novoselic recalled. “It was sad. He was just so worn out.” Kurt traveled in a separate tour bus from Novoselic and Grohl, but Shelli thought their relationship seemed better: “It wasn’t as tense as the previous tour, but maybe it all had just become normal.”
The next shows were in Portugal and Madrid. By Spain—only three dates into a 38-date tour—Kurt was already talking about cancelling. He phoned Courtney in a rage. “He hated everything, everybody,” Love told David Fricke. “Hated, hated, hated....He was in Madrid, and he’d walked through the audience. The kids were smoking heroin off tinfoil, and going, ‘Kurt! Smack!’ and giving him the thumbs up. He called me crying....He did not want to be a junkie icon.”
He also did not want to split with Courtney, but their increasing fights over the phone—mostly about his drug use—plus the separation caused by the tour, made him fearful of this outcome. He had wanted her on the road with him, but she was finishing post-production on her album. Kurt went to Jeff Mason and asked what would happen if he cancelled the tour: Mason informed him that because of past cancellations, they would be liable for damages from any missed shows, unless there was illness. Kurt fixated on this point, and in the tour bus the next day, kept joking that since the insurance only covered illness, if he was dead, they’d still have to play.
Though Kurt was heartbroken at seeing European teenagers equate him with drug abuse, the anxiety that overcame him did in fact spring from his addiction. In Seattle he knew where to find heroin, and it knew how to find him. In Europe, even if he found a drug connection, he was terrified of being arrested at a border crossing. Instead Kurt employed the services of a London physician who was well known for his liberal prescribing of legal but powerful narcotics. Kurt had prescriptions for tranquilizers and morphine, and he used both to cut the pains of his withdrawal. When he ran into trouble on tour, all it took was one phone call to this physician, who immediately wrote out prescriptions without question, and international couriers were used to ferry these to Kurt.
On February 20, a travel day, Kurt turned 27. John Silva jokingly gave him a carton of cigarettes as a present. Four days later, while in Milan, Kurt and Courtney celebrated their second anniversary, but they did so apart: She was still in London doing press for her album. They did talk on the phone and planned to celebrate when they reunited a week later.
By February 25, their second of two nights in Milan, something had shifted in Kurt. He no longer just seemed depressed—there was a defeatism about him. He came to Krist that day and said he wanted to cancel the tour. “He gave me some bullshit, absurd reason for why he wanted to blow it off,” Novoselic recalled. Kurt complained about his stomach, though Krist had heard this protest hundreds of times by now. Krist asked why he’d agreed to the tour in the first place, and reminded Kurt a cancellation would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. “There was something going on with him in his personal life that was really troubling him,” Krist observed. “There was some kind of situation.” But Kurt didn’t share any specifics with Krist—he had long ago stopped being intimate with his old friend.
Kurt didn’t cancel the tour that night, but the only reason he didn’t, Novoselic theorized, was because the next date was in Slovenia, where many of Krist’s relatives would attend. “He hung on there for me,” Krist recalled. “But I think his mind was made up.” During their three days in Slovenia the rest of the band toured the countryside, but Kurt stayed in his room. Novoselic was reading One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and he explained the plot to Kurt, thinking it would distract him: “It’s about this guy in a Gulag, who still makes the most of his day.” Kurt’s only response was, “God, and he wants to live! Why would you try to live?”
When the band arrived in Munich for two scheduled shows at Terminal Eins, starting March 1, Kurt complained he felt ill. He uncharacteristically phoned his 52-year-old cousin Art Cobain back in Aberdeen, waking him up in the middle of the night. Art hadn’t seen Kurt in almost two decades, and they weren’t close, but he was glad to listen. “He was getting really fed up with his way of life,” Art told People. Art invited Kurt to the upcoming Cobain family reunion when he returned from Europe.
Everyone who saw Kurt that day reported a sense of desperation and panic to his every action. Adding to his woes was the venue they were playing: It was an abandoned airport terminal turned into a club, and had horrid acoustics. At soundcheck, Kurt asked Jeff Mason for an advance on his per diem, and announced, “I’ll be back for the show.” Mason was surprised Kurt was leaving, considering how loudly he’d complained about feeling ill, and he inquired where he was bound. “I’m going to the train station,” Kurt answered. Everyone on the tour knew what this meant; Kurt might as well have announced, “I’m going to buy drugs.”
When he returned several hours later, Kurt’s mood was no better. Backstage he phoned Courtney and their conversation ended in a fight, as had all their talks over the past week. Kurt then called Rosemary Carroll and told her he wanted a divorce. When he put down the phone, he stood on the side of the stage and watched the opening act. Kurt picked all Nirvana’s opening bands, and for this leg of the tour he had selected the Melvins. “This was what I was looking for,” he’d written in his journal back in 1983, when he’d first seen this band and they had transformed his life. In many ways, he loved the Melvins more than he loved Nirvana—they had meant salvation at a time when he needed to be saved. It had been only eleven years since that fateful day in the parking lot of the Montesano Thriftway, but so much had changed in his life. Yet in Munich, their show only made him feel nostalgic.
When the Melvins finish
ed, Kurt marched into their dressing room and unleashed a long list of problems to Buzz Osborne. Buzz had never seen Kurt so distraught, not even when Kurt had been kicked out of Wendy’s house back in high school. Kurt announced he was going to break up the band, fire his management, and divorce Courtney. Before he walked onstage, Kurt announced to Buzz, “I should just be doing this solo.” “In retrospect,” Buzz observed, “he was talking about his entire life.”
Seventy minutes later, Nirvana’s show was over, prematurely ended by Kurt. It had been a standard set, but, strangely, had included two covers by the Cars—“My Best Friend’s Girl,” and “Moving in Stereo”—and after this latter tune, Kurt walked offstage. Backstage, Kurt grabbed his agent, Don Muller, who happened to be at the show, and announced, “That’s it. Cancel the next gig.” There were only two shows before their scheduled break, which Muller arranged to postpone.
Kurt saw a doctor the next morning who signed a slip—required for their insurance—stating that he was too ill to perform. The physician recommended he take two months off. Despite the diagnosis, Novoselic thought it all an act: “He was just too burned out.” Krist, and several members of the crew, flew back to Seattle, planning on returning for the next leg of the tour on March 11. Kurt headed to Rome, where he was to meet up with Courtney and Frances.
On March 3 Kurt checked into room 541 in Rome’s five-star Hotel Excelsior. Courtney and Frances were slated to arrive later that night. During the day, Kurt explored the city with Pat Smear, visiting tourist attractions, but mostly gathering props for what he imagined would be a romantic reunion—he and Courtney had been apart for 26 days, the longest span of their relationship. “He’d gone to the Vatican and stolen some candlesticks, big ones,” Courtney recalled. “He also kicked off a piece of the Colosseum for me.” Additionally, he’d purchased a dozen red roses, some lingerie, rosary beads from the Vatican, and a pair of three-carat diamond earrings. He also sent a bellboy out to fill a prescription for Rohypnol, a tranquilizer that can aid heroin withdrawal.
Love did not arrive until much later than expected—she had been in London during the day doing press for her upcoming album. At one of those interviews, Courtney had taken a Rohypnol in front of the writer. “I know this is a controlled substance,” she told Select. “I got it from my doctor; it’s like Valium.” Courtney was seeing the same London doctor as Kurt. When Courtney and Frances finally arrived in Rome, the family, their nannies, and Smear had a warm reunion, and ordered champagne to celebrate—Kurt didn’t drink any. After a while, Cali and a second nanny took Frances to her room, and Smear left. Finally alone, Courtney and Kurt made out, but she was exhausted from traveling, and the Rohypnol put her to sleep. Kurt had wanted to make love, she later reported, but she was too exhausted. “Even if I wasn’t in the mood,” she told David Fricke, “I should have just laid there for him. All he needed was to get laid.”
At six in the morning, she awoke and found him on the floor, pale as a ghost, with blood coming out of one nostril. He was fully dressed, wearing his brown corduroy coat, and there was a wad of $1,000 in cash in his right hand. Courtney had seen Kurt close to death from heroin overdoses on more than a dozen occasions, but this wasn’t a heroin overdose. Instead she found a three-page note clutched in the tight, cold ball of his left hand.
Chapter 23
LIKE HAMLET
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
MARCH 1994
Like Hamlet, I have to choose between life and death.
—From the Rome suicide note.
When Kurt sat down to compose his suicide note in the Excelsior Hotel, he thought of Shakespeare and the Prince of Denmark. Two months earlier, during his attempt to dry out at the Canyon Ranch, his doctor warned he had to choose whether to continue with his addiction—which would ultimately mean death—or get sober, and that his answer would determine his very existence. Kurt replied, “You mean, like Hamlet?”
In his Rome note, Kurt cited Shakespeare’s most famous character: “Dr. Baker says that, like Hamlet, I have to choose between life and death. I’m choosing death.” The rest of the note touched on how sick he was of touring, and how Courtney “didn’t love him anymore.” This final point he reinforced by accusing his wife of sleeping with Billy Corgan, who he had always been jealous of. In one of their conversations that week, she’d mentioned Corgan had invited her to go on vacation. She declined, but Kurt heard it as a threat, and his vivid imagination went wild with it. “I’d rather die than go through another divorce,” he wrote, referencing his parents’ split.
Upon discovering Kurt’s lifeless body, Courtney called the front desk, and Kurt was rushed to Umberto I Polyclinic Hospital. Love had retrieved two empty blister packs of Rohypnol next to Kurt—he had taken 60 of the aspirin-size pills, individually removing each from a plastic-and-foil container. Rohypnol has ten times the potency of Valium, and the combined effect was enough to put him very close to death. “He was dead, legally dead,” Love reported later. Yet after his stomach was pumped, Kurt had a slight pulse, though he was in a coma. Doctors told Courtney it was a matter of chance: He might recover uninjured; he might have brain damage; or he might die. During a break in her vigil, she took a cab to the Vatican, purchased more rosary beads, and got down on her knees and prayed. She called his family in Grays Harbor, and they too prayed for him, though his half-sister, eight-year-old Brianne, couldn’t figure out why Kurt was “in Tacoma.”
Later that day, Cable News Network interrupted a broadcast to report Kurt had died of an overdose. Krist and Shelli picked up their phone to hear a Gold Mountain representative with the same sad news. Most of the initial reports of Kurt’s death had originated from David Geffen’s office—a female identifying herself as Courtney had left a message with the label head saying Kurt was dead. After an hour of panic and grief, it was discovered the caller was an impersonator.
As friends in America were being told he was dead, Kurt showed his first signs of life in twenty hours. There were tubes in his mouth, so Courtney handed him a pencil and a notepad, and he jotted, “Fuck you,” followed by, “Get these fucking tubes out of my nose.” When he finally spoke, he asked for a strawberry milkshake. As he stabilized, Courtney had him moved to the American Hospital, where she thought he’d get better care.
The next day, Dr. Osvaldo Galletta held a press conference and announced: “Kurt Cobain is clearly and dramatically improving. Yesterday, he was hospitalized at the Rome American Hospital in a state of coma and respiratory failure. Today, he is recovering from a pharmacological coma, due not to narcotics, but the combined effect of alcohol and tranquilizers that had been medically prescribed by a doctor.” Courtney told reporters that Kurt wasn’t going to “get away” from her that easily. “I’ll follow him through hell,” she said.
When Kurt awoke, he was back in his own small piece of hell. In his mind, nothing had changed: All his problems were still with him, but now were accentuated by the embarrassment of a highly publicized fall from grace. He had always feared arrest; this overdose, and having been declared dead by CNN, was about the only thing that could have been worse.
And despite a near death experience and twenty hours in a coma, he still craved opiates. Later, he would brag that a dealer visited his hospital room and pumped heroin through the IV; he also phoned Seattle and arranged for a gram of heroin to be left in the bushes outside his home.
Back in Aberdeen, Wendy was much relieved to hear Kurt was better. Wendy told the Aberdeen Daily World her son was “in a profession he doesn’t have the stamina to be in.” She told reporter Claude Iosso that she had handled the news well until she looked at the wall: “I took one look at my son’s picture and saw his eyes and I lost it. I didn’t want my son gone.” Wendy had health struggles of her own that year: She had been fighting breast cancer.
Kurt left the hospital on March 8 and four days later flew back to Seattle. On the plane, he asked Courtney for Rohypnol so loudly other passengers overheard him; she told him they were all
gone. When they arrived at Sea-Tac airport, he was taken off the plane in a wheelchair, “looking horrible,” according to Travis Myers, a customs agent. Yet when Myers asked for an autograph, Kurt consented, writing, “Hey, Travis, no cannabis.” In America, the scrutiny he dreaded was mostly absent because the official Gold Mountain statement had declared Rome an accidental overdose—few knew he’d taken 60 pills or left a note. Kurt didn’t even tell his best friend, Dylan. “I thought it was an accidental OD, which was the party line, and was believable,” Dylan recalled. Even Novoselic and Grohl were told it was an accidental overdose. Everyone in the organization had witnessed Kurt’s overdoses before; many were resigned his drug use would one day claim his life.
The European tour had been postponed, but the band and crew were told to prepare for Lollapalooza. Kurt had never wanted to play the festival, and he had yet to sign the contract, but management assumed he’d yield. “Nirvana had confirmed they were going to appear on the 1994 Lollapalooza,” said promoter Marc Geiger. “Nothing was in writing at that point, but they were totally confirmed, and we were working on finishing up the contracts.” Nirvana’s take of box office revenues would have been around $8 million.
Kurt felt the offer wasn’t fair; he didn’t want to perform in a festival environment, and he simply didn’t want to tour. Courtney felt he should take the money, arguing that Nirvana needed the career boost. “He was being threatened with being sued for the shows he didn’t do in Europe,” Dylan recalled. “And I think he felt like he was going to be financially ruined.” Rosemary Carroll remembered Kurt emphatically announcing he didn’t want to play the festival. “Everyone around him basically told him that he had to, in his personal life and his professional life,” she said. Kurt handled this situation as he dealt with most conflict: He avoided it, and by stalling, he killed the deal. “He was withdrawing, not from drugs, but from dealing with people,” Carroll recalled. “It was such a difficult time that I think people exaggerated and blamed his drug use when they weren’t getting what they wanted out of him.”
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