Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of the Rock Stars 1955-1994

by David Hepworth

  The news got out just as quickly as the news of Buddy Holly’s death in 1959, and largely by the same route, the radio. It immediately struck a similar chord with a very different generation. Nirvana’s second album, Nevermind, which had been released in 1991, did something more for Generation X than other, better-known albums had done for their parents. The lyrics of Nevermind were opaque but you could read the band’s intentions in the sound. The people who mourned felt it said something that needed saying on their behalf. Following Cobain’s death it seemed to mean something more. Seattle’s record stores ran out of stock of Nirvana’s records. Some people wanted to become fans in order to join in the feeling of loss. At the gathering that took place in Seattle on the Sunday somebody was already wearing a T-shirt saying ‘Kurt died for your sins’.

  Kurt Cobain was a genuine rock star, possibly the last one. If there was anything manufactured about him, he did the manufacturing himself. He had a powerful personality and that personality was always very near the surface. He believed in his music. He also believed in the world from which it had come. He believed in the indie rock ideal of an invisible republic of cool people from all walks of life, people who rejected the siren call of earthly riches, people above the shabby, grabby routine of daily life, people magically united by their ability to detect the precious sincerity buried under the distorted guitars, slackened-off drums and impassioned vocals of a few records on tiny labels, records that they treasured, talked about and passed between them like sweet secrets. He believed nothing was more important than that.

  He had no great interest in the trappings his rock stardom brought him. He just wanted to make some mark in the small world of punk rock in the Pacific North-West. That was taken out of his hands. It just so happened that Nirvana’s moment of success coincided with the apogee in the business of recorded sound, which was waxing fat at the time on sales of compact discs priced far higher than any previous sound carrier had dared. That didn’t just mean that record companies were looking at revenues they’d never seen before. It also meant that the margins on these records provided fortunes that could be spent on videos, on print advertising, and on flying journalists business class halfway around the world in order to celebrate and venerate the latest signing. It meant that if you were big in the early nineties you felt, with some justification, like the biggest thing there had ever been.

  When the third Nirvana album, In Utero, was released in September 1993 it sold 180,000 copies in the United States in the first week alone. Cobain’s manager estimated that in 1993 the singer would earn $1,400,000 from just the songwriting royalties. Their management company was called Gold Mountain. Money in this kind of quantity produces unfamiliar tensions within bands, particularly those who until that point have thought of themselves as noble conspiracies against Mammon. It also guarantees that the member of the band with the most will become the target of every false friend and low-life capable of crawling on their bellies towards the glow of the campfire. If you have a serious drug habit, as Cobain did, it will be impossible to tell real friends from the other kind. In Cobain’s case matters were complicated by the fact that he was married to Courtney Love, who loved the money and fame every bit as much as they made him uncomfortable.

  They had a small child. Although like most rock stars he was not above adopting the pose that implies nobody has had a baby before – ‘holding her in my arms is the only drug I need,’ he lied – there were signs they might find it tough to hold the family unit together. His own parents had split up when he was nine, and the strongest relationship he’d had in his family was with an aunt. Courtney’s family background was flakier. In her adolescence she was passed between members of her family like a fizzing cartoon bomb. Kurt had no illusions about the stock his daughter was descended from. In a will made out after her birth he stipulated that even if every trusted person in their circle were deceased she could not be handed over either to his father or anybody in Courtney’s family. Looking after a small baby is simultaneously the most demanding and the simplest thing anybody can be called upon to do. All it requires is to put yourself in second place. Rock stars can find this aspect a challenge.

  Kurt and Courtney had domestic confrontations on an epic scale. If the characters in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? had had heroin to add to their alcohol problems they might have experienced something like the rows that took place at their expensive home in Seattle’s millionaires enclave (their next-door neighbour was the boss of Starbucks). They prowled the three floors, numerous reception rooms and five bedrooms of their lakeside property, a house that had been decorated lavishly if not lovingly, where the platinum discs, that epitome of uncherishable swag, were stacked against the walls and the only people allowed to turn up unannounced were those who supplied the drugs. They wandered until they were out of earshot of their eighteen-month-old child and her nannies and then loudly vented their frustration with the fact that he could no longer face going out to work and she could no longer face settling down.

  Cobain was never sure how to respond to fame’s awkward embrace. When his band finally appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone, which they had prayed for and planned for over the years, Kurt wore a T-shirt bearing the slogan ‘Corporate magazines still suck’ – a strangely eloquent illustration of the indie rock paradox. Like Bruce Springsteen, Cobain retained a very strong sense of what fans expected of their heroes. They expected them never to change, never to grow up. They expected them to keep it real – whatever keeping it real means to a multi-millionaire. They wanted everybody else to share in their special relationship with the artist but didn’t want that relationship to become any less special.

  The note he wrote immediately before shooting himself, poignantly addressed to an imaginary friend of his childhood, is in some respects like a reader’s letter to a music paper. There’s the same tendency to confuse music with life. In it he said he didn’t feel the same about playing music as he used to feel. This made him feel guilty ‘beyond words’. He felt bad about the fact that he was unable to enjoy the audience’s appreciation like Freddie Mercury did. ‘The worst crime I can think of would be to rip people off by faking it and pretending as if I’m having 100% fun.’ He asks himself ‘Why don’t you enjoy it?’ and answers, ‘I don’t know.’ He finishes with a line from Neil Young: ‘It’s better to burn out than to fade away.’

  These aren’t just the words of somebody who has fallen out of love with playing. Nor are they just the words of somebody with a serious heroin habit. Nor are they just the words of somebody battling depression who possibly senses he’s married the wrong woman. These are the words of a man who has grown up with all his hopes and dreams invested in the sole aim of becoming a rock star, and more than that a rock star in the mould of his heroes, and has found that he simply can’t live up to the demands of the role in which he has cast himself. He is twenty-seven years old. He has a wife and child and all the material comforts anyone twice his age could ever dream of, yet he feels hollow and used up. It’s like reading a letter from a priest who fears he has lost his vocation.

  Cobain had invested so much belief in his own heroes that he couldn’t face the idea that people were expecting as much of him as he’d expected of them. For a start he couldn’t deal with the attention. The reality of being famous is frightening. People who dream of being rock stars dream of the fame without having the slightest idea what it means. Fame deprives us of the civil liberty we enjoy but never value; the freedom to pass unnoticed. As soon as Kurt Cobain was famous he became the centre of attention in every room he entered. He wasn’t the kind of person who could just surf that attention. He felt that when people were looking at him they were looking to him. They expected things from him. They might be looking at him and finding him wanting. They might be expecting the same things from him that he had expected from the musicians he had looked up to when he was a teenager back in the small Washington town of Aberdeen.

  The group that first inspired Kurt Cobain wer
e the Melvins. He saw them play in a parking lot in 1983 not long after they had formed. They played loud, fast, intemperate rock and roll which was clearly more for their own pleasure than anyone else’s. Cobain was sixteen. ‘This was what I’d been looking for,’ he wrote in his journal. The Melvins never troubled the charts, despite having a short period on a major label in the wake of Nirvana’s success when those labels were signing up anyone who could be called ‘grunge’. In an interview to promote their nineteenth album in 2013 their leader Buzz Osborne said he had no time for people who asked him if he was jealous of Kurt Cobain’s money and fame. ‘You think I would trade places with a dead guy? No. I win. He loses. I’m very happy with who I am and exactly what I’m doing, and it’s way more than I ever expected. When I started this band thirty years ago my ambition was just to play a real show. And I surpassed that within six months. The rest is just gravy.’

  When Cobain followed what he thought was the logic of Neil Young’s observation about burning out and fading away, Osborne’s band had already been together ten years, which was longer than the Beatles had managed. At the time of writing they’re still going. The market for rock bands has, in the words of the economists, matured. All over the world there are hundreds of bands like the Melvins who have somehow managed to keep going. They’ve done that through careful housekeeping, cultivating their small fanbase and putting out of their minds any notion of being rock stars. Some are eaten up by the idea of what might have been. Others are as content with their lot as Buzz Osborne. The Melvins make another album in the hope that they can make another one after that. They play tonight’s show in the hope that there will be another one tomorrow. When the time comes, they won’t burn out. They will fade away. By refusing to play the game they may win in the end.

  1994 PLAYLIST

  Bruce Springsteen, ‘Streets Of Philadelphia’

  Beck, Mellow Gold

  Morrissey, Vauxhall And I

  Pink Floyd, The Division Bell

  Spin Doctors, Turn It Upside Down

  The Rolling Stones, Voodoo Lounge

  The Melvins, Prick

  Portishead, Dummy

  Nirvana, Unplugged in New York

  Oasis, Definitely Maybe

  9 AUGUST 1995

  MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIFORNIA

  Revenge of the nerds

  IN 1995 ONLY the most adventurous 15 per cent of Americans had ever used the internet. Email was starting to be available to those working in more advanced businesses but it wasn’t for everybody. The internet still looked like a technical undertaking rather than an artistic or commercial one. In 1995 computers took a long time to get started and made a lot of noise doing it. Once you had got on the internet it was a challenge to tell the difference between the content and the code that delivered it. The user-friendly skins which had been promised were yet to arrive.

  Similarly, in 1995 only 7 per cent of the population of the UK had a mobile phone. Not one single person in the worldwide entertainment business was thinking about them. Not even the phone companies thought this technology would be used for anything other than work. The speed at which everybody was proved wrong was breathtaking. Only four years later a mobile phone was being sold in the UK every four seconds. Even then very few people were predicting that within less than twenty years these devices would supplant the personal stereo, the home CD player, the radio, the diary, the address book and the camera, or that they would reshape the whole space in which human interaction takes place, or that the consequences would be felt everywhere from the bedroom of a twelve-year-old to the Oval Office.

  Even the people paid to know what was going to happen in the future had no idea how quickly that future was bearing down on them. In the spring of 1995 an executive of the electronics giant Philips blandly assured the German developer of a new sound compression technology that there would never be a commercial MP3 player. The new Pentium chips had only just become capable of playing a whole MP3 file without stalling; as computer hard drives were getting bigger and cheaper, it was conceivable that some of them might one day be able to accommodate an entire album of music. On 26 May 1995 Bill Gates sent a memo to everybody who worked for Microsoft telling them that the future was the internet and warning them that it could change their way of doing things. In 1995, Steve Jobs was still working for NeXT and was assuring the world that his former employer Apple didn’t have much of a future.

  In periods of great change it’s less important to have a vision of the future in which you believe than it is to have a vision of the future in which you can persuade people to invest. Jim Clark had such a vision. In 1995 he was briefly employing his talent for making money as the CEO of a company called Netscape. The key employee at Netscape was a twenty-two-year-old nerd called Marc Andreessen. When Andreessen was at university he had played a part in developing the browser known as Mosaic, which promised to turn the experience of looking at pages on the internet from something that appeared to be a page of specifications into something that felt more like a magazine. Clark’s plan was to launch Netscape on the stock market before any of his competitors. He hired an experienced corporate PR person and instructed her to ‘promote Marc like a rock star’.

  At the beginning of August 1995 the British press was getting more excited about a pair of British rock bands, more than at any stage since the Beatles-versus-Stones contests of the mid-sixties. On one side there was the clever, arty Blur. On the other was the plodding but charismatic Oasis. Both paid excessive tribute to the greats of the sixties, as if they could never hope to equal their elders and betters. The first was southern, the second northern. The first was middle class, the second working class. They both had singles coming out on the same day. Who would win? Who would win the nation’s heart? They billed it as the battle of Britpop. It kept Britain thoroughly absorbed for a year. The rest of the world had other concerns.

  The big story was taking place on Wall Street, although nobody in show business realized it. On 9 August shares in Netscape were offered for sale on the stock market. Demand was so great that trading had to be suspended after two hours. The efforts to position Marc Andreessen as a rock star had clearly excited the market.

  In 1995 the first port of call for information about business, or anything else, was tomorrow’s newspaper. The front page of USA Today on 10 August announced that shares in Netscape had risen from the offer price of $18 to a high of $171. This news was the starting pistol that began the great internet gold rush. This massively destabilized the worldwide communications and entertainment industry. It made a handful of people very rich indeed. It swept away many of the old certainties.

  As had been the case in the original gold rush, the people who got rich were the ones who sold the shovels. By the end of the day of the stock launch, Jim Clark’s share of the company was worth $633 million. He bought a plane and had the number 633 painted on its tail. The last issue of Wired magazine for the year announced ‘the new Hollywood: silicon replaces superstars’. At the beginning of 1996 Marc Andreessen was on the cover of Time magazine. He didn’t look like the traditional millionaire. He was wearing a black sweater, Levi’s, his feet were bare, and he was sitting on a golden throne. The headline was ‘The Golden Geeks’. All over the world smart young people looked on and dreamed about being tech stars in the way the previous generation had dreamed of being rock stars.

  Andreessen didn’t have long in the spotlight. The following year Microsoft responded by bundling their Internet Explorer browser with their Windows system. That year Netscape lost $132 million. In time the company was sold to AOL. In 1996 Steve Jobs was rehired to save Apple. His first big product was the candy-coloured iMac, which looked more like a pleasure machine than a work tool. People started realizing they could rip their CDs into MP3 files and play them from the computer. By 2001, when the pipes down which these noughts and ones travelled had grown wider and the parcels of data neater and more easily manipulated, the time was right for the iPod, the very mass-market MP3 p
layer the man from Philips had solemnly promised would never arrive.

  The phenomenal success of that product made Jobs not only the most powerful man in tech but also the most powerful man in leisure, and the most powerful man in the music business, for a while more famous, admired and envied than all the rock stars in the world put together. In the new world he had ushered into being there was no product release, no new album from Beyoncé or Jay Z or Adele, that could be quite as exciting or could touch quite as many people as the release of a new piece of free software. They promised content would be king. It wasn’t. Distribution was king, as it always had been.

  This was echoed in the world of dance music, which was what all pop music turned out to be. Here it was less about star names and devoted followers and more about one-off singles often released under mysterious names. Here the important thing was the tribal gathering. Here the new high priests were the DJs who could be paid huge sums of money for their ability to raise a room to a pitch of euphoria. The same digital technology that made it simple to distribute and copy music also put into the hands of young people all over the world music-making tools previously beyond the reach of all but the most successful professionals. A punk rock record made in the garage used to sound like a record made in the garage. Now that we all had access to the same tools there was no audible distinction between professional and amateur.