HEART-SHAPED BOX

The morning of April 8, 1994, I was rudely stirred from sleep by a telephone that would not take a hint. I picked it up and slammed it down without answering at least three times, but whoever was on the other end was not deterred. I did not answer the phone before noon. As a callow, immature, hard-drinking twentysomething, this seemed to me reasonable behavior.

I was in a downtown hotel in Seattle, on assignment for SPIN, writing a story about Sub Pop, the Seattle-based record company that had more or less birthed grunge. I was pretending to work there so I could report to the readers of SPIN what it was like to work at a famous independent record label. I took my job seriously, so I'd been out late drinking the night before with a band on the Sub Pop label called Velocity Girl, who were in town to play Sub Pop's Sixth Anniversary party, scheduled for Saturday. 

I called Daniel back. He put me on with Craig Marks, the magazine's whip-smart, no-nonsense Executive Editor. Craig told me what to do: go out to the house, interview the fans, call the medical examiner, get more details, talk to the cops, talk to anyone of Kurt's friends I could track down willing to talk. Do my job, in essence. Act like a journalist. In a very macabre sense, SPIN had lucked out. I was their man on the scene, and I was on the scene first. We could be out ahead of the story. This is what reporters are supposed to live for.

Therein lay the problem: I wasn't a reporter. I wasn't a journalist. I had little reportorial training and was not particularly interested in developing the necessary skills. I'd talked my way into a job at SPIN because I knew about music (I was a musician) and I could write (I was a writer). I'd never interviewed a medical examiner or a cop or really anyone I didn’t absolutely have to in order to cobble together a story. Further complicating matters, I was friends with Kurt. We'd known each other a bit before his band had rocketed to fame and fortune, but mostly during that vertiginous ascent, which was a deeply weird trip for anyone even tangentially involved, especially for Kurt.

He had wanted to be successful, but on his terms, and had no way of dealing with the overwhelming demands put on him by his stratospheric and entirely unforeseen—no matter who in retrospect claims otherwise—triumph. Kurt had hoped for a gold record, worked hard to make a gold record, because that would mean he could keep making music and not starve, which was at the time his fondest wish. 

"Smells Like Teen Spirit" was not meant to be a hit single. It was meant to set up the second single, "Come As You Are," which everyone thought had real potential as a crossover, mainstream hit. The record company initially shipped only about 45,000 albums to U.S. stores. When Nevermind exploded, he was horrified by the kinds of fans it attracted. All of that is public record, and should you wish, you can read more, at tedious length, in (among many others—it's a cottage industry!) The Big Book of Nirvana Things (Authorized) by Chapster McFeels. Some of the things Kurt, Dave, and Krist told good ol' Chapster were true, but most of it's just an excuse to air grievances that none of them could bring themselves to discuss face to face, back in the day. Much of the carping is petty and dumb, but it's a breezy read and aces in the underrated score-settling subgenre.

It was therefore a shock but not a surprise when he committed suicide. Anyone who uses the working title I Hate Myself and Want To Die, even in jest, for his third album, as Kurt famously did, has issues with self-loathing and depression. Those issues were inextricably tied to his appeal, and his death cemented that appeal to those in his audience, and later generations, who responded to his inability to handle modern life. 

But that is not all Kurt was, and it wasn't even very often who Kurt was. Most of the time he was a kind, gentle, caring, friendly, open, curious, intelligent, insecure, quiet young man. He could also be a stubborn, mouthy, contrarian prick. But that was rare, and only when he felt cornered, or threatened, or was being protective of his loved ones. That's not who he was to his friends. That's not who he was to me.

The label owners, Jonathan Poneman and Bruce Pavitt, were both in the office that day, partly because the Sub Pop Sixth Anniversary party was scheduled for the next night, and they had to decide whether or not to go forward with it. Most of the rock journalists in the country would be flying in for the party—or would have been flying in for the party, and now would be flying in to cover Kurt's suicide.

They took the kid out on the terrace below the office, and tried to console him. There's really not much you can do to console someone in that situation. He was "just" a fan. "Just" one of the millions of kids whose heart Kurt had just broken. He stood out on the terrace for a long time, racked with sobs. They let him stay there. We left him alone. It seemed like the right thing to do.

A cake showed up from Danny Goldberg, head of Atlantic Records and formerly founder of Gold Mountain Management, who managed Nirvana. The cake was in celebration of Sub Pop's birthday, and had been decorated with caricatures of Poneman and Pavitt in icing. It was a deeply weird moment. Nils told me to go get some beer and bring it back to the office. He also gave me some of his Xanax, for which he had a prescription. 

The only sane response at that moment, it seemed to us, was to numb the pain. The prevailing mood throughout that weekend was shock and awe, tinged at the edges with a deep sorrow that had not yet surfaced. The Sub Pop party (they decided it was too late and too impractical to cancel) turned into a wake instead of a party, which seemed appropriate. 

The next day, after the private memorial service for Kurt, a group of us stood smoking outside. I may not have been smoking, myself, but I was smoking-adjacent. No one said anything until Dave Grohl, grinding his dead cigarette under his heel, shook his head and chuckled, "Talk about passive-aggressive." He wasn't trying to be mean or clever. He was trying to deal with his emotions. 

Many of us then went back to the house at Courtney's invitation. A lot of people came and went that afternoon, though most of it's a blur. I remember hanging out with Kurt's mother, Wendy, and his younger sister Kim, who at that age bore an uncanny resemblance to her brother. His mom told a story about one time making breakfast and whistling and Kurt sitting at the table just looking at her, asking, "Why are you happy?" 

Courtney walked around in a state of semi-lucid grief that manifested mostly in a manic whirl of activity—she gave guided tours of the room above the garage where Kurt had been found (I did not participate), she went out and visited the public memorial for Kurt taking place that same day (or so I was told), she smoked a lot. I can't imagine the weight of sadness and responsibility bearing down on her in that moment.

In a way, I wasn't completely wrong. Nirvana was seen at the time by many as the culmination of the movement of various strands of punk/indie/alternative/whatever into the mainstream of popular culture. What we did not understand at the time was that Nirvana marked the end, not the beginning, of that movement. After Nirvana, post-Kurt, that movement was co-opted and destroyed by an industry that had no idea what to do with it. 

This you could probably have seen coming, and, in an unfairly simplistic way, can be reduced to one word: money. As soon as the big record companies decided that hitherto hidden or underground artists might also harbor hidden riches, the game was more or less over. Took a few years of compromise and rejection (by the public, by the companies, by the bands themselves) to understand that easy lesson. 

By the time they did, it was too late. A new sensibility gripped the music business, frustrated with the anti-star mentality of its biggest artists; many of those same artists, unused to any attempt to exercise control over the content or presentation of their music, soured on the major label experience and were either dropped and went back to their underground hideouts, or dropped themselves and did the same, having decided that careerism was not a viable path for a musician with artistic pretensions. The music business then moved on to more malleable pop/rock acts and began a decline from which it has never really recovered (aided and abetted by the Internet, but that's a subject outside the scope of this article).

But Nirvana remains—Kurt remains—forever trapped in the amber of his golden-haired youth. The liner notes he wrote inside Incesticide included the statement: "If any of you in any way hate homosexuals, people of different color, or women, please do this one favor for us—leave us the fuck alone! Don't come to our shows and don't buy our records." Well, that didn't happen. It was laudable as a sentiment, as a mission statement, but its ineffectuality could only have made worse Kurt's sense of futility. The people Kurt Cobain did not want to listen to his band's music are now in charge. Everything he was against has risen against us, and it's not his fault. He's regarded now as a Gen X icon, whatever that means, as the voice of that generation, and kids who were not born when he died and have likely never heard a note of his music beyond "Teen Spirit" wear Nirvana T-shirts to signify… what, exactly? A kind of vague anti-establishment attitude that they don't in fact believe in and an embrace of corporatism that the very fact of buying and wearing the dead band’s merch contradicts?