Senseless Apprentices: 30 Years since the death of Kurt Cobain
Remembering where I was when I heard the news. Remembering I’m still friends with so many of the people I sat with that night. We played the music, had some drinks. We were just kids.
It was 30 years ago that Kurt Cobain died. Remember, we’d all had a ‘scare’ with the earlier news that he was in hospital, a few weeks ahead of this final, tragic take he’d had an attempt, a cry for help. I remember thinking it was the same with Prince, many years on. In fact, when that first story broke about him collapsing, cancelling a show, I knew then and there he wasn’t much longer for this world.
Anyway, when Cobain died — early April 1994 — we met in a friend’s garage. It was like the set to That 70s Show, but crucially, several years before that show was even a thing. Look, it might have even been a week after the death of Cobain. News travelled a lot slower back then. We would have had to have waited anyway. For a Saturday night. We were still in school.
We drank a lot of beer, and we made a shrine to Cobain. We lit candles, played the music, it had been a bonding agent for many of us. Someone cut out a picture of Kurt’s head and attached it to a LifeSize, floor-to-ceiling poster of Hulk Hogan. Over his face. That was high school bookended for me right there. When I left intermediate, I was a pro-wrestling fan. It wasn’t cool anymore, almost overnight, and I had to keep that quiet. Hulk Hogan had passed the torch to the Ultimate Warrior anyway. When I left high school to try to go out into the world on my own, and what a balls-up that turned out to be, Kurt Cobain was dead.
I gave the keys of my Volvo to a sober driver and he took us over to Clive, we crashed the end of a big party where bands were playing. I think this was the night I ate some cat food — as a joke. I wasn’t sure who was laughing. We ended up at the pub, the great underaged gambit. Who would make it in? And who wouldn’t? It was where the night ended for some. And how it only just started to get going for others.
One of my friends from that night took his own life several years later — completely unrelated to Nirvana or Kurt Cobain of course, and I had many good times with him and many of us wondered if we weren’t quite ‘there’ for him in the ways we should have been, but it can be hard to do that ever since news started to travel a lot faster, and the world sped up. Flash forward to Prince dying, or David Bowie, even Michael Jackson — many years before either of them — and it’s gone by lunchtime. We’re all like Hamlet’s uncle moving in for the next thing to post about within a few hours. There are no Saturday night sermons in garages with the people that used to matter most.
I’d first properly heard Nirvana like most other people — when Smells Like Teen Spirit rode in like Sgt. Peppers, like Jimi Hendrix, like Bob Dylan going electric, like Madonna in a wedding dress singing Like A Virgin for the, um, very first time, at the VMAs, like Aerosmith and Run DMC collaborating. It was one of those moments that changed the wider world around it, an instant soundtrack to everything.
But actually, I’d heard the debut album, Bleach, soon to when it had been released. A friend in Auckland, older, always had the coolest records. He’d played me Van Halen’s 5150 back when it was first released. He’d introduced me to Jane’s Addiction and, um, Suicidal Tendencies. And, yes, Nirvana.
But Bleach didn’t stick. Until after I’d bought Nevermind. A few weeks of that and I had to get anything else by the band that I could. Bleach was in the back-catalogue and Incesticide was released as a stopgap until the next album. That, of course was the final album: In Utero. And it’s clearly the greatest thing Nirvana ever did. But it needed everything else to have happened for it to be the culmination of anything, and the response to everything. There was also the Unplugged album — which is charming in its way. Even if it’s a little decaffeinated by design.
I don’t listen to Nirvana all that much anymore. I can’t. And I barely ever try. But I can dial up any of those songs instantly in the Rolodex of my mind. I have butchered a few of them in bands, and I have enjoyed one or two ‘legal’ cover versions (Sinead xx).
It didn’t quite dry up overnight, but it was definitely a thing: The end of listening to NIrvana. The overkill of knowing all of the music, that vital, finite music. And knowing there’d never be anymore. And also the way it gave birth, inadvertently to so much shitty, piss-weak fluff. Cobain did not walk so that Candlebox and Silverchair could jog to wherever they thought they were getting to.
But Cobain did teach me about the Melvins. And I feel that’s the spirit of Bleach best served. And the closest I get to Nirvana most days.
The closest I get to a drink these days, is pouring one for anyone else.
So no stumbling around Hawke’s Bay at 1am cry-laughing at the death of a hero and pondering on the fly what it even was to try to mourn a reluctant celebrity; a musical influence, the brief flicker of his legend snuffed as it was just reaching the full yellow of its glow.
I guess the best thing I can think of — when I try to contemplate that its been 30 years since the death of Kurt Cobain — is that I’m still friends with most of the people that sat in that room chugging beers, and holding hands in some weird, and awkward sway. My mate said at the time, we cannot tell anyone about this. It’s our little secret. But it’s not that interesting. And the statute of limitations has well passed. (Sorry Justin).
We don’t all sit around in anyone’s garage anymore. We’re all homeowners, but who can afford a place with a garage as well these days, let alone the time to detach from your family and chew the fat over records and drinks with your mates that all live in different cities from one another.
The best is that we’ve thus far only lost one from that crowd, as far as I can remember. And as time now goes by so slowly, but also a whole lot more swiftly, we do remember to check in on each other a lot more and with kindness and real duty of care. We tell our friends we love them, or we show it — or both. We’ve been together (and apart) as friends for two thirds of our lives so far, even more. That’s not nothing. That really is something. There’s something special in the way we found each other. Often over music. And also a bewildering sense of what else was there in that little dumb town. We made bands, and trouble, and we got the requisite grades to move on and out of that place and to start lives in other cities, and now in some cases other countries. We travelled. Or we didn’t. We loved. Lost. Loved again. Some of us listened to Nirvana a lot more than others. But it most certainly defined our teen spirit. What else can I say.
R.I.P. Kurt. (And R.I.P. Hamish)
