Revisiting the last tragic days of Kurt Cobain

Individuals can still be reached on the National Suicide Prevention Line: 1-800-273-8255.

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It's hard for me to write about Kurt Cobain.

This is partly because Cobain died longer than I was alive; in two years he will be dead longer than he was alive. In the 25 years since his death, Cobain has been the subject of more books, documentaries and conspiracy theories than perhaps any other modern musician. Between this pbadage of time and the intrusive tenacity of his life, it is hard to imagine that there is anything new to say about Cobain and the music he composed with Nirvana.

And yet, this pbadage of time has hardly alleviated the shock caused by Cobain's suicide, a sudden and overwhelming death in rock history such as that of John Lennon or Elvis Presley. All the writers or filmmakers who praised Cobain, or the millions of Generation X members who grew up listening to Nirvana, could tell you where they were when they heard of his death. I am not one of them. It always hurts to read about Cobain's life and its end. Cobain's death remains warm to the touch, and it requires caution and reverence, like a meteorite whose impact has left a crater still smoking on the surface of an alternative rock.

To write about Kurt Cobain, you have to cut all the bullshit around him – the Rolling stone hagiography, the story of the "spokesperson of a generation" – and written about him. Death has turned Cobain into myth as much as man, so it is essential to remember who this man was and how he died. Cobain was not a great artist because his fight against depression and addiction; He was a great artist because he was able to translate these fights into visceral and haunting music, but catchy enough to dominate MTV. But these battles have not been doomed to failure. Cobain had fought his demons in a worrying stalemate for years, but it was not until the last weeks of his life that they had pushed their claws deep inside him and finally tore him apart.

Nirvana started the European tour of her tour In utero, his third (and last) album, in February 1994, and from every point of view, it was a shitty show. Cobain has only five days of travel before starting to talk about canceling the remaining dates; This deterioration of his mood was fueled by the deterioration of his relationship with his clbadmates and his wife Courtney Love, as well as his ever-present stomach pain. He realized his wish on March 1, the first of two dates scheduled for the group in Munich, Germany. Before the show, Cobain had played on the phone with Love, then burst into the Melvins' main locker room and landed on Buzz Osborne, telling his musical hero how he wanted to break Nirvana and divorce him. ;love.

A little over an hour later, Nirvana's last performance ended. Cobain's voice was emancipated because of laryngitis – or that's the excuse he gave – and he shortened the series. The tour scheduled to resume on March 11, the members of the group separated; Cobain went to Rome where Love and their daughter Frances joined him a few days later. On the morning of March 4, Love woke up to find her husband insensitive, having overdosed on champagne and Rohypnol. Nirvana's management claimed that the overdose was accidental, but months later, Love revealed that it was a suicide attempt. Rolling stone that Cobain "took 50 bading pills" and wrote a suicide note. Cobain – whose parents split up when he was young – wrote that he "would rather die than suffer a new divorce".

Nirvana's tour was reprogrammed to allow Cobain to recover, but he refused after returning to Seattle. He withdrew from everything that was happening in Nirvana, refusing to appear at the top of the list at the upcoming Lollapalooza festival and skipping rehearsals with his fellow bandmates. In an attempt to reduce Cobain's heroin addiction, Love forbids her from using drugs at home; Cobain reacted by gaining height in shabby motel rooms or in the apartment of his dealer. The Seattle police was summoned to his home on March 18 as a result of an argument that took place when Cobain was locked in a room with guns. the police seized the firearms, but no charges were laid against him. As in Rome, Cobain denied that it was a suicide attempt.

On March 25, Love and nine other people – including group members, executives and friends – surprised Cobain with an intervention. Cobain was indignant, taking on everyone in the room – especially his wife, whom he accused of being "more stupid than he was", as Danny Goldberg, co-director, of Charles R. Cross, author of Heavier Than Heaven: Biography of Kurt Cobain. * Love responded by saying that she had planned to start an addiction treatment program in Los Angeles the next day and told Cobain that she would divorce him if he did not ask for treatment. His group companions offered a similar ultimatum, threatening to leave Nirvana. The intervention ended in a stalemate; The love left for the airport immediately after and one after the other are gone. For some of them, including Love, it would be the last time they would see it. That evening, Cobain was back at his dealership, asking him, "Where are my friends when I need them? Why are my friends against me?

Between the intervention and his put in rehab, Cobain had his last interactions with several other friends and family members. He called his grandparents and planned to go fishing with his grandfather the following month. talk to The Seattle Times the month after Cobain's death, his grandmother said, "Everything seemed to be fine […] when he spoke to me, he seemed to be happy. "Others have seen Cobain at his lowest level. The day after the intervention, his mother and sister visited Cobain, who left his home in tears after seeing him hanged on heroin. On March 29, a few days after a new, almost fatal overdose, Cobain agreed to let Nirvana's bbadist, Krist Novoselic – his closest friend – take him to the airport, to escape to the house after a hand fight in the main terminal.

The next day, Cobain visited Dylan Carlson, another friend, and asked him to help him buy a gun. Having had his weapons confiscated in the past, Cobain may have suspected that the police would know if he was trying to buy a new one. He told Carlson that the weapon was intended to keep intruders away – an badertion that Carlson, who was at Cobain's intervention, believed. Carlson and Cobain traveled to Stan Baker's Sports, where the former bought a shotgun and ammunition. "It seemed a little weird that he buys the shotgun before he leaves," Carlson said. Rolling stone in June 1994. He offered to keep it until Cobain returned, but Cobain declined the invitation, taking the weapon home with him before going to the airport this night.

Cobain was scheduled to spend four weeks at the Exodus Recovery Center in Los Angeles. As Exodus was not informed that the Rome incident had constituted a suicide attempt, Cobain was treated as a normal patient. Other patients and visitors remember that Cobain had shown amazing cooperation with counselors. Frances and her nanny visited him twice, and he spent time with pleasure playing with his daughter. At about 6 pm On the third day, April 1, he phoned Love, the last conversation he ever had with her. "Do not forget, no matter what I love you," Cobain told his wife. An hour and a half later, Cobain went into an outdoor part of the clinic and climbed a six-foot brick wall while no one was watching him. By the time Love learned that Cobain had escaped, he had already taken a flight with red eyes to his home.

The last days of Cobain in Seattle are an insoluble puzzle of unconfirmed observations and unsuccessful credit card transactions. Some people told police that they saw Cobain in Viretta Park near his home in the Madrona neighborhood; others claim to have seen it at Capitol Hill, where its dealer lived. It has even been reported that Cobain had spent a night in his summer residence in Carnation, a 40-minute drive east of Seattle, with a friend. Love's decision to cancel Cobain's credit card the day after he left Los Angeles also hurt efforts to trace Cobain's footsteps. it only made things more difficult for Tom Grant, the private investigator that Love had hired to find her husband. After the card was canceled, it stopped reporting its use. The following week, several attempts to use the card were attempted – two of them causing confusion after April 5, the day Cobain is believed dead.

All we know for sure about Cobain's return to Seattle is the first thing he did and the last. Cobain arrived home after midnight on April 2 and woke up his friend Michael "Cali" DeWitt, who had stayed at home with his girlfriend (a young Jessica Hopper) while Cobain and Love were in rehab. Shortly after DeWitt and Hopper went back to sleep, Cobain took a cab to an armorer's house, where he bought more shotgun shells. DeWitt had been on drugs and did not even say that Cobain was back; It was only two days later, during a fight with Hopper, that he realized that Cobain's visit was not a hallucination. He then told Love, who had sent his Hole teammate Eric Erlandson, to search the house with DeWitt. The house will be searched twice more over the next two days – once by Grant and Carlson, and once again by DeWitt. Nobody looked in the garage or the greenhouse above, the place of Cobain's suicide.

I choose to call Cobain's death a suicide because that's what the evidence corroborates most clearly. Death, in all its forms, leaves unanswered questions, but suicide torments the living, to the point of provoking the denial that someone would want, more than anything, to die. The theories that Cobain was murdered do not answer these questions; they disrespect him and those who loved him, blackening what is already a tragedy. In the greenhouse, Cobain wrote in red ink a note, addressed to his childhood friend Boddah, in which he described emptiness in him that nothing – neither his music, nor his fans, nor even l & rsquo; Love of his wife and daughter – could not fulfill. He took out the old cigar box where he kept his heroin kit and prepared one last time. Then he raised his rifle to his mouth and squeezed the trigger.

I can think of two reasons why people kill each other. The first is out of despair; it is perhaps the conviction that the only certainty in life is more suffering and that the only way out of this suffering is death. It may be the belief that your life is a burden to those you love and that by dying you release them from this burden. This is what Cobain's sister seems to believe: "He thought that everyone would be better off without him," she said. Kurt Cobain: Editing Heck. "He thought that it was the problem."

But in suicide, your loved ones must bear the weight of your absence. This may be the intent of such an act – "a fierce indictment of the living", as Anthony DeCurtis wrote in his memory of Cobain. same Heavier than the skyThe author's summary suggests that Cobain's death was "an act of will that characterized his short, angry and inspired life." This is the second reason to commit suicide – as an act of rage meant to hurt those who love you. Being the "spokesperson of a generation" meant doing and being what everyone expected of him. Cobain's suicide was exactly what he wanted. "He wanted to be screwed into oblivion," said Novoselic in Heavier than the sky. "He wanted to die."

(Column: Sometimes even rock stars need a little help)

I can not say which of the two – despair or rage – Cobain felt more as he composed his suicide note. The two themes were as fundamental in Cobain's life as in death, as evidenced by his interactions with a media that never understood him well and that was heard in his music, as they were across the stage grunge. Among the four biggest grunge bands from Seattle – Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Alice in Chains – all but one have suffered the loss of a singer whose brilliance and charisma could not save them from their work. ;themselves. It is an overwhelming reminder that these men, and others, were able to write these songs of isolation, addiction and depression because they had lived them.

Cobain was also living with other things – his life, as desperate as it was fierce, was not without moments of happiness and serenity, and it seems that towards the end of his life he lets himself live more. often. In his last interview with Rolling stone In January 1994, Cobain did not look like a man who wanted to die: "I've never been so happy in my life," he said. He also described his vision for Nirvana's next album as "quite ethereal and acoustic" work, as he had never done before. Cobain would never have put the songs in his head, but I imagine that they would have looked like a man who had finally found the transcendence that his group gets his name from. They might not have been as important to his fans as "Smells Like Teen Spirit" or "Lithium". But they would exist and, hopefully, Kurt Cobain too.

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*Charles R. Cross's Heavier Than Heaven: Biography of Kurt Cobain is probably the definitive biography of Cobain. Other sources have been used to corroborate information, but unless otherwise indicated, Heavier than the sky is the source of most of the quotes and anecdotes from this piece.

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