2/20/1967 - 4/5/1994

You know how the older generation always talks about how they remember where they were when John F. Kennedy was shot? I think the closest thing I have (at this moment in time, anyway) is where I was when I heard the news about Kurt Cobain.

Nirvana was one of my favorite bands when I was 13 and I was at my friend Nick's house one day and his mom and her friend told us that some rock star died. We turned on MTV news (probably with Kurt Loader reporting) and learned it was Cobain.  I didn't really know what to think, because it didn't really make sense to me. She said that it was probably a drug overdose, but at that time, I thought only hippies from the 60s died of drug overdoses. Surely current rock stars that were feuding with Axl Rose, married to a pretty (albeit still trashy, even when I was 13 I knew that) girl with a young daughter didn't die of drug overdoses. Then we watched the news for a bit longer and found out that it was a self-inflicted gunshot wound. I knew what suicide was, because a kid that lived up the street from me had unintentionally hung himself a few years back, but it didn't really occur to me that people did it on purpose.

I wasn't heartbroken, by any means, but still a little bummed. We went outside, played basketball for a bit then I went home and listened to In Utero all night waiting for the 10 o'clock news to start and hoping that they would talk about him at least a little bit.
I cut out the article from the newspaper when it ran and hung it in my locker for the rest of the year. I still have it in a little photo album with all my concert ticket stubs from when I was younger.

Also found this video earlier today, but had no idea what it was until Badass Digest filled me in, so I'm re-blogging what he wrote about it. He's got a longer piece on Cobain over there if you want to check that out, too.

"Patton Oswalt retweeted someone who shared this YouTube clip of Nirvana on Top of the Pops way back in the prehistoric days of the early 90s. They came on to flog their single Smells Like Teen Spirit, something that deeply disturbed Kurt already. To make matters worse, Top of the Pops was essentially karaoke, with Kurt singing live over recorded musical tracks. In true punk fashion, the band drew attention to the artifice, barely even pretending to play their instruments. But best of all, Kurt crooned the song in a deep voice that he said was his attempt to imitate Morrissey. While he was taking the piss, as the Brits in the audience might have said, Kurt ended up doing one of the great variations on the song."