Kurt promised me access to anyone I wanted to talk to, and that I could write whatever I wanted. This was shortly after Vanity Fair had published a story that was used as evidence to briefly relieve them of custody of their infant daughter, Frances. “That sounds interesting,” I said, playing it as cool as I could manage, “but could I talk to Kurt about it?” She handed the phone to Kurt. She wanted to know whether I would like to write a book about Nirvana. Late one evening a month or so later, the phone rang. Like many people around him, I just didn’t want to know. It didn’t really seem like he had a cold, but I ignored that. All those shows and travel would naturally take a toll on anybody, even someone who had just turned twenty-five. He told me he was in bed because he was nursing a cold, which made sense-he was coming off a tour that had gone from Australia to New Zealand to Singapore to Japan to Hawaii. The beautiful thing was, he had a knack for conveying that in song, and in the most ineffable way.Īs I was talking with Kurt, he was experiencing heroin withdrawal.
But that didn’t make me anything special-a whole lot of people could have connected to Kurt Cobain.
So here I was, a bespectacled college-boy Rolling Stone journalist from New York City, connecting with a high-school dropout from the rural timber town of Aberdeen, Washington, whose dad worked in a lumber mill counting logs. We grew up on the bands that so many American kids of our era did-Kiss, Cheap Trick, Queen, Black Sabbath-before having our lives changed by punk rock. I told him how I’d felt the same way about my own parents’ divorce, when I was the same age. And Kurt said, “I did that, too!” He said that his parents had divorced by the time he was ten years old and he’d been melancholic ever since. Somehow I got to talking about Arlo Guthrie’s “The Motorcycle Song” and how I’d play it on the family record player and run around the house pretending I was a motorcycle. I stood up, unfurled my wiry five-foot-six-inch frame, and said, in a theatrically manly voice, “I don’t know what you’re talking about!” We exchanged smiles, and our bond grew from there. I asked Kurt what he was like as a kid, and he said something about being small for his age. I sat down on a little footstool next to his bed, started up the tape recorder, and began asking him questions. It just wasn’t something that anyone would say out loud at the time. It turns out that a lot of other people around him did, too: his bandmate Dave Grohl sensed it, and so did Kurt’s wife, Courtney Love. I’d never met someone like that before or even known many people who had died at all. The other thing I realized is uncomfortable to say: I sensed that he was one of those rock musicians who dies young. (I was kind of a stoner in high school myself.) All the nervousness went away. He wasn’t some sort of rock-and-roll space alien-he was actually like a lot of the stoners I went to high school with. “Hi,” he said, and two things struck me instantly. To this day, whenever I smell jasmine I’m transported to that moment. The smell of jasmine flowers wafted through the screen of the window above his head. His bare feet stuck out past the bedsheets, and his toenails were painted a rosy hue. I got to the door and opened it to find Kurt lying in a little bed in a little room, his back against the wall, facing the doorway, his shocking blue eyes gazing at me through the subdued lighting.
As “Norwegian Wood” played faintly on a crappy stereo, Courtney led me down a short hallway to the bedroom. There was a tiny, dimly lit living room with no furniture, LPs and guitars strewn around the floor, and a small Buddhist shrine with burning candles. Courtney greeted me at the door and graciously offered me a plate of grapes. It was dusk when a taxi dropped me off at his place. He was also the most celebrated rock musician on the planet. Not much was known about Kurt at that point, other than he was this guy from Seattle who screamed in his songs, smashed his guitars, and might be a heroin addict. I had flown there from New York to interview him for a Rolling Stone cover story, the one with a famous photograph of him wearing a homemade T-shirt that said “Corporate Magazines Still Suck.” I was nervous. In early 1992, when I first met Kurt Cobain, he and Courtney Love were living in a little apartment in a two-up-two-down building on an ordinary street in the Fairfax section of Los Angeles.
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