When Nirvana's frontman died, 10 years ago today, not everyone took notice. They should have, writes Padraig Collins
The first time I heard Nirvana I wasn't even listening. It was August 20th, 1991, a month before Nevermind, their second album, came out. They were supporting Sonic Youth at Sir Henry's in Cork. I had never heard of Nirvana, but I remember Kurt Cobain knocking over Dave Grohl's drum kit and thinking that it seemed like such a rock-rebellion cliché.
A couple of weeks later MTV started playing the video for Smells Like Teen Spirit. I would turn on just in the hope of seeing it. In a year when Bryan Adams's appalling (Everything I Do) I Do It For You was number one in the UK from July 13th to November 2nd, Smells Like Teen Spirit was extraordinary. It had a straightforward but brilliant riff, a powerhouse rhythm and near-unintelligible lyrics. It was a visceral symphony.
The music industry was about to go through a bright shining moment: following Nevermind's release, on September 24th, Primal Scream's Screamadelica, Neil Young's Weld, My Bloody Valentine's Loveless and Teenage Fanclub's Bandwagonesque were released at two-week intervals. Nirvana had opened the gates of popular culture to bands that were otherwise too left field for mainstream attention.
I first heard Nevermind in the early hours of a bitterly cold October morning while taping it at a friend's house. Walking back to my flat at 5 a.m. I was stopped and questioned by three gardaí in a patrol car. I would have asked for a lift, but I knew the walk back would allow me to hear a half-hour of Nevermind on my Walkman. I played that tape to death and didn't buy a CD copy until years later.
The album's review in the now defunct Melody Maker concentrated, presciently, on the state of Kurt Cobain's mind. It described the song On A Plain as "a raw blister of pain". "Nirvana have emotion, raw emotion, the sort where the singer bares his soul all the way down the line and with the use of but a few simple words and phrases communicates way deeper with the listener than this sort of music is meant to."
The NME's review spoke of how the band were transcending their underground past "without wimping out of the creative process". It went on: "Nevermind is the big American alternative record of the autumn. But better still, it'll last well into next year." If only the reviewer knew we would still be talking about it more than a decade later.
By the time I saw Nirvana again, in a Sydney beachside hotel on February 6th, 1992, they were the world's biggest-selling band and Cobain had taken his first of many drug overdoses.
On January 12th, in a New York hotel room, Cobain's fiancée (and soon-to-be wife), Courtney Love, woke to an empty bed. She found him on the floor. His breathing had stopped and his skin was green. He had been using heroin for months, but this was his first overdose.
"It wasn't that he'd OD'd. It was that he was dead," Love said years later. In Heavier Than Heaven, his biography of Cobain, Charles Cross writes that Love threw water on Cobain's face and punched him in the solar plexus until he started breathing again.
Later that day the weekly US charts were announced. Nevermind had gone to number one for the first time.
The Sydney show, three and a half weeks later, was astonishing. When they played Smells Like Teen Spirit, seven songs in, the atmosphere was supercharged. The capacity crowd of about 800 was ecstatic. I fell over three times and lost my glasses twice while slam-dancing in the mosh pit. It was awesome. If you fell others immediately helped you up. There was an incredible camaraderie; we knew this was historic. We were seeing the biggest band in the world in a glorified pub because the tour was booked before their popularity exploded. After Smells Like Teen Spirit they played Sliver, a beautifully sweet three-minute punk-pop song about a child missing his mother. My two favourite Nirvana songs in a row: life didn't get much better.
Somewhere along the line, though, I got bored with the Cobain soap opera. He constantly said the pressure of being a rock star was unbearable. I thought, just give it up, go and live on a mountain somewhere if you feel so pressured. You're a multimillionaire, you don't need to record another note.
I didn't get their third album, In Utero, and didn't buy a ticket for their concert at the RDS, in Dublin, on April 8th, 1994. Instead I was going to see Buffalo Tom at the Tivoli.
A friend phoned me at about seven o'clock that night to tell me that Cobain had been found dead. It was so unsurprising after Love passed off as an accidental overdose what had obviously been a suicide attempt in Rome the previous month.
When Buffalo Tom played Taillights Fade, a song about suicide, as their opener rather than keep it for the encore, as they had always done, the gravity of what had happened began to kick in.
Later that night I got angry when a DJ on 2FM dedicated a Nirvana song to Kurt "Coban". The greatest rock star of our time had just died, and the DJ couldn't even pronounce his name.
I thought about the fact that he was only 15 days older than me and about how his daughter would grow up without her dad. I thought about what a stupid bastard he was to take his life when he had so much to live for and hoped, in vain, that no child would be so misguided as to copy him.
The lack of recognition at his passing shocked me. When John Lennon died we never heard the end of it. Cobain was our Lennon, but the Guardian the next day gave him a tiny obituary, a third the size of a tribute to a disco producer called Dan Hartman (Who? Exactly). It seemed the baby boomers in the media barely know who Cobain was.
In the 77 album reviews I contributed to The Irish Times between November 2000 and August 2002 I mentioned Nirvana only three times. Their influence on the music business was enormous, but their influence on music was negligible.
Many bands tried to copy Nirvana's sound, but none did it remotely successfully. You can't clone genius.
