The truth, it turns out, was that Cobain, who claimed to have overcome anaddiction to heroin, was indeed abusing unspecified drugs. A record-industrysource told TIME that two weeks ago Cobain's wife Courtney Love, front womanfor the group Hole, gathered doctors and friends together in Seattle, thecouple's home, to try to scare Cobain into dealing with his problem; Nirvana'smanagers even threatened to drop Cobain from their roster unless he got cleanedup. The intervention seemed to work, for Cobain checked into a Californiatreatment center. But according to a missing-persons report filed by hismother, he fled early last week. Seattle police periodically checked Cobain'shouse, finding no traces of the singer.
Last Friday, an electrician visited the house to install a security system.When no one answered the front door, he walked around the house, peeringthrough windows. He thought he saw a mannequin sprawled on the floor, until henoticed a splotch of blood by its ear. When police and the coroner broke downthe door, they found Cobain dead on the floor, a shotgun still pointed at hischin and, on a nearby counter, a suicide note penned in red ink, reportedlyending with the words "I love you, I love you," addressed, a source said, toLove and the couple's 19-month-old daughter Frances Bean.
Kurt Cobain, dead at 27. The news came as a shock to millions of rock fans, andMTV pre-empted its usual programming for hours of J.F.K.-like mourning, with asomber Kurt Loder playing the Walter Cronkite role. Given Cobain's talent andinfluence, however, the reaction was understandable. Nirvana came from themusic-industry equivalent of nowhere, with a rough-edged first album recordedfor a chiselly $606. The next, Nevermind, released 2 1/2 years ago, contained aseries of crunching, screaming songs that also had catchy melodies, part punk,part Beatles. Selling almost 10 million copies and knocking Michael Jackson'sDangerous from the top of the charts, the album fibrillated the psyche of ageneration. It also launched the commercial vogue for grunge and made Seattlefamous for something other than cappuccino, rain and bad professional sports.Before long, equally abrasive Seattle groups like Pearl Jam (a Nirvana rival),Mudhoney and Alice in Chains joined Nirvana high on the charts. The NewLiverpool, Rolling Stone called the city in early 1992 (launching searches forthe New Seattle).
Cobain was at the center of it all, the John Lennon of the swinging Northwest,a songwriter with a gift for searing lyrics as well as seductive hooks, aperformer with a play of facial expressions so edgy and complicated that theyrivaled Jack Nicholson's.
If the loss of an oddly magnetic, brilliant musician was jolting, though, themanner of his death was not entirely unexpected. Cobain spoke so openly on thesubjects of drugs and depression and suicide that writers searching for easyobituary ironies didn't have to look very hard. Cobain himself even beganjoking about it; a song called I Hate Myself and I Want to Die was recorded butdropped from the last album. "It was totally satirical, making fun ofourselves," Cobain told a reporter earlier this year. "I'm thought of as thispissy, complaining, freaked-out schizophrenic who wants to kill himself all thetime. I thought it was a funny title."
Love, an alternative-rock star in her own right, was in Los Angeles at the timeof Cobain's death but reportedly flew to Seattle Friday morning. While talkingto the pop-music critic Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times early lastweek, Love broke into tears describing her husband's recently fragilecondition. "I just don't ever want to see him on the floor like that again. Hewas blue," she told Hilburn, recalling Cobain's overdose in Rome last month. "Ithought I went through a lot of hard times over the years, but this has beenthe hardest." A source who had been close to Cobain confirms what now seemsobvious: the European incident, labeled an accident at the time, was anunsuccessful suicide attempt. "You don't take 50 pills by accident," notes thesource. Two weeks after returning to Seattle from Rome, Love had to call policewhen Cobain locked himself in a room along with some of the guns he enjoyedkeeping around the house; police removed four weapons that day, including aColt AR-15 semiautomatic rifle.
Growing up in the depressed logging town of Aberdeen on Washington's Pacificcoast, Cobain had, by his account, a relatively happy childhood until hisparents, a cocktail waitress and an auto mechanic, got divorced. He was onlyeight at the time, and he claimed the traumatic split fueled the anguish inNirvana's music. He shuttled back and forth between various relatives, evenfinding himself homeless at one point and living under a bridge. His buddingartistry and iconoclastic attitude didn't win him many fans in high school;instead, he attracted beatings from "jocks and moron dudes," as an old friendonce put it. Cobain got even by spray-painting QUEER on his tormentors' pickuptrucks.
Cobain formed and reformed a series of bands before Nirvana finally coalescedin 1986 as an uneasy alliance among Cobain, bassist Krist Novoselic (a hometownfriend) and eventually drummer Dave Grohl. Cobain married Love in 1992, whenthe band was first peaking on the charts, when she was already pregnant withFrances Bean, and when both parents had already developed heroin habits (Loveclaims to have kicked hers immediately after finding out she was pregnant)."It's a whirling dervish of emotion, all these extremes of fighting and lovingeach other at once," is how Cobain described the marriage last year, proudlyshowing off nasty fingernail scratches on his back.
It was Nirvana's unexpected stardom that seemed to eat at him. He appearedunusually tortured by success, even in a profession famous for containingpeople who are tortured by success. "He was a very bright, sweet, generous andcaring individual, perhaps a little too sweet and sensitive for the business hewas in," says Michael Azerrad, author of Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana.Danny Goldberg, the former head of Nirvana's management company who now runsAtlantic Records, says, "In all the years I knew him, he had very mixedfeelings about being on this planet." Goldberg remembers another of the band'shandlers once asking the singer why he was moping. "I'm awake, aren't I?"Cobain replied.
He suffered the usual torments of the underground poet moving into themainstream, and was worried that his band had sold out, that it was attractingthe wrong kind of fans (e.g., the guys who used to beat him up). True, he likedthe money that went with mall-rat adulation. But in interviews he exuded a painbeyond standard-issue superstar whining. He said his heroin use was a kind ofself-medication for stomach pains, but what he really seemed in search of waspsychic equilibrium.
"None of this would have happened had he not been famous," insists DanielHouse, a friend of Cobain's and the owner of an independent record label inSeattle. "When Nirvana started catching on, he was kind of bewildered. Hismusic was so personal, it amazed him when people came out in droves to hearit."
They were there, though, because Cobain conveyed meaning and even beauty in hisharsh recordings. His lyrics could be sour, occasionally frightening if opaque.Take these simultaneously blase and acerbic lines from the group's biggest hit,Smells Like Teen Spirit: "And I forget just why I taste/ Oh yeah, I guess itmakes me smile/ I found it hard, it was hard to find/ Oh well, whatever, nevermind." Cobain's sometimes fierce, sometimes weary growl, the sometimesconvulsive, sometimes grating guitars, the very loud drums: all of itcommunicated anger, maybe loathing, definitely passion, no matter how inchoate.
His subject was the same perennial, youthful fury captured by the Sex Pistols,before they too self-destructed, and by the Who, before Pete Townshend survivedto purvey nostalgia to Broadway theatergoers. Youthful nihilism may not be new,but no artist invents all his materials; it's what he does with them thatcounts, and Cobain wrote great rock songs as he explored a familiar theme withgenius.
Last year a journalist visited a home he and Love were renting before theymoved into the house in which Cobain would end his life. He had decorated oneof the walls with this graffito: NONE OF YOU WILL EVER KNOW MY INTENTIONS. Itcould serve as his credo as well as his epitaph. "Guess we won't be getting thedeposit back on the house," he joked.