Nirvana's Palace - Life without Kurt

Canadian Press TORONTO -- Kurt Cobain and his band Nirvana continue to generate headlines more than two years after his suicide.
Whether it's widow Courtney Love wanting to tear down the garage where her husband ended his life April 5, 1994, or word of a new double album this fall, Nirvana refuses to slip from the public consciousness.
The most compelling evidence of Cobain's status as a generational martyr is the number of songs naming the blue-eyed singer as the inspiration.
Julian Cope, Catherine Wheel, The Cranberries, For Squirrels, Vernon Reid, Patti Smith and even Canadian rock heroes The Tragically Hip are among the artists who've written about Cobain.
It's prompted Details, a U.S. magazine, to snidely suggest a special collector's CD called "And I Swear I Don't Have a Gun: Songs Inspired by the Suicide of Kurt Cobain."
Others less cynical say it's Cobain's gift as a brilliant songwriter that has earned him more musical eulogies than John Lennon, Buddy Holly and other fallen pop stars.
"Plenty of musicians die, overdose, but Kurt meant something to a whole generation," said Edward Skira, publisher of Chart magazine. "Look at radio today. It's a whole lot different than was it was before Nevermind. That album blew wide everything."
Guitar legend Neil Young was one of the first out of the homage gate with 1994's feedback-laden Sleeps with Angels, an unsentimental epitaph that left some critics puzzled.
"But when he died that night, she rang up phone bills, she moved around from town to town (too late), he sleeps with angels (too soon)."
The words confounded but the impetus did not.
Cobain's suicide note quoted lyrics from Young's 1979 song Out of the Blue: "It's better to burn out than to fade away," which Young took hard.
Cobain's death also deeply affected R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe, who penned Let Me In from 1994's Monster as an open letter to his late friend about the nature of fame.
"Yeah, all those stars drip down like butter, we eat them up," Stipe sings.
In a Newsweek article after the album's release, Stipe explained what he was driving at.
"That was me on the phone to him, desperately trying to get him out of the frame of mind he was in," he was quoted as saying.
"I wanted him to know that he didn't need to pay attention to all this, that he was going to make it through."
Some of the songs ponder the choice he made.
With a mixture of frustration and anger, 70's punk icon Patti Smith wrote About a Boy on her latest album, Gone Again.
"From a chaos, raging sweet, from the deep and dismal street, toward another, kind of peace, toward the great emptiness, about a boy, beyond it all."
After watching her best friend photographer Robert Mapplethorpe fight for his life, Smith was dismayed to see "another person just throw their life away."
"You want to take a person by the scruff of the neck and say 'OK, You're suffering? This is suffering. Check it out,"' she told Rolling Stone.
Some songs are mistaken for being about Cobain's suicide. For instance, Filter's Hey Man Nice Shot and Suicidal Dream by Silverchair don't belong on the Cobain set list.

INSPIRATION ABOUNDS

Sleeps with Angels -- Neil Young
Let Me In -- R.E.M.
Queen/Mother -- Julian Cope
Mighty K.C. -- For Squirrels
Hole -- Catherine Wheel
About a Boy -- Patti Smith
Saint Cobain -- Vernon Reid
Don't Wake Daddy -- The Tragically Hip
I'm Still Remembering -- The Cranberries

By JOHN SAKAMOTO
Jam! Showbiz
There will be one more Nirvana album after all.

Two years after nixing a planned live double-CD release, surviving band members Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic have given the go-ahead for a collection of Nirvana concert recordings to come out. Tentatively titled From The Muddy Banks Of The Wishkah, it's due out in Canada on Oct. 9, a day after the U.S. release.

Contrary to reports in both the L.A. Times and online music mag Addicted To Noise, the album will be a single-disc set, a spokesperson for Geffen Canada said Monday. Further, the album will be drawn from the band's live dates from 1991-94. It will include material from all phases of their career.

Unlike the November 1994 Nirvana Unplugged release, From The Muddy Banks Of The Wishkah focuses on the group's electric performances. "It is the exact opposite of Unplugged," says the Geffen spokesperson. "If that was one side of Nirvana, this is definitely the other side."

The album's title refers to a river in Aberdeen, Wash., the small town in which Kurt Cobain and Novoselic grew up.

Toronto Sun : Two years ago today Kurt Cobain - Nirvana frontman, gifted songwriter, heroin-user, chronic stomach pain sufferer, incredibly understanding husband of Courtney Love and loving father to Frances Bean - committed suicide in the greenhouse above the garage of his Seattle mansion.
And by shooting himself (although two Montreal journalists would have you believe he was murdered) Cobain joined that exclusive club of highly respected musicians who have seemingly left the planet too early. Or at least too early as far as everyone else is concerned.
For Cobain, whose 1993 Nirvana album In Utero was originally called I Hate Myself And I Want To Die - the timing may have been perfect.
And you didn't exactly hear crass, bottom-line, record executives complaining either.
Nirvana's shake-'em-up breakthrough album, Nevermind, has only fallen off Billboard's Top 200 chart a mere three weeks since its debut at No. 144 on Oct. 12, 1991. After hitting the chart's top spot and 10 million in album sales, Nevermind currently sits at No. 166.
"It was sort of surreal. After he first died, you would turn on MTV and it'd be `Up next! A song from Nirvana! or Nirvana Unplugged'," said Chris Cornell of Seattle band Soundgarden in a recent interview.
"It was almost as though they were sort of ignoring the fact that the guy took his own life. They still could get some mileage out of his career, and they weren't going to let him killing himself hinder that.
"What should have been a sombre approach to playing these songs wasn't really there. It was just sort of a band breaking up more than a guy dying."
The exploitation of Cobain's death by the music industry, unauthorized biographers and assorted parasites certainly isn't something his former Nirvana bandmates, drummer Dave Grohl and bassist Krist Novoselic, have ever been a part of.
Only recently has Grohl, coincidentally in town Wednesday night with his new band Foo Fighters, begun to speak to reporters.
"There area few bands that go out there and do Nirvana covers and it's absolutely ridiculous," said Grohl. "That's almost like desecration, that's what I think of it as. Tori Amos' take on it (Smells Like Teen Spirit) was fine. I mean that was pretty hilarious. She can do whatever the hell she wants."
Grohl has been touring for the last year to support Foo Fighters' self-titled debut. Meantime, Novoselic, whose own new band Sweet 75 is expected to have its debut album out by the end of the year, has been working for Bosnian relief and other causes.
Grohl says he and Novoselic played "just bass and drums," after Cobain's death, but there was never any serious consideration that he would join Foo Fighters.
"We didn't really sit down and have a discussion about it. But there was no bad blood at all," said Grohl.
And although the upbeat-sounding Grohl sounds as if he's moving on, he says he'll always been proud of what Nirvana accomplished.
"Having been involved in something that people consider so special, of course, would be an honor for anybody," said Grohl.

Life Without Kurt