Kim Gordon thinks Cobain was murdered

I overheard a couple of guys talking about it at (I think) a Phantom Surfers show in London. I raised my eyebrows and said nothing.

I was in a shitty nightclub and they played Smells Like Teen Spirit which I thought was weird because they didn't normally play music like that, it was usually Eurodance and the same "party" songs over and over (imagine Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons stamping on a human ear forever), and my friend said oh didn't you hear

that's such a weird tic some people have when they're excited to share some fucked-up news. i remember a kid coming to band class in HS with a big smile because he was the first one to hear that paul wellstone died. guess it made him feel important to be the bearer of news

― global tetrahedron, Friday, April 5, 2019 1:11 PM (twenty minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Seriously, it's like in fifth grade when kids were breathlessly relating the news when each of the Beastie Boys died of drug overdoses in such quick succession. It was really fucked up, not the least reason being that it taught me the hard way that fifth graders are totally full of shit.

if 1986 was like 2019

it was raining; i came home from work (at a north carolina public school system) and one of my housemates was sitting at the kitchen table watching mtv. he said kurt cobain killed himself and we both were like, well, not too surprising

Seriously, it's like in fifth grade when kids were breathlessly relating the news when each of the Beastie Boys died of drug overdoses in such quick succession.

they were similarly callous about what ought to have been a private matter for rod stewart

I was 17 and in college and yet have no specific recollection of hearing the news.

(Ask me about River Phoenix, though — hoo boy...)

I was 14, I'd never heard his name before, the only mention of Nirvana I'd heard was hearing my older brother listening to Weird Al's "Smells Like Nirvana". It was whispered about but that was it. Somebody drew graffiti in the boy's bathroom that said "we miss you Kurt" and a cross. It was a year later before I actually heard the band ("Smells Like Teen Spirit" blaring out of the high school weight room on repeat). It was the first celebrity death I can remember registering as having happened, but I had no emotional response. Shannon Hoon a year later, then John Candy a year after that was a mild bummer. It was only when Lady Di died that I actually felt sad about a celebrity dying, and it took until John Fahey died for me to ever cry about it.

I saw a kid with a nirvana smiley face tshirt in 1993 or so at mass and thought it looked cool but when kurt died and I was 9 i didn't hear about it.

I was 12 and in an older kid's room a couple years later and he had a kurt cobain poster and I asked "who is kurt cobain" and he gave me a shocked look then taped nevermind and incesticide for me and I listened to the tape til it wore out

My ex and I went to look at the house where he died a few years ago. We then went and sat by the lake nearby.i was shocked to see nude bathing in a well to do neighborhood in the states

I never listen to nirvana anymore but will occasionally strum about a girl if I'm bored around a guitar

i was shocked to see nude bathing in a well to do neighborhood in the states

public nudity is 100% legal in Seattle, but is generally kept to smaller examples of the many lakeside beaches in that neighbourhood ime

(I was surprised the first time I saw someone laying out, balls to the air, in 14°C too)

In summer '89 I was visiting Boulder and passed up a chance to go see Nirvana open for The Fluid in Denver, must have been the Bleach tour. I was a Mudhoney fan but I don't think I had heard Nirvana and I skipped the show.

I have a super clear & distinct memory of walking into the radio station that I was at back in late September 1991 and having the DJ before me say "the high school kids have been freaking out about this Nirvana song all day" - this was at a left-of-dial station run by the local school district. The single had come out on the 10th and anticipation was high, as per Wikipedia:

Geffen shipped about half of the initial U.S. pressing to the American Northwest, where it sold out quickly and was unavailable for days

I didn't initially click with the band, it wasn't until after he died (summer 1995) when I borrowed a friend's car, Bleach was in the tape deck, and it was perfect for that moment of my life. I never came around to In Utero but the rest is still perfect to my ears.

I've shared this here before but I remember a day in the 10th grade where 2 or 3 people at school asked me if I was going to the Nirvana show that night. I had never heard of them. Everyone at my school was into RHCP and Jane's Addiction which weren't really my bag, plus I thought Nirvana was a REALLY dumb band name, so I didn't give it a second thought

Turns out I missed a legendary show. The next day everyone was buzzing and playing Nirvana in the halls and parking lot and I loved the music lol

He died on April 5th but was not discovered until the 8th. It was a Friday and I was in 9th grade in Seattle. Nirvana was everything to me. I went to the vigil at Seattle Center and was quoted in a Rolling Stone piece about the event. I still play Nirvana regularly.

He died on April 5th but was not discovered until the 8th.

Was not aware of this somewhat gruesome detail.

I was in college at my first coffee house and it absolutely devastated me and everyone there.

No graceful way to put this… I was in the middle of a tech support phone call, helping some dude in San Jose rewrite a new EOF header on a scrambled DAT tape when he suddenly interjected “holy shit Kurt Cobain just killed himself”
“Wait what?

We were in a nightclub (of sorts) in a small British town and some joker told us, but this was around 10pm and we didn't know for sure until we heard the radio news headlines (it was only the 2nd or 3rd headline, astonishingly) at around 3 am in a take-away. The very notion that even as recently as 1994 someone could tell you something in a room full of people, and you'd have *no way of knowing at all* if it were true for 5 hours, blows my mind.

It was later in the day in England, I turned on John Peel and he immediately broke the news at the beginning of his show. He sounded really shaken up. I remember him wording it something like "Kurt Cobain has died, apparently by his own hand," or something like that. I can't recall what he played at all. I had tickets to see them at an upcoming Brixton Academy gig. Still have the tickets somewhere.

My big memory is being bemused at the shock and surprise being performed in discourse amongst classmates, radio (oh, so much presumptive "we're all feeling [x]" all day forever on the radio) and press: like, he got out of hospital after a suicide attempt just weeks ago.

like, he got out of hospital after a suicide attempt just weeks ago.

I think this is part of why it didn’t make a memorable impression on me; it struck me as an “echo” or continuation of earlier news (not that it makes it any less sad, or that it was or should have been “inevitable,” etc. — it just wasn’t shocking)

If only there had been some way of knowing where his head was at, some sign of his intentions

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kadq1kTIkpc

there is this story of the ex-bassist of guns'n roses duff mckagan who was one of the last persons to see cobain. they flew from la to seattle sitting together in the 1st class. mckagan met a friend at the airport in seattle who said to him that they should not leave cobain in the state he was in alone. when they looked behind cobain was gone.

I was at a gig in Glasgow and Norman Blake and maybe some other Teenage Fanclub guys were there and the people I was with said, "Wow, they (the Fannies) are all really upset because they're just heard Kurt Cobain killed himself". Then I think someone made up a tasteless joke about Kurt Cobain - it might even have been me - and we all laughed.

That doesn’t sound like you. Oh wait.

The Duff story is related, by Duff, in this which is grim but well made

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is0OGzUmk-Y

Didn’t find out until Saturday morning when listening to the Danny Baker show on Radio One. Predictably Baker was less than respectful when talking about him.

It was a Friday*, sometime between 3 pm and 4 pm - school was over for the day and the dinner rush hadn’t begun yet. Between the kitchen and the restaurant area of the country club where I worked as a busboy was a preparation area or station, a place to prepare little bowls of butter, fold napkins, sort silverware, unload racks of drinking glasses. I was in there, doing one of those things probably. The layout of that room and the various adjoining entrances are very clear even now: the stainless steel industrial counters and refrigerator, the ice machine, the coffee makers, the cinderblock walls painted a shade of yellow so pale it was nearly white. If you turned to the right of where I stood you’d cross a hallway and enter the kitchen. If you turned to the left of where I stood you’d have four choices, two of them leading to well stocked bars, one leading to the main dining room, another leading to the room used to stage the weddings and special events featuring unimaginative DJs. Whatever I was doing had to be done and as I was doing it I talked to an older waiter, mid-20s, who is probably a middle aged banker now - he looked like a middle aged banker then. I was 17, about to wrap up junior year. It wasn’t the ideal job, but what job is? Getting that one had to do with connections but, certainly, I took the work seriously. The waiter projected an air of empathy but that was probably a mask; he was nice enough. He wandered around singing the chorus of Pearl Jam’s “Daughter” to himself as though it were the whole song. We worked with worse people. Like that asshole tennis pro, a sneering weasel in a headband and glasses, who chose that moment to join us, bursting through the entrance near the kitchen, laughing, to let us know that Kurt Cobain was dead, that he’d blown his brains out, before fucking off sweatily to teach another tennis lesson, or whatever. (I posted this on FB the other day.)

^This was in Phoenix, Maryland, at what was known as the "Towson Golf & Country Club" - I think they call it something different now.

Like that asshole tennis pro, a sneering weasel in a headband and glasses, who chose that moment to join us, bursting through the entrance near the kitchen, laughing, to let us know that Kurt Cobain was dead, that he’d blown his brains out, before fucking off sweatily to teach another tennis lesson, or whatever. (I posted this on FB the other day.)

― Lactose Shaolin Wanker (Raymond Cummings)

david foster wallace could be such a dick

Ha! In my memory he was more of a Steve Albini type.

Did he play poker with the guests as well as tennis?

My Facebook post on where I heard the news that was, according to some, that generation's "Where were you when you found out John Lennon died" moment:

Today is the 25th anniversary of Kurt Cobain's death but it's not the 25th anniversary of when all of us found out about it. That was three days later on the 8th. Still, I'll tell my story now...

Ric Ricard was pissed at me.

I had procrastinated and not picked up Pearl Jam tickets. We were set to cover the band when they played at the Patriot Center (now called EagleBank Arena) in Fairfax, VA for a concert review for a British magazine - I believe it was Metal Hammer. We often would try and cover shows outside of NYC because getting credentials was easier and my folks lived near there so we had a place to crash after the show.

Because I didn't take the train into the Epic offices from Brooklyn during the day to pick up the tickets, after he got off work Ric had to pick me up, drive into the city to get them, and then drive to the DC suburbs while dealing with rush hour traffic.

"If we don't get there in time for me to take pictures, you're paying for my gas," he said. Which was quite the threat since I was always broke. It also showed how pissed he was.

We finally get to the venue. We missed Mudhoney but had time to pick up his photo pass. However the person at will call says, "Sorry, the band revoked all photo passes."

Ric, who was already on edge from the long drive, traffic and being pissed at me, snapped at the guy, "What do you mean?"

"There was a death in the band," he said.

"Wait, who died," Ric asked. He told us it was Kurt Cobain.

Ric's response was classic: "He's not in Peal Jam!"

We didn't play the radio on the drive down, listening to cassette tapes the whole time, so even if a radio station might have announced it, we didn't hear it. So this was how we found out.

The band played a really intense set (which I found in full on YouTube - linked below) and Eddie Vedder broke into tears at one point. Ric didn't get to take pictures but fortunately Pearl Jam was one of about three rock bands he liked at that point and since his photo pass was revoked it wasn't my fault so I didn't have to pay for the gas.

After the show on the way to my folks' apartment Ric and I were discussing it. We were wondering how he died. Drugs seemed the most likely culprit.

Get to my parents' place and immediately tell dad I have to turn on MTV. I didn't have cable at the time and it was amusing having dad roll his eyes remembering when I lived at home and would change radio and TV stations but he acquiesced and at that point is when we learned that it was suicide.

Ric and I got real quiet - we couldn't believe it - and even dad started to pay attention (dad would recount to me Nirvana lyrics published in the Washington post a few days later, telling me he liked them) and we watched MTV for a few hours before finally getting to sleep.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8CbK5lDsI0

I guess I was in a supermarket because I saw it on the Daily Star which was the only UK paper to carry the news on its front page

in my attempts to verify this with pictorial evidence just now I found a story on their website titled Kurt Cobain ‘KILLED by Illuminati after making chilling 9/11 warning in THIS photo’ which is literally based on youtube comments. can't believe the Daily Star would etc