tangle of cassettes, CDs and what looks to be a change of clothes. I’ve become something like friends with Nathan. Every so often, I bring a cold beer back to him, bum him a Marlboro or bum one from him. We talk about real bands with real guitars and real drums. He gives me tapes of new music, demos mostly, underground stuff by bands I never heard of, and will probably never hear again.
Nathan hands me a worn-out cassette tape; ink scribbles cover the original handwriting. Big black chicken-scratched letters read: BLEACH. On the back was written Nirvana: live gigs. “These guys are really good, and they’re gonna blow up,” Nathan yells. “You wait and see. Huge.”
A few months after Nathan gave me the tape, in the club I started to hear “Smells like Teen Spirit,” the first song from Nirvana’s second album, Nevermind. A few months later, it was all over the radio and the video was played on MTV whenever MTV played videos. Hair bands faded away. Glam boys and Glam girls stepped aside for grunge—with its dirty flannel shirts, ripped jeans and uncombed, unwashed hair. Nirvana sold 26 million copies of Nevermind worldwide. Nirvana was on the cover of Spin, NME, and Hit Parader. Kurt Cobain was on the cover of Rolling Stone. Nathan was right. Nirvana was huge, and during the nearly four years the band was in the spotlight, we all watched as they “blew up.”
It was no surprise that Kurt killed himself. He was tangled up in heroin. He was depressed, manic, and obsessed with suicide. I think what surprised me most about the news of his death was me—sitting at my desk and thinking about that ragged cassette. Strange, really. Me—wearing a tie and white shirt, and dress shoes. Me—staring at the sales reports and employee reviews that needed to be complete before I could go home. Me—wondering what happened to my DJ friend, wondering what he thought of this mess.
All that weekend, on TV, were pictures of devastated fans. Imagine 7,000 people holding candles, flowers, and homemade signs. Imagine the burning of flannel shirts. Imagine a recording played to the audience—a grieving widow reading his last words. Reading, "It’s better to burn out than fade away . . .”
Watching this, I realized my life had taken a bad turn when I wasn’t paying attention. I wasn’t going anywhere I wanted to be. A few years back, I was the kid dressed in black with parts of my head shaved and other parts long and tangly. Now, out of nowhere, I’m behind a desk telling employees there are no raises, not this year. To think: yesterday, I was a rising star at the office. Today, I’m a sell-out to conformity.
You get caught in the current. You know you need to steer—but it’s so hard. And you know if you don’t, then you will again start to think about the metallic taste of the gun.
Is it fair to say that Kurt’s death was as momentous as the death of John Lennon? These two moments in time seem, to me, both different and yet the same. For many people, I imagine the loss of John was the loss of a voice. But what was the loss we felt when Kurt died? Maybe it was his voice. Maybe we lost a moment. Or maybe we saw truth in his final words. I don’t know. Regardless, I think it’s fair to say that the world had changed again—changed because Kurt Cobain was dead.