NEVER FADE AWAY: THE KURT COBAIN STORY - June 1994 by Dave Thompson. [Excerpts]

Excerpts from the book "Never Fade Away: The Kurt Cobain Story" by Dave Thompson, published June 1994. 

The weekend following the March 18th incident.

Courtney and Nirvana bassist Chris Novoselic led the delegation of friends and family who intended confronting Kurt over his continued drug use and delivering the simple message, "shape up or ship out". As Tammi Blevins, a Gold Mountain spokeswoman, explained, "people close to him definitely did not want him on drugs."

Steve Chatoff, head of the Steps chemical dependency and mental health facility north of L.A., was intended to moderate the Intervention if everything had gone according to plan, Chatoff would have returned to California with Kurt by his side. But it didn't. Someone reportedly warned Kurt what was going on, and that particular meeting was cancelled.

"There was no sense in my going after that," Chatoff told reporters. "You need the element of surprise, to break through denial." And as another family friend told the L.A. Times' Robert Hilburn, "Kurt is so much in denial about a drug problem that it's unbelievable."

The Intervention went ahead regardless, a week later at Kurt and Courtney's home in Seattle's exclusive Madrona district.

March 25th 1994.

 It was strictly informal, simply a gathering of the ten or so people who cared most about Kurt, who just wanted to sit down with him for a while and talk. Courtney and Chris; Danny Goldberg, now head of Atlantic Records; Pat Smear, the guitarist who had been working with Nirvana on and off since the previous fall; Dylan Carlson, one of Kurt's closest friends...

"I told him, 'you've got to be a good daddy,"" Courtney said afterwards. "We've got to be good parents."

But Kurt wasn't interested. He would sit there for a while, quiet and seemingly acquiescent, his gaze passing from faces to his feet, but he didn't give a damn, not even when he heard that Gold Mountain had added their weight to the warning, reportedly by informing him that he would be dropped from their roster if he didn't clean up. Instead, he told Smear that they had work to do, and went down to the basement to rehearse a new song.

Courtney left Seattle to San Francisco with Janet Billig. 

March 26th 1994

Courtney checked into the Peninsula Hotel in Beverley Hills, her base while she was in Los Angeles promoting her own band, Hole's, new album release, the now ironically titled "..live through this".

...She had left Kurt behind in Seattle, not out of choice, but out of necessity. He could be stubborn as a mule when his mind was set on something, and all she could hope to do, all anybody could ever do, was simply try to wear his resistance down. Now she was calling him every day, asking him to join her and maybe check out the rehab clinic Exodus Recovery Center, in Marina Del Rey.

Finally, Kurt gave in. He'd be down in two days and he'd swing by the clinic and see what was happening.

March 27th 1994.

The day before he left for L.A., Kurt apparently posted a lengthy message on the Internet computer network. It was mostly inconsequential ("so this is the Information Highway our illustrious VP has been jawing to the nation about?"), but did include a few tidbits about his plans for Nirvana's future a "revamped" version of the last album's "Penny Royal Tea" which was planned for imminent release as a single; the "calmer, moodier" album they'd start work on in the fall.

"If you're expecting the same verse-chorus-verse... you have but two choices. Don't buy the new album ... or get used to the fact that the band is changing. Longevity, folks."

He made only one reference to his recent personal crises. "I'm still a little freaked over the Rome thing, and need some time to rest and get over it. You'd think they could make a good milkshake, but no."

It wasn't only Kurt's health which concerned Courtney, however, even though that in itself would have been enough. The couple were still reeling from their 18-month-old encounter with the California child welfare authorities, swinging into action following a Vanity Fair article which claimed that Courtney maintained her own heroin habit while she was pregnant with her daughter, Frances Bean.

The crisis was averted, but it was still raised in conversation-even Spin brought it up when they'd talked earlier in the year.

"So, what about the actual charges?" writer Dennis Cooper asked.

"Innocent," Love replied. "Isn't that obvious?" Almost precisely one year before, on March 23rd, 1993, having spent the past three months submitting to regular urine tests and check-ups from social workers, the Cobains were informed that the authorities would be taking no further interest in Frances.

But as Courtney was well aware, it wasn't just her conduct during her pregnancy which had come under the microscope. It was her future behavior as well, and not only her's, but Kurt's too. Among the threats which she hurled at her husband as she begged him to check into rehab, was the knowledge of what could happen should his true state ever become public knowledge. "If we lose Frances..."

Once Kurt was in the Center, everyone breathed a huge sigh of relief. He was going to be okay. Two days later, Courtney's whole world came crashing down again.

The time Kurt Cobain spent in rehab remains undocumented, hardly surprisingly, of course. More than a week after he "jumped the fence" as Courtney put it, the Daniel Freeman Hospital, to which the Exodus center is affiliated, had still to confirm that he was even a patient.

But whatever happened, whatever treatment was meted out to Cobain, it doesn't seem to have made much difference. Kurt appeared to have vanished into thin air. Even Courtney was left in the dark. "I didn't know where he was. He never, ever disappeared like that. He always called me."

Instead, she was left with the memory of his last phone call, shortly before he vanished. "No matter what happens, I want you to know you made a really good record."

She asked him what he meant, what was likely to happen? But he wouldn't say. "Just remember, no matter what happens, I love you."

On Sunday, April 3rd, according to a source close to the band, Courtney and Geffen arranged for private detectives to be hired, to trace Kurt. It was their belief that he would probably head back to Seattle.

Kurt was, in fact, already there. He arrived on Wednesday, March 30th, the same day he left the rehab facility, and contacted his old friend Dylan Carlson, guitarist with Olympia's band Earth, and the best man at Kurt and Courtney's marriage two years before. Kurt asked Dylan if he would go with him to buy a shotgun. "He said he wanted [it] for protection," Dylan explained later, which seemed reasonable enough.

So did Kurt's request that Dylan make the actual purchase. He was worried, Dylan said, that if he bought it in his own name, the police would simply come around and confiscate it. He and the Seattle Police Department had quite a history in that respect, as Dylan himself knew the Taurus .380 which had been taken away just a couple of weeks before, had been registered in Carlson's name. It was also one of the guns which had been temporarily impounded the previous June.

The pair set off for Stan Baker's Gun Shop, on Lake City Way NE Baker later remembered wondering "what the hell are those kids going to do with that shotgun? It's not hunting season." But it was not his concern, either. Dylan purchased the weapon, a 61b Remington Model 11 20-gauge shotgun, and the two left the store. Dylan later asked Kurt if he wanted him to keep the rifle at his condo. Kurt told him no. That day was to be their last meeting.

Where Kurt went from there may never be known for certain. Later on Wednesday, he was in a downtown gunshop buying a second box of shells. He did spend at least one night at a property he and Courtney had bought the previous year, a little north of Carnation, a township 40 miles northeast of Seattle. Courtney would tell Seattle's Post Intelligencer newspaper that it looked as though he'd had company, as well. Balled up by a fireplace, in the still-unfinished two story house which the couple were building, lay a blue sleeping bag which she had never seen before. A nearby ashtray overflowed with cigarette butts, some, she recognized as Kurt's brand, but as for the others, she'd not seen them before either.

On Monday, the day after the private detectives were taken on, Courtney was interviewed by the L.A. Times' Robert Hilburn. She spoke of the horror of finding Kurt spread out on the floor in Rome, blue and still. "I don't ever want to see him ... like that again. I thought I went through a lot of hard times over the years, but that was the hardest."

It was the last scheduled interview she would do. The following afternoon, callers were informed by the hotel switchboard that her room was not accepting any calls whatsoever. An interview with the Seattle Rocket was cancelled without warning, although Hole guitarist Eric Erlandson explained simply that Courtney was feeling unwell. He promised that he would try to reschedule the telephone interview for later that evening. He didn't.

In fact, Courtney probably wasn't even at the hotel. Instead, she was combing the streets of L.A., searching for her husband.

Back home, Cobain's mother, Wendy O'Connor, was instituting a search of her own, filing a missing person's report with the Seattle police department on Monday. Word had reached her that her son had bought a shotgun; in the report, she described him as armed, and possibly suicidal. But somewhat mysteriously, he was not considered dangerous.

Back in L.A., Courtney was voicing similar anxieties. "I'm really afraid for him right now," she told a friend.

In the days that followed, the Seattle police department paid several visits to the Cobains' Madrona home. There was no sign of life. They would also check out the address on Seattle's Capitol Hill, where O'Connor claimed her son bought his drugs. Again, however, there was nothing.

Courtney remained in L.A., wrestling now with both her own conscience and the calm advice of friends. Every instinct in her body was screaming she should return to Seattle to join the search for Kurt. But other people, she admitted later, counselled her simply to sit tight.

They knew as well as she did how volatile Kurt could be when he wanted, how he would so often do one thing when he was asked to do another. The last thing anybody needed was for him to storm off in a fit of contrariness and maybe do something stupid. "I listened to too many people," Courtney confesses. "I'm only going to listen to my gut for the rest of my life." At the time, however, the advice seemed sensible. The private detectives had apparently made some headway in their search for Kurt, contact had been made, but Kurt refused to be taken back to L.A. Instead, he turned and fled.

He remained in sight, though, and while the idea of physically harnessing Kurt was reluctantly dropped from the gameplan, according to a source, a friend was directed to keep tabs on him.

Also on Monday, a music industry insider is said to have run into Kurt, and pleaded with him to check into a local rehab center. Cobain refused. Other sources claimed to have seen him out in search of drug dealers.

There was even a rumor, reported one week later in the L.A. Times, that he actually telephoned a friend to say he'd bought a shotgun. What he needed to know now was, what was the best way to shoot yourself in the head? The friend's response does not appear to have been recorded.

By Tuesday, tension within the Nirvana camp was palpable, although the precise state of affairs remained a closely guarded secret, a decision which may or may not have been wise. It is easy to say that the knowledge that he was the subject of a major private manhunt might simply have driven Kurt further underground. But it is also possible that the more people who searched for him, the more chance there was that someone might find him.

Instead, the only news which had leaked out concerned the aftermath of the unsucessful intervention. Rumors spread first that Gold Mountain had indeed dropped the band from its books, then that Nirvana had just broken up, both possibilities which were only reinforced two days later, when it was announced that contrary to previously published information, Nirvana would not be headlining this summer's Lollapalooza tour.

The reason given was Kurt's health problems, although the break-up was just as plausible, particularly as a few people immediately began speculating-when one considered the apparent ease with which Nirvana had just backed down for the first time from the creative control they had insisted upon when they signed with Geffen.

Although their last album, the six month old In Utero, had already sold over two million copies, there were no doubts that it had still to reach its full potential audience. The hoped for reason? The reluctance on the part of so-called rack jobber distributors, to place it into certain "middle America discount chains" on account of its cover art. A report in the CD newsletter Ice announced that a small section of the album's original cover depicting one of Kurt's own fetus and womb strewn art works had been enlarged (the section showed no fetuses) "to serve as the entire back cover... [in addition] the song title 'Rape Me' has been changed to read 'Waif Me'."

The report continued, "One Geffen executive estimated that getting the album into [these] stores can add 10% to its total sales figures," meaning "at least 200,000 units are at stake, enough to shake any artist's idealistic stance."

But Kurt was not "any artist", and if his stance could be described as idealistic, it was because his very nature was idealistic. That was what lav at the heart of so many of his problems, a sense, maybe even the knowledge, that all too often, the idealism which he felt simply did not translate into other peoples' worlds.

And though both Geffen and Gold Mountain moved swiftly to defuse the story ("you're really not changing ... Nirvana's artistic vision," Janet Billig told Ice, "just ... some words on a piece of paper"), few observers could imagine Kurt having simply rolled over and agreed to the butchery of his muse. If nothing else, it did not fit his esprit de punk.

Of course, this may have had nothing to do with the reasons behind the sudden outburst of activity behind the scenes, behind the screens. It really was just another iron lying in the fires of speculation. But there again, so was the very idea that Nirvana were on the verge of splitting up; might even have already done so.

Sometime on Tuesday, April 5th, Kurt headed back to Madrona, quietly letting himself into the gray house. According to the Seattle Post Intelligencer, he was high, riding on the combination of heroin and valium which seemed to blot out his personal pain better than anything else. The PI alleged that the level of smack in his bloodstream was 1.52mg per liter. Doses one third as strong have been known to prove fatal.

The house was silent, empty, dark, it always was when Courtney and Frances were away, and he switched the television on. Then, he slipped across to the mother-in-law apartment above the garage, where Michael DeWitt, Frances Bean's former nanny, had once lived.

Two days later, on Thursday, April 7th, the Seattle Police Department reportedly received another summons to the Cobain residence, when a phone call alleging a disturbance was apparently received. Five minutes later, a source insists, a second call retracted it, insisting that the report was merely a hoax.

The police would have responded either way, but the house was silent, empty, and the workmen who had been in the grounds throughout the week wouldn't have known anything about disturbances or hoax calls. So far as they were concerned, Mr. and Mrs. Cobain hadn't been near the house all week. The private detectives who were still engaged in searching for Kurt would have backed up their story, and so would the neighbors. Cobain's body lay where he fell for three days.

Back in L.A., Courtney was at her wits' end. A full week had now passed since she last spoke with her husband. She was, her lawyer, Barry Tarlow, later said, already "disturbed, concerned, troubled"; now she was allegedly having some kind of allergic reaction to the medication prescribed for her, to try and sooth her nerves. Hives and swellings were breaking out on her body. Desperately, she called 911.

Courtney was rushed to Century City hospital, not, however, as an allergy sufferer, but as a suspected drug overdose. Following treatment, she was booked on suspicion of narcotics possession; possession of drug paraphernalia (including a hypodermic needle); and possession of stolen property, a prescription book, Tarlow said, which her doctor had left behind in her room.

He also dismissed the possession charge. Tarlow said the fine powder, which the authorities found in a good-luck charm, was ashes. Courtney was released on $10,000 bail three hours after she was charged. Arraignment was set for May 5. She resumed her vigil.

But her wait was almost over.

Gary Smith, a 50-year-old electrician employed by Veca Electrical Contractors in Bellevue, arrived at the Cobain house around 8:30 A.M. on Friday, April 8th, to begin installing a security system. "I walked around to the door on the back side of the garage [and] looked to see if I had a way to route the wire." That's when he saw the body, "through a glass opening in the door." Except at first, he didn't know it was a body. At first, he thought it was a dressmaker's mannequin lying alongside an upturned flowerpot.

Then he saw the blood, congealed in the right ear. And then he saw the shotgun, pointing at the chin.

Smith bolted for his truck and put a call through to the dispatcher. "Call 911... there's a body!" He admitted that he didn't recognize it, that he'd never seen Kurt Cobain. "If he passed me on the street, I would not know who he was."

While Smith waited for the police to arrive, his boss was on the phone to local rock radio station KXRX-FM.

"He had his details straight," says DJ Beau Roberts, who took the call. "But when I asked him his name, he was very defensive and hung up. We thought it was just another hoax." It would not, after all, have been the first time rumor mills thrive on death and disaster, and it really doesn't need much to start the ball rolling.

It took a second, more detailed, call to convince KXRX to take their inquiries further; then, when the police department confirmed that a body had indeed been discovered, the station broadcast what information they had, breaking the news to a stunned Seattle.

It was precious little, but more than enough. Throughout the day, listeners remained glued to radio sets for updates, info, or even vague rumor. MTV went into day long overdrive, prompting Time magazine to compare their coverage with that which followed the assassination of JFK, 31 years before -"with Kurt Loder in the role of Walter Cronkite." 

Still. as late as its midafternoon edition. the local Seattle Times newspaper still couldn't provide anything more concrete than the fact that a body had indeed been discovered; and the police were keeping quiet as well. There was a suicide note, but police "wouldn't say who signed [it], who it was addressed to, or its contents. They [also] declined to discuss the identity of the dead man."

For Cobain's audience, however, even the rumor was enough. By 11:30 A.M., the first knot of fans were braving the drizzle and making their way to Madrona. By mid-afternoon, though there were still no more than half a dozen milling around, the most disinterested passerby would have noticedthat something very tragic, very sad, had just shattered the peace of the leafy, well-heeled neighborhood.

Things were somewhat more frantic elsewhere. At one point, crisis hotlines in Seattle were taking up to quarter of an hour to answer their phones, and as late as midnight, there was still a lengthy delay. One volunteer worker admitted she had never experienced a day like it and hoped she never would again.

Three days later, on Monday, April 11th, the first copycat suicide was reported in Seattle. It would not be the last. "Cobain was a talented artist, but his last message implied suicide was okay," King County Executive Gary Lock complained to the media. "It's crucial [now] that we answer that message. There is help available." MTV backed his message by including an item on suicide prevention in the following weekend's Week In Rock news show.

Both KXRX and KISW announced that they would be broadcasting Nirvana's music throughout the weekend, pre-empting their scheduled programming and playlists. "People are just in shock," KXRX news director Mike West said. "For the so-called 'Generation X', he's the John Lennon of their time. They lived for every word."

KISW DJ Mike Jones agreed. The station's switchboard had been ringing red-hot all day, hundreds of fans calling, "not wanting to hear what we have to tell them. They expect us to tell them it's a rumor."

But of course, it wasn't. By the end of the day, KXRX, KISW and KNDD had announced they would be staging a memorial vigil at the Seattle Center Flag Pavilion for Sunday evening. Saturday night, there would be a candlelight vigil in Cobain's Aberdeen hometown, while local label Sub Pop's long scheduled sixth birthday party, set to be staged at the Crocodile Cafe that same evening, was now being referred to as a wake. The news cameras were outside before the invited guests even started arriving.

It was a subdued, and for the assembled pressmen, a disappointing affair. Three bands played, all Sub Pop discoveries-Sunny Day Real Estate, Pond and Velocity Girl-but even their own fans seemed distracted. Bruce Pavitt got up to speak, briefly and sadly. "A lot of what happened for [Sub Pop] happened in tandem with what happened for Nirvana.... We should remember and celebrate the positive things about Kurt Cobain." Later, many of the party-goers headed on to Linda's Tavern, the nearby bar partially owned by Sub Pop's Jonathan Poneman and Pavitt, where Kurtwas apparently seen a week before he took his life.

Record stores were picked clean by 3 P.M. Friday, there was scarcely a Nirvana record to be bought in Seattle. Many stores had even taken their phones off the hook "we've not had a day like this since John Lennon!" sighed one of the handful still answering.

On both sides of the Atlantic, the following week's chart showed Nirvana's entire back catalog had made sizeable-if not utterly unpredictable-leaps up the chart. In Utero jumped from #72 to #27, with sales in excess of 40,000; Nevermind tripled the 7,000 copies it had sold the previous week, to climb from #167 to #56; Incesticide re-entered the chart at #147; sales of Bleach went from 2,000 in the week before Kurt's death, to 9,000. And that only included sales figures up to the Sunday following the tragedy.

Where Nirvana albums were exhausted, fans started picking up Hole's instead. Live Through This, the band's second album, was released on the Tuesday following Kurt's death, a date which had been scheduled some time before, and at least one Seattle record store was able to report, "we sold out the day we got it," Rich Price, store manager of the downtown branch of Music-land, told the Post-Intelligencer. "A lot of people have been requesting it. There's definitely a buzz going on. It was getting good reviews before [Kurt's] death, but [the death] has been a catalyst."

Yet amid so much activity, still there was little news to go on. Kurt's body was identified from his fingerprints, and by 7 P.M. Friday, the first black limousines were passing through the winding driveway to the house. The police had already abandoned the scene, to be replaced by a private security firm.

Courtney Love had yet to appear. News of her arrest the previous day had yet to surface, except as a very vague rumor which was promptly, and regrettably, dismissed even by hardened reporters. Instead, journalists and cameramen chased ghosts, one report insisted she had been sighted boarding a charter plane for Seattle at Van Nuys airport, another claimed she was in London, where Hole were scheduled to perform at the Astoria II the following Sunday.

As it transpired, she had flown to Seattle immediately upon hearing of her husband's death, booking a charter flight and making her way directly to Kurt's mother, Wendy O'Connor. "Every night I've been sleeping with his mother," she told the thousands of fans gathered for the memorial vigil that Sunday. "And I wake up in the morning and I think it's him, because her body's sort of the same."

She arrived at her now media-besieged home on Saturday. Michael Azerrad, author of Nirvana's Come As You Are biography, appeared at one point to deliver a message of thanks from Love to the assembled fans. Later, Courtney spoke briefly with MTV news reporter Tabitha Soren (who ironically was already in Seattle, filming a report on drug abuse). She read aloud several passages from Kurt's suicide note; the rest she reserved for the message she was tape recording for the following evening's memorial at the Seattle Center. She would read more in person at the family's own, private, service.

There, around two hundred friends and family, including the father Kurt had scarcely seen since his teens, his mother and sister Kim, his aunt Bev, and his paternal grandfather, Leland, gathered to pay their final respects. Dave Grohl and Chris Novoselic, Kim Deal and Peter Buck were there as well. Kurt's grandmother, Iris, wasn't; ill-health prevented her from making the journey up to Seattle. "Now I have no way to say goodbye," she reportedly told Aunt Bev.

After the service, a tape of some of Kurt's favorite music was played Iggy Pop, the Beatles, Leadbelly and his own. Somehow, his inclusion within such esteemed company only seemed right.

At the same time, Courtney's tape recorded message was booming out over a now silent Seattle Center. Other speakers, DJs, remembering their own encounters with Kurt, his step uncle, Larry Smith, recounting a few happy memories, the Reverend Towles, leading the crowd in a short but heartfelt prayer, had come and gone. Now Courtney was bathed in a spotlight she wished she had never, ever seen.

Her voice all but inaudible through her tears, Courtney began to read her late husband's last words. She'd prefaced them with a brave explanation brave, because even in his last few moments, Kurt's thoughts were not only of his immediate family. They also went out to everybody who had ever bought a Nirvana record, everyone who had ever gone to see them play, everyone whose life would be touched, and somehow rendered a little bit sadder, by what he was about to do.

"I don't think it takes away from his dignity to read this, considering that it's addressed to most of you. "Later, there was some criticism within the media that so private a moment should be shared with 5,000-plus strangers, but Love was right to read it, just as she was right to appear personally at the memorial, shortly before it was over, traveling directly from Unity Church to sit quietly amidst the grieving fans.

She was right, too, to lead the crowd on tape into a chant of "asshole" in memory of her late husband. In the face of his own confession, that he took his life because he couldn't stand his job, it was the most honest response she could have delivered.

And today, most people agree with that.

But even as answers are finally given to the questions which have swirled round Seattle since the story first broke, as the cracked jigsaw puzzle of Kurt's last days is finally pieced together and solved, still there remain several pieces which might never be satisfactorily fit into place.

Why, when Cobain's delicate mental state was common knowledge, was

he never pointed in the direction of help that he could trust?

Why, when his health was clearly endangering both his own wellbeing, and that of his band's, was more not done to discover what was wrong?

And why, before his body was even laid to rest, did one have the terrible feeling that he will not be the last pampered and sheltered superstar to die so adored and yet so alone? In a remark which is still being broadcast around the world, the first quotable quote from any grieving family member, Wendy O'Connor lamented that her son had finally joined "that stupid club," the club which is reserved for dead rock'n'rollers.

The news services gobbled her comment up greedily, even pausing to note that Kurt was 27 when he died, the same age as Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison. But Hendrix and Morrison, Sid Vicious, Brian Jones, Andrew Wood and the all other stars who shine in rock'n'roll heaven, didn't deliberately choose to die, didn't calmly write a letter to their families before placing a shotgun in their mouths and firing.

There was nothing accidental about Kurt Cobain's death, and no room for error either. Even without the suicide note, nobody could ever say it was another cry cry for help which went horribly, tragically, wrong. Cobain knew what he was doing, as certainly as he knew why he did it. And in making that decision, he made another, too. He wasn't joining some "stupid club" ... or if he was, it wasn't the one which his mother had in mind.

NEVER FADE AWAY: THE KURT COBAIN STORY

Copyright © 1994 by Dave Thompson