Everett True's Recollection

The Funeral

I was in Cincinnati, Ohio, on 8 April 1994 with Steve Gullick when I first heard the rumour that Kurt Cobain had killed himself.

We were in town to interview Beck, then one of Gold Mountain's rising stars with his slacker anthem 'Loser'. I'd got to town the previous night, in time to catch Tacoma WA skate-grunge band Seaweed at a local venue that also served as a Laundromat. Despite two members being down with the 'flu, the ex-Sub Pop act were in fine thrashing form, reminding me of all the energy and massive power hooks that first attracted me to the Seattle sound. Steve had flown in the following morning and we were sitting around waiting for his room to become ready. It was one of those days you sometimes get while travelling: grey, dull and stretching forever. We were looking forward to hooking up with Guided By Voices in neighbouring city Dayton later that week, though.

Already, we'd been informed that Beck also had the 'flu, and might have to pull out of both that night's show (at the Laundromat, with skewed LA female pop band That Dog in support) and our interview. So we were sitting around in my hotel room, relaxing. watching MTV and CNN, looking at magazines with pictures of Hole in. The Hole album Live Through This was about to come out and Steve, being faintly prudish, was shocked at some of the photographs of Courtney. 'I wonder what Kurt thinks of this? he asked me on more than one occasion. Despite the weather, though, we were happy; bringing each other up to speed on the last few hectic weeks, when the phone suddenly rings. It's about eleven a.m.

Steve picks it up. It's Paul Lester, my features editor from Melody Maker not always the most sensitive of fellows. 'So what's all this about Kurt Cobain being dead then?'

'I don't know what you're talking about,' Steve replies. 'You better speak to Everett.'

I look at Steve. There's obviously something wrong, I can tell by his manner.

'It's Lester,' he says. 'He says there's a rumour going round that Kurt has killed himself'

I speak to Paul and tell him that neither of us knows anything but that I'd ring around, find out and ring him back as soon as I could. He asks me to hurry, as there's a whole load of Maker journalists waiting in the office late in case the story is true. Steve and I look at each other: it's about then that the façade crumbles and... don't ask me how... but we both know it's true. Kurt has killed himself.

I don't know what made us feel so certain. It wasn't as if either of us had realised up to that point that Kurt was suicidal. Both of us had thought that the Rome incident where the singer had overdosed on a cocktail of champagne and Rohypnol a couple of weeks earlier had been a genuine accident. I thought this, despite the fact Courtney had called me up shortly afterwards, asking whether I thought that treating Kurt to a 'tough love' session to help him kick his heroin addiction was a good idea. I had no idea what such a session entailed but I figured anything that helped Kurt sort his life out had to be worth trying. Also, Courtney's personal manager Janet Billig from Gold Mountain had phoned me up personally after Rome to reassure me there was nothing mentally wrong with Kurt. (Whatever. I'm sure Janet was trying her hardest to cope with a crap situation as best she could. It wasn't until a few months later that I'd learnt that Kurt had written a suicide note that night.)

The next thirty minutes were spent in a bad haze of uncertainty as I phoned every number I could think of Gold Mountain, Bad Moon (Nirvana's UK press agents), my contacts at Geffen, the house to no avail. Eventually I was forced to call Nirvana biographer Michael Azerrad in New York City. I didn't want to. I didn't like the man. I felt he'd been chosen to write the Nirvana book by Kurt's management simply because he was a 'safe pair of hands'.

'Yes, it's true,' he told me. 'We're all just on our way out to Seattle. I'd advise you to do the same'. (It struck me then as an odd statement. It still does. What earthly good could I do by going to Seattle? Perhaps Michael was making reference to that job description I'd had screamed at me on Brighton-London train all those years ago and that I'd vehemently denied: 'You're just a fucking music journalist.' Is that all it came down to after years of passion, that I had a job to carry out?) told Steve the news.

I threw the remnants of my bottle of Maker's Mark down the sink, figuring that the worst possible thing I could do at that stage was to get trashed. Steve asked me to inform Melody Maker that he didn't want any of his photos used in the inevitable tribute that would follow.. I think that when I called back up I must have spoken to my editor, the semi-legendary old punk journalist Allan Jones. He told me that I should just go and do what I needed to do, 'plane tickets, whatever, it doesn't matter, we'll cover the cost, you don't have to write anything if you don't feel like it'. It's a conversation I'll remember with gratitude until my dying day.

I can't accurately remember what followed. It wasn't real. We sat there dazed. I didn't know what to do or where to go. I didn't want to fly to Seattle to confront a future that I knew would come crashing down around me as soon as I arrived. For the last five years of my life I'd managed to leave my past behind and not deal with the bad side. I wanted to be anywhere but in America, in Seattle, in Ohio... I started thinking of all those times I'd refused to call Kurt or Courtney, thinking that famous people didn't need friends, not when they had so many managers around them. I knew that if Kurt had just managed to hang out with Steve and me, see a band like Guided By Voices a few times, get trashed with Kim Deal, he'd never have been driven to such an extreme.. Yeah, right.

The phone rang again. It was Eric, Courtney's guitarist and my (and Kurt's) friend, calling from an airport. 'Courtney wants you to come to Seattle.' So it was I found myself walking through the sterile, anaemic aisles of Cincinnati airport with Steve, clutching a bag full of vinyl albums that I'd bought only the day before. We didn't know what to say to each other. I gave Steve the records to take back to England with him.

So it was that I came to be flying into Seattle on the afternoon that Kurt Cobain's body was discovered, tears streaming down my face, the refrain to a Hole song spiralling crazily round inside my head. 'Live through this with me,' the lady sang. 'And I swear that I will die for you.'Eric had informed me that when I arrived at Seattle, if I called the house they would arrange for a limousine to pick me up from the airport. It was necessary. By the time the car had got to the gates of the Cobain residence in Lake Washington it was crazy outside. Police tape and small scrums of reporters and the curious lined the secluded road. No one was being allowed in unless they'd been expressly invited. I couldn't help feeling I was being allowed access to the rock journalist's ultimate dream. A guest list to die for. Sorry about the black humour, but you know we liked it that way.

Inside the house, it was curiously silent. Mark Lanegan, awesome blues singer with Ellensberg's Screaming Trees and close friend of Kurt's, was standing in one corner. He looked alone and I felt alone, both of us separated from everyone else by our natures and the situation. It seemed natural we should hang out together.

There was virtually no one else there until Krist and Dave turned up with a few friends and family and went and stood on the other side of the room. Courtney and Eric's camp turned up a little later . or perhaps it was earlier. I remember some record company types briefly having a fit at my presence there - I was a journalist -and thinking, 'You stupid, stupid fuckheads. I'm not the one being paid to pretend I'm a fucking friend.'

At one stage, Krist came over and asked me if I wanted to come to a wake being held for Kurt that evening by a few of his old Seattle friends. I declined because.. well... I was in Courtney's camp that day, and there was no getting round it. My loyalties had been sorted out a while before. Even though I wanted to speak to Krist, I couldn't because of the politics around Nirvana that didn't die away for one second upon Kurt's suicide, only intensified.

Mark and I stuck around the house after most everyone else had departed. There were some terrible arguments going on between Courtney and Eric, and the nanny Cali, but that was nothing unusual. Some of the people there wanted to take drugs to hide the terrible sudden pain, and others equally as vehemently didn't want them re-introduced to the house. We were introduced to Kurt's mom Wendy by Courtney the following way, Courtney using my real name "This is Kurt's friend, Mark, and this is my friend, Jerry.' Both of us were shown and read the suicide note.

And that's almost all I'm going to tell of that terribly sad weekend. Mark and I stayed in the whole time at his apartment, somewhere near the start of the Monorail, downtown. We didn't go out except for perhaps one cup of coffee round the corner. We barely spoke. I was mostly concerned with making sure Mark was all right, and I'm sure he was the same back. We turned on thetelevision once: there was talk of Nirvana and the fans' vigil, and we turned it off again straight away. A load of Sub Pop hipsters were holding their annual party which had turned into a wake at the Crocodile Club. Fair enough, but Kurt hadn't exactly got along with his old peers in recent years. We played a few records, walked around the house, tried to pretend to each other that we hadn't been crying. Mostly however we just sat there and waited for Courtney to call, in case she needed us.

When it came to the day of the funeral service, we realised that I had no appropriate clothes to wear. My only pair of jeans had holes in their knees. We knew that Kurt wouldn't have given a fuck but I still didn't want to look disrespectful. So I borrowed a pair of Mark's black drainpipes and turned up to the service with the top three buttons undone.

It was a gloriously sunny day as we left Mark's apartment to go down to the church the sort of day when Seattle becomes the most beautiful city in the world, bar none, with Mount Rainer and the Olympics in shimmering crisp detail behind the skyscrapers and Space Needle. It had been raining the whole of the previous week, as is the Pacific Northwest's wont

'I swear that Kurt would never have killed himself if the weather had been this nice last week,' Mark remarked thoughtfully.

Initially, I felt a sense of betrayal at Kurt's suicide. That rapidly disappeared over the following months. People say that suicide is the ultimate act of cowardice but you know what? It's far more cowardly to let your life disappear into nameless years of drinking and drugs, wasting away the days of your life in a bleak TV-satiated depression because you're too scared to make a change. Sure, I blamed his management for placing too many demands on him while he was feeling so fragile. I soon outgrew that, though. They didn't mean to fucking kill him! They were only trying their best to accommodate everyone, do what Courtney and Kurt and Krist and Dave were asking of them.

Kurt's death was such a shame, such a shame. At one point it had really felt we could've changed things, but with his suicide it was finally proved to me, irrevocably, this is what happens when you try to fuck with the system. There it was in plain black and white. The system kills you.

I know others that the system has killed also; people with fragile, unique voices that became overpowered by the boorish chants of the grey masses, friends and acquaintances and others even closer. They too were unable to cope with the demands placed upon themof everyday life. Maybe someone they loved left them, perhaps they never managed to adjust to everyone else's normality. Who knows? It's not difficult to imagine nothing when you sink into such total depression. Anything is preferable to loneliness: es- pecially death. Kurt happened to be the most famous friend who'd killed himself. He was also the hardest to mourn. Who could I call? Who could I speak to about his death? Anyone I knew that might be able to relate was thousands of miles away and had sorrows of their own. I already felt bad enough about the contradictions of my position as part of the voyeuristic rock press... Had I somehow contributed to Kurt's death? Maybe the only reason we hung out together was because his glory reflected upon me and gave me that illusion of glamour I'd been searching for all my life?

We had talked about changing things with Nirvana. What would we have replaced the old order with, though? We wanted some- thing better. What did that mean? We wanted something less macho, more female-led, more sensitive and spontaneous and fun and exciting: Jad Fair and Courtney Love and Kim Deal, Kathleen Hanna, Daniel Johnston and Dan Treacy. We wanted our friends, our peers, our dreams and our heroes in positions of authority; is that such a crime? We wanted a place where bullies and braggarts didn't automatically rule. We wanted a place where women aren't automatically second-class citizens because they we - are already part of us. A place where commercial radio counted for shit. A place where no fucking managerial types could make hypocritical speeches about maintaining freedom of speech within the press while simultaneously repressing the press' right to same through use of a few well-placed lawsuits and threats.

What did we want? Not much: just Nirvana.

I returned to England after a couple of days.

Some things were said at Kurt's funeral service that made me realise precisely why the singer had finally given up. They had no grounding in reality, no relation to any man I've ever known. Kurt was referred to as an angel that came to earth in human form, as someone who was too good for this life and that was why he was only here for such a short time. Bull-fucking-shit! Kurt wa was as pissy and moody and belligerent and naughty and funny and dull as the rest of us, it just so happened he was a little too sensitive for the situation he found himself in, too. After the service I left the church and started walking to anywhere, anywhere but where all these self-righteous prigs revelling in their own fame and importance were sitting.I forced myself to return, remembered there were people like Lanegan there, and Calvin Johnson, and Jon and Bruce from Sub Pop, and the Breeders... people I loved dearly. Yet in all the days that followed, I only ever found one other person who had been equally upset by what had been said: Kristen Pfaff, bassist with Courtney's band and formerly bassist with great Minneapolis hardcore trio Janitor Joe. (I'm certain there were others but 1 wasn't in communication with many people right then.)

We chatted about Nirvana that summer as Kristen rejoined her old band for a tour across Eastern Europe alongside fellow Amphetamine Reptile act, Hammerhead. There were nine or so of us all crammed into a dirty old van, talking of love and laughter and life and those small, but so significant, details in between. Everything seemed so right again: punk rock like I'd always loved it practised by two bands to whom it was their natural birthright. The venues were tiny, sweating, crammed with enthusiastic faces and blistering power chords. At night, we would all sleep together in a dormitory, enlivened by whatever cheap alcohol we could lay our hands on. It was like being born again: Kristen was so lively and full of optimism about the future and music and life.

"The rhythm that you hear is the pounding of our hearts,' as one poet put it.

A couple of weeks later, she was found dead in a bath in her Seattle apartment by her former lover and Hammerhead singer Paul. Strangely, the evening was the first time I'd spoken to Courtney since leaving Seattle. She thought I'd heard the news somehow when I called. It wasn't that. It was just that I'd had another premonition of death, similar to the time an Angel of Death had visited me while driving down the freeway between Boston and New York after I'd been drinking with the Unsane drummer Charlie Ondras.

The craziness didn't stop there.

still travelled to America and Australia and Europe, drinking even harder. What else could I do? It wasn't real, was it? I was sure that somewhere along the line I'd receive a phone call from Anton or Janet telling me that it had all been a ghastly Dwarves-style joke. (Sub Pop's scum rock band Dwarves once put out a press release stating that their bass-player had been murdered in a back alley in middle America. Family members phoned up, concerned. The outrage was considerable when it transpired the whole story was made up.) It was absurd to feel that way, especially as Courtney had taken me into the garage where Kurt's body wasfound where she had lit some candles in homage, but sometimes the massive events are the hardest to come to terms with. So I continued out-drinking bands and PRs and passers-by in vain attempts to regain my feeling for life; so I became even more desperate in my writing, searching for replacement bands.

It wasn't until my passport got stolen from my hotel room in Chicago while I lay comatose on the floor on the other side of the bed, vomit dripping from my mouth, that I finally stopped travelling to America. Instead, I continued beating myself up on the other side of the Atlantic, reverting to the bleak acceptance of being down the pub beyond chucking out time every night of the week, not even bothering to attend shows.

Music had failed me.