After 15 years, Kurt Cobain’s light still shines

The roots of grunge are varied and tangled, and they formed primarily in Seattle. But the emergence of Nirvana, and the stardom that came to singer-songwriter Kurt Cobain, happened in part via an assist from the New York-based post-punk band Sonic Youth.

Danny Goldberg, along with partner John Silva, managed Sonic Youth. Since the group’s members were always looking for new artists to join them on the road, they recommended Nirvana, which was seeking management.

Goldberg recalled seeing Nirvana play live for the first time at the Palace in Los Angeles shortly after his company signed the band in late 1990. “I was stunned how intimate the relationship was between Kurt and the audience, even with material that a lot of people didn’t know,” he said. “There was something about the way he performed that made him seem like a member of the audience and being on stage at the same time.”

In truth, if Goldberg and his partner hadn’t signed the band, Nirvana probably would have been huge anyway, because the word was out. Goldberg acknowledged that others were after the artists. Cobain and Nirvana had created a sound, a movement, a zeitgeist, that grabbed a generation by its lower flannel and wouldn’t let go until events caused it all to end.

One of those events occurred on April 5, 1994 — 15 years ago — when a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head ended Cobain’s life at the age of 27. Nirvana was no more. Because of the tragic ending, the legacies of Cobain and his band are usually linked in the collective memory with the depression that tormented the singer. Yet many in and around the “grunge” movement — and that term came later, after much music had been made and the outside world needed a label — recall that period with wistful joy.

“There were no rules,” said Chris Cornell, lead singer and guitarist for Soundgarden, one of the major acts that came out of the Seattle area around the same time as Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains, among others. “That was how the real alternative term started. It was supposed to mean anything that was an alternative to the popular mainstream.

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“Seattle was a town where often larger acts wouldn’t come, but small indie acts that were traveling around in vans would go, because they would go anywhere. So we got everybody coming through.”

Cornell said it was that lack of attention and the focus on the art itself that led to a purity in the music of the time. “It was about isolation, a provincial isolation scenario,” said Cornell, who released “Scream,” his third solo album, earlier this year. “There was no big media, no dangling carrot of big media.

“We didn’t have stars in our eyes. We worked normal blue collar jobs to subsidize our music, to buy guitars, guitar strings, wah wah pedals. Nobody at that time came to Seattle to mine the unsigned bands. In the absence of the allure of success, there was a genuine outpouring of this musical inspiration. There were no distractions.”

‘Be authentic, don’t be formuliac’
Into that climate came Cobain, who grew up in Aberdeen, a logging and fishing town outside of Seattle, and “had a lot stacked against him before he ever picked up a guitar,” said Charles R. Cross, author of the definitive Cobain biography, “Heavier Than Heaven.” Cross had worked at a local music magazine in Seattle and was there during Nirvana’s rise.

“He came from a family where alcohol and depression were rampant,” Cross said. “In some ways I’m actually surprised he managed to make as much music as he did.”

Cross recalled a time shortly after Nirvana’s hit album “Nevermind” was recorded, but not yet released. “He got evicted from his place because he couldn’t pay $175 in rent,” he said. “After he recorded this album that would make him a star, there he was, sitting on the curb with all his stuff.”

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The late 1980s weren’t considered a golden era of popular music. Hair bands had filled the landscape like herds of rock and roll Afghan hounds. Punk had long been dead, and serious music buffs were yearning for something new and meaningful.

“It was reflective of a musical shift,” Cross said of Nirvana and grunge in general. “Just prior to Nirvana going in to record ‘Nevermind,’ one of my favorite stories is that the group that was in the studio recording right before them was Warrant, a heavy metal hair band.

“If there was a theme to grunge, it was be yourself, be authentic, don’t be formulaic. Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, in some instances you had ugly men making powerful music. What was important was the sound and not the look.”

Nirvana’s sound was largely crafted by Cobain, with great assistance from drummer Dave Grohl and bass player Krist Novoselic. “His singing style especially became the default template for rock music,” said Sasha Frere-Jones, pop music critic for The New Yorker magazine, of Cobain. “You could look at David Cook. Alice in Chains. Nickelback. He changed the way singing was done.”

Cobain’s songwriting was also helped to stir a generation. “Kurt Cobain was one of the most important writers in American rock history,” said Larry Mestel, CEO of Primary Wave Music Publishing, the company that owns the rights to Nirvana’s songs. “I think ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was a song that changed the way people in the ’90s viewed music, everything from how unique the video was to the sound itself.”

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