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Kurt Cobain (or Kurdt)

RomanzoCriminale

RomanzoCriminale

David Bentley
I've been reading the Kurt Cobain biography Heavier than Heaven by Charles.R.Cross...... anyone else read it? I liked Nirvana but hated grunge, in the book it says they weren't really grunge as they were too pop but got dragged in with the sub pop thing. I think the mtv acoustic show proves this and being a guitar player, some of his melodies are amazing.

He was pretty ****ed up though wasn't he, i'm not even sure you could call him a tortured genius. Seemed as though he had little grounding for a lot of his issues. The only thing i could figure out was as a child he hated it when he was no longer the centre of attention, the divorce affected him, but he became quite selfish and turned in on himself, became narcissistic...... seems like he craved attention from that point, but when he got it and got success he hated it, or did he just pretend to hate it.

Cant imagine what it must have been like living with Courtney though, no wonder he did so many drugs.....
 
There was a good documentary on BBC4 a while back, it'll be around again I'm sure... Had some insight into his deterioration.

Real shame, amazing voice. Much of the material more than stands up, what, 20 years on?
 
And I assume you've seen the documentary by the guy who thinks he was murdered? Met this fella at some point who claims he was offered money to kill Kurt, but didn't do it. Supposedly got hit by a train a couple of weeks after this was shot.

[video=youtube;Ho2nK5IQs_g]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ho2nK5IQs_g[/video]
 
RomanzoCriminale said:
I've been reading the Kurt Cobain biography Heavier than Heaven by Charles.R.Cross...... anyone else read it? I liked Nirvana but hated grunge, in the book it says they weren't really grunge as they were too pop but got dragged in with the sub pop thing. I think the mtv acoustic show proves this and being a guitar player, some of his melodies are amazing.

He was pretty ****ed up though wasn't he, i'm not even sure you could call him a tortured genius. Seemed as though he had little grounding for a lot of his issues. The only thing i could figure out was as a child he hated it when he was no longer the centre of attention, the divorce affected him, but he became quite selfish and turned in on himself, became narcissistic...... seems like he craved attention from that point, but when he got it and got success he hated it, or did he just pretend to hate it.

Cant imagine what it must have been like living with Courtney though, no wonder he did so many drugs.....
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Frankly that is bull****. There was no such thing as grunge before Nirvana and after Nevermind there were a load of bands hanging on their coat tails. The SubPop bands would have been been referred to as slackers before Nevermind.
 
Grunge was really a nothing term musically. It was just lazy marketing/journalism to put a label on Seattle bands, even though Pearl Jam and Nirvana were chalk and cheese musically.
 
Heart Shaped Box is the pinnacle of song writing genius for me. I will never hear a melody that awesome in my lifetime.

Of course Cobain craved attention. But he was a genius of music. As a kid, Guns n' Roses, Metallica and Megadeth made me want to be in a band. Nirvana made me realise I could be in one.
 
The term 'grunge' was popularized as a music-term by Sub-Pop, Pavitt and Poneman specifically. It had been used, loosely, before that by a couple of others, but those two and Sub-Pop were the ones to make it a recognized term in the late '80s. Jacobs just stole some thunder in the early '90s because he 'fashionista'd the whole 'look' and packaged it into something, errr, trendy. Ouch.
 
AuroRaman said:
Heart Shaped Box is the pinnacle of song writing genius for me. I will never hear a melody that awesome in my lifetime.

Of course Cobain craved attention. But he was a genius of music. As a kid, Guns n' Roses, Metallica and Megadeth made me want to be in a band. Nirvana made me realise I could be in one.
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Yes he was. As I've said often, a great loss.
 
I think that one of the things that I liked best about Cobain was his willingness to talk about and promote bands that he liked. He has a really good and broad taste in music and turned me onto loads of good stuff.
 
Yet he was a bit of an outsider in the Seattle scene. 'Grunge is Dead' is a great book around that whole scene and the impression I got was that while he was obviously talented, he wasn't popular like Staley or Cornell who had the looks, charm and voice.
 
I think what's interesting is that Staley and Cornell were both part of another scene in a sense. They were firmly rockers, whereas Nirvana were always riding the alternative/punk/Lanegan end of things…I always thought it was incredibly lazy to throw them all in together. Pearl Jam and Nirvana (for example) had geography in common but not whole bunch more. I always found the 'lump 'em in' thing aggravating.
 
thfcsteff said:
I think what's interesting is that Staley and Cornell were both part of another scene in a sense. They were firmly rockers, whereas Nirvana were always riding the alternative/punk/Lanegan end of things…I always thought it was incredibly lazy to throw them all in together. Pearl Jam and Nirvana (for example) had geography in common but not whole bunch more. I always found the 'lump 'em in' thing aggravating.
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Same here. Most of the other successful bands who got lumped in were pretty straight along the line rockers. Half of them had poodle perms a few years earlier!
 
thfcsteff said:
I think what's interesting is that Staley and Cornell were both part of another scene in a sense. They were firmly rockers, whereas Nirvana were always riding the alternative/punk/Lanegan end of things…I always thought it was incredibly lazy to throw them all in together. Pearl Jam and Nirvana (for example) had geography in common but not whole bunch more. I always found the 'lump 'em in' thing aggravating.
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The music press will always do that and always have done, it was the same with punk, really that was just something that McClaren created having spent time out in America coming back and creating the Pistols. Bernie Rhodes then did the same with the Clash and it snowballed. Wasn't Joe Strummer just a middle class, privately educated toff playing in a pub rock band before being asked to join the Clash. Could you really class bands like the Stranglers punk, weren't they too old? Once any scene comes out to the masses its finished, Mod, hippie, punk, madchester, grunge, britpop, brit rock etc.....

Never having been into grunge and hating that period 92-93, for me music was in a pretty bad place during that time. Nirvana as well as the Lemonheads who i'm a massive fan of were the only American bands that i liked, it seemed like they understood that music had to be built on melody and feeling as well as attitude and noise. Kurt just seemed like one of us, he wanted success, but not by selling out ....... and i love the fact that he hated the jocks and preppies getting into his music and purposely wrote in Utero to turn them off.
 
RomanzoCriminale said:
The music press will always do that and always have done, it was the same with punk, really that was just something that McClaren created having spent time out in America coming back and creating the Pistols. Bernie Rhodes then did the same with the Clash and it snowballed. Wasn't Joe Strummer just a middle class, privately educated toff playing in a pub rock band before being asked to join the Clash. Could you really class bands like the Stranglers punk, weren't they too old? Once any scene comes out to the masses its finished, Mod, hippie, punk, madchester, grunge, britpop, brit rock etc.....

Never having been into grunge and hating that period 92-93, for me music was in a pretty bad place during that time. Nirvana as well as the Lemonheads who i'm a massive fan of were the only American bands that i liked, it seemed like they understood that music had to be built on melody and feeling as well as attitude and noise. Kurt just seemed like one of us, he wanted success, but not by selling out ....... and i love the fact that he hated the jocks and preppies getting into his music and purposely wrote in Utero to turn them off.
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The only person who believed that was McClaren
 
milo said:
The only person who believed that was McClaren
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Really? McClaren put the Pistols together, its well documented, there are numerous books that go into detail on him going to America and bringing the term punk back with him and how he was going to form a band. He'd also seen John Lydon coming into sex a long time before he asked him to join the Pistols and told the rest of the band they had to find him only for him to walk into the shop again. Apparently he was shockingly bad at his rehearsal, a point that probably helped get him the gig.

Do you know something that everyone else doesn't, i'd be interested to hear it, music's been my passion in live, even more than THFC, i love learning new things, new tales, stories. Like AuroRaman i'd love Steff to tell some of his stories from when he was a journo....
 
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