It Was 20 Years Ago Today

Kurt Cobain took his own life on April 5, 1994, but we didn’t learn the news until Friday, April 8.

Can you imagine that today, three days passing? No distraught tweet from Courtney Love? No Instagram of the body from an assistant coroner, whose account is taken down the next day?

It was bad enough as-is. It was huge, huge news. And it rocked me.

The day I really remember was Saturday the 9th, standing on the platform in Princeton Junction that morning, waiting for the train into the city. (I had a New York girlfriend.) And I just felt lost, totally lost.

He was only two years older than me. (I’d just turned 25.) Kurt was the first of my generation to go and that really rattled me. He represented something important and now he was gone.

In college, at the radio station, we knew and liked that first Nirvana album, Bleach. So it was really fucking weird two years later when they became THE BIGGEST BAND IN THE WORLD. It was the fall of 1991 and I’d just moved back to Jersey from my folks’ place in Maryland for my first real job. I remember driving around in my friend-and-former-prom-date Frances’s Jeep, hearing “Smells Like Teen Spirit” pound out of the radio speakers. WRCT bands weren’t supposed to be famous. That’s how they trained me. They weren’t even supposed to be on major labels. I think back to a story (or was I in the room? no, I don’t think so) of fellow DJ Dan getting a phone call from a smug rep at the TVT label, telling him about the debut release from Nine Inch Nails, and “didn’t he like industrial music.” As the story goes, Dan replied, “This is industrial music,” and held the receiver up to a station speaker that was blasting some gloriously punishing noise.

So that’s how we rolled.

Now Nirvana was on a major label, and the radio, and magazine covers, and MTV, and I didn’t have my WRCT family around to help me process it all. But Cobain bristled at the fame and I was glad to see it. In glossy photos shoots he wore t-shirts like “Corporate Magazines Still Suck” on the cover of Rolling Stone, and a Daniel Johnston shirt, who I’d learned about back in Pittsburgh on a tape with Yo La Tengo. (A few years later, I’d buy that same shirt.) In late 1992, Nirvana put out Incesticide, an album which for some reason I associate with the rainy parking lot of the Lawrence Public Library. It was a compilation of stray tracks and covers of Pastels songs.

He was still one of us. Or was trying, anyway. So was I, but it wasn’t easy, just getting a little bit older, more responsible. By now I worked in an office building in New York City and took the train in like one of those people.

A year later there was In Utero, that was good. They recorded it with Steve Albini and he didn’t take any shit from anybody!

It was still on MTV.

And then a little more than six months later, he was dead.

That same month, I’d move up to Hoboken, where I’d frequent a club where Nirvana had played, and where I’d get to see Daniel Johnston for the first time, and where the Pastels and Yo La Tengo would be scheduled to play in the summer of 2013. I’d buy Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged album and mourn again, and then the concert album a couple of years later.

I’ve clung to the indie life the best I can but something changed forever, in me, in the world. In 2003, Elliott Smith took his own life (probably) and I felt a similar deep pain; he was also the same age as me and I felt a real connection.

But the raw shock was gone. I was a little more accustomed to the fucked-up nature of the world—the suffering, the tragedy, the heartbreak.

Which is a real shame.

Thank you, Kurt. We miss you.