Kurt Cobain’s Rage and Bliss
Rock journalist Michael Azerrad on the Nirvana singer’s search for innocence
Illustration by Austin Hughes
This summer Michael Azerrad, writer for Rolling Stone magazine and The New Yorker among many other places, joined TAP editor in chief Austin Ratner via Zoom to discuss his book Come As You Are, the definitive account of the rock band Nirvana.
It was published in 1993 and last year reissued in an annotated 30th-anniversary edition. The original book was an incredible piece of rock journalism, and the new edition is a really interesting annotated and expanded version that not only sheds more light on Kurt Cobain and Nirvana, but also the work of being a journalist and trying to get to the bottom of who your subject is.
Austin Ratner: I want to begin with the crossover between journalism and the work of a psychoanalyst—trying to get to the bottom of a person when they have a certain agenda that might be at cross purposes to the revelation of the truth.
Michael Azerrad: Well, I guess the background to that was that Kurt had a heroin addiction and that he and Courtney had been temporarily relieved of the custody of their baby by child protective services or some organization like that, partly on the basis of a magazine article that appeared in Vanity Fair. They were very wary of the press, but they also understood that maybe they could use the press to help redeem themselves. And that, I think, was a great impetus for participating in this book. And when I was talking to Kurt at the very beginning, he said, Just tell the truth about me, that’ll be better than anything else that’s been written about me. And so I took that as my marching orders.
Kurt and Courtney kind of lucked out that I just simply wasn’t interested in the so-called dirt and I was just a fan. I wanted to know about my favorite band. I think also there was just a certain amount of personal comfort between Kurt and me. The first time I interviewed him was for a Rolling Stone cover story. And it’s a famous cover photo by Mark Seliger where Kurt’s wearing a T-shirt that says “Corporate Magazines Still Suck.”
I flew out to Los Angeles to interview him, went out to their place in the Fairfax neighborhood of Los Angeles, knocked on the door. This person named Courtney Love, who had just started to gain some notoriety, answered the door and offered me a plate of grapes and welcomed me into their tiny little apartment and pointed down this short hallway at the end of which was a closed door and said, “Oh, Kurt’s down there.”
This hall must have been about 10 feet long, but it just seemed to elongate endlessly because I was so nervous. And I got to the end, opened up the door, pushed it open, and there’s Kurt Cobain lying in bed with his back to the wall, just under an open window. His feet were sticking out the bottom of the blankets and his toenails were painted kind of this rosy-red pink and he says hi. And I said hi back. And in that moment, I realized I know this guy. He’s like a lot of other people I’ve known in my life. And I instantly felt comfortable. It’s funny because six or seven months later, I mentioned this to Kurt. I said, “I was so nervous to meet you. And I instantly felt comfortable the second you said hello.”
And he said, “I felt the same way. I was nervous about meeting you. You’re like the Rolling Stone guy doing the cover story. You’re from New York, blah, blah, blah. And you walked in and I thought, OK, this is going to be all right.”
AR: You have this great description of his laser-blue eyes, when you see him in the half shadows of his bedroom. And I can imagine meeting a guy that famous with music that people respond to in the way that they do, the idolization that people feel about him. He was famously uncomfortable with the stardom that he eventually achieved. He seemed to feel guilty about it. Freud talks about this character type of being wrecked by success. I wondered if you felt that that applied to Kurt Cobain in any way.
MA: That particular idea does apply, I think, to a certain degree. He was very conflicted. He knew he wanted to play rock music from an early age, seven or eight years old or something like that. So, at that time, rock musicians were either rock stars or they were a failure. If you endeavored to be a rock musician, you were de facto endeavoring to be a rock star. And that’s what he thought until he discovered punk rock, which was a much more egalitarian, much less ambitious arena of rock music. It was almost shameful to be a star in punk, because it implied maybe you thought you were better than everybody else. And there was actually a record label in nearby Olympia, Washington, called Kill Rock Stars. You couldn’t get more explicit about that sentiment than that. But also, this was a kid with low self-esteem. And he said that the idea of punk rock, not placing a premium on being a rock star and in fact downplaying it, appealed to his low self-esteem.
He was also very acutely aware of being provincial. He was a really bright, creative person. And he was raised in a very provincial, pretty conservative logging town that was very far from anywhere cosmopolitan. He wanted to escape that place, I think, both physically and psychologically. So he eventually moved to Olympia, Washington, which is a college town. One of the colleges there is called the Evergreen State College. It’s a very progressive college that attracts a lot of very bright and intelligent, affluent people. And so he got exposed to that class of people. And he really wanted their approval, partially because he needed to raise his self-esteem, and also because he wanted to escape this Aberdeen of the mind, the place where he grew up. Those kids disdain success in a way that affluent upper-middle-class kids can afford to do. And so he got introduced to this idea of the rock musician who disdains success and is not successful.
So there you have this conflict between what he grew up on, idolizing bands like Cheap Trick and the Beatles and Queen, bands who courted and enjoyed success, and then going to Olympia and becoming a fan of bands that didn’t court success and would never have a chance of achieving success like Black Flag or the Raincoats. And so there was this conflict that he never managed to resolve.
AR: You can hear it in his music and in his lyrics. You talk about the herd consumerism that Nirvana rebelled against. When he struck a note with fans and then the record company made all this money off of Nirvana, he began to look out into the crowd and see the herd attending his concerts. And it was contrary to the whole ethos of his art, right?
MA: It was also contrary to what the people whose approval he craved endorsed. Like I say, kill rock stars. And he was a rock star.
So he tried to compensate for that by endorsing a lot of very obscure artists like Daniel Johnston or Flipper or the Raincoats and things like that, trying to offload this guilt, or he might say using his fame to elevate people that he felt were deserving.
AR: You talk about his self-hatred as a sort of theme in his life. He made authentic music and then he won popularity anyway. He kind of got both things. And it seems to me, maybe if he hated himself less, he could have enjoyed it a little bit more, you know? He could have let himself have it essentially. I guess that’s the Freudian in me talking.
MA: If you have low self-esteem and you have trouble dealing with praise, you’re not used to it. And bear in mind, like I say, he came from a very provincial town and he described his upbringing as, I think he said, “working class, masquerading as middle class,” and his father had a number of different jobs. One of them was counting logs at a logging company, and his mom, I think, worked as a waitress before she got married and became a homemaker. There were no expectations on Kurt. He was probably going to work in the logging industry or at the 7-11 down the street. He just didn’t know how to cope with success, because it was never expected of him.
When I was talking to Kurt at the very beginning, he said, Just tell the truth about me, that’ll be better than anything else that’s been written about me. And so I took that as my marching orders.
AR: Were his parents in the picture at all after he became famous? Did they react to it? Did he seek their approval?
MA: I don’t get the sense that he cared about his father’s approval. He was kind of estranged from his father. They didn’t really speak. He was much closer to his mother, and she was very proud of his achievements. But I don’t think he made music to impress his parents.
AR: You interviewed his mother and you have a quote from her toward the beginning of the book about Kurt’s imaginary friends when he was little. I’m curious to hear anything you have to say about Kurt Cobain’s childhood. The world of childhood feels present in his music from the baby on the cover of Nevermind to many of his lyrics. There’s a sense of childlike woundedness and rawness in his lyrics.
MA: He described his early life as, quote, “blissful,” and he loved his mom hugging him and kissing him. He talked about how happy he was when he was a little kid. Then his parents got divorced and he turned melancholy and kind of dark and felt alienated from his friends. He really prized that blissful time, an almost Edenic moment, you know, before he lost what he perceived as his innocence. I think he tried to reclaim that in various ways for the rest of his life.
One thing he did was heroin. You know, that gives a euphoric feeling, a very warm, almost loving, euphoric feeling that kind of simulated that sensation that he craved. In a later interview, Courtney said that sex also was, quote, “sacred” to him. I think sex also could obviously recreate that feeling. And I think making music also maybe had that kind of blissful euphoric feeling too.
And maybe it’s no coincidence that the band is called Nirvana. I don’t know if he purposely named it that or if he just thought it was a cool Buddhist word. You know, Nirvana is the absence of worldly pain. Maybe it’s total coincidence. Maybe it’s not. I have never been able to figure it out.
He wrote a song called “Sliver” that was a single that appeared between their first album Bleach and their second album, the blockbuster, Nevermind. And it’s about a kid who gets dropped off at his grandparents and while the parents go out, he’s unhappy and he can’t really eat and he’s just kind of watching TV and not really wanting to be there. And then at the end of the night, his parents come back and his mother picks him up and holds him. And you can feel the bliss of that moment, although he kind of screams it in that song. And I think that’s a really, really core song. If you want to understand Kurt Cobain, listen to that song, “Sliver.” I think that he craved that feeling.
I think he would divide his life between before his parents got divorced and after. I know that he very much feared a similar thing happening to his own child. He really dreaded his daughter losing that kind of innocence. And you’ll see babies appear in the artwork, and I guess in some of the songs, I’m sure. There’s an album title, In Utero. He had a tattoo of a record label, Letter K Records, which was the big Olympia hipster record label. And someone asked him why he had that tattoo on his arm and he said it was to remind him to be childlike, because a lot of the music on K Records was very naive and not very technically accomplished. It was like outsider art. So
He loved a record called Kids of Widney High, which is a bunch of kids making music under the tutelage of their teacher. And I think he just really loved their blamelessness and their innocence and their purity. And he tried to channel that feeling into his own music.
AR: And he would refer to music executives as the grownups. It seems like he had some sense of himself identified with not being a grownup. But there was an element of oppositionality also between the child perspective and the grownup perspective. I wondered if you had more to say about why he looked at the grownups in the room as the enemy.
MA: I think Kurt called the execs around him the grownups because he felt like they were uptight and they were stifled and corrupted like many of us become as we become adults. They’ve lost that childlike freedom and blamelessness. And he felt that they were squares and they were standing in the way of being as cool as he possibly could. They were the ones who wanted to talk about the boring stuff and looked at music as a commodity rather than an art form and all those things, the stereotypical grown-up way of looking at things rather than the free, uncorrupted creative child.
Kids’ art, it’s always good. And it’s because they’re unselfconscious and they’re not cramped by self-consciousness or expectations or things like that. And that’s something that Kurt prized and it’s something that a lot of us lose. A lot of those same kids who did those really beautiful scrawls, those really beautiful pieces of art when they’re five, grew up to be uptight grownups who could never recreate that kind of freedom. I think that’s something that Kurt really tried to avoid. And yeah, by calling them the grownups, yes, now therefore he is the child, the free spirit, the blameless one.
AR: He seemed to also object to what we might now call toxic masculinity. You mentioned that when you first met him, he had painted his toenails, he sometimes cross-dressed. And yet, at the same time, his voice has an incredibly aggressive male sound to it.
MA: He was very much in touch with his feminine side, even though he made some fairly aggressive music. At one point, he said he’s bisexual. I mean, he was kind of queer, and that turned out to be visionary. That was a pretty radical thing at the time. Now that kind of thing is taken for granted. I mean, you have lots of male rock stars wearing dresses or something, or being out, or just playing with gender fluidity in general. I think that’s part of the reason why his legacy’s lasted so long as people recall him as a visionary.
I would also point out that his wife made pretty much equally aggressive music with an equally aggressive voice. I think they were both playing with that crossover, the gender crossover. It’s pretty interesting.
Where did his rage come from? Partially, it was his particular personal situation where after his parents divorced, he acted out and he got shuttled from family member to family member. He lived with his mom for a while. She kicked him out. He lived with his dad for a while. He lived with various other relatives for a while. Sometimes he crashed on friends’ couches. He was kind of rootless. I could see having a chip on your shoulder about that.
Also, like a lot of Gen X people, he just entered his sexual prime in the shadow of AIDS. That must have been terribly frustrating. The Reagan-era Cold War was going on. That was a scary time. Gen X were not expected to do as well as their parents, the first American generation to experience that. They were called slackers. That was an insulting term. The nickname for your generation is an insult like slackers. I mean, that alone would piss me off. So, there were a lot of things to be angry about. He articulated them, interestingly, not explicitly in the songs, but everyone knew exactly how he felt. Deep down, they knew why. And that’s one of the magic things about his music.
AR: Did you ever see his emotions? Did you ever feel you’re in the presence of those emotions in real time?
MA: Sure. I was around for some arguments between him and his wife. And it was funny, usually Kurt would speak in quite a low voice, almost affectless. And so you had to kind of mentally amplify everything he said. If he just kind of had a sneer in his voice, it meant he was being really surly and sarcastic.
Then he would get in an argument with Courtney and he could yell. And she could yell loud enough to rattle the windows. It was really intense. And it wasn’t out of hatred, it was just passion. They were just two really passionate people and they mutually understood that. And it was kind of shocking at first, then I gradually understood, that’s just the way they communicate. I visited him in his hotel room once on tour and he started yelling about firing Dave because Dave couldn’t play with enough subtlety, he felt. Dave Grohl, the drummer. Dave’s room was right next door. It was a hotel. And I said, he can hear you. And then he yelled back, I don’t care! I think Dave might’ve been out because I don’t think there were any repercussions from that particular exchange.
At the end of a lot of shows, he would throw himself into the amplifiers and drums.
AR: Like throw himself physically into the drums, into the amplifiers, fling himself.
MA: Yes. And that could be interpreted as being self-destructive, but I have a different spin on it. I think, like I said, that performing music had an anodyne effect, this kind of a feeling of painlessness. That’s what he wanted to get out of making music. And maybe that’s what he wanted to get out of listening to music too, that transcendent effect, that feeling of nirvana. And at the end of the show, when he would throw himself into the drums or amps, which appeared to be incredibly painful, he would just get up as if nothing had happened. I don’t think he ever said this explicitly, but I get the feeling that that was a proof of concept, that he was showing that the music had succeeded in its purpose, which was to make him feel no pain, psychic, or emotional, or physical, even.
He could also be self-destructive, not in physical ways, or even really verbal ways. One time when they were in New York to play a big show, he invited me to this big dinner at some fancy restaurant with a bunch of execs who handled various aspects of his business. And I think he just wanted me to come along to see what he was always complaining about with “the grownups,” and what it was like to deal with the suits. So I went to this dinner, and it was, I don’t know, maybe eight people at a big round table.
We all sat down, ordered our meals, but Kurt just ordered a slice of chocolate cake, which, I was naive enough not to understand, was kind of a junkie move. I guess they crave sweets. At some point, Kurt excused himself, and he was gone for, I don’t know, five minutes, and then maybe 10 minutes go by. And I thought, Oh, wow, he did a runner. He just left, he split the restaurant, he sneaked out. But no, he came back, and he was obviously really high. And he had kind of self-sabotaged in front of all these people who took care of his business. He was just sitting there, nodding out and just really stoned on heroin.
And that was a cry for help, basically. Yeah, that was pretty shocking. That was the first time I ever saw him high, and that was after the book was done, so he could maybe let his hair down a little.
And then, of course, he committed the ultimate act of self-harm a little later.
He was becoming the thing that this peer group despised. And he was really uncomfortable about that.
AR: He shot himself with a rifle, right?
MA: Yeah, shotgun, yeah.
AR: Did you ever see any signs of suicidality, of the impulse to self-harm?
MA: I asked him once for a list of 50 key albums that’s influenced Nirvana for the appendix of Come as You Are. And he sent it to me, and I don’t know, a day or two later I get this phone message saying, “Whatever you do, don’t publish that list. Because I left out too many bands and I’m going to get grief for this. If it gets published, I might as well blow my head off.” He said that a lot when he was frustrated, he used that exact phrase, I heard him say it several times.
In retrospect, that shows suicidal ideation. Hindsight is 20/20. You realize that actually he was telegraphing something. But it’s not something that you realize in the moment. If there’s any lesson I’ve taken from my whole experience with Kurt, it is to try to be alert to telegraphing like that. Although, again, sometimes you just don’t know. Sometimes they’re being melodramatic. Sometimes they’re telling you something. And I’m still not completely sure of the difference, but at least I’m alert to it.
AR: He shot himself shortly after coming out of rehab, is that right?
MA: Yeah, actually, he escaped from rehab. He didn’t even complete it. Apparently, he jumped over the wall of the compound where this place was in Los Angeles. But the thing was, he could have just walked out the door. People weren’t in prison there. You could come and go as you please, but he chose to jump over the wall.
AR: That’s an amazing anecdote. It strikes me as a symbol of the way that we as human beings can create our own prisons where they don’t always exist except in our heads.
MA: I think also he was just trying to express his rebelliousness. You can’t confine me. It would be too easy to walk out. Bear in mind, another thing that he wanted to be when he was a little kid was a stuntman. He really idolized Evel Knievel. He would jump off roofs of houses. I think he had some sort of metal plate that he put on his chest and had people throw stuff at it. And so he was a sensation seeker, even then. I think that sensation-seeking thing was part and parcel of making rather sensational rock music. It came from the same impulse, I think. I think jumping the wall was just part of his stuntman thing. He just liked the idea of that.
AR: I think Kurt Cobain got a biographer in you that was up to the task of respecting the complexity of the person that he was. It can get very reductive to try to apply models and theories to the complexity of human beings.
MA: You know, when I wrote the original book, I was a pretty naive person. I was a pretty immature 30-year-old, frankly. And I just wasn’t attuned to a lot of emotional IQ stuff. I’m a little bit more so now, 30 years later. But that’s why I annotated the book because there was so much more that I realized about what happened just from thinking about it for 30 years and also from coming back to the book and looking at the clues that were right there in the book and connecting dots that I was too close to see at the time. The annotated version of the book wound up being this kind of dialogue between my 30-year-old self and my 60-something-year-old self. All of those things get put into annotating this book and using it as a springboard for understanding what happened. And not just Kurt’s death, but just being that close to such a gigantic band. It was exciting, but it was also kind of traumatic.
So this whole annotated Come as You Are, The Amplified Come as You Are, was kind of therapy for me. But it was also therapy, I hope, for people who loved the band and loved Kurt, to try and sort out what happened and why.
Published July 2024