by Mark Yarm
DAVE GROHL There are some people that you meet in life that you just kinda know they’re not gonna live to be a hundred years old. In some ways, I think you kind of prepare yourself emotionally for that to be a reality. It was a terrible surprise. Everybody was totally surprised. And even as much as you prepare yourself for something like that to happen, it doesn’t make it easier. It was probably the worst thing that’s ever happened to me in my life. I remember the day after that I woke up and I was heartbroken that he was gone. And I just felt like, Okay, so I get to wake up today and have another day, and he doesn’t.
KURT COBAIN (from his suicide note) Thank you all from the pit of my burning, nauseous stomach for your letters and concern during the past years. I’m too much of an erratic, moody baby! I don’t have the passion anymore, and so remember, it’s better to burn out than to fade away.
KELLY CURTIS I was in D.C. when I heard the news. Neil Young called me, looking for Eddie. He was very upset that someone killed themselves and left a suicide note using the lyrics he had written. He said he didn’t mean them in the way Kurt interpreted them. I don’t know who he found out from, but he knew about it. It could have come from Courtney. I called Stone and told him to go tell Eddie before he heard it on the news.
EDDIE VEDDER When I first found out, I was in a hotel room in Washington, D.C., and I just tore the place to shreds. Then I just kind of sat in the rubble, which somehow felt right … like my world at the moment.
MARK ARM I don’t think we said anything at the show that night. We’re not very good at grand gestures. It was hard enough just trying to keep our shit together and do the show. The funny thing I remember was reading a review of that show the next day where it talked about how Pearl Jam had lit all these candles onstage in memory of Kurt Cobain. But the previous night they’d had the same candles onstage.
KELLY CURTIS The next day, we went to the White House. The band, minus Dave Abbruzzese, and me and a guy named John Hoyt, who got us into the White House. That was weird.
JOHN HOYT (political and community advisor for Pearl Jam; Pyramid Communications partner) We’d been trying to figure out alternative tour locations. The Clinton administration was looking at a series of base closures, and we thought that if we could do concerts at some of those venues and give some money back to the community that was struggling because of a base closure, that might be of interest. So we ended up setting up a meeting with George Stephanopoulos and some people at the White House.
MARK ARM As a courtesy, Pearl Jam were like, “Yeah, these guys can go along.” Me, Matt, and Dan smoked some pot before going. Matt still had a roach with him and the guy who was driving the shuttle bus to the White House started telling some story about how the Secret Service will go through all your shit and how some woman got arrested for having nail clippers or something like that. And I watched Matt’s face as the thought process was going on …
MATT LUKIN I had another joint that I was going to smoke on the way, but all of the sudden, I realize, We’re on our way straight to the fuckin’ White House. I got no time to light this thing up. So I ate it. I’m chewing on this fucking joint, and it’s all dry. After I’m already really stoned anyway.
MARK ARM [Director of the White House Office of Personnel Security] Craig Livingstone—he popped up in the news later when he got canned for something—was the one who welcomed both bands. And then Pearl Jam went on to meet Clinton. We were hoping to meet him, but I think we knew ahead of time that we weren’t going to get the full deal.
MATT LUKIN We got a behind-the-velvet-rope tour. Then some kid recognized us as Mudhoney and asked us for an autograph. So, sure, we gave him an autograph, and as soon as that went down, people just started pouring in, thinking we were Pearl Jam. We’re like, “No, no, no, you don’t know who we are. You don’t want our autograph.” And they’re like, “No, no, you’re Pearl Jam.”
DAN PETERS I’m sure once they get home and realize that some guy named Dan Peters signed their piece of paper, they were like, “Who the fuck was that?”
MARK ARM Craig Livingstone told us, “Yeah, we all know how you feel. We lost a good friend here, too”—referring to Vince Foster. It seemed like a really weird thing to say, and kind of insincere.
JOHN HOYT Meeting the president was an add-on. We sat talking to Stephanopoulos, and then Clinton’s secretary came in and said, “Would you guys all take a moment to see the president?” There was some concern about a possible copycat effect with Cobain.
NILS BERNSTEIN After Kurt died, a Clinton advisor or someone, I don’t remember who the person was, called me, saying, “Clinton’s gonna have to address this. Can you give us advice on what might resonate with people that this is meaningful for—what he might talk about or not talk about?”
JOHN HOYT We went into his outer room and hung out for a little bit, and then Clinton came out in his Arkansas sweats. We all went into the Oval Office and did a group photo, and he said that Chelsea really wanted to go to the Pearl Jam concert, but Hillary thought better of it—Chelsea was still pretty young. At the end of it, they asked us to get people out of the room and everyone left so Ed and the president could talk. When Ed left, he turned, and I remember him saying, “See ya, Bill.”
KELLY CURTIS We got summoned into the Oval Office, and Clinton asked Eddie if he should address the nation. Eddie said, “I don’t think you should address the nation.” They didn’t know if there were gonna be a bunch of copycat suicides. Eddie thought it was a mistake, and it would draw attention to it.
KERRI HARROP That morning I’d gotten to the Sub Pop office early to finish up this fanzine I was making as our sixth-anniversary party favor. It was six or eight pages, photocopied, and supposed to be this fun little activity book. And the center spread was this cartoon caricature of Kurt, with these starry, dreamy eyes. I purchased these ratty old blond wigs from some thrift store, and was taping locks into the pages of this thing: “Your very own lucky lock of Kurt Cobain’s hair!”
We were going to give out fortune cookies, and Nils and I had come up with all these smart-ass fortunes. Twenty different fortunes, and they all related to bands on the label. But there were two that pertained to Kurt. One specifically was P.U. SMELLS LIKE KURT FARTED. Obviously we have no way of knowing which cookies contained the fortune, so we couldn’t use them, either. We had like 10 pounds of fortune cookies, which is a hell of a lot! So we had fortune cookies for weeks after. To this day, I can’t eat a fortune cookie and not think of that time.
NILS BERNSTEIN Then we had our Sub Pop sixth anniversary at the Crocodile. It basically turned into a wake and was just really horrible. Velocity Girl played, and they just felt like assholes playing cheery music, and the singer got really drunk and ran offstage and disappeared outside somewhere.
SARAH SHANNON (singer for Washington, D.C., area’s Velocity Girl) It was just a really bad night for me. I didn’t know Kurt Cobain, but I felt pretty sad about it and got a little too drunk and kind of couldn’t perform.
MEGAN JASPER I remember walking in and there were cameras everywhere outside. The people inside were just in shock. Everyone was fucked up, fucked up beyond—like really fucked up. People were numbing themselves.
JEFF GILBERT There was kind of an unspoken thing around town that when national media came through here, nobody says anything.
Geraldo Rivera and his camera crew of douche bags showed up at RKCNDY one night after Kurt killed himself. The clubs were still full ’cause everybody was hurting; people just needed to be around each other. So here comes Geraldo and his camera crew. Guy at the door tried to charge him cover, he said, “No, we’re with the media,” and he just busted through. Geraldo was trying to get some interviews from people, and he comes up to Marty Chandler from Panic, a thrash-metal band, and Marty goes, “Hey, Geraldo, pull my finger!” Everybody basically turned around and walked away from Geraldo. He got out of there really quick.
NILS BERNSTEIN Obviously Kurt’s death was a big deal to every young pers
on in Seattle. Which really bothered me. I only wanted to see people that knew him. I didn’t want to know what the newscaster had to say, what a kid down the street had to say, what display some record store was putting up about him. And within a couple days, I did a total turnaround. The feelings of everyone who knew Kurt are tied up with their experiences with him or their feelings about Courtney, whatever. It felt like people that didn’t know him had a purer appreciation for his life and his music.
SUSAN SILVER I was driving when I got the news about Kurt, and I remember the first feeling that I had was the same feeling that I had when Lennon was shot, where it was this huge physical shock and then this overwhelming sense of compassion and protection towards Yoko, and in this case, towards Courtney, regardless of the antics that I’d observed over the years and the mysterious disdain that she had for me.
A few of us started to talk, and there certainly was a need for a public gathering and a private gathering. It occurred to me that it would be a good idea to have the private service at the same time as the public gathering so that the public didn’t try to find the private service. There was a church near downtown Seattle that I’d gone to a few times and I called and said this is what had happened in this community—the reverberations are international, there’s a real need for a safe place for a smallish group of people to come together and have a service—and they were really open.
MARCO COLLINS I spoke at the memorial at the Seattle Center. We played a tape from Courtney, and it was intense. At the end, when Kurt’s music was coming out of this fountain—the speakers were built in—there was this total chilling fuckin’ moment of anarchy, where all these kids, fully clothed, just start diving into this fountain. It was just super-fuckin’ beautiful.
ALICE WHEELER I met Danny Goldberg and all those people at the funeral. It was really odd, because there were all these guys in suits at the door and they knew who everyone was. They did not look on a piece of paper to see your name or anything, and I’d never met these people before. And then I realized when I got in that there were so few of the rock crowd there that that’s how they knew us. Half of the church was his extended family, and then there was a whole group of all the people from L.A., and then maybe 25 rock people. I was surprised ’cause I thought he was a lot more popular than that. I never really thought I was like his super-great friend or anything, but then after the fact it’s like, I guess so few people really connected with him.
LORI BARBERO We were pretty close. When Kurt was in Minneapolis, we hung out a lot. His coat got stolen one night, and I gave him that one sweater that he wore all the time, a greenish, brownish V-neck. When I gave it to him, it had thumb holes ’cause I’d been doing that since I was a little kid. When he put it on and put his thumbs through the holes, I go, “I do that to my sweaters,” and he goes, “So do I!” He goes, “I’ve done it since I was a little kid.” I go, “Me, too!” I also gave him the jeans with all the patches on them. It still really upsets me when I see pictures of him wearing the sweater and the jeans.
Courtney’s not the most complimentary person, but when I went to Seattle for the memorial, she told me, “Lori, Kurt really loved you. He talked about you all the time.” Courtney’s usually not like that. Thank you for saying that, you know?
ELIZABETH DAVIS-SIMPSON The thing that I remember most about the funeral was Courtney spoke and she quoted from the Bible from Job, and I was really blown away by her ability to speak so eloquently under duress.
JENNIFER FINCH There was a moment when Courtney was giving her eulogy and Frances was just like, “Mommy, where are you?” It was so sad.
SLIM MOON Danny Goldberg gave the most ill-conceived, offensive speech. I like Danny Goldberg. I don’t think he’s an evil man. Danny’s thing was really offensive because he wanted to talk about what a great guy, what a kindhearted, decent person Kurt was, and so he gave examples of something that Kurt hadn’t really wanted to do—that Kurt had really objected to on personal-belief-system grounds—that he had begged and cajoled and gotten Kurt to do. Then he gave another example of something that Kurt hadn’t wanted to do, that Kurt felt would violate his personal values, that Danny’s wife, Rosemary Carroll, had begged and cajoled until Kurt gave in. And then he gave a third story of Kurt really not wanting to do something. I can’t remember what they were, but they were all business decisions that some would call “selling out.”
It just cemented a lot of people’s belief that if you go into the major-label system and you get a big-time manager and you get a big-time lawyer, they just manipulate the crap out of you and convince you to do all types of things that you don’t believe in.
DANNY GOLDBERG Courtney asked me to speak. I was thinking about Courtney and about Kurt’s mom and about John Silva; those were the people that were on my mind. Just trying to give some spiritual view of things about what he did while he was here and the immortality of the soul, which I believe in. There’s no way you can make people feel good about such a horrible, horrible thing, and there’s people that felt that Kurt’s success was a betrayal of his punk-rock roots, and that I was one of the collaborators in having him go from being a punk-rock artist to an international celebrity who killed himself. The truth is, if it hadn’t been me, he would have picked someone else. Kurt wanted to do that.
I’m glad I was the one to have been able to do it, because I loved him and I loved working with him. I don’t believe for a minute that Kurt’s ambitions were caused by me. I had a lot of visibility, and when you have that kind of visibility—which can be good for you, and it helped my career in many ways—the flip side is people want to be mad at somebody. I’m one of the visible people they can be mad at.
SUSAN SILVER At the end of the service, I went up to offer my condolences to Courtney, and she saw me coming and just turned her back to me and closed this circle of people she was talking with, so obviously she wasn’t interested in any sort of contact. Which is fine—it certainly wasn’t a day about our potential friendship.
NILS BERNSTEIN Take what you will from the fact that after Kurt’s funeral, two of the people closest to him had separate events for people to gather at. Courtney had a party and Krist had a party—they were wakes, I guess—at the exact same time. Krist and Shelli never got along well with Courtney. You chose which one you were gonna go to. Which did I go to? Both. (Laughs.) Courtney’s was more family, and more of the label and industry people from out of town. It had a much different vibe from Krist’s, which was more friends and musicians.
BOB WHITTAKER I didn’t go to the service because of the media and all that stuff. But I went to Novoselic’s house after, and Novoselic took me out on the porch and read me the eulogy that he had read. I burst into tears and left.
MARCO COLLINS That night, after the memorial, Courtney was with Kat from Babes in Toyland, and she was loaded as fuck, and I remember my radio station called me and said, “Courtney is downstairs in a limo. She wants to come up and all she’s saying on the phone is, ‘I want to come up there and make you guys stop playing fucking Pumpkins and play Kurt.’ ” We had been doing 24-hour Nirvana, and at that point we’d started playing other bands again.
The ratings on something like that would be monster—she wanted to use our station as a place to mourn on the air. She does everything in public, that’s for sure. I remember going, “Fuck, no, man. She’s gonna say a bunch of shit she’ll regret later.” I was like, “Just tell her to call me,” and she called me, but she was loaded, slurring. There’s no fuckin’ way I was going to let her go on the air at that point. It would have been a fuckin’ crime.
KAT BJELLAND I’d gotten a flight out there to go to the funeral and to hang out with Courtney and support her. In the funeral home, I saw him dead, which was more than disturbing. She made me hold his hand. Isn’t that gross? I just sat there, frozen. Paralyzed. It was icky, awful. I never told anybody that before, except my friends. I just feel like gettin’ it out of my system because I’m sick of holding secrets.
&nb
sp; I had a nervous breakdown right after that, when I got home to Minneapolis.
MATT LUKIN Years later, Courtney started talking a lot of shit about Mudhoney not being at Kurt’s funeral. I’m like, Fuck that! We were busy! We were on the other coast! My then-wife was there—I guess I was somewhat represented by her. At one point, Courtney invited each of us to pick a guitar of Kurt’s: “Go pick up a piece of Kurt’s stuff to remember Kurt by.” The only one who took her up on it was Steve Turner. To me, it was like, I knew Kurt, I got my memories. I don’t need her to fucking help me out with that.
MARK ARM Getting a guitar of Kurt’s? It would make me feel like a vulture, I guess. I spent about a year putting distance between myself and them, so it seemed like a ruse on Courtney’s part somehow. Like she’s buying us off or something.
STEVE TURNER I ran into Courtney somewhere and she called me a few times and said she really wanted to give me one of Kurt’s guitars, how much Kurt looked up to us and all that kind of stuff. So I went over there and basically took some old, ridiculous guitar that wasn’t any guitar he played. Courtney seemed just kind of lost and crazy to me.
I kind of regretted it upon walking into the house. It seemed like total zoo chaos. Kurt’s mom was there, they had the baby, obviously, there’s nannies that were high on drugs. It was like a drug house, a giant mansion with fuckups wandering about. And the guards and the hangers-on and the people that were still trying to get something out of them—the sharks that were living there. I took some stupid guitar at her insistence, and I’ve never seen her since.
JOHN LEIGHTON BEEZER I’d heard on the news that Kurt and Courtney’s house was next to a place called Viretta Park, which is in a neighborhood that I used to live near. So it struck me as odd that I had never heard of Viretta Park before. A couple of days after the suicide, I was driving past the area and I was curious: What’s Viretta Park? I was always a fan of out-of-the-way parks to smoke pot in.
