27: Kurt Cobain by Chris Salewicz

‘Now he’s gone and joined that stupid club: I told him not to join that stupid club.’
    And so Wendy O’Connor, the mother of Kurt Cobain, reacted to the news of her son’s self-inflicted death on 8 April 1994.
    By ‘stupid club’, O’Connor meant the phenomenon of musical stars who had passed away – as had her son – at the age of twenty-seven, as though they were unable to cross that bridge into full adulthood that lies ahead of all of us in our late twenties. Other members of Wendy O’Connor’s ‘club’ included the Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones, the Doors’ Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix – like Kurt Cobain, another left-handed guitar player from America’s Pacific North-West, who also revolutionized the music scene while fronting a power-trio.
    Kurt Cobain was not the first male member of his family to kill himself. So matter of course was suicide on both sides of his family that, as a young teenager, Kurt would joke of having ‘suicide genes’.
    When the future Nirvana singer was twelve years old, Burle Cobain, his great-uncle, brother to Kurt’s grandfather Leland, took a pistol and shot himself, first in the stomach and then in the head, finally killing himself. A year previously, ignoring medical advice that he would face death if he did not give up alcohol, Ernest Cobain, Leland and Burle’s brother, had fallen on the stairs in his house while drunk, dying from a brain aneurysm – some form of subconscious suicide, perhaps. (‘Aneurysm’ would become the title of a 1991 Nirvana song, the B-side of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’; however, there seems little link to Ernest Cobain’s tragic fate – Charles R. Cross, Cobain’s biographer, asserts that Kurt wrote the lyrics to ‘Aneurysm’ about his ex-girlfriend, musician Tobi Vail.)
    On his mother Wendy’s side, Kurt’s great-grandfather had stabbed himself in front of the entire family. Admitted to a mental hospital, he finally killed himself two months later by tearing apart his healing wounds.
    It must have seemed almost an everyday occurrence, when, as an early teenager, Kurt and a pair of friends found the hanging body of a boy who had killed himself. So, you are inclined to muse, was Kurt’s end inevitable?
    Surviving members of families in which suicide has occurred are frequently haunted by the fear that it runs in the family, that one day they too might take their own lives. Mental health problems run in many families, and it is worth recalling that the third single off
Nevermind
was ‘Lithium’, a song that took the name of the drug that allegedly ‘treated’ manic-depressive – bi-polar, as it became termed – behaviour. This was an affliction from which Kurt certainly suffered, though it is not known whether he ever took lithium.
    Yet tragedy in the family can act as a spur for other members. Was this the case with this highly sensitive and intelligent, innately artistic boy who would utterly change the course of 1990s music?
    In 1991 Nirvana revealed themselves as the last Great American Rock Band, one which emerged seemingly from nowhere to sell over 30 million copies of
Nevermind
. Nirvana are as indelibly the sound of America’s West Coast as the Beach Boys, but this is a different West Coast, marinaded in rain, mist and darkness. In the vanguard of what became known as the ‘grunge’ movement, the sludgy fusion of punk rock and heavy metal that emerged from the Pacific Northwest, Nirvana’s seemingly sudden success overturned the American music business. Until then, ‘alternative’ music had seemed marginal at best in its sales potential, but now it was evident that there was a critical mass of fans apparently waiting for just such an act to materialize. Nirvana shook the world with their music. Their explosive arrival opened the floodgates for acts