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Ten Percenter
- FB Enquirer -
United Kingdom
1733 Posts |
 Posted - 12/22/2002 : 00:46:10
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Pete Townshend's review of Kurt's journals - thought it might be of interest...
Why he died before he got old
Kurt Cobain was adored, addicted and angry - the rest of the rock myth followed from there. Pete Townshend suffers as he plumbs the depths of Cobain's despair in his Journals
Sunday November 3, 2002
The Observer
Journals
by Kurt Cobain
Viking £20, pp288
'I hope I die before I become Pete Townshend,' wrote Kurt Cobain in his journal in the middle of one of his rants against the rock press establishment. Why? Because I had become a bore? Because I had failed to die young? Because I had become conventional? Or, simply because I had become old? In fact, in the early Nineties, when Kurt was struggling with himself over whether or not to do an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, I was not boring, neither old nor young, and I was not dead. I was, unlike Cobain, hardened. Tempered, beaten and subjugated by all that rock had delivered to me and via me over 30 years. Rock is, I think, particularly hard. And in this statement Cobain appears to be hard on me. But perhaps he is sad for me?
Nirvana, and their principal creative architect Kurt Cobain, are considered by many in the UK to be the most important band in the history of rock. The publication of Cobain's journals is considered, then, to be a major event and has been anticipated with a mixture of trepidation, curiosity and excitement.
As a songwriter and rock architect, I was interested to look behind the creative process of Kurt Cobain. Nirvana's second album, Nevermind was a breath of 'punk' fresh air in the musically stale early Nineties. So I picked up this book searching for connections. Where might a particular lyric idea have begun? What, for example, is behind the smart, striking and ironic wit of 'Smells Like Teen Spirit'? If this sounds rather professorial, that's me, the first proprietor of the rock academy of lyric analysis.
Now here I have before me a sober and distinguished hardback. The word 'Journals' is quietly inscribed under the author's name. The inner jacket is deep purple. The first facsimile page is like a piece of pop art. It is an expensively and reverently reproduced photo of a page from a spiral book, the cheap kind sold in American drugstores. There are 11 marks on the torn sheet. 'Booze' - the first mark - is recorded in ballpoint, a light blue. On the same line, in a darker pen, is the second mark, the number '30'. Another mark is 'Records/watch', followed again by a number - obviously the cost - '50'. 'Food' and 'ticket' follow. The total sum is '200'.
What follows appear to be the scribblings of a crazed and depressed drug-addict in the midst of what those of us who have been through drug rehab describe as 'stinking thinking'. That is, the resentful, childish, petulant and selfish desire to accuse, blame and berate the world for all its wrongs, to wish to escape, or overcome and, finally, to take no responsibility for any part of the ultimate downfall. Me? An expert? Of course. Been there, done that. Back to the academy.
If the first draft words for 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' are here somewhere, I'm not sure I could find them without help. I believe that there are actually three drafts in this book. But the song on the CD is clear, outstanding, dark, ironic, amusing and disturbing at once. It occurs to me that somewhere along the way, in the business that passed between his first infantile scribblings and the rehearsals and recording studio sessions with his band members, Kurt Cobain had a lot of help to reorganise, focus and realise his ideas.
Most of these pages are facsimiles from what appears to be four or five other notebooks. The tatty front covers are sometimes themselves displayed. Apparently, there were actually 20 notebooks. It's a pity the entries are not dated, and that no attempt has been made to provide a chronology. The entries are not uninteresting. It is simply that they are devastatingly hard to contemplate. They actually hurt. These are the scribblings of a once beautiful, angry, petulant, spoiled, drug-addled middle-class white boy from a divorced family who just happened, with the help of two of his slightly more stable peers, to make an album hailed as one of the best rock records ever. I sometimes get letters from people who write and draw like Cobain. I put them in a file marked 'Loonies', just in case they try to sue me in the future for stealing their ideas.
Incidentally, Kurt was obviously a very good graphic artist. He drew artwork for early posters for his band. But what is reproduced here is gothic in its grossness. What is obscured behind the striking but puerile, classroom-brat drawings here is the ambition and excitement, the sheer energetic drive that was behind Cobain's youthful desire to become a rock star, to change the music, to sweep away the old and replace it with the new. That this should be muddled with his resentments, his political naivety and his extraordinary self-obsession (he worried at one time that he was lactating because his nipples were always sore) is simply sad.
There is some insider interest generated by some of the images. On page 139, there is a small cartoon of a baby swimming underwater, obviously the inspiration for the cover of Nevermind . But that art was redeemed because the face of the child was happy and free. Cobain's cartoon is captioned: 'Sell the kids for food'. No irony here. In a world plagued by the abuse of children, it is depressing, because what troubles Kurt was and is still real.
It is terrible that someone so obviously sick, so mentally deranged, so angry and unstable, should not have been helped further and beyond his wonderful work with his band. It might be that those around him will maintain that these scribblings were private and that at other times he kept such strange outpourings to himself. But if that is the case, I wonder at the result of publishing them now. It has the effect of unfairly accusing everyone around him of ostrich-like denial or ignorance.
When Cobain was in deep trouble with heroin addiction in 1993, I was visiting New York regularly in connection with my own child-abuse story, Tommy , which had hit Broadway. I met Michael Azerrad who had written Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana. Azerrad asked if I would contact Cobain, who was in constant danger of overdosing. I had chosen this year to give booze another gentle try after 11 years. When Azerrad approached me, I was not drunk, nor unsympathetic, but I did not make the necessary judgment I would make today that an immediate 'intervention' was required to save his life.
It is desperately sad for me to sit here, 57 years old, and contemplate how often wasteful are the deaths of those in the rock industry. We find it so hard to save our own, but must take responsibility for the fact that the message such deaths as Cobain's sends to his fans is that it is in some way heroic to scream at the world, thrash a guitar, smash it up and then overdose.
Read this book to see that the human spirit, even at its most sublime, can effect monumental damage on itself and its fellow souls if addiction enters the story. I mourn for Kurt. A once beautiful, then pathetic, lost and heroically stupid boy. Hard rock indeed.
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Chris Knight
= Cult of Ray =
USA
899 Posts |
Posted - 12/22/2002 : 11:54:48
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| The existence of these journals intrigues me, while the capitalization on them makes me dour. |
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Itchload
= Cult of Ray =
USA
891 Posts |
Posted - 12/22/2002 : 12:06:27
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I'll give Pete some credit for not going ballistic on Kurt for being insulted, like Ted Nugent did. But Ted's constant mentioning of Kurt being insane are a bit odd. Drawing the cover of Neverind and captioning it iwth "sell the kids for food" isn't crazy, it's just black humor, or satire, or surrealism. What Pete seemed to miss is that these diaries were not intended to be seen. If someone got a hold of all the notebooks I scribbled in, they'd probably think I'm psychotic as well.
as for the diaries publication, I'm with Chris Night. |
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Itchload
= Cult of Ray =
USA
891 Posts |
Posted - 12/22/2002 : 12:07:39
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| Ugh, sorry. I meant "Pete's constant mentioning...". I'm too computer illiterate to actual edit my post. |
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Erebus
* Dog in the Sand *
USA
1834 Posts |
Posted - 12/23/2002 : 08:55:35
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Here's an interesting opinion on the journals.
How To Read Kurt Cobain's Journals
A guide for the perplexed.
By Tim Appelo
Posted Friday, November 15, 2002, at 3:20 PM PT slate.com
In high school, Kurt Cobain wanted to start a band called Organized Confusion. Cobain's recently published journals are disorganized confusion: They are presented raw, with ridiculously skimpy explanatory material. Here's some advice to help you make sense of Cobain's scribbles, based on Charles Cross' definitive bio Heavier Than Heaven (which presents some of the same excerpts, but more intelligibly than the new book does) and my own conversations with Cobain and his family as Entertainment Weekly's grunge reporter:
1) Don't picture the author as a rock star. His peak journal-writing period was 1989-90, when he was unemployed, living off his maternal girlfriend Tracy Marander (who inspired "About a Girl"), and jotting lyrics and delusional plans that came true: "Nirvana No. 1 on billbored top 100 .. 2 times on the cover of Bowling Stoned." Picture him as only a few years removed from an 8 Mile-like upbringing: He was an ambitious outsider musician with a blond kid sis and a gorgeous divorced mom who drank, dated a guy barely older than her son, and refused to press charges against a lover with money coming in who sent her to the hospital. (But unlike Eminem, Kurt only lived in a trailer when he stayed with his dad.)
2) Don't feel guilty—it's not like reading a normal diary. He often invited people to read his journals ("Hey, read this story I wrote about me lactating!"), and I'll bet he wouldn't mind your doing so—if you're sympathetic and smart.
3) Don't read simplistically. Pete Townshend was not smart to describe the journal entry, "Hope I die before I turn into Pete Townshend" as the "infantile … stinking thinking" of a suicidal addict. It is that, but also a bit of sly boomer-bashing agitprop. As Cobain writes, "Elitism = punk rock." Also, it's not a simple cri de coeur; he used the journals to rehearse snappy lines for interviews and got the Townshend dis into BAM magazine in 1991. He was wary of being pinned down to single, simple meanings, in lyrics or in his journals. "My lyrics are a big pile of contradictions," he writes. '90s punk irony was a style of discourse permitting the speaker to suggest two meanings, earnest and "sarcastic," while taking full responsibility for neither. (Cobain's suicide note was addressed to Boddah, the imaginary childhood friend to whom toddler Kurt attributed his naughty deeds.) "This is not to be taken seriously," one journal entry warns. "This is to be read as poetry."
4) Get used to it: Death was his default tactic. The journals are rife with it. Nirvana means "snuffed" in Sanskrit, and he threatened to have two authors "snuffed" if they didn't stop writing his unauthorized biography. When I exposed this plot (and got threatened), he phoned a mogul pal and got the innocuous book killed by threatening suicide. He threatened suicide in a Rome concert when his PA system malfunctioned, and when he got stressed over a list of favorite albums the highly sympathetic Nirvana biographer Michael Azerrad requested. The day after his daughter was born, he eluded his doctors, presented a .38 to Courtney Love, and demanded double suicide; she thwarted at least a dozen of his suicide attempts. His was the fifth suicide in his family; his great-grandpa hara-kiri'd his own belly, then ripped the wound open when doctors weren't looking. (Cf. the journals' account [written for some reason in the third person, like a news report, though most of the book is first-person] of Kurt in concert accidentally getting a cut eye: "It wasn't too deep at first until Kurt rammed his head into the wall next to him in protest. It opened more.") In junior high, he told at least seven friends variations of the vow, "I want to be rich and famous and kill myself like Jimi Hendrix." At 15, he made a movie, Kurt Commits Bloody Suicide. One of his first recorded songs was "Samurai Suicide" (shades of great-grandpa). Parts of Journals seem scary after 9/11: He sketches a lynched GI in a football helmet, and the most-repeated phrase in the book, linked to the "Teen Spirit" video, is "Revolutionary debris litters the floor of Wall Street."
5) He was the sensitive type. At 6, he was traumatized by the sight of the Beatles' album cover with bloody meat and decapitated baby dolls; his own collages on In Utero and elsewhere are similar (though far superior). A TV ad about starving African kids could drive him from the room. He passionately identified with rape victims and helpless animals, despite the fact that he also killed a cat and fed tadpoles to turtles. His last suicide note reiterates the word "empathy" five times. The journals pullulate with instances of morbid empathy, and murderous rage.
6) He was funny. Gus Van Sant likened Cobain to a perverse, laconic "standup comedian," and the journals bear him out. The plan for a Nirvana T-shirt reading "Fudge-packin', Crack-smokin', Satan-worshipin' [sic] motherfuckers" is admirably droll, as is the story of the narrator's rape and murder by the cast of Andy Griffith in Cobain's song "Floyd the Barber." It's hard to pull other examples free of their context in the journals, but be alert for horror twinned with humor.
7) He wanted to tell it his way. Besides being a chronicle of addiction and an inexplicable pain condition, the journals, like the late Nirvana tunes, record Cobain's volcanic anger at other people's counter-narratives about him. He clipped out his head from the comic book dramatization of his life story and sarcastically drew an emaciated body onto it. He read his press obsessively and wrote meticulously wrongheaded rebuttals. Many entries begin as pop-encyclopedically learned essays and degenerate into foam-flecked rage, like John Belushi's editorials on "Weekend Update": "When I say I in a song, that doesn't necessarily mean that person is me. … I wont calmly and literally complain to you! I'm going to fucking destroy your macho, sadistic, sick right wing, religiously abusive opinions. … Before I die many will die with me and they will deserve it. See you in hell Love Kurdt Kobain Thanks for the tragedy I need it for my art." The tragedy was self-consciousness: He could not ignore what people said about him. He needed to correct their lies—most urgently when what they said was true. Sarcasm failed him. In the end, all he had was a denial, repeated ad infinitum, like the finale of "Teen Spirit."
Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2074093/
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