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kottke.org posts about Kurt Cobain

Joan Jett Rocks “Smells Like Teen Spirit” at Nirvana Reunion

The surviving members of Nirvana (minus Kurt Cobain, of course) held a six-song reunion at the Cal Jam festival with a couple of special guests, including Joan Jett taking over vocal duties on Smells Like Teen Spirit, and All Apologies, and Breed. The video above captures the whole thing from the crowd…here’s another view of just Smells Like Teen Spirit:


Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck

HBO will premiere the critically acclaimed authorized documentary Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck later this year on May 4. Here’s the trailer:

Looks promising. The film is directed by Brett Morgen, who also did the excellent The Kid Stays in the Picture documentary about Robert Evans. And the name comes from a late-80s mixtape made by Cobain.


Kurt Cobain’s Montage of Heck

In 1987 or 1988, Kurt Cobain made a mixtape called Montage of Heck. The Guardian has the backstory.

The tape itself is a surreal, often psychedelic insight into the mind of the 20-year-old Cobain: cut-ups of 60s, 70s and 80s TV shows interspersed with the sound of the toilet flushing and people vomiting, bits of the Beatles and Led Zeppelin interspersed with troubled Austin singer-songwriter Daniel Johnston screaming about Satan, and white noise so intense that when Simon & Garfunkel’s Sound Of Silence starts up it comes as physical relief.

There are snippets of a few unreleased Nirvana songs, too, among the tumult and screaming and dead-end repetition, amid the excerpts of William Shatner, The Partridge Family, Queen, Queensryche, Butthole Surfers, James Brown. In many respects, Montage Of Heck echoes and predates turntable culture, the ubiquitous YouTube mash-up and the Beatles’ experimental sound collage Revolution No 9.

The entire mixtape is available on Soundcloud and Vimeo.

Here’s a rough tracklist. Just a year or two after Cobain recorded Montage of Heck, Nirvana released their debut album, Bleach, and they were off to the races.


Cobain gone for 20 years

Saturday was the 20th anniversary of the death of Kurt Cobain at the age of 27. Many have written of the anniversary, but I liked Dennis Cooper’s piece published in Spin a few weeks after Cobain’s death.

Cobain’s work nailed how a ton of people feel. There are few moments in rock as bewilderingly moving as when he mumbled, “I found it hard / It’s hard to find / Oh well, whatever / Nevermind.” There’s that bizarre, agonized, and devastating promise he keeps making throughout “Heart-Shaped Box”: “Wish that I could eat your cancer when you turn black.” Take a look in his eyes the next time MTV runs the “Heart-Shaped Box” video, and see if you can sort out the pain from the ironic detachment from the horror from the defensiveness.

(via NYT Now app)


When Kurt met Courtney

An excerpt from a biography on Kurt Cobain about how he and Courtney Love met.

Already infamous in Portland, Love was holding court in a booth when she saw Kurt walk by a few minutes before his band was set to appear onstage. Courtney was wearing a red polka-dot dress. “You look like Dave Pirner,” she said to him, meaning the remark to sound like a small insult, but also a flirt. Kurt did look a bit like Pirner, the lead singer of Soul Asylum, as his hair had grown long and tangled โ€” he washed it just once a week, and then only with bar soap. Kurt responded with a flirt of his own: He grabbed Courtney and wrestled her to the ground.

I was listening to some music with the kids the other day and Ollie saw the cover for Nevermind in my iTunes and asked, “hey Daddy, what’s that one with the floating baby?” So we played some songs and tried to explain what that album had meant to so many people, but I didn’t do it justice. How do you explain culture shifts to kindergarten-age children? “Everything was the same as it was before, except that everything was different. Does that make sense?” In the end, I pulled a power-dad move and said, “I guess you just had to be there.” ยฏ\_(ใƒ„)_/ยฏ


Kurt Cobain’s favorite albums

From Kurt Cobain’s journals, a handwritten list of the late Nirvana frontman’s 50 favorite albums, including those from Sonic Youth (duh), Pixies (double duh), and Mazzy Star.

Cobain Top 50