30 years since Kurt Cobain

So, 30 years since Kurt Cobain died have crept up on us. I prefer to count it back the way. Nirvana’s last album is now closer to The Beatles' first than it is now… their first as close to early Elvis as it is now… a sobering look at the march of time.

I don’t think I really realised it at the time, but at the age of 13 (and 11 and a half months), Kurt Cobain’s death was a watershed moment in my youth and my life as a music fan.

I discovered "music" around the age of 10 when I badgered my dad to bring down his vinyl collection from the loft after my uncle told me that Led Zeppelin had songs about Lord of the Rings and that my dad had the records.

"Couldn’t you just listen to them on YouTube?"

So, around 1990, as happy hardcore blared from the tape players of youths in bus stops, I was discovering all things '60s and '70s. The music wasn’t enough for me. I wanted the stories too, so I would spend every waking hour that I wasn’t at school listening to vinyl and reading books about said vinyl.

It was a strange obsession. Listening to the creative output of people who had died before their time. I just assumed that all the good music was in the past and everyone was dead and gone.

Auchinleck Academy

Fast forward a few years, and I was in high school (Auchinleck Academy), and a small group of like-minded individuals were devouring music that wasn’t in the charts.

I think all teenagers feel isolated and believe that the thing they are into is the most important thing in the world, and no one else understands it. We were listening to underground music (albeit on major labels), which was about feeling different and no one understanding you, and it was some of the best music ever and the biggest thing on the planet. What a time to be alive!

The fact that it was now 1992, and the vast majority of teenagers in the world thought they were living in similar bubbles, was an alien concept to us. We would get taken shopping on a Saturday with our parents and rush into school on Monday to report that we had seen someone wearing a Nirvana T-shirt shopping with their parents in Tesco. I don’t think I can quite describe fandom before the internet if you’ve always lived with it.

Nirvana was the tip of the iceberg of a whole slew of bands we were listening to: Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Screaming Trees, Mudhoney, Stone Temple Pilots, Rage Against The Machine, Smashing Pumpkins. I’d love to say that we delved deeper and found Tad and The Melvins or bands with women in them… But it was hard enough to find the mainstream stuff.

Simultaneously, we were also devouring the history of music: everything from Motown and soul (The Commitments are responsible for that) to Queen, The Who, The Stones, and Hendrix. Just about anything that was older than the '80s and therefore had a bit of gravitas.

The minimum hourly wage in the UK was introduced in 1999. It was £3 for 18-21-year-olds. In 1992, I was 12, and a CD cost about £15. You could scratch the itch by getting a CD single for about £1.99 or £3.49 if it was an import. Import meant that it was no longer in the charts. Where they were importing UK-only releases from for sale in the UK remains a mystery.

Second-hand vinyl shops were a great source of old albums: Led Zeppelin, The Stones, The Beatles. Every album cost 50p-£1… everyone was moving to CD’s. I wish I’d stocked up an inventory. New albums on vinyl were relatively hard to find and quite expensive. There would often be 12-inch single versions of the new stuff, but my only access to this was either going to Tower Records in Glasgow or the second-hand market.

"Couldn’t you just listen to them on YouTube?"

You would spend hours in music shops - Our Price, Woolworths, and other bygone names. A trip to Glasgow to the bigger record shops was something you would plan in advance. You’d scour the CDs and inlay booklets for information. Eventually, they had listening posts where you could listen to the four singles they were pushing that week on broken headphones.

The solution to feed a habit was home taping. This involved either badgering someone to copy their CD onto a tape or doing a swap with something you had. There was also the mixtape: a personally curated playlist that combined tracks from your own collection with songs taped off the radio. It wasn’t unusual to have a song that you knew and loved that you’d only heard from a fourth-generation copy.

The listening medium was CD and vinyl for home and tapes when you were on the move. Discmans hadn’t quite reached Ayrshire yet. Maintaining a Walkman became a must for every music fan. You learned to repair headphones; you learned that the little Y-plugs that let you listen with a friend were useless; you learned that if you rubbed the batteries, you could get another 20 minutes out of them to last the rest of your bus journey… but get this… the Walkman played slightly slower, so everything was dropped a few keys. Pitch-shifted Mark Lanegan :)

Inevitably, we eventually tried to emulate all these songs and learn to play them on whatever bits of instruments were lying about the school.

We were in the school brass band, so we pretty much had free rein of acoustic guitars and drums. If the school had amps and electric guitars, they were wise to pretend that they didn’t.

It became standard for a guitar band to play at school concerts, with bagpipes doing Scottish-y stuff, brass bands performing '70s schmaltzy ballads they’d found the score for, and then Nirvana covers on out-of-tune guitars without anyone mixing or really knowing what they were doing, all to an audience of grannies.

The first time I was involved, we played "Pinball Wizard" by The Who, "All Right Now" by Free, and "State of Love and Trust" by Pearl Jam. I may have stood on the drum kit and hit cymbals with my bass guitar to emulate Pearl Jam on MTV Unplugged, or it may just have been suggested. My personal jury is still out as to whether I wish there was video footage or not :)

There was an Ayrshire work ethic that surrounded all things with the bands, so before long, we were playing gigs in local pubs.

I try to think back to how much of a message we took from the music. Pretty much every band that we listened to had politics in what I’d still consider the right place. If they didn’t mention it, I just assumed. I don’t remember ever having a conversation about it, but we were fairly aware that the arrogance and cocksure stance of Guns N' Roses and hair metal was about as cool to us as their hair crimpers.

Our school was rough, populated by children from mining communities with closed mines, entering their second decade of Thatcherism where the main growth area was heroin use.

I had very little to be rebellious about. At that point, we’d only ever known Thatcher, but we knew she was the devil before we could walk, so we had become pretty resigned to it by that point. We preferred to just live in our own bubble.

Inevitably, we grew our hair. This felt like more of a rebellion at the time than it should have been. Looking back from where we are now and imagining that there was any sort of furore concerning hair length just seems quaint.

Moral panic was sweeping America. The youth were being corrupted by devil worship, forcing them to grow their hair long and making them listen to abrasive music. It was the gays with their AIDS and the blacks with their street culture what done it… The solution was to put parental advisory explicit content stickers on CDs.

We had a small window to this as satellite telly was adding hundreds of international TV channels where previously there had only been four British channels. Hard to imagine a world before the internet with only the four terrestrial channels and the tabloids to tell us what is happening in the world. We would request for people to tape 3 hours of MTV (it played music back then) and then make mix tapes of videos and live concerts. Fourth-generation cassette tapes and fourth-generation VHS tapes…

Couldn’t you just watch them on YouTube?

Our school was going through it’s own moral panic. The school chaplain (Clem Robb) had been jailed for paedophilia. Proper horrible bastard. Not the “Honest guv, I thought they were 18” type of child abuse… actual raping wee boys with a King James bible in his pocket. My memory of a newspaper article I read was that he showed no remorse and on conviction made wild claims about people not understanding higher levels of sexuality and that it’s not a problem in Amsterdam.

Just for anyone deep googling anything… he always boasted of a friendship with Paul Daniels. I was never sure if this was to make him more appealing to children or if it suggests Paul Daniels was part of something sinister. Daniels later suggested that some of Saville’s victims were exaggerating things… I often wonder if he ever knew that an Ayrshire paedo was name dropping him. It’s possible they never even met…

Somehow, the school responded by getting the retired former headmaster to come in and kind of lay-preach. He seemed to have hit retirement and fancied himself as some sort of Calvinist evangelist. The result was a hellfire and brimstone presentation which demonised (quite literally) homosexuality, masturbation, long hair, and loud music.

Wait a minute… your lot rape wee boys and it’s us listening to R.E.M. and growing our hair that is bringing down the moral fabric of society.

I’m pleased to say that many of the pupils responded with an en masse “fuck that!”. Most teachers under the age of 50 were in agreement that it was pretty beyond the pale so there was little to no resistance to our non-attendance.

I don’t recall us getting any further religious assemblies in our non-denominational (Scottish for Not-Catholic) school. Either we didn’t get any or they were incredibly uneventful.

The wee wannabe-Billy Graham homophobe didn’t give any more assemblies. In a strange twist of fate, he would be the guest compere at the School Variety Concert where by now we were writing our own songs. He introduced us as we played a song about the debacle. It may surprise you to know that it started with arpeggios and then there was a loud bit then a quiet bit and then a loud bit - all filtered through the medium of distortion pedals and a lot of hair and presented to a sea of grannies once again…

Anyway, I tell you all this because it gives you an idea of the headspace we were in when Kurt Cobain was providing the soundtrack for us. Even as a “normal” teenager from a stable family, there was plenty going on around me that some loud abrasive guitars were welcome to my ears and we didn’t have to look far to be anti-establishment.

The Seattle musician heroin epidemic was a weird one for us. Heroin addicts were a familiar sight on the streets of Ayrshire. They still are. Especially in Auchinleck. The poor emaciated zombies didn’t seem to have any of the pizazz or songwriting skills of Messrs Cobain, Lanegan, or Staley…

I now look back with less rose-tinted specs and look at photos. Few of them looked well. If I’m being philosophical, I wonder what was going wrong in the world that the void for teenage influencers was this shape. Many of these musicians were victims of that, who hadn’t really signed up to being spokespersons for a generation. Add drugs and it’s not a combination for longevity.

The UK press barely covered grunge. It just further fed our feeling of alienation from the rest of the world. At one point, I had a cut-out from a broadsheet which had covered Cobain’s drug overdose in Rome in 15 words - not because I was worried about him, but because one of my bands had been mentioned in the newspaper… such was the lack of coverage.

Eventually, I had subscriptions in my local paper shop for the Melody Maker and the NME. I would arrive at school on a Wednesday with them. Classes would be skipped(plunked in local vernacular) as we poured over them looking for reviews panning our favourite bands in between terrible journalism about bands you would never hear of again written by journalists who were even more jaded and underground than us.

Rumours and hearsay got exchanged like Chinese whispers. Teenagers never let the truth get in the way of a good story, especially without people being able to fact-check things on the internet. The many benefits of the internet outweigh the loss of Schoolboy rock star hearsay - but only just.

We were well aware that Cobain’s jaikit was on a shoogly peg. People old enough to attend gigs had tickets to see Nirvana at the SECC. It got postponed multiple times for health reasons.

When Cobain actually killed himself, the newspapers covered it, but the coverage barely reached 100 words. The TV news ran it as an “also today” story. Such was the world’s detachment from what was going on with people under 25.

At 13.95 years old, one of my favorite artists killing himself should have been a watershed moment. I don’t remember it. I remember where I was when Diana died… But not Kurt Cobain. Maybe I’ve blocked it out. Maybe it just wasn’t really a surprise.

The world found out on a Saturday. The Saturday after a week off school for Easter. My bandmates had been caught defacing the room in the music department that we abused acoustic guitars in by carving names into the wall. Our headmaster had told them to decorate the room over Easter as punishment (it was a different time).

I was in school for a band practice on the Sunday. We would have discussed it, but they were enjoying being painters and decorators for the weekend. There really wasn’t anyone else to discuss it with.

In my English class, the teacher had eased herself through her post-Easter hangover with the classic ruse of “what I did on the Easter holidays” essays. Mine told the story of school wall defacement and repair and redecoration and painted me as somehow being more involved in this teenage rebellion than I was. I concluded by pointing out that whatever bubble of hilarity I had presented was burst by the news about Kurt Cobain.

My English teacher at the time was in her first year of teaching. I guess she could have been as young as early 20’s. I remember her acknowledging it and saying how she was a fan. We would be the only two people in the room who knew who Nirvana was.

I think nowadays we should have been getting therapy. I don’t feel damaged by it, but that feels like a bit of a fluke. Maybe there was just so much tragedy in the daily life of Ayrshire at the time that you didn’t think greeting about a dead musician on the other side of the world would find much of an audience. The Samaritans opened a special support line in 1996 when Take That split up. Maybe that lack of support in 1994 contributed to that, or maybe Nirvana fans were just hardier than Take That fans.

With America demonstrating that Cobain’s death did in fact mean something to quite a lot of people, the UK press slowly started to. It’s hard to psychoanalyse 13-year-old me, but this was probably weirder for me than one of the artists I obsessed over committing suicide. A few months after his death, it became compulsory for every corner of journalism to provide their take on Kurt Cobain.

Woman’s Weekly. Fox and Hound. Children’s hour. Suits across the land demanding content relating to the radio-friendly unit shifter. None of it seemed to relate to suicide, mental health or even music.

I may have been naive in thinking that our small band of teenagers were the only people listening to this music, but there was a real feeling that it had been taken from me. Whether it be the alternative becoming the mainstream or whatever structures I had created to deal with what on paper should have been quite harrowing, I closed the door on Nirvana a fair bit.

To this day, I’m fairly aware that my experience with Nevermind, Bleach, and Incesticide are much different from my experience with In Utero. I’d poured over the former 3 for years. I’d only had a few months with In Utero when he died. While it’s a fantastic album, it always felt cold and missing the humor of the previous recordings. That might be more about me than them.

By 1995, Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged was released as an album. What had previously been a coveted 2nd generation VHS taped off someone’s telly had become a means for people to cite Nirvana as their favorite band despite their aversion to the majority of their output. Colliding with the arrival of Britpop and the rise in guitar sales, it resulted in some of Nirvana’s best songs being belted out with simplified chords in a Liam Gallagher drawl on corners of shopping streets across the land.

“Yeah man. I was in Glasgow on Saturday and someone was wearing a Nirvana T-Shirt. Couldn’t wait to get to school to tell you guys.”

More recently, I watch every young generation discover Nirvana and the experience gradually getting diluted. I’ve stood on stage playing in a band as an inebriated young singer presented a soliloquy on how Cobain was one of their favourite songwriters before launching into "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?" having never listened to anything beyond the first three tracks that Spotify presented.

I’d like to think Cobain would find the humor in it all.

“Teenage angst has paid off well Now I’m bored and old.”

So here I bring you, the things you maybe didn’t know about the contemporary teenage Nirvana fan.

Tastes were ridiculously ecclectic

Before 1994, there were two types of people: those that listened to music and those that didn’t. As a result, the bucket of “music fans” involved all sorts of tastes, and these all intermingled.

It's crazy to think that R.E.M.’s "Automatic for the People" sat next to "Bleach" by Nirvana in both CD racks. Filler was provided by acceptable bands from a few years back that were easy to purloin from parents and older siblings' collections: Deacon Blue, Queen, Wet Wet Wet, and Simply Red.

It happened the other way as well. Seattle grunge had kicked down the barriers between metal and punk and presented the influences with equal weight, so bands like Sepultura and Pantera were household names.

All of this could be squeezed onto a C90 that the originator thought was expertly curated.

Magazines like Kerrang and Guitar World didn’t know where to look. Twiddly guitar coverage was getting sat beside guides on how to play two-chord songs. Lines between genres were blurred, and haircuts, fashions, and how many pointy bits were allowed on your guitar were changing by the month.

There was a lot of humour in Nirvana

I feel the fun of Nirvana has been lost. They are remembered as a dour band for disgruntled teens, but they were actually hilarious in interviews. The humor was quite like the early Beatles interviews. I don’t know how anyone can see Kris Novoselic and not see a happy, cuddly, fun element.

For musicians, "Negative Creep" and "Territorial Pissings" might be quite heavy, but I challenge you to play them without seeing fun in them.

Nirvana were scaffy alternative musicians from rainy towns who found themselves being pushed into a world of sunny Hollywood tastes and PR-driven celebrity. It was really good fun at the time - like laughing at a fart.

There was a real sense of community presented by the bands.

In defiance of the expectations of a confused American media, there was a real sense of camaraderie among the bands. Despite the music coming out of Seattle crossing a number of different genres, there was a constant feeling that this bunch of unwashed musicians falling out of transit vans were going to gigs in small clubs to see their friends' bands on the nights they weren’t playing. Music scenes were cultivated and maintained at a grassroots level by ordinary punters with a passion for music.

It was a far cry from the Ferraris, tits, and big hair of the previous genres presented to us.

Whether it was true or not, it sent a great message. I think music venues changed for the better forever as people realised it was their local music economy, and they had the power to grow it.

This was quite handy because between heroin, suicide, and stances against Ticketmaster, you could often find yourself going to gigs you were only partially interested in because none of the big boys were touring.

I can’t quite describe how heavy it sounded at the time.

It’s strange trying to place your ears at a different point in history. We will never quite know what it was like hearing "Heartbreak Hotel" for the first time before Elvis became musical-theatre’s biggest star or what "The Rite of Spring" sounded like before the world's ears were changed forever.

In the same way, most of the bands I was listening to were described by adults as “just noise.”

Within a few years, the same drums and guitar tones were being used across the board from Britney Spears to TV ads.

It’s a music cognition quirk that fascinates me. Maybe one day technology will be able to recreate the feeling of being a caveman hearing a piano chord for the first time.

In the same vein, the musicians of the “Seattle scene” seemed to take great pleasure in shoehorning unknown and unpalatable bands into interviews or raising issues such as feminism and pro-choice into the fluffiest puffiest crap you could imagine. There was confusion as to how to deal with this from journalists across the board. Bring back Motley Crue!

The alternative became the mainstream:

As much as the Beatles were groundbreaking, they were pop music. That’s what made it so good. They were updating and improving a box that was already there. At the same time, there was underground alternative stuff going on. Pink Floyd was making weird noises in small clubs. They released singles, but they weren’t generally infringing on the Beatles' box.

Nirvana broke through an invisible barrier, and before we knew it, the alternative had become the mainstream. The world would never be the same again. Your auntie’s hairdresser would now own Mariah Carey’s greatest hits and Nirvana’s greatest hits. Brands like Doc Martens are now in shopping centres between Marks & Spencer and Next, and Converse is owned by Nike…. That was Nirvana.

It is absolutely wild to listen to Bleach and try to get your head around this band being bigger than Beyoncé within a year or so. I think it says a lot about the damage that was done to the world in the 1980s.

They broke down the wall between punk and metal. Credit where credit is due, this was a door which had been loosened by Guns N' Roses and glam metal, but previous to the grunge era, punks and metalheads were like mods and rockers. The punks didn’t need the twiddly guitars, and the metalheads didn’t need the social justice.

These lines got blurred, and with it, all sorts of different sub-genres got wiped out. Everything with long hair was just "alternative".

You’d go to concerts, and you could read the room based on the T-shirts in a gamut which ran from Black Flag to Iron Maiden via 80s goth.

In a pre-social media world, you obsessed
It’s crazy that you now get a daily update from celebrities and bands.

It used to be around two years between albums. Sometimes a lot more. Eleven songs for two years, and the bands weren’t really obliged to give you much else. You had to scour the music papers, the music magazines, and the guitar magazines for whatever PR journey the record label had decided to invest in. If the record label didn’t agree with your tastes, there was little to nothing and you just had to focus on those 11 songs.

As a result, a new photo or a live gig review from the other side of the world had to last you much longer. Fashions, haircuts, music tech - a throwaway decision from a drunk musician on tour became era defining.

It’s a stark contrast to the ephemeris of today.

We were ridiculously contented with awful audio quality

In a world where we can access absolutely everything ever recorded via multiple sources and in a portable manner; some are even free, it’s wild listening to people complain about the audio quality of MP3 and streaming.

“Yeah but…”

“Yeah… I’m aware…”

I used to travel with a rucksack full of cassette tapes in case I needed access to one of my current 30 favourite albums. You needed spare batteries. You also needed a pencil to sort tangles. The tapes weren’t always first-generation copies or even second-generation copies. The Walkman was rarely top-end - The headphones followed suit…

At school, we had a cheap tape player. It was like running a vintage car. There were tricks and techniques for avoiding earth hum and hiss. Its relationship with the wall socket was definitely not PAT tested.

Cars were all tapes. My dad had a fancy car stereo where you didn’t have to turn the tape. It just flipped the heads or something. As a result, our favourite album (the first tape of Led Zeppelin remasters) played on repeat from 1990 onwards. It soundtracked so many long road trips that it was warped. The warping got worse as you made it through each side.

Dave Grohl was a bit-part

It’s hard to imagine, but between the iconic Cobain and the huge and goofy Novoselic, Dave Grohl was a bit of a background character.

Even as drummers, we weren’t that keen on him. Some music teacher somewhere in Scotland had crumbled to pressure and thought they were doing the youth of Scotland a favour by creating a graded drum score for Heart Shaped Box that could be used as an assessment piece. I think even Grohl will admit that it’s not the most interesting drum part ever.

We saw him singing at MTV Unplugged and were aware that he sang a B-side, so there were hints that he wasn’t some neanderthal drummer in the background.

I remember when he released "This Is a Call." I really liked it. The world was ready for something a little more happy, I think. The critics and most folk I knew panned it. The UK music press were certainly determined that he wasn’t very good.

I’ve since seen him on small stages and festival stages. I think if he sticks at it he’ll do well.

…oh yeah… and he follows us on twitter…

So there we go…. if you read this far… thank you for indulging….. Apologies to Paul Daniels, I was just repeating what a paedo told me… and you’re dead now anyway…. apologies to an English teacher whose name I don’t remember. I suggested you might have been hungover for a cheap laugh but have no evidence of this, I just looked at school teachers I know now and worked backwards. Apologies to the wannabe tele-evangelist who I chose not to name. I’m sure your intentions were good, but I think homophobia expressed to school children is unforgivable. I’m confident that the main cause of homophobia is repressed homosexual feelings so I hope the internet has helped you tackle these feelings and your wife is comfortable with it. Apologies to Kris Novoselic for calling you goofy. It’s said with love from one tall goofy person to another. Apologies to Dave Grohl if you did think Heart shaped Box was an influential drum part. Apologies to Our Price and other record shops for pointing out your insane pricing structure. I’m sure the ridiculous mark-up wasn’t all taken up by you and not all your headphones were broken. If the statute of limitations is such that home taping of mix tapes in the 90’s could still be considered a crime that anyone would want to investigate…. I only talked about it for narrative effect and I was well known at the time among my peers for crafting well curated mix tapes of music which was out of copyright…. Leadbelly and other influences to grunge…