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Re: Pete reviews Kurt Cobain's journals
It is, at moments like this, that I love Pete Townshend
the most.
Thank you Brian...
That said, my opinion of Cobain remains intact.
No, I will NOT read his "book/journal"...life is short,
too little time for the good stuff, no time for Cobain
on ANY level (except my rants).
My.....was I raving....or was I offering a clear invitation
to *The Dance?*
Might I have the pleasure of your company on the dancefloor,
my lovely?
AnEnglishBoy~
PS~Bite me Cobain!
From: Brian Cady <brianinatlanta2001@yahoo.com>
Reply-To: thewho@igtc.com
To: oddsandsods <oddsandsods@thewho.net>, "thewho@igtc.com"
<thewho@igtc.com>
Subject: Pete reviews Kurt Cobain's journals
Date: Sat, 2 Nov 2002 19:16:13 -0800 (PST)
From The Sunday Observer at:
http://www.observer.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,824698,00.html
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.
=====
-Brian in Atlanta
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