WHERE DO ALL THE ROWBOATS GO?
THE INTERVIEW WITH KURT COBAIN - A PLAY
(Kurt adjusting the volume. The only known photo of Kurt Cobain since 1994.)
{After a decade of no Nirvana and a whole lotta strange stories, I decided one night while listening to In Utero to look up Kurt Cobain. It wasn't that hard, he looked exactly the same since I last saw him on TV. So after showing me his collection of tea-bags, we sat down with his guitar, just to see what he thought of Nirvana and what he's been up to all this time...}
Kurt Cobain: No, there's plenty of Nirvana's...I think there still might be some pizza leftover if you want it. {Quickly getting up}
Carson Arnold: Oh, thanks, maybe later. Not sure how long you have to talk, if you've made other plans or something.
KC: No, no plans, we can talk. Now and then a few people have interviewed me since... '94? Yeah. Whenever I died. None of those guys from Rolling Stone have yet, they're all busy- I always give 'em a different story. Could you plug in that cord for me?
CA: ...What are we doing anyway?
KC: This old lamp broke and am replacing it with this one. I don't use any shades, I like the lights just to spread out.
CA: But you don't have any lights on.
KC: I was doing some music {throwing his shoes off}. When I first began playing in Aberdeen in this old barn, I'd borrow equipment from a friend, and we'd set the mics up on lamp-holders as stands and sing. I had an amp that was so burnt-out, there was no sound like it. When we were recording In Utero I'd try to sneak it back on "Scentless Apprentice". When you hear that sharp guitar screech-- that's it. I was fooling around with it before you came actually, trying to get that fuzz on "Territorial Pissings", which was really no more than me screaming through the pick-ups.
CA: Is it true you applied to work in a dog-kennel the week Nevermind was released?
KC: Heh, and I continued to, we went on world tour {Laughs, sitting down, rubbing a hand through his hair}.
CA: I was reading something back then that your guitar would be tuned in row to the first six letters of the alphabet.
KC: Eventually I changed. Butch Vig always cringed, I got suspicious of that guy. He drives around in a big car. Kris would actually tune all of his bass strings to B or something, and it'd triple the effect. I could just play power chords. Never felt the need to go beyond that..."Polly" was probably the hardest, when I think about it, especially electric. We never thought about any of this, though, it just came out. You know, if I were alive, I'd love to play again, as it was, and although people say the dead can revisit, well, that's just not true. {Picks up his guitar} I'm here.
CA: Oh? You can't swoop down and watch people? No special powers?
KC: No, and I like it here, no more chatter. I'm stuck in the space between each song, and that's true. When you listen to those seconds before "Heart Shaped Box", that's me {Begins playing the intro}. For the last ten years I've written "Something In The Way" two thousand times that I don't even remember the real version. I've turned it into a song about sleeping under bridges, eating coconuts, tuning my guitar. I'll sit here and do the whole MTV Unplugged concert front to back, and have recently gone back to playing the drums, but don't own any. You don't keep your royalties after you die. Sometimes I can hear things. In Francis here {rubbing the guitar}. I do a lot of feedback stuff, like I did with William Burroughs, and the amp will tell me certain things about rock music. Where it's at. It's been telling me lately that it ain't happening, that I wouldn't...like it. There's signs, too. You know those big sunglasses I wear in that photo, I accidentally crushed them the other day. {Setting the guitar on his lap and ruffling through his shirt}
CA: Is this what you do all day then?
KC: ...Well. It's kinda the same as it was before Nirvana. Actually reminds me of the winter while I was writing songs for Bleach. I had this girlfriend and used to crash at her place and we'd listen to The Beatles all night which...was really, really great {begins strumming "About A Girl"}. They say I use to shoot the windows of a bank with a bb gun, but I don't remember that. But yeah, today, I dunno, it's taken nearly ten years for my vocal chords to heal from singing "School" across the earth. For years, I had to drink honey and potato chips every morning. I don't play electric guitar, don't see the reason for it, play more acoustic stuff which is where we were kinda going. Like on In Utero, we were more and more shying away from the mainstream and doing kinda Ono Band-like acoustic stuff. At least that's how Dave {Grohl} described it. But I was a mess then. With "Pennyroyal Tea", I was trying so hard to bring across a happiness, but ended up all dreary. Anyway, most of those were written in like ten minutes while watching TV in a hotel room with Courtney.
CA: Speaking of, are you clean?
KC: {Scratching his arm} I am. I know I lied in other interviews years ago, but it's obviously different now. I'm dead, and it's hard to do heroin when you're dead, trust me. I don't know how to describe this either than a lonely afterlife, living out the songs I wrote while alive, sometimes with the same stomach pains. {Nodding his head} Those are gone for the most part. I love it how people used to say that was just an excuse...
CA:What do you feel about being compared to John Lennon?
KC: I didn't know I was...Lennon...Lennon was an entire different thing. I mean, it's not even on the same planet, really. When I was a kid I use to think about all that icon-stuff. I wanted to go down as, you know, John Lennon, but to me, I'm far from him. People know that when The Beatles first threw out their early tunes and went Sgt. Peppers, it was all over right there, it had reached its peak, and when it does that...it sees its entire horizon. Nirvana began to feel that. Me and Kris would exchange certain looks, even if I was slamming my head against an amp-- we'd give a look-- the crowd might feel it, too. What it all meant, though-- I dunno. I hate sounding...melodramatic, but I sometimes wonder what happen to all those kids in the front-row.
CA: I noticed when you sang that song for me earlier, that you still use the British accent which you played around with on In Utero, which always came out on "Radio Friendly Unit Shifter".
KC: I do? That song I just played was "If You Must", an old one off a Nirvana b-side that's out somewhere. B-sides and Other Rarities, I think. Actually, those recordings were some of the better stuff we did, just because they weren't produced...and all that. A lot of the songs had parts that would later bleed into a lot of the songs on Nevermind, which are so easy. {Chuckling} "Smells Like Teen Spirit" you can play with your thumb, except for the solo, which don't ask me to remember how to play. Ask The Melvins.
CA: You were telling me you listen to a lot of Howlin Wolf now. They just released that song "You Know You're Right", which reminded me of-
KC: Wait...they released that?
CA: Yeah, it's on a recent Greatest Hits, I'm not sure of the story behind it, but they made a video with a thousand Nirvana clips all happening at once.
KC: God. {Lights up a cigarette} I don't remember a lot of that song except it was recorded on the spur, I had been humming the verse for a few weeks. I think it was...I think it was suppose to sound more like Fugazi, but instead of being artsy, it was heavy and I never liked it. I always found it funny how we could fill an arena with choruses that just screamed, you know, "Yeah". A lot of those later songs were...uh, symbolical to what I think I was going through and what was happening in music at that point. The problem was, I didn't want people to know what I was feeling like, but we were so big that it undermined anything we (or I at least) believed in originally. I'll have to show you all the revisions of my so-called suicide-note, I have 'em all. See, to this day, I'm not sure why we became so big, and what hurts, is that I indulged in it. 'Nuff about me.
CA: Which isn't something the world would want to admit to. Especially since after you died it was all about you as a martyr, you as a myth, one more rocker who perished at 27.
KC: I heard that they published my journals recently as well as a few other things, which surprised me. Just in that they can only freely sell merchandise until after you're dead. Why I am looked upon as a martyr is ridiculous, I think. The girl who killed herself in her bathroom the following day is no more one than me. Maybe that's why I'm here-- for her. People are in love with the dead artist. When I think about it, it's kinda creepy that I'm on magazine covers still. Me, with a song like "Dumb". I mean, what do you feel?
CA: You're asking me? The one thing I can say about Nirvana is that you both...flowed and had some of the greater lyrics. No, hold on, I'm serious. Even it they were just four words or something, it totally described what was going through in a kid's head during that time that no book, movie, or person could really transmit, you know?
KC: ...{Leaning back} But bands that we came from, like Green River, Tad, or even Mudhoney, were just the same in their own signature. Seven Year Bitch could've easily exploded, or any number of the people that would hang out with us in club dressing rooms getting high.
CA: That movie-
KC: The fact- Oh sorry- {Plucks a chord and stops} The fact that we were commercial, for whatever reason (I guess it doesn't matter now), and that we had a hit lyric like, you know, Here we are now/ entertain us, was sort of a beginning and end to what we were built to be. Another Guns n' Roses or something. People were buying our records to hear that message, and at the same time, them purchasing it, was the same thing that was tearing it down. It's like when I appeared on Rolling Stone...with "Corporate Magazines Still Suck" drawn on my T-shirt, as much as it's true, looking back, it seems so...almost cliche, expected from a guy who's declared as a heroin-addict and making a million dollars, you know? The lyrics that you're talking about, yeah, came from an angst, a dramatic one. Having that and then suddenly put in a position where "bastard-child-becomes-a-celebrity", obviously isn't meant to succeed. I might have too much time to think about this, but that was the point. I wouldn't even be on the magazine if it were now.
CA: So you're saying anything that has a voice is exploited if it becomes famous.
KC: Watch a live show of "Rape Me". As soon as I hit those first chords, everyone starts jumping. No matter what I was singing about-- it could be anything-- everyone would start. As long as we were up there, it didn't matter. It would've been different if it were in someone's basement, but with MTV in front of me, I dunno, it didn't add up. People insist that my frustration was something else. It might've been, I don't know. Frankly, the whole heroin myth, as much as it's true, I think was a ploy to sell more records. But as of 1994, as a star with a big house and my mom with a car, this was it. {Leaning back lightly strumming}
CA: Thus: Here we are now/entertain us.
KC: And that was written long before Nirvana even became successful. We were playing that song in small clubs and nobody thought it meant much, you know? That's when we idolized all the new-wave punk stuff, like Sonic Youth. I was listening to Soundgarden's debut-- are they still together?
CA: No, broke up long ago. Pearl Jam cut off all their hair, too, and Circus magazine wouldn't leave you alone until about '99.
KC: I haven't listened to any of that music for a while now. I still like The Raincoats. I did hear about Courtney's affair with Hollywood, which I think is funny.
CA: What's your feelings about her fighting the whole legal battle between Kris and Dave? Should Nirvana's unreleased material be released, despite what legal documents you signed?
KC: Well...this is what I mean. Whatever I signed back then was in the heat of the moment-- I didn't trust a lot of things, and had faith in Courtney, despite whatever fucked up stuff she was doing as well. (Please don't ask me if she was with Billy Corgan, because I don't know nor care.) Today...it's a combination of...death, what choices Courtney's made since, and however bad the industry is hurting. All rolled into one. {Sets the guitar down} So obviously they point more to be released than not, I say. But it depends also. But you know, I think about more things than this.
CA: For instance?
KC: {Pause} Uhh, if I never bumped in Sub-pop, for one, I'd probably be in Seattle painting or something. That's what I always loved anyway. A lot of the nonsense lyrics that I wrote-- which came to be analyzed as some great importance to rock music-- came from that sorta abstraction I liked in painting. I could lie and say, you know, everything off Insecticide was a punk-rock testimony and we knew exactly what we were doing...in advance... but we didn't-- we were just winging it. {Coughing} I could never really see us doing that today, though.
CA: That's the thing. To me, as a kid, the industry's incredibly boring. Not that it ever wasn't, yet it seems like, yeah, you may play music, but all the surroundings seem empty. It's all about going in, getting your feed, coming home.
KC: See, I remember playing a show once in Rome and this kid came back stage and said something about how he was grateful we were huge because at least he didn't have to suffer through all the hair-band eighties. It was one of the best things I heard and didn't make me feel ashamed to have left all my friends back in Seattle for...popularity, not that I did, but at 24 and homeless-- what else? Because all that eighties stuff was what we and anybody like us were reacting against. We might not have known it then, but it was an evolution. When we recorded In Utero I began to see more and more people taking advantage of the sound, which is why I hated Pearl Jam at first-- everything became "grunge" overnight. It was all labeled. Like playing at the Reading Festival-- just a mass venue. Somehow they got the notion...that all the eighties pop was going nowhere and decided to dig out the underground as their next commodity. Alice In Chains and so forth. I just wanted to play punk-rock without all this.
CA: You sound as though you never liked Nirvana, never even enjoyed a moment of it.
KC: {Tuning his guitar now} Well, the beginning were the best days. On tour three hundred nights a year, there wasn't a communication between any of us, whereas playing at parties and sleeping in your car was totally different. Now that I think of it {staring to the right}, if we were to have kept Chad Channing as our drummer on Bleach...none of this might have happened.
CA: Your death?
KC: Everything. Stardom, attention, careers. For all I know, Nirvana's albums would be in a discount bin and I'd be staring at them on lunch-hour.
CA: Would this be more appropriate?
KC: I guess, but then I remember I had two other members who had their own pursuits. As you can see Dave went off and did his own thing and is hard to believe he's the same guy that'd be behind me, you know, playing "Come As You Are", which is a song I once heard a wedding-band play nearly better than us. As far as Kris goes...I mean, so much has been talked about the band, it's hard to relate to anybody who've only known us through the photos they've seen, you know?
CA: Earlier on you said you gave people a different story when they interview you. Is this about your death?
KC: My death was quick, yeah. I don't remember much of it. {Lights up another cigarette}
CA: Right. But there's a lot of speculation around it. Some say you were murdered. That Courtney possibly had something to do with it.
KC: You mean that documentary that Nick Broomfield did? Naw, that wasn't accurate, to tell you the truth. (Can you hand me that ash-tray?) Most of the suspects he interviewed were all these whack-outs from a few Seattle bands that were around us. Real burn-outs. I mean, I wouldn't doubt if she {Courtney} was trying to put a price on my head or anything-- I read Jimi Hendrix once sought out a hit-man. But...you know. I've given a few versions of the story to a few people who ask. There's the one that I shot myself with my toe, which is what most people believe. There's one that, yeah, Courtney did me in. There's also one that fans broke in and killed me, maybe those homophobes who bullied me in school, even. One that Billy Corgan did the job in a jealous rage for Courtney. It'd make sense-- that lyric of his: May the king of gloom be forever doomed. So...you never know which one to believe. If you watch the Unplugged concert everything was pained. You might not see it but I totally do. I wanted to jump over Pat Smear midway and run for it. {Begins gently playing George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord"}
CA: It sounds as though you don't want people to find out. That you want the myth, Kurt. Does it keep selling your records?
KC: {Stops playing} Why do I care if it keeps selling records? I'm dead. I don't want people to know what actually happened that night, frankly, because everyone's chosen to interpret it in their own way. Let 'em do it, I'm dead, you found me, others have, too. Why a reason? I left my daughter, but...{Sighing} I loved music in a odd way, that most normal people couldn't relate to, or maybe they could and that's why Nirvana made such a sudden impact. And now we're just another poster on the wall. {Long pause} You hear this one?
{Kurt begins playing "All Apologies" in a yodeling version I've never heard before. It took me a minute to remember how to get back home, and after the song ended, he pointed in the direction I came from. Walking, I turned around to ask another question, but he wasn't there. And so I waved and moved on.}
--Carson Arnold - February 16th, 2004
copyright 2004 Carson Arnold
H(ear) is an online music column consisting of interviews, articles, and investigations written by Carson Arnold. As a freelance writer for various magazines and liner notes, living in the woods of Vermont with his family, Carson widely encourages one to submit their art, writing or any interesting piece of material that you would like to share. H(ear) is accepting both promos and demos for review or any other valuable music-related subjects. If you wish to make a comment or would like to receive H(ear) weekly by email please contact Carson at [email protected]
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