ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, July 5, 1996 TAG: 9607050001
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: NEIL STRAUSS THE NEW YORK TIMES
FROM SEATTLE to Dublin, everyone - except his widow - in the rock world is paying musical tribute to Kurt Cobain.
Take out a rock record that was released sometime in the last two years. Look for the following words: boy, heroin, shotgun, depression, angel, stomach, blue, pain. Can you find at least four of them occurring in a single song? If you did, chances are you've found a tribute to Kurt Cobain.
It has been 2 years, 2 months and 27 days since Cobain, the leader of Nirvana, was found dead in a small room above his garage, and songs influenced by his suicide continue to stream out of songwriters' pens from Seattle to Dublin.
There are scores of songs known to be about Kurt Cobain - among them ones by Neil Young, Pearl Jam, the Cranberries, R.E.M., Julian Cope, Vernon Reid and the Tragically Hip - and dozens more believed to be about Cobain, though the bands aren't telling.
There are also compilation albums like the new ``Angels Bleed'' on the small Seattle label Reversing Records, in which 20 young bands pay tribute to the grunge martyr.
The latest song about Cobain is by a woman well versed in death, having lost her husband, her brother and several friends in the last few years. In ``About a Boy'' on Patti Smith's new album, ``Gone Again,'' she laments: ``From a chaos, rich and sweet/From the deep and dismal streets/Tore another kind of peace/Tore the great emptiness.''
Why has the rock world taken hold of this event so forcefully - even more so, if subject matter is any barometer, than it did the death of Jerry Garcia?
To begin with, Cobain's death touched a nerve not just among his fellow musicians and his fans (there were copycat suicides reported from as far away as Turkey and Australia) but also among those who had never heard his music. As Young sings in his Cobain song, ``Sleeps With Angels,'' ``He sleeps with angels; he's always on someone's mind.''
Cobain was young; he was talented; he was troubled. It is an oft-told story: the public face of fame hides the private burden of pain. For older musicians like Patti Smith and Neil Young (whose lyric ``It's better to burn out than to fade away'' was quoted in Cobain's suicide note), Cobain represented an alternative path their lives could have followed. It is the route that ends in a dark period and doesn't continue on to a wiser, mellower maturity.
There are two kinds of songs about Cobain: those by musicians who knew him and those by musicians who didn't. Songs by Smith, Young and the Cranberries fall into the latter category.
To them he is a symbol, not a person. He is a boy in a void to Smith, an angel in heaven to Young and a cheap means of tugging on the heart strings to the Cranberries.
In contrast to these songs are those by friends of Cobain, which conjure up a real person, flesh and blood, one with strengths and weaknesses.
His suicide seems to be felt all the more profoundly by these songwriters because to them it is not an abstract event to be mythologized or empathized with but a real loss that leaves behind nagging questions, doubts and anxieties.
``I had a mind to try and stop you, let me in,'' Michael Stipe moans in R.E.M.'s ``Let Me in.'' And in Imperial Teen's ``You're One,'' Roddy Bottum belatedly says, ``I'd pump your stomach if I thought it'd stop the pain.'' (referring to the stomachaches Cobain said he tried to relieve by using heroin).
Perhaps the most touching song about Cobain was written by a 10-year-old friend of his, Simon Fair Timony. Titled ``I Love You Anyway,'' it is performed with the former Nirvana members Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic joining Timony's band, the Stinky Puffs.
``I'm happy I smashed your guitar with you/And I'm happy we shared some love,'' Timony sings. Then, hurt at Cobain's disappearance and a broken promise, Timony bawls, ``You said you wanted to record with the Stinky Puffs!''
One thing that distinguishes songs about Cobain from other rock death songs like Don McLean's ``American Pie'' and Mike Berry's ``Tribute to Buddy Holly'' is that the Cobain songs generally feature another character who is an equally strong presence in most of the lyrics: his widow, Courtney Love.
Love is the "she," for instance, described as tragically flawed before Cobain is even introduced in Young's ``Sleeps With Angels.''
The English singer Julian Cope's ``Queen Mother'' is written solely from Love's point of view, with Cope bellowing in her voice, ``I hate myself and want you back.'' Back in Seattle, Mudhoney does just about everything but blame Love for Cobain's death in ``Into Yer Shtik,'' telling her, ``Why don't you blow your brains out too?''
Songs like these are only the early rumbles of a Cobain avalanche. The Screaming Trees, Seattle friends of Cobain's, wrote a song about the suicide, but left it off their forthcoming album because the band felt it would be disrespectful so soon after Cobain's death.
And Hole, Love's band, has yet to record an album since Cobain's death. One can bet that the words boy, heroin, shotgun, depression, blue and angel will be in ready supply when they do.
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