0.13 Dark pop  (Page 9/13)

It would be another seven years, with the publication of Charles R. Cross’s Heavier than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain , before the full story of Cobain’s suicide and genetic predisposition to it became known. In the days following his death, the most moving excerpt released from Cobain’s suicide letter cited the dead and empty feeling that overcame him when he walked onstage to the frenzied adulation of thousands. “For example,” he wrote, heroin-addled, in his suicide letter, “when we’re backstage and the lights go out and the manic roar of the crowd begins it doesn’t affect me the way in which it did for Freddie Mercury who seemed to love, relish in the love and adoration from the crowd. Which is something I totally admire and envy…. Sometimes I feel as if I should have a punch in time clock before I walk out on stage.” It struck me at the time as a classic Northwest reaction: an overwhelming distaste for fame, celebrity, attention. Having arrived at what he had taken for his Nirvana, Cobain was no better off than he had ever been, and now had nowhere else to go. He was still loathsome, still alone, still irredeemably miserable.

It also is hard not to consider Cobain’s suicide as artistic composition, particularly when you recall the refrain from his “In Bloom,” first performed in 1990, that describes a devoted, gun-obsessed fan who sings along when listening to Nirvana songs and “knows not what it means.” The refrain describes Dylan Carlson, whom Cobain befriended in 1986. An avid gun enthusiast, Carlson taught Cobain how to load and shoot firearms. Four years after “In Bloom,” during the days when Cobain’s suicidal intentions were on the minds of everyone who knew him, Carlson would purchase Cobain’s suicide weapon at the singer’s request, and later say to Cross, “If Kurt was suicidal, he sure hid it from me.”

Of all the Seattle bands to hit it big during the heyday of grunge, Nirvana and Pearl Jam were by far the most popular, and Pearl Jam wasted little time in imploding—albeit less spectacularly than Nirvana—in the face of its outsized success. Lead singer Eddie Vedder was given more and more to growling sarcastically in public about his band’s celebrity, and growing more surly and more drunk at performances, until finally the band picked a hopeless fight with TicketMaster Which controlled fans’ and performers’ access to nearly every concert venue in the United States. and dropped out of sight almost entirely after deciding not to tour at all in 1994. One day I called the band’s manager, Kelly Curtis, to ask what had happened, and caught him in the mood for conversation. “You called me at a good time,” he said. “I was just sitting here feeling bummed about it.”

I walked over to the office of Curtis Management, which was located in a picturesquely seedy second-floor walkup above the Puppy Club at Fifth and Denny, near a fountain built around a bust of Chief Seattle. The headquarters looked like a private detective’s office in an old B movie. Its floors were slanted, its doors crooked, its walls grimy. It was furnished mostly with second-hand stuff—old desks, overstuffed chairs, a tattered couch—and was littered with magazines, piles of paper, discarded food containers and a crowd of young hangers-on with assorted piercings, tattoos, and a tremendous amount of free time.