"We tried in vain to breath the fire we were born in"
(quote from Bruce Springsteen).
copyright ESP 2007 all rights reserved
It can be precious to look back on life's unforgettable moments, the good ones, anyway. And the more one thinks about them, the more there seem to be. Memories seem to live in chains.
The best such moments are usually very personal. Sometimes, I think, how sad it is, that my memories will completely die with me, when I die, or with me and with those with whom I have shared such memories, when WE die.
But some striking memories reflect the emergence into one's own awareness of a shared phenomenon or experience in society.
Those memories can be comforting, in a way, because they seem to have a better shot at a kind of immortality.
I particularly remember one particular sunny afternoon in the early nineties, because I was walking along the local collegiate drag, walking past the college bars and trendy-ish clothes boutiques, and I saw something at the record shop that surprised me.
Of course, the windows of any record shop are always plastered with the latest hopefuls. I have always found that a bit annoying, perhaps because it has tended to arrouse both the hopes and the anxieties I have felt in my own life as an artist, because it makes me both fearful (knowing that high hopes can lead to failure in the field of art, be it music or painting) and envious (that someone is having a success I'm not having).
Not really an admirable way to react, I know.
But this particular afternoon, I REALLY got annoyed. The whole freakin' front of the store was plastered with a thousand versions of one particular cd. Still, annoyed as I was, I had to admit that I was struck by the image it presented - a baby, underwater, seemingly chasing a dollar bill on a hook.
That WAS a powerful representation of what it can feel like to be a member of this society, I think.
photo copyright ESP 2007 all rights reserved assist to copykat
alternative version of Nevermind album cover from
Come As You Are by Michael Azzerad
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Of course, the record getting such heavy promotion was Nevermind, by Nirvana.
Never before had I seen the window of that store plastered with a single cd that way, or even any number of cds. I guess I can't say it never happened, but I've never seen it, before or since.
I guess it wasn't 100,000 screaming fans meeting the Beatles at the airport (lol!), but it was a VERY strking thing to see. It was a declaration by that store, at least, that a cultural phenomenon was ocurring.
I suppose part of the reason the whole thing annoyed me too was that I know manipulation when I see it. Obviously, the music industry wanted me to think this particular record was important. Years later, I was talking to a guy who was djing at the time at the local college radio station and he complained that the record company had put some kind of unusual pressure on the station to put Nirvana's Nevermind into heavy rotation. He saw the whole thing, the whole Nirvana phenomenon, as a heavy handed media manipulation.
Maybe he was right, but by that time, my mind had changed about Nirvana. I had decided that I loved them and that their music represented a true turning point in cultural history, a good one, and not just a monstrously cynical media campaign (notice, I'm not saying that there wasn't a monstrously cynical media campaign involved!).
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Who was Nirvana? Well, Nirvana was a classic power trio. It was fronted by an emotional singer who was also a virtuoso guitar player (like Eric Clapton), it featured a bass player who provided emotional stability and sound depth (like Jack Bruce) and a drummer who was both powerful and nimble (like Ginger Baker).
Of course, Nirvan differed from Cream in that the primary singer and songwriter was the lead guitarist and not the bassist, and Nirvana was more punk influenced and less jazz/blues influenced and so on.
The main difference was Kurt Cobain. Cobain was one of those driven individuals who, it seems, burst into the pop world from time to time, seemingly destined to change the way people see things, destined to alter folks' notions of what is possible artistically.
Such individuals can be both commercial gold AND cultural dynamite. Eventually they pass from the scene. It's up to the rest of us to determine on what side of the line their legacy comes down, the commercial side or the artistic side. It's down to what we do with the impulse they transmit.
If I were to pick the musicians whose legacy most changed the twentieth century pop music the way I mentioned, I would pick: Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Bill Monroe, John Lennon. Bob Marley and Kurt Cobain.
Louis Armstrong kicked the twentieth century off with an artistic statement so strong that it reverberated through the entire century, a statement which said that black and white culture could not and would not be separated. He said in music what Martin Luther King said in words, and I think he helped make it possible for King to say what he said in words. Armstrong helped put the idea of cultural unity (not homogeneity) so deep in peoples' minds that it could not be eradicated.
Bessie Smith, as I see it, changed the way people sang. It's not that she made everyone sing blues. But the centrality of emotion and expression was so clear and so stirring in her music, so that music was like talking, but deeper and richer than talking, that no one could ever really go back to putting the primary focus on note shaping (not that note shaping isn't important).
I credit Bill Monroe, more than anyone else, with teaching us that the great european heritage of popular music runs a lot deeper than showhall type stuff.
John Lennon, more than Dylan, in my opinion, declared that a pop musician is an artist, first and foremost. An artist may make money and he may not, but his first responsibility is to express himself honestly and forthrightly.
Bob Marley deserves, I think, the most credit, for believing that good expressive music belongs to ALL the world, not just to the industrialized countries, not just to the rich, not just to those of European cultural heritage, and he hammered the point home not just with great music and hits, but with international touring.
And then there was Kurt.
copyright ESP 2007 all rights reserved
Kurt was possibly the unlikeliest star in the unlikeliest pop explosion the world had seen since Liverpool's glory days. Why Kurt? Why Seattle? I think they are partly the same question. Seattle had a lot going for it. It had a cohesive and yet innovative band scene. It had a start up record company that was enormously motivated and talented (Sub Pop). But it also had the intangible, unplannable: just as Liverpool had John and Paul, Seattle had Kurt and Eddie.
Kurt was a rare bird. In a way, we are all birds, kept in cages, that we more or less accept. The rare bird simply refuses that.
He threw himself against the bars of the cage, physically, mentally, artistically. He seemed to hurt himself more than the cage. But he broke down the cage a little.
For a little while, for a few years, anyway, people breathed air that was more free and more nourishing, culturally.
The cage has been rebuilt. It's much stronger now. The bars are made of Patriot Acts and American Idols. But the bars are also brittle, I think. I think everyone can feel it, can feel that something is wrong, can feel an energy of life and creativity that is bursting to get out. Maybe this time, when the energy bursts out, there will be a million, a billion, Kurt Cobains, who refuse to allow their souls to be caged.
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photo copyright ESP 2007 all rights reserved assisted by copykat
From Come As You Are, by Michael Azzerad
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I've read a fair amount about Kurt here or there. Most of what I know about him comes from Azzerad's book. Kurt seems to have been an unusually happy and energetic child. His parents' divorce when he was seven was apparently a terrible blow to him, and this was exacerbated, subsequently, by a life of constantly being shuttled from one relative to another.
He came from a very musical family and showed a strong interest from an early age in both music and drawing.
Kurt developed an early interest in the Sex Pistols, and idolized them, long before he had a chance to know what they sounded like. So he invented what he imagined punk music to be. In a way, this must have helped him to chart his own course musically, when he came under the influence of actual punk music. At the same time, encountering such music in its actuality seems to have been a homecoming for him.
Punk music does not seem to have been a vehicle for success to Cobain, but a passion and a community. In some ways, this is my favorite thing about Kurt Cobain:
Cobain was a devoted champion of early alternative rock acts. His interest in the underground started when Buzz Osbourne of the Melvins let him borrow a tape with songs by punk bands such as Black Flag, Flipper, and Millions of Dead Cops. He would often make reference to his favorite bands in interviews, often placing a greater importance on the bands that influenced him than on his own music. Interviews with Cobain were often littered with references to obscure performers like The Vaselines, The Melvins, Daniel Johnston, The Meat Puppets, Young Marble Giants, The Wipers, Flipper, and The Raincoats. Cobain was eventually able to convince record companies to reissue albums by The Raincoats (Geffen) and The Vaselines (Sub Pop). Cobain also noted the influence of The Pixies, and commented that "Smells Like Teen Spirit" bore some similarities to their sound. ...
Cobain also made efforts to include his favorite performers in his musical endeavors. In 1993, when he decided that he wanted a second guitarist to help him on stage, he recruited Pat Smear of the legendary L.A. punk band The Germs. When rehearsals of three Meat Puppets covers for Nirvana's 1993 performance for MTV Unplugged went awry, Cobain placed a call to the two lead members of the band, Curt and Cris Kirkwood, who ended up joining the band on stage to perform the songs.
http://en.wikipedia....
I learned about the Meat Puppets through Nirvana and one of my favorite records in my collection is by them.
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There is controversey about whether or not Cobain killed himself or was murdered. I've read a little about it, watched a documentary and so on. I don't believe he killed himself, but that is because my sense of him as an artist is that he was just getting started. I do not think an artist who had a lot more left in him or her would kill themselves.
Never say never (look at Van Gogh), but if there's one thing I've picked up from reading about Kurt and from his music and art and so on, it's that he had an absolutely unquenchable creative drive. I don't think he killed himself. Maybe I just don't want to.
Kurt grew up in poverty and without a secure source of love, In the face of that he threw his creative energy. Some of that would be viewed as destructive by many - graffiti for example. Rock throwing.
My favorite thing about him, outside of his music, is the way Azzerad describes the house Kurt shared with his girlfriend prior to Courtney Love. The walls were covered with pictures he had made. There were animals all over the place (not as well cared for as they should have been). Cobain would collect junk from thrift shops and combine it with clay sculptures into huge dioramas, that he would constantly recreate.
Above all, he constantly pushed his bandmates to practise, practise, practise.
It was a real house of art. I like to think that my house is like that. In some ways it is.
When Cobain met a soulmate in Krist Novoselic, the future that must have seemed unimagineable, and maybe undesirable, became maybe inevitable. Look at any great band and you will see at the core of it two people who are creative and committed and who are soulmates.
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I won't pretend to try to analyse Nirvana's music too much. Kurt did several things that I think had a big affect on the Pop world of the nineties and an ongoing affect. Perhaps more than any pop musician before him, Kurt wedded the music of his band to sensibility for visual expression. He always was almost as much a visual artist as a musician, and this 'paid off' in the form of powerful posters, album covers, videos, etc.. Secondly, Kurt brought rock music back to folk music. I think he was tormented by the separations that stardom could create, and he loved to sense and live music as a community. My guess is that this is where he and Courtney really began to drift apart (assuming they did), because I think Courtney was all for stardom.
Thirdly, and most importantly, I think Cobain widened the range of emotional expression available to singers. Like Janis Joplin, but more so, even as a male, Cobain explored inflections of vulnerability in his music, and of pain, of anguish. I think this was far more of a revolution than has been recognized. Both blues and rock, especially rock, have tended to cloak vulnerability behind macho posturing. Of course, macho posturing has a major place in Kurt's artistic vocabulary. One of his signature gestures is the bird. Another is destroying his guitar. But the ultimate gesture for him was always jumping into the drum kit, like a crash victim. Surely, a more potent symbol for anguished impotency could not be found.
Eddie Vedder said this in response to Kurt's death:
"People think you are this grand person who has all their shit together because you are able to put your feelings into some songs," he says softly. "They write letters and come to the show and even to the house, hoping we can fix everything for them. But we can't... because we don't have all our shit together either. What they don't understand is that you can't save somebody from drowning if you're treading water yourself."
http://www.jvoegele....
With respect, I think Vedder was somewhat missing the point. People felt touched by Kurt not because he seemed a heroic figure, who had it all together, but because he seemed to share their pain and was willing to show it.
I used to have a friend who idolized Cobain. He expressed this by finding inspiration in Kurt's art. He was particularly influenced by Cobain's visual art. This is one of my friend's pieces:
copyright ESP 2007 all rights reserved
Like Kurt, maybe more than Kurt, he had come from a troubled background and he seemed to feel deep pain because of this. At the same time, he felt like the world was trying to build a cage for him and he fought against it, throwing against it the only thing he had, himself. A lot of his ways of coping were self-destructive, but some of his least self-destructive ways of expressing what he felt were inspired by Kurt. In the end, it didn't save him, but I think it gave him a lot of hope and a lot of solace.
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This is an attempt to portray what should have been: Kurt as an old man, playing his music, for some folks, or just for himself.
copyright paul kane 2007 all rights reserved
Kurt Donald Cobain: February 20, 1967 - c. April 5, 1994
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Unfortunately, it has become necessary for me to add a postscript to this diary, stating what is already obvious in the text: I DO NOT ADVOCATE ANY CONSPIRACY THEORY RELATING TO KURT'S DEATH. MY THOUGHTS ON THIS MATTER AS EXPRESSED IN THIS DIARY WERE PERSONAL AND WERE EXPLICITLY PERSONAL. PLEASE DO NOT ACCUSE ME OF DOING WHAT I IN PLAIN ENGLISH DID NOT DO. WHAT I SAID ABOUT KURT'S DEATH WAS AN EXPRESSION OF MY FEELINGS AND NOTHING MORE. I MADE THAT CLEAR IN PLAIN ENGLISH. I ASK THOSE OF YOU WHO HAVE LABELED ME AS CT MONGER TO RESPECT MY EXPRESSION OF MY OWN FEELINGS.
You may think this diary is crap. Fine. Don't rec me. But don't accuse me of CT mongering when that is not fair, considerate, reasonable or accurate.