Sing The Sad Song Of Kurt Cobain

"Don’t tell me what I want to hear

Afraid of never knowing fear

Experience anything you need

I'll keep fighting jealousy

Until it's fucking gone."

I was living in Seattle when Grunge happened & young people around the globe embraced the “Seattle Sound” of sludgy guitar sound, fuzz & feedback. I became aware that the city was becoming the center of American culture for a decade. The look of angst & the raw sound jumped to the fashion world & a lifestyle of thrift shop flannel went international with the huge success of Nirvana’s album- Nevermind.  Amazing, this was 20 years ago.

Kurt Cobain’s music reflected his fractured childhood & disconnection from the world.  Kurt Cobain befriended a gay student at Aberdeen High School, & suffered bullying from straight students who concluded that Cobain was gay. He claimed that he liked having the identity of being gay because he didn't like people & when they thought he was gay people left him alone. Cobain: "I started being really proud of the fact that I was gay even though I wasn't". Cobain claimed that he was "gay in spirit" & "probably could be bisexual." He also stated that he used to spray paint "God Is Gay" on pickup trucks in Aberdeen. Cobain: “I am not gay, although I wish I were, just to piss off homophobes.”

The Husband & I passed through Aberdeen, 2 hours from Seattle, each time we went to our favorite spot on Washington’s Pacific beaches. Aberdeen should be, at a first easy glance, a touristy town with plenty of Victorian homes, or even an arts center with period, boarded-up warehouses & loft space. But the town, named for a dreary city in Scotland, has a perpetual grey, mist cloud of sadness hanging overhead. In 2005, a sign went up at the city limits, paid for by the Kurt Cobain Memorial: ‘Welcome to Aberdeen – Come As You Are’.

For a lot of the young people I supervise at my place of employment, Nirvana was the first music that they purchased. Nevermindcontributed to a period in music that, for a certain person of a certain age, has come to have lasting significance, because what was happening in Seattle in the 1990s.

Cobain was found dead at his home on Lake Washington on April 8, 1994, just a few blocks away from The Husband’s restaurant- Plenty. I was working there that day & we heard the sirens & the whirl of helicopters all day long. The staff were arriving in tears, some unable to work. Cobain’s ashes are scattered in the Wishkah River. He has no grave, fans visit Viretta Park  which borders the house where he lived with Courtney Love.

This world was just too much for tortured Kurt Cobain. He would have been 45 years old today.


I love this song. I would like to cover it. I believe it would translate well into a heartfelt saloon song:

What else should I be?

All apologies.

What else could I say?

Everyone is gay.

What else could I write?

I don't have the right.

What else should I be?

All Apologies.

In the sun

In the sun I feel as one

In the sun

In the sun

Married!

Buried!

I wish I was like you

Easily amused

Find my nest of salt

Everything is my fault

I'll take all the blame

I'll proceed from shame

Sunburn with freezer burn

Choking on the ashes of her enemy

In the sun

In the sun I feel as one

In the sun

In the sun

Married, Married, Married!

Buried!

All in all is all we are

Cobain

1990