Kurt Cobain

 It was reminded to me the other day that on April 5 it was 15 years since Kurt Cobain died. That seriously seems like a long time, long enough to re-assess what his legacy and that of Nirvana was and means.  

I’ve written about Cobain`s death before, I just don’t remember who for, but if I find the link I’ll update this post because I have no interest in rehashing any of that same ground. 

I was just starting out in music journalism then and it was one of the biggest stories I ever had to deal with as an editor, student media or no, and I don’t think I did a good job. In fact, I was a little snarky about it because I was going through my douchebag scenester period and thought cracking wise about the whole thing was the thing to do.

My previous story was about the adventure we had trying to confirm the story when it was just rumour and all the crocodile tears myself and many of my colleagues in the music press shed when his death, although a surprise, kinda wasn’t, if you know what I mean.

The truth was that I really did like Nirvana. 

What I hated was the grunge movement as a whole. To me, it was more of the invasion of metalheads and other assorted rednecks who latched onto punk rock and drained everything out of it except stupidity and aggression. First it was the HC-metal crossover of the mid-`80s, now it was skids who were into fag bashing while blasting Zepplin in their Cameros trying to be edgy and cool by playing classic rock licks and calling it alternative. 

My position since then has since mellowed. With the benefit of hindsight, bands back in the late ’80s, early ’90s were doing the same thing the rockabilly bands were doing a decade earlier and the new wave bands were doing five years ago.

Part of the problem is that I saw it through a punk rock lense, and it wasn’t until much later that I realized that Nirvana had little to do with punk rock. Sure, “alternative” music of that era encompassed a lot of that music, from jangly REM bands through to the rattiest thrash. The scene back then wasn’t nearly as large or segmented as it is today, and it was common to see a bunch of different styles of bands being reviewed in magazine’s like the major punk zine Maximum Rocknroll.

What I don’t see mentioned very often is that Nirvana’s success was a surprise. The Sub Pop bands were gaining attention in the late ’80s and there were rumours that some were planning to jump to a major label, but the names that were flown around were usually Mudhoney or The Fluid. And when it was Nirvana I remember thinking “Nirvana? Really?”

I picked up a copy of Nevermind on cassette so I could listen to it on a long bus ride and I did really like it. I kept that a bit to myself because back then, in the circles I traveled, admitting you liked Nirvana was a bit like admitting you like Nickelback today. But I thought, like many other alternative bands who took the major label leap, they would see limited success and either break up or go back to some indie to recover (see: Husker Du).

But we all know what happened, Nirvana became the biggest band in the land, changed the music industry forever, blah blah blah. While that is all still pretty debatable, what I will give them credit for is that they were primarily responsible for tearing down the myth of the iconic rock star, placed on a pedastel to be worshipped.

Sam McPheeters captured all this in a huge article on the man formerly known as Doc Dart.  McPheeters, a veteran of the scene himself, having been the frontman for the highly influential hardcore band Born Against in the early ’90s, and a columnist for Maximum Rock N Roll and the former editor of the fanzine Dear Jesus, is an excellent choice to tell Dart`s story. Having been an important  and controversial voice in the scene himself, McPheeters is one of the few writers from the scene that could relate to Dart, now given himself the unusual name 26, in a perceptive, yet sensitive and unjudgemental way.

He traces 26`s roots from when he was a young bank executive working at his family`s bank, to his dismissal and starting the Crucifux in his late 20s. What it most striking is the juxtaposition between the descriptions of the notoriety of being in a popular punk rock band and the life he subsequently fell into, which, frankly, sounds about two degrees removed from Unabomber territory.

If nothing else, this article made me depressed. This is a story of a man who is clearly unhappy, possibly mentally ill, with an unhealthy need for confrontation for its own sake.