(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
By every definition of the word, Kurt Cobain is a legend, and Nirvana are legendary. It would take a rock fan stuck fast in 1976 to argue that the band that created Nevermind were anything other than one of the most spectacular and influential bands of all time. Their rise changed the face of rock forever and showed that there was a space for that alternative music right at the very top of pop culture. However, while they’re legendary for all the good reasons, they’re also legendary for all the bad reasons too.
After all, let’s be real here, Kurt Cobain is no longer a human being who lived and died tragically young, he is “a legend”. On the one hand, this means a deeply important and respected person who will live forever in as a story to tell and be retold. On the other hand, stories change in their retelling. Kurt Cobain is a legend because no one will ever really know him with any accuracy ever again.
Even the people who knew him as he lived will all have different stories to tell about the man. Now, to be clear, the man himself was setting the table for this long before he passed away. It’s fairly common knowledge by now that Cobain had a habit of embellishing the stories of his life. Which is a nice way of saying that the man was a nigh-on compulsive liar and pretty much everything he said should be taken with a fistful of salt.
Even something as simple as his oft-repeated assertion that he hated Nevermind having such a commercial mix falls apart on the slightest amount of research. Everyone involved in the final mix of the album remembers Kurt practically doing cartwheels around the studio upon hearing his songs be turned into such a glossy, enormous-sounding rock record. However, enough time has passed that now, even people involved in the Nirvana project beyond Kurt seem to be having iffy memories about that time.
What other Nirvana stories aren’t true?
A man who seems to take a pretty understandable degree of relish in taking down the myths of Nirvana is Melvins frontman Buzz Osborne. The proto-grunge legends have the authority to do so, considering the Melvins basically invented the Seattle alternative rock scene that Nirvana would come up through a few years later, and Cobain in particular was a Melvins die-hard.
The two were… probably not friends as that doesn’t seem to be a word in either man’s vocabulary, but it’s clear they go back years. Today, when he’s not still fronting the sludge metal godheads, Osborne seems to have a lucrative side gig bursting the Kurt Cobain bubble. Ratting out the Nirvana frontman supposedly lying about everything from living under a bridge to having medical issues with his stomach so painful that he turned to drugs for respite from them.
However, he’s moved on from bursting bubbles made by Cobain himself to bursting bubbles blown by everyone involved in the band. In a recent interview with the Garza podcast, host Chris Garza stated the oft-repeated anecdote that when Nirvana were looking for a second guitarist to play live with, Osborne was one of the guitarists asked, but he turned them down. Osborne himself flatly denies it, even when Garza points out that this was a quote from Dave Grohl himself.
Osborne himself seems a little tired of this, though, by the end of the interview, he himself is saying “Fiction is better than reality”, and who are we to argue with that? They say print the legend, and as I started this article saying, Kurt Cobain is a legend. Might as well embrace it.
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