(Credits: Far Out / Geffen Records)
Growing up, Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain caught on pretty quickly to the kind of music he liked. But more than that, he learned all about the kind of music he loathed.
First exposure to the greats, for Cobain, was a confusing experience. Listening to bands like Led Zeppelin and AC/DC, he knew he liked the melodies. Loved them, even. But there was something about it that made him itch, and it wasn’t the fact that all the kids seemed to love them too. He’d later realise that it was what they were saying, specifically, that didn’t sit right with him.
It was the kind of discomfort Cobain already experienced at school. He was an outsider because he looked around him and felt out of place, deeply, existentially. But also in a way that seemed somewhat obvious. Because while his fellow school kids did the things every kid that age would do, like repeat derogatory terms and bully others for how they looked or acted, Cobain wanted no part of it. He was self-aware and intelligent in a way he wasn’t even aware of, just that there was an instinct there he couldn’t quite put his finger on.
When it came to shaping Nirvana, therefore, Cobain looked elsewhere. While he always loved the melodies he’d discovered in those sorts of bands, it was The Breeders, Sex Pistols, The Stooges, Black Sabbath and countless more who taught him the power not only of genius storytelling but how to spotlight the dark corners of his mind. And Cobain had many.
So many, in fact, that they were hidden deep, expressed only through those Cobain looked up to himself and shared with his fellow musicians and bandmates. It was actually the first thing Dave Grohl noticed about him – how reserved and “sweet” he was, when beneath the surface lurked an iceberg of troubles and trauma. But secondary to that character reading was also the music he listened to, and it turns out, it was the same music Grohl loved, too.
“We talked about music, we loved everything from Neil Young to Public Enemy, from Black Flag to Black Sabbath,” Grohl reflected to Mojo. Diving into their shared love for the same bands was an immediate ice breaker and something that made Grohl feel they were all “pretty compatible”. It also opened his eyes to new things that unknowingly got him into the Nirvana headspace.
“I went out to the record store and bought a copy of Bleach, and played it 10 times and went to U-Haul and bought a big fucking cardboard box,” he added.
Grohl had actually only known about Cobain and Krist Novoselic because of their Bleach cover, but their conversations and the little music he heard were enough for him to “dismantle” his drum kit, pack it all up and fly to Seattle for the next chapter of his life. But what he discovered wasn’t a pair of egotistical know-it-alls, but two down-to-earth music lovers who “looked like these dirty fucking biker children.” They were nice, though, obviously (“They wouldn’t hurt a fly”). Otherwise, it wouldn’t have worked.
Despite the nature of the music itself, they always had this sort of calm composure behind he scenes. It was the kind Cobain had since his school days. That quiet sense of observation that could snap into action when it counted. It was the same kind of “romantic, quiet, visionary” attitude that Cobain saw in people like Greg Sage that he tried to “assimilate” in his own stuff, like his own way of keeping to himself in a slow, calculated way, with all the edges of punk and grunge intact.
That, above all, was the type of music he fell in love with. Not the classic explosive rock kind that only talked about sex, drugs and… you guessed it.
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