"GOD IS GAY AND SO AM I"
June 11th 2008 03:12
I have a copy of some of Kurt Cobain’s journals. The above title has been scrawled throughout, amongst other thoughts, truths, lyrics and drawings. The compilation of some of his copious amounts of journals were taken out of a safe in 2002 and released to the public as a book, “Kurt Cobain Journals”.
The first page reads “Don’t read my diary when I’m gone. Ok, Im going to work now, when you wake up this morning, please read my diary. Look through my things and figure me out.”
The diaries shed light upon the erratic behavior of Kurt and Nirvana, which only increased with every new fan, every interview, every live performance and every hit. On tour in 1991 in the US, Kurt ignited the audience with electricity unprecedented when performing Smells Like Teen Spirit. Aside from the songs ‘fuck you’ essence, Kurt would egg on the audience by climatically smashing his guitar on stage and throwing it into the drum kit. He wrote in his diary that “In expression you need 100% full freedom”, and that was exactly what he was doing. If anyone tried to stop him on stage (bouncers and security guards usually), he would react with so much vigor that more often than not, a riot would start. According to Rolling Stone Magazine, on the St Louis stop of the tour Kurt noticed security being especially rough with kids near the stage so he said “Fuck it, come on stage”, and had about one hundred people pile onto the stage. Their sound engineer commented “It was a typical Nirvana tour moment: twenty three hours of boredom, and one hour of sheer terror.”
The worst incident according to Craig Montgomery (sound engineer) was reported in Rolling Stone, “The vibe was insane”. The sound in the small club was so shitty that Kurt smashed in the monitor with his guitar and a fight broke out. One of the bouncers grabbed him from the stage and apparently punched him in the face, so Kurt swung his guitar and hit the bouncer, causing him to bleed from the head. Infuriating the bouncer even more, the band bailed and jumped in a cab which was pursued by the bouncer on foot, who managed to punch in the back window with his fist.
Kurt’s spiteful rebellion against ‘jocks’ may have had something to do with his hatred for them, which started back in school. In his journal he wrote “It is time now for all the fortunate ones, the cheerleaders and the football jocks to strip down naked in front of the entire school at an assembly and plead with every inch of their souls for mercy and forgiveness, to admit they are wrong. They are representatives of gluttony and selfish values and to say that they are sorry for condoning these things will not be enough, they must mean it, they must have guns pointed to their heads, they must be petrified to ever think of being the stuck up, self righteous, segregating, guilt spreading, ass kissing, white-right wing republicans of the future. Kill the Rockerfellers.”
While I am insanely jealous that I was just out of nappies when Nirvana were at their peak, there is no concert I’d rather be at than Halloween night, 1991 in Seattle. The band played at an old 1920’s gothic theater, “There was an electricity in the air…These people were breaking beyond the limits of what we knew…At the end of Smells Like Teen Spirit, six songs into the set, Kurt Cobain pounded his guitar on the floor, stuck it into an electrical fan and then hurled it toward the ceiling. When it landed it broke in two”, according to a Rolling Stone interview.
And this was the the less jaded version of Kurt.
After the Halloween show in Seattle, Nevermind went platinum, which basically aggravated Kurt’s complex even more. His drug habit was increasing and at the beginning of 1992, Kurt spent a week scoring heroin in New York before strolling into an interview for Saturday Night Live. According to RS, Saturday Night Live had an audience of 25million people and before stumbling on stage in a ripped home made t-shirt, Kurt vomited on his publicist and was almost thrown out by security because they didn’t believe he was in the band. If viewers weren’t quite understanding Kurt’s dislike of the predictable by now, they certainly were when the credits rolled and Kurt grabbed both Dave and Novoselic and kissed them on the mouth.
With the success of Nevermind, the band was asking to be on the cover of Rolling Stone Magazine. While a great honor to most people, Kurt hated the publication and only agreed to the shoot if he were in charge of what he wore. This consisted of giant sunglasses and a t-shirt he made that read “Corporate Magazines Still Suck”.
Kurts thoughts about he magazine were made clear in his diary (before the shoot, may I add):
“Hope I die before I turn into Pete Townshend. At this point in our uh, career, before hair loss treatment and bad credit, I’ve decided that I have no desire to do an interview with Rolling Stone. We couldn’t benefit from it because the average Rolling Stone reader is a middle aged ex-hippie – turned hippiecrite who embraces the past as “the glory days”…The average Rolling Stone reader has always denied the underworlds musical options unless it becomes an obviously safe commodity..the now generation doesn’t read Rolling Stone, so we’ll just sit around and wait until the old school starves like dinosaurs while the diaper school begins to litter the floors of Wall St with “Real love” – revolutionary debris. I would only wear a tie dyed t shirt if it were dyed with the urine of Phil Collins and the blood of Gerry Garcia.”
To be continued... xx
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Comment by Tee
You are quite obviously a Cobain fan.x