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Authors: Pamela Des Barres

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“The grown-ups don’t like it,” Kurt declared about Geffen and Gold Mountain’s first response to
In Utero
. Kurt knew they wanted another
Nevermind,
but said he would “rather die.” Steve Albini told the
Chicago Tribune
that he didn’t think Geffen would accept
In Utero
, and soon the press was full of stories about Nirvana’s unacceptable record. The rumors were tossed around from
Rolling Stone
to
Newsweek,
picking up speed. “We will release whatever record the band delivers,” Geffen maintained. Another announcement stated, “Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain debunks rumors of Geffen interference with new album.” The truth was pretty simple. There were a few things the band wanted to change, and even though the higher-ups agreed with the changes, the press was making Nirvana look like wimps, with Gold Mountain and Geffen as their avaricious tormentors. In the end the album was remastered, two songs were remixed, and acoustic guitar and harmonies were added to “Heart-Shaped Box.”
After months of nightmarish legal battles, on March 23 the Department of Children’s Services left the Cobains alone with their daughter, deciding that none of the allegations against Kurt and Courtney in Family Court were legally valid. But Kurt was more depressed and reclusive than ever. His friends and family were very worried about him.
Kurt Cobain with wife, Courtney Love, and baby daughter, Frances Bean, caught in the spotlight. (KEVIN MAZUR/LONDON FEATURES INTERNATIONAL)
On May 2 Kurt shot heroin, arriving home trembling, flushed, and glassy-eyed. According to a police report, Courtney had to inject Kurt with
buprenorphine, an illegal drug used for heroin ODs, then give him a Valium, three Benadryls, and four Tylenols with codeine to make him throw up. She told the police it had happened before. On June 4 the police were back after Courtney claimed she and Kurt had been arguing over guns in the house. He was booked for domestic assault and spent three hours in jail. On July 23, before a gig in New York, Kurt overdosed again and was brought around by Courtney. He played that night at the Roseland Ballroom. On September 21
In Utero
was released to glorious reviews.
The fall of ’93 was spent on tour. Former Germs guitarist Pat Smear joined the band, and Kurt was able to focus on his vocals. All over the country, people raved about the intensity and passion of Nirvana’s live performances. About being onstage, Kurt said, “It’s anger, it’s death, and absolute total bliss, as happy as I’ve ever been when I was a carefree child running around throwing rocks at cops. It’s just everything. Every song feels different.” Offstage was another story. Though he seemed eager to begin a project with R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe, Kurt was silent, withdrawn, and closed, causing deep concern for those close to him. The record company wanted a bodyguard to trail him around, keep tabs on him, but Kurt refused. “Axl Rose has a bodyguard. I’m not Axl Rose.”
One of Kurt’s joys was bringing his favorite bands to a wider audience, and in October Nirvana performed a Vaselines song and two from the Meat Puppets on
MTV Unplugged.
When the band played London in February, Kurt insisted that the Raincoats open for Nirvana, along with his heroes, the Melvins, who played several of the European shows. But by the end of February Kurt was sick and shows had to be postponed. He was losing his voice and had visited several doctors who told him he shouldn’t be singing at all. From Munich, Kurt went to Rome, where he was going to meet Courtney and little Frances at the Excelsior Hotel for a much-needed holiday.
The March 4 announcement from Gold Mountain sounded reasonable enough: “Kurt Cobain slipped into a coma at six A.M. European Standard Time. The coma was induced by a combination of the flu and fatigue, on top of prescription painkillers and champagne. While Cobain has not awoken, he shows significant signs, say his doctors.” But Kurt had wanted to die that night. Earlier he had a prescription filled for Rohypnol (a Valium-like tranquilizer) and ordered champagne from room service. Then Kurt unwrapped the fifty tinfoil Rohypnol pill packets and swallowed them all with mouthfuls of champagne. At the crack of dawn Courtney found him unconscious. “I reached for him and he had blood coming out of his nose,” she told Select magazine. “I have seen him get really fucked up before, but I have never seen him almost eat it.” There was reportedly a suicide note left at the scene, but Gold Mountain insisted the note found was not a suicide note. When Kurt awakened from his coma twenty hours later, he scrawled, “Get these fucking tubes out of my
nose.” A few days later the couple were back in Seattle. “He’s not going to get away from me that easily,” Courtney said. “I’ll follow him through hell.”
On March 18 the Seattle police got another hysterical call from Courtney, who told them her husband was holed up in the bathroom with a .38-caliber revolver, threatening to kill himself. According to the report, when the police arrived Kurt came out of the bathroom, saying he had no intention of committing suicide. Four guns and twenty-five rounds of ammunition were confiscated.
Along with a few of Kurt’s friends and family members, Courtney started talking to counselors, and on March 25, along with a counselor and ten friends—including Gold Mountain executives, guitarist Pat Smear, and Chris Novoselic—performed an intervention on Kurt. Courtney vowed to leave him if he didn’t check into rehab, and Pat and Chris threatened to break up the band. After the difficult, lengthy session, Kurt and Pat Smear went down to the basement to rehearse. When she wasn’t able to convince Kurt to check into rehab with her, Courtney flew to L.A. without him, checked into the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills, and started an outpatient detox program. Back in Seattle, Kurt went looking for a gun.
Kurt convinced the best man at his wedding, Dylan Carlson, to go with him to buy a shotgun, reminding him that his own guns had been confiscated and he needed one “for protection.” Dylan thought it was strange since Kurt was about to leave for L.A., but accompanied him to Stan Baker’s Gun Shop on Lake City Way, where he bought a 61b Remington Model 11 20-gauge shotgun. Concerned, Dylan offered to keep the gun for him until he got back from L.A., but Kurt took the gun home. Then he left for L.A. and checked himself into the Exodus Recovery Center. This time he lasted only two days. On April 1 Kurt called Courtney at the Peninsula, telling her she made a really good record. When she asked Kurt what he meant, he replied, “Just remember, no matter what, I love you.” Courtney never spoke to her husband again. That evening, after telling the staff he was going out on the patio to smoke, Kurt jumped the six-foot brick fence and disappeared.
On April 2 Courtney hired a private investigator and canceled Kurt’s credit cards. On April 4 Kurt’s mom, Wendy, filed a missing persons report. Somebody claims to have seen him in the park near his house a couple of days later, but on April 5 it seems that Kurt climbed the stairs to the greenhouse above his garage and propped a stool against the French doors. Then he removed his hunter’s cap, got his drugs from an old cigar box, wrote a letter with a red pen, and opened his wallet to his driver’s license, tossing it on the floor as identification. Courtney believes that Kurt then pulled a chair to the window with a view of Puget Sound, took some heroin, pressed the shotgun barrel to his left temple, and pulled the trigger.
Two and a half days later Kurt’s body was found by Gary Smith, an electrician
who had been hired to install a security system in the house. Unrecognizable, the body was identified by fingerprints several hours later. Heroin and Valium were found in Kurt’s bloodstream.
Meanwhile, at 9:30 P.M. on April 7, Courtney was rushed from her room at the Peninsula to Century City Hospital after 911 had been called regarding a “possible overdose victim.” She was arrested immediately after being discharged and booked for possession of a controlled substance, drug paraphernalia, and a hypodermic, as well as for “receiving stolen property.” All charges were later dropped. (The “controlled substance” turned out to be good-luck holy ashes given to her by her lawyer, Rosemary Carroll.) Courtney hadn’t spoken to Kurt for a week and must have been crazy with worry and grief. Released on ten thousand dollars’ bail, she went directly to the Exodus Recovery Center, spending one night. The following day her worst fears were confirmed.
Gary Smith had called radio station KXRX-FM with “the scoop of the century,” adding, “You’re going to owe me a lot of concert tickets for this one.” Kurt’s mom, Wendy, learned of Kurt’s death on the radio. “Now he’s gone and joined that stupid club,” she said, referring to Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison. “I told him not to join that stupid club.” Courtney flew to Seattle and stayed with Wendy. She wore Kurt’s clothes and carried around a lock of his hair.
While Courtney’s taped message played for thousands of sorrowful fans at the candlelight vigil across town, a private memorial was being held at the Unity Church. “A suicide is no different than having our finger in a vise,” Reverend Towles told the 150 mourners. “The pain becomes so great that you can’t bear it any longer.” Chris Novoselic asked that Kurt be remembered for being “caring, generous, and sweet.” Courtney read from the Bible and from Kurt’s suicide note, including a passage she left out of the tape for the vigil: “I have a daughter who reminds me too much of myself.” Gary Gersh read a note from Michael Stipe, and Gold Mountain’s Danny Goldberg spoke last: “I believe he would have left this world several years ago if he hadn’t met Courtney.”
Courtney told the crowd in her taped message that she would read the part of Kurt’s suicide note addressed to his fans. The rest, Courtney said, was “none … of your fucking business.” But before she could begin to read the note, Courtney stopped herself, saying, “He is such an asshole. I want you all to say ‘asshole’ really loud.”
Then Courtney began to read from the suicide note, in which Kurt told of feeling “guilty beyond words.” Kurt said that for years he hadn’t experienced any thrill at “the manic roar of the crowd.” “Well, Kurt, so fucking what?” Courtney said, interrupting her reading. “Then don’t be a rock star, you asshole.” After Courtney continued to read Kurt’s confession that the “worst
crime” would be to fake having 100 percent fun as a rock star, she countered, “No, Kurt, the worst crime … is for you to just continue to be a rock star when you fucking hate it.”
Courtney continued to recite Kurt’s self-torturing confession and farewell to his fans. Kurt labeled himself as “one of those narcissists who only appreciate things when they’re alone.” He wistfully observed that he had it “good, very good,” but almost in the same sentence revealed that since the age of seven he had become “hateful towards all humans.” Kurt’s good-bye concluded with his thanking his fans “from the pit of my burning, nauseous stomach,” and his signing off, “Peace, love, empathy …‘It was better to burn than to fade away …’ Kurt Cobain.”
The crowd then heard Courtney tell them on tape not to put “any stock” in the tough-love tactics that had failed in the end to save Kurt. Courtney said, “I’m really sorry, guys.” Her message ended by her asking his fans to “tell him he’s a fucker, okay? Just say, ‘Fucker, you’re a fucker,’ and that you love him.”
Two months later, on June 16, Hole’s bass player, Kristen Pfaff, died in her bathtub of a heroin overdose.
The warm July night I ran into Courtney at Jones restaurant, she seemed beaten up and bruised from the inside out. She was pale and dazed, damp-eyed and disheveled, sitting with a bunch of rock stars in a dark booth. When she saw me she opened up her arms and I held her for a long, sad time. She told me it was hell being a rock widow, and that mourning didn’t suit her. “I miss Kurt so much,” she said over and over, “but I will survive.”
And she has. With rage, passion, and unshakable courage, Courtney has yanked herself out of her anguished fog and fucked with the odds. From her abrasive rants on America Online to the admission that she drowned her sorrows in too many rock guys, Courtney parades through the award shows like a risky princess and curses out Hole’s packed crowds while entertaining them to the hilt. She continues to stun and titillate, making headlines like all good rock stars are supposed to do. She recently pleaded guilty to assaulting Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna at Lollapalooza, and the judge suspended her sentence on the condition that she “refrain from violence for two years and take anger management courses.” But nobody will be able to tame Courtney Love. When we did our interview, I asked her if she felt power by being a rock star. “Fuck yeah, man,” she shouted. “I’m a rock star
girl!”
Kurt would be proud.
EDDIE COCHRAN
T
hirty-five years ago on a dark, rainy Saturday night, a talented, sweet-natured American kid was thrown through the windshield of a British taxicab and killed. At twenty-one he was just beginning to cause a stir in the rock world with his lighthearted, wildfire songs about teenage problems. He dressed really cool, he shook his shoulders just right, and when he swung his flashy orange guitar from side to side, a lock of blond hair fell over his forehead in a way that made the blossoming girls swoon. He had just started to raise a fuss and holler—and then he was gone.
The adored baby of a large, seemingly close-knit family, Ray Edward Cochran loved to play cowboys and Indians and shoot off his capguns, pretending to be Hopalong Cassidy or his hero, Roy Rogers. He led parades through his picture-perfect Albert Lea neighborhood in Minnesota, banging pots and pans for drums, and on Saturday afternoons twelve-cent double matinees at the Rivoli Theater were a big treat. He was a true practical joker, a mischief maker, always pestering the daylights out of his many nieces and nephews.
Eddie enjoyed fishing with his cane pole and taking his fancy western-style BB rifle hunting with his dad. He loved scarfing up his mom’s soup beans and corn bread, and he played a mean guitar.
When Eddie’s older brother, Bill, went into the service, he left the five-year-old in charge of his old Kay acoustic guitar, and soon Eddie was hanging blankets on the clothesline, entertaining the neighborhood kids, who paid a penny each to sit inside the blankets and listen to him play. When his music teacher wanted him to play clarinet in the school band, Eddie insisted that he wouldn’t join the band at all if he couldn’t play his guitar.
When the Cochran family had to move to California in 1953, childhood friend Shirley Oman says she’ll never forget what Eddie said to his mother. “Eddie was standing in his backyard with his silly little cap on, and he said, ‘You know, Mom, when we go to California I’m going to make something of myself and you’re going to have everything, Mom, you’ve never had.’”
As I drive down Bernice Circle in Buena Park, I’m struck by the picturesque, unchanged, fifties quality of the suburban stucco bungalows, and the neat, tidy squares of lawn. Except for the glare of ever-present sunshine, I could be Anywhere U.S.A., Anytime U.S.A. Birds chirp, a lawnmower hums. Boys in jeans toss a ball. I’m here to see Eddie Cochran’s sister, Gloria, and her son, “Little” Ed—I’m taking them to lunch so we can discuss a beloved family member, lost all those years ago on a rainy night in England.
Little Ed, who was eight when Eddie died, answers the door—a large fellow, now in his mid-forties, with a ready, shiny grin—and leads me into the living room, which is pretty much a shrine to Eddie Cochran. Lots of gold records, posters, portraits, and an oil painting that’s such a good likeness, it’s scary. Sister Gloria is seventy years old, a sweet little lady with a quiet and gentle demeanor, cloaked in polyester. Everybody has gotten a whole lot older, but Eddie is still twenty-one years old. He always will be. His presence is so overwhelming, I’m curious if Eddie spent any time in this house. “Yes,” says Gloria, wistfully. “We moved in here three months before he died.” I knew it.
The all-American Cochran family. “When we go to California,” Eddie told his mother, “I’m going to make something of myself.” (COURTESY OF GLORIA JULSON)
“I thought we’d go to Black Angus,” says Little Ed, and although I’m a vegetarian, I charmingly agree and we pile into his mid-eighties Lincoln and cruise through Anywhere U.S.A. to the local steak house.
Unmistakable: It’s baby brother Eddie’s joyous full-throttle shout coming from the speakers. “I can’t listen to him all the time,” says Gloria quietly. “It hurts. But this is a special occasion.” I listen to Eddie’s earliest country-punk efforts with Hank Cochran (no relation), all about a pair of pegged pink slacks, and marvel at his masterful guitar playing and wailing wit.
We settle into the high-backed booth and I order the Black Angus specialty, baked potato soup, while my guests order hamburgers. How did Eddie get so good on that thing so young? I ask his sister. “California was a strange place, and Eddie was alone a lot, so he played that guitar constantly.” She smiles. “He didn’t think about college. Music was it. He even took his guitar out on dates!” Gloria recalls with a glint in her eye. “He admitted music was his first love.” There had to have been girls, right? I know I would have been prowling around. “He had one girl in high school—her name was Johnnie. He went with her for a little, but when he got so interested in his music … he took ’em as they come, you know.” Gloria seems a tad embarrassed by this revelation, and giggles. “The young girls, when they found out where we lived, would drive by and drop notes in his car.”
Eddie got a three-piece band together and played local dates, one of which was the opening of a market, getting his first paying gig a few months later at South Gate Auditorium. He met Hank Cochran at the Bell Gardens music store, and the two teamed up early in 1955, writing songs together and getting a record deal almost instantly with Ekko Records. Eddie was sixteen and decided to drop out of school, against his family’s wishes. “Mom didn’t like it, but Eddie stuck to his guns,” Gloria told me. “He said, ‘I want my music, I got this, and this is what I want to do.’ He sure was stubborn.” The duo took their country-shuffle-with-a-backbeat into barn dances and eventually landed a regular spot on the
California Hayride
TV show. But the three Cochran Brothers singles flopped dismally and, due to Eddie’s increasing desire to rock out, the two went separate directions—Hank to Nashville, where he became a successful songwriter, and Eddie back into the studio with Jerry Capehart, who would soon become his manager and writing partner.
Eddie’s sister Gloria pulled this picture straight out of the Cochran family photo album. (COURTESY OF GLORIA JULSON)
Eddie was redefining his style, mixing his country swing with some Ray Charles and Little Richard. He played all the guitars on these early sessions and, listening to his natural ace virtuosity, it’s hard to believe Eddie was barely sixteen years old. (He went on to overdub lots of guitars on all his records, a highly unusual practice back then.) Jerry and Eddie signed with a publishing company, American Music, and cut some demos (known then as “dubs”), one of which—a raucous little number written by Capehart, “Skinny Jim”—got Eddie a deal with Crest Records. Though it got decent reviews, the record didn’t set the charts on fire, so Capehart took the single and dubs of Eddie singing “Blue Suede Shoes” and “Long Tall Sally” in search of a new deal. Rock and roll was shaking up the
Billboard
charts, and Liberty Records founder Si Waronker dug the dubs enough to sign the teenager, hoping the gifted kid might become a blond Elvis Presley. Coincidentally, while recording some backing music for a low-budget flick, producer Boris Petroff got a load of Eddie in the studio and offered him a cameo in
The Girl Can’t Help It,
Jayne Mansfield’s trashy, tawdry rock classic. It was a double shot of success that seemed to sit just right with Eddie Cochran.
I spoke to big brother Bill Cochran, and he said Eddie was just brought up right: His family came first and his music second. “He was so down to earth, it was kinda scary. Like I say, he loved his family, and he had music in his heart.” Well, Eddie may have had an entire band in his heart, but his familial ties were questionable, says Jerry Capehart. “Eddie’s mother, Alice Cochran, was a complete control freak,” he insists. “Eddie’s dilemma in life was trying to maintain a relationship with his family and having a career. His family wanted to tell him exactly what to do.”
It’s a brief but potent three minutes in
The Girl Can’t Help It
when somebody turns on a TV set to watch Eddie perform “Twenty Flight Rock,” a nutty ditty about being “too tired to rock” with his girl after climbing twenty flights of stairs. It almost became Eddie’s first single, but someone at Liberty suggested a John D. Loudermilk tune, “Sittin’ in the Balcony,” for Eddie’s big-label debut, giving Jerry and Eddie a day to think it over. When his manager asked the singer what he thought, Eddie said, “Well, Dad, I think it’s a hit.” He was right. The song was recorded in eight hours with Eddie on guitar and Capehart using a cardboard box for drums, and when it came out in the fall of 1956, it went straight into the Top Twenty. The song was a little schmaltzy and a tad sweet and croony, but Eddie played up the heartthrob angle with a twinkle in his eye, suggesting “There’s a whole lot more where this came from.”
Back at the house, Gloria and Ed take me into the den and pop in a long-ago black-and-white video clip from Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand.”
Dick was doing one of his retrospective shows a couple of years back, and Eddie’s mother, Alice, and sister Gloria were invited to the festivities, taking with them Eddie’s precious Gretsch guitar. We watch the baby-faced blond swinging the same orange guitar, kissing gooey-eyed girls in the balcony, and then, sure enough, there’s Gloria and her late mother, Alice, beaming from the audience as Dick sings Eddie’s praises, touching the Gretsch like it was God’s own instrument. “Dick was talking to Mother, asking if there was anything he could do for her,” a misty-eyed Gloria recalls at the end of the mini-Eddie screening, “and she said, ‘Yeah, you can give me the tapes you have on Eddie,’ and he did. It’s so funny,” she goes on, “because when this accident happened, Mother tried to buy the tapes and he wouldn’t sell ’em.” Then Little Ed interjects, “Well, he would have, but the price was so high … .”
I call Eddie’s other sister, Pat, a soft-spoken lady who runs an office-supply store in Garden Grove. “I consider Eddie the last of the innocents,” she begins. “Our teenage kids could use more people like Eddie today. He was a delightful individual for the short time he was with us.” She sighs. “Sure, he may have had one too many beers sometimes, but he wasn’t into the dope scene or anything like that. I don’t want to paint him as not being human—he was terribly human. He loved people, he loved his family, but most of all he loved his music.”
“I’m going to tell you some information that very few people have,” Jerry Capehart tells me. “Eddie was cast in a feature motion picture called
Rally Round the Flag
with Paul Newman. He had the part, it was all set. I went to pick him up for the first day’s shooting, and Alice says, ‘We’ve decided that the part isn’t big enough for Eddie.’ I argued, but she wasn’t going to change her mind. If Eddie had done that part, he would have been as big as James Dean. I used to try and instill in Eddie the positive side of life, but that family of his … he felt totally oppressed.” What about his father? I query. Did he get involved in the decisions? “Are you kidding? I bet I didn’t see Frank a half a dozen times during the years I knew them. He would go to work, come home to his bedroom, and get drunk.”
After the success of “Twenty Flight Rock,” Eddie put out another single, “Drive-In Show,” which didn’t quite hit, and made another movie,
Untamed Youth,
starring Mamie Van Doren (in her tell-all tome, she recalls seducing the young rocker). The Warner Bros. film about kids picking cotton in Bakersfield, California, features the charismatic Eddie in the role of “Bong,” and one reviewer loved him: “There’s a guy who works with Mamie whom I never before heard of—one Eddie Cochran, who writhes through ‘Cottonpicker’ in a manner that could make Elvis envious. Real frantic, this boy.” Eddie may have had some private moments with the blond bombshell, but most of the year was spent touring the country in his white (with wood paneling!) Country Squire station wagon.
I call Gene Ridgio, Eddie’s drummer from the very beginning, now working in the gaming industry in Las Vegas, and he’s still full of abounding love for the boy snatched from their midst a long time ago. Gene recalls his glory days like they were just yesterday, telling me how he and his band met Eddie at the Rainbow Roller Rink, backed him on a couple of songs, and became his touring band. “Once we did ten weeks of one-nighters,” he remembers. “Everyone hated the promoter. We’d go north, then south, then north, west, east, north, south. We would leave a job, pack up, load the trailer, and take off. We didn’t sleep in motels; we had to sleep in the car and keep going. Eddie would sleep skewed down in the front seat with his feet up on the dashboard.” Gene tells me about the time they were spotted in a gas station after a show with their pay wrapped in rubber bands. Because a local bank had been robbed that day, the station attendant called the cops on the greasy-haired delinquents. “The police pulled us all out of the car,” Gene says, “one cop in front, one in back, and one on each side, and they proceed to question us.” He laughs heartily. “So they call in to headquarters and say, ‘We got the money and it’s all in rubber bands.’ ‘Did you say
rubber
bands? The money was taken from the bank in
paper
bands.’” It seems the jerkwater cops had messed up big-time. “Eddie says, ‘Sarge, do you have a daughter?’ He says, ‘Yeah.’ Eddie says, ‘She’s gonna be very mad at you’—that’s how cool he was—and the cop says, ‘What’s your name, son?’ ‘Eddie Cochran.’ ‘The rock-and-roll singer?’ ‘Yessir.’ And the cop says, ‘Yep, she’s going to be mad, all right.’ So Eddie says, ‘Tell you what, you want me to give you an autograph so she won’t be that mad?’”
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