On April 5, 1994, Kurt Cobain, the charismatic and tortured leader of Nirvana, committed suicide at the age of 27. Thirty years later, a look back at the crazy encounter between the grunge idol and Hole singer Courtney Love.
In 1990, the American singer Courtney Love – who will soon find success with her rock band Hole – leaves Alaska where she had gone to dance in bars and stops for a stopover in Vancouver, before deciding on Seattle. She discovers that the city scene is making more and more noise and feels attracted by this new emulation. The independent music label Sub Popcreated in 1988 by the journalist Bruce Pavitt and concert promoter Jonathan Poneman, releases thrilling records, including a 45 rpm by the group Mudhoney which catches the eye of Courtney Love. This noisy group exerted a great influence on her, first on a musical level but also physically because the young woman found herself fascinated by the beauty and charisma of the singer, Mark Arm.
The first meeting between Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love
At the same time, the group Nirvana also makes a name for himself with his single Love Buzz, which is not necessarily to the taste of Courtney Love, who snubs the maxi upon seeing the cover. She shows a Kurt Cobain juvenile, dirty and with hair pulling his mouth. But as she walks through the streets of the cradle of grunge, she realizes that she will not psychologically last long in this dreary gray town and manages to change her ticket to return to Portland.
This is where the girl at heart becomes infatuated with a record store that lets her listen to all the exciting new musical releases of the moment. One evening in January 1990 (some think it was in 1989, because Nirvana also played that year in the same venue), she went to see a group in concert that no one remembers today at the Satyricon. The first part is called Nirvana and enjoys a good image thanks to their first album Bleach, which has just been released by Sup Pop. Everyone’s eyes are on them and their new sound: between punk and grunge.
As soon as the singer appears on stage, Courtney Love is struck by a flash: she has rarely seen a man of such charismatic beauty, such high sex appeal and such devastating magnetism. It’s the boy from the cover that she saw a little earlier, however. But behind the grime, class: lagoon blue eyes, blond hair, fine features and the slender silhouette of a little androgynous boy who seems to have suffered quite a bit and traveled around. It’s love at first sight, on one side or the other, at first sight.
“I remember suddenly having no taste for anything. Nothing concerned me anymore.” Kurt Cobain
Born on February 20, 1967 in Aberdeen, Washington, to a father who was a mechanic and his mother, who was a waitress and then a housewife, Kurt Cobain was a cute, blond boy who was marked by a family event that can seem common at first glance. But the child is one of those sensitive beings for whom the slightest disturbance is equivalent to an earthquake. In 1975, his parents divorced and tragedy struck: the happy child would never recover from this breakdown in his home. Shaken, he withdraws into himself and loses his smile, later stating in an interview: “I remember suddenly not having a taste for anything. Nothing concerned me anymore. I was lost and useless, and this bitter feeling would not let me go. I didn’t want to go out with the others anymore, they had parents and I didn’t.”
His parents are also disappointed by their offspring, who does not really correspond to the ideal son, despite his baby-like physique.
His father would like Kurt Cobain to enjoy sports, but he prefers music. Giving in to pressure, the teenager signs up for his college’s wrestling team but hates the competitive spirit that reigns there. During a fight, he voluntarily allows himself to be defeated without striking any blows, under the worried gaze of the paterfamilias. Abandoned by his family, Kurt spends nights staying with uncles, aunts and grandparents, constantly moving. A lack of benchmarks that is not conducive to the personal development so praised by the “American way of life”.
Like a hero Gus Van Sant, the young man becomes aware of his disgust for the prejudices typical of small towns. In high school, his friendship with a homosexual causes rumors to spread about him, which causes him to be heckled by his classmates. In his diary he writes: “I’m not gay, although I would like to, just to piss off the homophobes.” At the same time, Kurt Cobain painted the punk slogan on walls and trucks:God is gay” at age 19 and was arrested in 1985 for tagging “Long live gay sex” on a bench.
Unmotivated to find a job and live a “normal” life, he sometimes has difficulty paying the rent, and he sometimes eats at the soup kitchen and sleeps under a bridge by the river. The only escape for the rebellious blond, as for many kids who feel different, is to take refuge in music. Art as a solution to chaos.
“When they see each other for the first time, Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, the two unloved former middle schoolers then perhaps recognize each other as freaks, when their sad and expressive eyes meet.”
When they see each other for the first time, Kurt and Courtney, the two unloved former middle schoolers, perhaps recognize each other as freaks, when their sad and expressive eyes meet. But as usual, the young woman doesn’t know how to do it as soon as she really likes a boy. When Kurt comes to her after the concert, intrigued by her punk and raunchy reputation as a music-loving, ambitious, funny, dark, rebellious and adventurous stripper, she glares at him.
As a final affront, she compares him to Dave Pirner, the singer with long, filthy hair from Soul Asylum. Then, after seeing Kurt’s girlfriend, the voluptuous redhead Tracy to whom the song “About a girl” of Nirvana is dedicated, Courtney Love delivers a scathing reply to the boy: “Your girlfriend is fat!”. In return, he calls her a dirty bitch. Then the two savages begin, drunkenly, to hit each other on the sticky ground then to insult each other copiously before furtively kissing each other.
To make it up to him, he gives his wrestling partner a sticker bearing the image of a little monkey from a cartoon he loved as a child, Speed Racer. The blonde fury has something equivalent in its violence to the drama queen Scarlett O’Hara as much as to the queen of no-wave Lydia Lunch. Taller and more curvy than Kurt, she wears a red polka dot dress and has badly bleached hair. She later recalled: “It was in front of the jukebox, it was playing my favorite song from Living Color and there was beer on the floor.”
Kurt confided about this failed evening: “I thought she looked like Nancy Spungen. She looked like a classic punkette. I felt attracted to her and probably wanted to fuck her that night, but she broke down.”
If Kurt is seduced by Courtney Love, loud-mouthed, violent, and two heads taller than him, and it doesn’t scare him, it’s because he has nothing like the other heteronormative men in his country , scalded by the fear of being emasculated by punk fury. Feminist and deconstructed, he does not flee from such a tornado, but on the contrary, falls in love. It must be said that the young man may well be the figure in full rise of a nasty musical trend – grunge – but he nonetheless remains a fragile poet inhabited by an anarchic childhood and adolescence, far from the conventions of dreams. American. But the blond being in a relationship, the two neurotics, each as crazy as the other, would not see each other again for a year and a half.
This text is taken from Violaine Schütz’s book Courtney Love, from punk hell to glam redemption (Camion Blanc editions).