This is an edited version of a column I wrote that ran in The Citizen on Feb. 20, 2004.
Today is my birthday. It's a day I share with my nephew, as well as the lovely Heather Drewry, the best thing that’s ever happened to my former Citizen night shift colleague Brian, who is now the sports editor at the Victoria Times Colonist.
It’s a bit of a sad day for me, and not because I’m a year older.
If he hadn’t shot himself 20 years ago this April, Kurt Donald Cobain would have been 47 years old today.
In case you’ve been in a cave where rock music is not allowed for the last 25 years, Cobain was the raging lead singer, guitarist and songwriter for Nirvana.
In its list of the 500 best albums of all time released in November 2003, Rolling Stone magazine ranked Nirvana’s major-label debut album, Nevermind, at No. 17, at least seven spots too low. Just listen to the local rock station, 94X, for a day. Many modern rock bands are still paying homage to Cobain’s unlikely marriage of punk fury and pop’s melodic sensibility, 23 years after Smells Like Teen Spirit blew onto the airwaves and buried ’80s rock forever.
While Cobain certainly didn’t invent the genre that would become known as alternative rock, he single-handedly popularized it and transformed Seattle into a hotbed of new rock, with bands like Soundgarden and Pearl Jam following Nirvana into superstardom. Sirius Satellite Radio calls channel 34, its 90s alternative rock station, Lithium, after a song on Nevermind.
And when Smells Like Teen Spirit comes on the radio, it still sounds as fresh and urgent as the day it was released.
“With the lights out, it’s less dangerous,
Here we are now - entertain us
I feel stupid and contagious
Here we are now - entertain us”
I was in a record store in Kelowna when I first heard Smells Like Teen Spirit in the fall of 1991. The video came on MuchMusic from overhead TVs placed in the corner of the store and the sound was piped through the store’s audio system. From the moment Dave Grohl’s frantic drumbeat kicked in and Cobain’s guitar roared, I stood there, mouth open, CD in my hand forgotten.
For the next five minutes, I watched Nirvana lace up steel-toed boots and give rock a well-deserved and long overdue kick in the ass.
I bought Nevermind a week later during a trip to Vancouver and listened to Smells Like Teen Spirit about four or five times in a row before moving on to the rest of the classic album. The liner notes featured a fuzzy photograph of Cobain and his two bandmates. Cobain was flipping the bird. Nobody said genius had to be friendly and agreeable.
Three-and-a-half years - and two more excellent albums - later, Cobain was dead.
A fellow reporter 10 years my senior who believed Steely Dan was God’s gift to rock music asked me the day Cobain died what the big deal about this guy Cobain was and was he really as important as Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison like some of the obituaries were already claiming.
“Oh, yes,” I replied over my coffee. “Easily.”
The reporter shook his head in disbelief.
“Wait 10 years,” I said. “You’ll see.”
So, Dave Duncan, wherever you are, I told you so.
Nirvana will join Steely Dan in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame during an induction ceremony this April, just a few days after the 20th anniversary of Cobain's tragic death.
