Grunge icon Kurt Cobain remembered 25 years after Nirvana frontman’s death
- Fans trekked to Seattle’s Viretta Park to leave notes and flowers on benches to mark the anniversary
On the 25th anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death, dozens of people left flowers, candles and handwritten messages at a Seattle park near the house where the Nirvana frontman killed himself.
Cobain, whose band rose to global fame in the city’s grunge rock music scene of the early 1990s, was 27 when he died on April 5, 1994 in his home in a wealthy neighbourhood near Lake Washington.
Fans trekked on Friday to nearby Viretta Park, leaving memorials on benches, where flowers mixed with handwritten phrases like “thank you for your art” and “find your place”.
In an essay on the Crosscut news website, Cobain biographer Charles R. Cross wrote that few Seattle musicians “have been as tied to Seattle in the mind of the popular zeitgeist as Kurt Cobain”.
Nirvana’s breakthrough album, Nevermind, was released in 1991. Featuring the hits Smells Like Teen Spirit and Come As You Are, the album went to No. 1 on the Billboard charts and has sold tens of millions of copies worldwide.
Nirvana was the most prominent of the era’s series of Seattle grunge bands, including Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Alice in Chains, that would go on to release bestselling records.
Cobain’s angst-filled lyrics and his band’s powerful, dark rock struck a chord with young people.
Days after his death, thousands of people gathered near the Space Needle for a public memorial.
An investigation determined he took a massive dose of heroin and then shot himself.
On the anniversary, former manager Danny Goldberg spoke with Yahoo Entertainment about the last time he saw Cobain, when Cobain’s wife Courtney Love asked him to help the rocker by being part of an intervention.
“I was in New York, and Courtney called and asked if I would come and be part of an intervention,” he said. “She was really worried about Kurt, said it was the worst she’d ever seen him and so forth.”
Goldberg described how Janet Billig Rich, another manager who worked with Nirvana and Love’s band Hole, “found some dude who had been part of interventions before, a 12-step person”, and “maybe half a dozen people” flew into Seattle and travelled to Cobain’s home for the ill-fated meeting. “Kurt was really stoned, and we went to the house, and it was weird, and he was not happy, and feeling invaded by people lecturing him on how he should behave, and who would?”
Soon after, Goldberg spoke to Cobain for the last time on the phone.
“He still sounded really just depressed and wiped-out. I just told him I loved him, and that was it.”
Additional reporting by Tribune News Service
