Saturday, April 7, 2012

Photographer chronicles Kurt Cobain's last days

I never wanted my generation's legacy to be "Where were you when Kurt Cobain died?"

This is what I was thinking eighteen year ago when I sat, eyes affixed to the TV screen, the day that Kurt Cobain killed himself. It's a pretty shallow and selfish sentiment when you consider that most of my peers were palpably upset. I was barely out of my teens, and a punk rock dilettante with a carefully crafted disdain for anything too popular, but even apart from that I had a particular hate-on for grunge. The glorification of drug use, the overall funereal pacing of its music, and that it was tailor-made, or rather tailor-marketed for kids like me was something I studiously avoided. Nearly twenty years later, I realize that by the time the thing we know as "grunge" got around to me, it was already pre-packaged for the masses, and my own background more similar to Kurt's than I'd probably like to admit.

Writing about the death, or the anniversary of the death, of an icon is always awkward for me: on one hand, I have the general narrative that's been handed down through twenty years of reading about music, and then I have my own, which amounts to a couple bad jokes I probably shouldn't have made and a few poor attempts at writing about an artist, who, though hugely influential, I never really "got." I always thought of Kurt as the unfortunate recipient of a game change in music that had to happen, but then I hear stories that he did, indeed, court the fame he inevitably got -- he wanted it, but was wholly unprepared for it.

Photographer Jesse Frohman took a series of pictures of Kurt just a few short months before his death. By late 1993, Cobain had already one very public overdose under his belt, gone in and out of rehab, and toured while battling heroin addiction, stomach problems, and scoliosis. Most of Frohman's pictures smack of the time they were taken (oy, the clothes), some show an innate sort of goofiness that's been mostly forgotten, but in all of them, it's obvious how sick he really was. In a recent Rolling Stone interview, Frohman says, "He was very quiet and he was wearing these white Jackie O glasses with his chin down to his chest, and he asked for a bucket. And I said, 'Sure, we have a bucket. What do you need a bucket for?' And he said, ''Cause I think I'm gonna puke.' And that was my introduction to Kurt."

While the pictures capture who Kurt Cobain was, pubically, at the time, there's an inescapable sadness to the whole series, something that was easy to romanticize then, while he was still alive.

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