Wilco, Jeff Tweedy, Kurt Cobain, Nirvana

Jeff Tweedy: I have hung this corny frame on my living room's wall. How’s everybody doing after Election Day? Not so good, probably. A lot of you are probably feeling about the same way I am, scared. My thoughts on our current moment: I think we all saw a new world and we were all excited about that coming true. And I think a lot of our fellow citizens saw that world as well, but were much more afraid of it. I don’t feel like I should get to hate people I don’t know. So I’ll just say that I think they’re very fearful. And I don’t think we should be fearful. We saw that new world, and I don’t think we should let it go. It’s going to be clearer, and clearer. And maybe we just need to get better at explaining why it’s not to be feared. Personally, I’m making a choice to not be fearful. It’s not easy. But I have good examples in my life of people who saw something far on the horizon, and worked for it, fearlessly, for long long periods of time. I hope that hope isn’t ever an unwelcome message. Truth and love have been smacked down, so many more times in history before today. Truth, because it’s often inconvenient, and love because it is vulnerable. But truth is like gravity, and carbon, and the sun behind an eclipse: it’s still there. And love stays alive if you tend it like a flame. We can’t save everything all at once, but it’s still worth saving something. Like gravity, and carbon, and the sun behind an eclipse. When you heart grows cold, that's when they think they have truly won. Source: siriusxm.com

Jeff Tweedy wishing happy birthday to his wife Sue Miller Tweedy: "Happy birthday to this blinding beam of light and goodness. Everything, every decision I make, every song I write… every ounce of everything I do is an act born from the sincere desire to manifest in myself some sense that I’m worthy of her love—that I really deserve a place by her side. I love you, Sukierae!" When Tweedy met Sue Miller in June 1991 while she was booking Wilco at the Axe Lounge club, Nirvana had exploded in the charts with their anthem "Smells Like Teen Spirit", and Tweedy looked a bit jealous sitting uncomfortably on a chair while he observed her future wife cheerfully listening to Cobain's band. In contrast to Nirvana, Wilco were another underground alternative rock band struggling to be popular. 

Despite of their different personalities, Tweedy fell in love with Sue Miller and proposed to her two years later. At that time, Sue was living with her best friend Julia Adams and she seemed hesitant to abandon her single lifestyle's jollies. Tweedy reacted at first refusing her phone calls, then progressively embracing their friendship and finally wooing her with his charisma. They got married in August, 19, 1995, a year after the grunge star Kurt Cobain's death. According to Greg Kot in his book "Wilco: Learning How to Die", Jeff Tweedy could have tried to replace Cobain's figure in the alternative rock landscape, but Tweedy was always reluctant to be solely associated to a musical genre.

No one can say for certain what went through Kurt Cobain’s mind in the hours before his death. As he said just a month before the end, ‘I feel like I’m performing in a circus.’ It is known that, after struggling to overcome his addiction, Cobain had again fallen prey to heroin. The toxicology report confirmed that, along with traces of Valium, there were 1.52 milligrams of the drug in his blood, three times the normal fatal dose. According to the doctor who performed the autopsy, ‘it was the act of someone who wanted to obliterate himself, to literally become nothing’. Courtney Love would tell a reporter that police could identify her husband only through fingerprints. Dental records were no use, because nothing was left of his mouth. A relative named Beverley Cobain, a psychiatric nurse, adds: ‘Kurt was, without doubt, bipolar – he had a psychological disorder which caused him to swing from wild ecstasy to manic despair. In trying to self-medicate with heroin, he certainly made the problem worse. That was the background to his shooting himself.’ According to this reading of Cobain’s life, an heroic but fragile talent, hemmed in by the demands of the market, took the only way out to maintain his dignity and preserve the legend. Yet another image was that of the young, tormented demi-Christ – a perception Cobain angrily denied yet hastened to play up to – whose early death was somehow of a piece with a violent, beleaguered life. For TV host Andy Rooney, simply ‘Kurt Cobain was a loser’. Yet another view was that Cobain, an admittedly rare and fragile talent, had betrayed his radical ideals, as if by becoming so successful, and thus by inference ‘selling out’, he had in some way impoverished his gifts. 

This was a theory heard frequently in Seattle. Cobain in person was nothing like Cobain the legend. He was an intensely shy man, poorly educated, and prone to the same vanities and excesses he despised in others. Like all his family he was over-sensitive and never forgot a word of criticism. Like anyone who grows up feeling more intelligent and more put-on than everyone else, he was afflicted with a strange mix of ego and insecurity. Cobain succeeded because his voice tapped the eternal themes of frustration, bewilderment and anger. Suddenly a sizeable part of the world’s youth had a hero figure they could relate to. The adulation had just the opposite of the desired effect on Cobain. When he realized that, for the first time in his life, perfect strangers not only admired but worshipped him, he was confronted with all his old feelings of inadequacy and doubt, and it was this weakness that killed him. He had to know that injecting himself with Buprenex or heroin merely exacerbated a craving for more drugs, and that by dulling the nervous system he did nothing for his creative faculties. ‘His addictive side came about then,’ says Beverley Cobain. ‘From early childhood it was a religion for Kurt that everything could be cured by drugs.’ 

As someone whose protest lay chiefly in drugs and punk rather than sex and alcohol, it was true that Cobain was almost blushingly monogamous compared to other rock stars. His shyness was real, as was his modesty. According to Michael Azerrad, ‘he slept with a total of two women on all of Nirvana’s tours. To sleep with someone who he worked with or liked was as natural as playing the guitar, but to screw someone just for sex was out of the question.’ Azerrad saw in Cobain’s taste for independent women a warped reflection of his lost relationship with the mother who abandoned him. Love explained: ‘We bonded over pharmaceuticals,’ she told Azerrad. ‘I had Vicodin extra-strength, which was pills, and he had Hycomine cough syrup. I said “You shouldn’t drink that syrup because it’s bad for your stomach.” 

In a short time the meetings and chemical exchanges evolved into dating, sex and a full-blown affair. For all the lies, half-truths and skewering of Love as a drug-fuelled opportunist who bought into celebrity, it is certain that she stuck with Cobain when even his immediate family and colleagues deserted him. In a long harangue in Spin, Love would complain, ‘All they want to talk about is how much drugs Kurt and I did. That is not all we did. We ate breakfast. We ate lunch. We ate dinner. We rented movies, and ate ice cream. We would read out loud to each other almost every night, and we prayed every night. We had some fucking dignity.’ All of those things were true. Until he was nine, Cobain was raised in a normal working-class home; although he could never reject Aberdeen enough, some of its habits and customs stuck with him. Among these was a refreshing humanity and simplicity of outlook that survived the ravages of his later fame. When in the mood, he could be exceptionally kind, sensitive and considerate of others. He was, in some senses, the antithesis of rock star vanity.

Once the first delights of marriage had worn off it became obvious to both that, although they complemented each other in many, perhaps most, respects, in others they were woefully incompatible. Love rebelled fiercely against the shackles of domesticity, while Cobain’s vision of a perfect match was of a relationship so close that every confidence was shared, no private agenda pursued. He wanted to possess and to be possessed. This vision filled his wife with horror. Not only was there the matter of her career, there was also the threat of Cobain’s drug habit. Looking at Cobain’s life in full, it is tempting to see a kind of insecurity of which his need for a strong wife was typical. He honestly thought he was marrying above himself. Courtney Love compensated for his crippling lack of self-esteem. ‘She’s my one and only chance,’ Cobain described her to Grohl. What he wanted from marriage was constant encouragement, loyal support, and affection. Within reason, Love gave them to him. That she also valued her independence and her career was understood, and in July 1992 Hole signed to Geffen for a sum that led one cynic to tell Newsweek, ‘sleeping with Kurt Cobain is worth a million dollars.’

According to Frank Hulme, ‘They were not compatible. They may have loved one another. I doubt they’d have won the Nobel Prize for chemistry.’ The Vanity Fair article destroyed Cobain’s spirit, hastened his physical decline and almost crushed him financially. In part this was due to the irrational fear that the world was out to ruin him. There was also the ‘suicidal grief’ of losing old friends. Cobain was hurt deeply when his own colleagues began to turn their backs on him, leave the studio when he arrived, and make excuses to be elsewhere when he invited them to dinner. The most shocking feature of Cobain’s outbursts was not his savaging of Nirvana but his scornful dismissal of the world. Cobain recognized that, though ‘one or two people’ were worth saving, ‘the same fuckwits were always around’, that ‘ninety-nine per cent of humanity could be shot if it was up to me’, and that rock music had done ‘literally nothing’ to transform society. By late 1994 rumours had surfaced of a Hollywood ‘biopic’, potentially starring Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt or Stephen Dorff (whose role in S.F.W. is highly reminiscent of Cobain). -Kurt Cobain and the Grunge Scene by Christopher Sandford (2024)