Kurt Cobain: The Rolling Stone Interview
by David Fricke, January 1994
part one of two

Shirtless, disheveled, Kurt Cobain pauses on the backstage stairway leading to Nirvana’s dressing room at the Aragon Ballroom, in Chicago, offers a visitor a sip of his apres-gig tea and says in a drop-deadpan voice, "I’m really glad you could make it for the shiitiest show on the tour."

He's right. Tonight's concert- Nirvana's second of two nights at the Aragon, only a week into the band's first US tour in two years- is a real stinker. The venue's cavernous sound turns even corrosive torpedoes like "Breed" and "Territorial Pissings" into riff pudding, and Cobain is bedeviled all night by guitar- and vocal-monitor problems. There are moments of prickly brilliance: Cobain’s sandpaper howl chorus of "Heart-Shaped Box," a short, stunning "Sliver" with torrid power strumming by guest touring guitarist Pat Smear (ex-Germs). But there is no "Smells Like Teen Spirit," and when the house lights go up, so does a loud chorus of boos.

According to the Cobain press myth- "pissy, complaining, freaked out schizophrenic," as he quite accurately puts it- the 26-year-old singer and guitarist should have fired the soundman, canceled this interview and gone back to his hotel room to sulk. Instead, he spends his wind-down time backstage, doting on his daughter, 1-year-old Frances Bean Cobain, a petite blond beauty who barrels around the room with a smile for everyone in her path. Later, back at the hotel, armed with nothing stronger than a pack of cigarettes and two minibar bottles of Evian water, Cobain is in a thoughtful, discursive mood, taking great pains to explain that success doesn’t really suck- not as much as it used to, anyway- and that life is pretty good. And getting better.

"It was so fast and explosive," he says in a sleepy, gravely voice of his first crisis of confidence following the ballistic success of Nevermind. "I didn’t know how to deal with it. If there was a Rock Star 101 course, I would have liked to take it. It might have helped me.

"I still see stuff, descriptions of rock stars in some magazine- ‘Sting, the environmental mental guy,’ and ‘Kurt Cobain, the whiny, complaining, neurotic, bitchy guy who hates everything, hates rock stardom, hates his life.’ And I’ve never been happier in my life. Especially within the last week, because the shows have been going so well- except for tonight. I’m a much happier guy than a lot of people think I am."

Cobain took some long, hard detours to get there over the past year. The making of In Utero, Nirvana’s long awaited studio follow-up to Nevermind, was fraught with last-minute title and track changes as well as a public scrap between the band, its record label, DGC, and producer Steve Albini over the album’s commercial potential- or lack thereof. Cobain’s marriage to punk-noir singer Courtney Love of the band Hole- dream fodder for rock gossip since the couple exchanged vows in February 1992- made headlines again last June when Cobain was arrested by Seattle police for allegedly assaulting Love during a domestic fracas. Police found three guns in the house, but no charges were filed, and the case was dismissed.

Last year, Cobain also made a clean breast of his long-rumored heroin addiction, claiming he’d used the drug- at least in part- to opiate severe, chronic stomach pain. Or as he puts it in this interview, "to medicate myself." He’s now off the junk, and thanks to new medication and a better diet, his digestive track, he says, is on the road to recovery.

But the roots of his angst, public and personal, go much deeper. Born near the logging town of Aberdeen Wash., Cobain is- like Nirvana’s bassist, Krist Novoselic, drummer Dave Grohl and a high percentage of the band’s young fans- the product of a broken home, the son of an auto mechanic and a secretary who divorced when he was eight. Cobain had early aspirations as a commercial artist and won a number of high-school art contests; he now designs much of Nirvana’s artwork. (He made the plastic-fetus collage on the back cover of In Utero, which got the record banned by Kmart and Wal-Mart.) But after graduation, Cobain passed on a art-school scholarship and took up the teen-age-bum life, working as a roadie for the local band the Melvins (when he was working at all) and applying himself to songwriting.

"I never wanted to sing," Cobain insists now. "I just wanted to play rhythm guitar- hide in the back and just play. But during those high-school years when I was playing guitar in my bedroom, I at least had the intuition that I had to write my own songs."

For a long time, after Nirvana catapulted from junior Sub Pop label signees to grunge supergods- they won the Best Band and Best Album trophies in Rolling Stone’s 1994 Critics Poll- Cobain could not decide whether his talent was a blessing or a curse. He finally came to realize it’s a bit of both. He is bugged that people think of him more as an icon than a songwriter yet feels that In Utero marks the finish line of the Nirvana sound crystallized in "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Cobain remains deeply mistrustful of the music business but says he has done a complete U-turn on his attitude toward Nirvana’s mass punk-wanna-be flock.

"I don’t have as many judgments about them as I used to," Cobain says, almost apologetically. "I’ve come to terms about why they’re there and why we’re here. It doesn’t bother me anymore to see this Neanderthal with a mustache, out of his mind, drunk, singing along to ‘Sliver.’ That blows my mind now.

"I’ve been relieved of so much pressure in the last year and a half," Cobain says with discernible relief in his voice. "I’m still kind of mesmerized by it." He ticks off the reasons for his content: "Pulling this record off. My family. My child. Meeting William Burroughs and doing a record with him.

"Just little things that no one would recognize or care about," he continues. "And it has a lot to do with this band. If it wasn’t for this band, those things never would have happened. I’m really thankful, and every month I come to more optimistic conclusions."

"I just hope," Cobain adds, grinning, "I don’t become so blissful I become boring, I think I’ll always be neurotic enough to do something weird."


Along with everything else that went wrong onstage tonight, you left without playing "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Why?
That would have been the icing on the cake [smiles grimly]. That would have made everything twice as worse. I don’t even remember the guitar solo on "Teen Spirit." It would take me five minutes to sit in the catering room and learn the solo. But I’m no interested in that kind of stuff. I don’t know if that’s so lazy that I don’t care anymore or what. I still like playing "Teen Spirit," but it’s almost an embarrassment to play it.

In what way? Does the enormity of its success still bug you?
Yeah. Everyone has focused on that song so much. The reason it gets a big reaction is, people have seen it on MTV a million times. It’s been pounded into their brains. But I still think there are so many other songs that I’ve written that are as good, if not better, that that song, like "Drain You." That’s defiantly as good as "Teen Spirit." I love the lyrics, and I never get tired of playing it. Maybe if it was as big as "Teen Spirit," I wouldn’t like it as much.
But I can barely, especially on a bad night like tonight, get through "Teen Spirit." I literally want to throw my guitar down and walk away. I can’t pretend to have a good time playing it.

But you must have had a good time writing it.
We’d been practicing for about three months. We were waiting to sign to DGC, and Dave and I were living in Olympia, and Krist was living in Tacoma. We were driving up to Tacoma every night for practice, trying to write songs. I was trying to write the ultimate pop song, I was basically trying to rip off the Pixies. I have to admit it [smiles]. When I heard the Pixies for the first time, I connected with that band so heavily I should have been in that band- or at least in a Pixies cover band. We used their sense of dynamics, being soft and quiet and then loud and hard.
"Teen Spirit" was such a cliched riff. It was so close to a Boston riff or "Louie, Louie." When I came up with the guitar part, Krist looked at me and said, "That is so ridiculous." I made the band play it for an hour and a half.

Where did the line "Here we are now, entertian us" come from?
That came from something I used to say every time I used to walk into a party to break the ice. A lot of times, when you’re standing around with people in a room, it’s really boring and uncomfortable. So it was "Well, here we are, entertain us. You invited us here."

How did it feel to watch something you’d written in fun, in homage to one of your favorite bands, become the grunge national anthem, not to mention the defining moment in youth marketing?
Actually, we did have our own thing for a while. For a few years in Seattle, it was the Summer of Love, and it was so great. To be able to jump out on top of the crowd with my guitar and be held up and pushed to the back of the room and then brought back with no harm done to me- it was a celbration of something that no one could put their finger on.
But once it got into the mainstream, it was over. I’m just tired of being embarrased by it. I’m beyond that.

This is the first U.S. tour that you’ve done since the fall of ’91, just before "Nevermind" exploded. Why did you stay off the road for so long?
I needed time to collect my thoughts and readjust. It hit me so hard, and I was under the impression that I didn’t really need to go on tour, because I was making a whole bunch of money. Millions of dollars. Eight million to ten million records sold- that sounded like a lot of money to me. So I thought I would sit back and enjoy it.
I don’t want to use this as an excuse, and it’s come up so many times, but my stomach ailment has been one of the biggest barriers that stopped us from touring. I was dealing with it for a long time. But after a person experiences chronic pain for five years, but the time that fifth year ends, you’re literally insane. I couldn’t cope with anything. I was a schizophrenic as a wet cat that’s been beaten.

How much of that physical pain do you think you channeled into your songwriting?
That’s a scary question, because obviously if a person is having some kind of turmoil in their lives, it’s usually reflected in the music, and sometimes it’s pretty beneficial. I think it probably helped. But I would give up everything to have good health. I wanted to do this interview after we’d been on tour for a while, and so far, this has been the most enjoyable tour I’ve ever had. Honestly.
It has nothing to do with the larger venues or people kissing our asses more. It’s just that my stomach isn’t bothering me anymore. I’m eating. I ate a huge pizza last night. It was so nice to be able to do that. And it just raises my spirits. But then again, I was always afraid that if I lost my stomach problem, I wouldn’t be as creative. Who knows? [Pauses] I don’t have any new songs right now.
Every album we’ve done so far, we’ve always had one to three songs left over from the sessions. And they usually have been pretty good ones that we really liked, so we always had something to rely on- a hit or something that was above average. So this next record is going to be really interesting, because I have absolutely nothing left. I’m starting from scratch for the first time. I don’t know what we’re going to do.

One of the songs that you cut from "In Utero" at the last minute was "I Hate Myself and I Want to Die." How literally did you mean that?
As literal as a joke can be. Nothing more than a joke. And that had a bit to do with why we decided to take it off. We knew people wouldn’t get it; they’d take it too seriously. It was totally satirical, making fun of ourselves. I’m thought of as this pissy, complaining, freaked-out schizophrenic who wants to kill himself all the time. "He isn’t satisfied with anything." And I thought it would be a funny title. I wanted it to be the title of the album for a long time. But I knew the majority of the people wouldn’t understand it.

Have you ever been that consumed with pain or rage that you actually wanted to kill yourself?
For five years during the time I had my stomach problem, yeah. I wanted to kill myself every day. I came very close at times. I’m sorry to be so blunt about it. It was to the point where I was on tour, lying on the floor, vomiting air because I couldn’t hold down water. And then I had to play a show in twenty minutes. I would sing and cough up blood.
This is no way to live a life. I loved to play music, but something was not right. So I decided to medicate myself.

Even in satire, though, a song like that can hit a nerve. There are plenty of kids out there who, for whatever reasons, really do feel suicidal.
That pretty much defines our band. It’s both those contradictions. It’s satirical, and it’s serious at the same time.

What kind of mail do you get from your fans these days?
[Long pause] I used to read the mail a lot, and I sued to be really involved with it. But I’ve been so busy with this record, the video, the tour, that I haven’t even bothered to look at a single letter, and I feel really bad about it. I haven’t even been able to come up with enough energy to put out our fanzine, which was one of the things we were going to do to confront all the bad press, just to be able to show a more realistic side of the band.
But it’s really hard. I have to admit I’ve found myself doing the same things that a lot of other rock stars do or are forced to do. Which is not being able to respond to mail, not being able to keep up on current music, and I’m pretty much locked away a lot. The outside world is pretty foreign to me.
I feel very, very luck to be able to go out to a club. Just the other night, we had a night off in Kansas City, Mo., and Pat and I had no idea where we were or where to go. So we called up the local college radio station and asked them what was going on. And they didn’t know! So we happened to call this bar, and the Treepeople from Seattle were playing.
And it turns out I met three really, really nice people there, totally cool kids that were in bands. I had a really good time with them, all night. I invited them back to the hotel. They stayed there. I ordered room service for them. I probably went overboard, trying to be accommodating. But it was really great to know that I can still do that, that I can still find friends.
And I didn’t think that would be possible. A few years ago, we were in Detroit, playing at this club, and about ten people showed up. And next door, there was this bar, and Axl Rose came in with ten or fifteen bodyguards. It was this huge extravaganza; all these people were fawning over him. If he’d just walked in by himself, it would have been no big deal. But he wanted that. You create attention to attract attention.

Where do you stand on Pearl Jam now? There were rumors that you and Eddie Vedder were supposed to be on that "Time" magazine cover together.
I don’t want to get into that. One of the things I’ve learned is that slagging off people just doesn’t do me any good. It’s too bad, because the whole problem with the feud between Pearl Jam and Nirvana had been going on for so long and has come so close to being fixed.

It’s never been entirely clear what this feud with Vedder was about.
There never was one. I slagged them off because I didn’t like their band. I hadn’t met Eddie at the time. It was my fault; I should have been slagging off the record company instead of them. They were marketed- not probably against their will- but without them realizing they were being pushed into the grunge bandwagon.

Don’t you feel empathy with them? They’ve been under the same intense follow-up-album pressure as you have.
Yeah, I do. Except I’m pretty sure that they didn’t go out of their way to challenge their audience as much as we did with this record. They’re a safe rock band. They’re a pleasant rock band that everybody likes. [Laughs] God, I’ve had much better quotes in my had about this.
It just kind of pisses me off to know that we work really hard to make an entire album’s worth of songs that are as good as we can make them. I’m gonna stoke my ego by saying we’re better than a lot of bands out there. What I’ve realized is that you only need a couple of catchy songs on an album, and the rest can be bullshit Bad Company rip-offs, and it doesn’t matter. If I was smart, I would have saved most of the songs off Nevermind and spread them out over a 15-year period. But I can’t do that. All the albums I ever liked were albums that delivered a great song, one after another: Aerosmith’s Rocks, the Sex Pistols’ Never mind the Bullocks…, Led Zeppelin II, Back in Black, by AC/DC.

You’ve also gone on record as being a big Beatles fan.
Oh, yeah. John Lennon was defiantly my favorite Beatle, hands down. I don’t know who wrote what parts of what Beatles songs, but Paul McCartney embarrasses me. Lennon was obviously disturbed [laughs]. So I could relate to that.
And from the books I’ve read- and I’m so skeptical of anything I read, especially in rock books- I just felt really sorry for him. To be locked up in that apartment. Although he was totally in love with Yoko, and his child, his life was a prison. He was imprisoned. It’s not fair. That’s the crux of the problem that I’ve had with becoming a celebrity- the way people deal with celebrities. It needs to be changed, it really does.
No matter how hard you try, it only comes out like your bitching about it. I can understand how a person can feel that way and almost become obsessed with it. But it’s so hard to convince people to mellow out. Just take it easy, have a little bit of respect. We all shit [laughs].

"In Utero" may be the most anticipated, talked-about and argued-over album of 1993. Didn’t you feel at any point during all the title changes and the press hoopla stirred up by Steve Albini that the whole thing was just getting stupid? After all, it is just an album.
Yeah. But I’m used to it [laughs]. While making the record, that wasn’t happening. It was made really fast. All the basic tracks were done within a week. And I did 80 percent of the vocals in one day, in about seven hours. I just happened to be on a roll. It was a good day for me, and I just kept on going.

So what was the problem?
It wasn’t the songs. It was the production. It took a very, very long time for us to realize what the problem was. We couldn’t figure it out. We had no idea why we didn’t feel the same energy that we did from Nevermind. We finally came to the conclusion that the vocals weren’t loud enough, and the bass was totally inaudible. We couldn’t hear any notes that Krist was playing at all.
I think there are a few songs on In Utero that could have been cleaned up a little more. Definitely "Pennyroyal Tea." That was not recorded right. There is something wrong with that. That should have been recorded like Nevermind, because I know that’s a strong song, a hit single. We’re toying with the idea of re-recording it or remixing it.
You hit and miss. It’s a really weird thing about this record. I’ve never been more confused in my life, but at the same time I’ve never been more satisfied with what we’ve done.

Let’s talk about your songwriting. Your best songs- "Teen Spirit," "Come As You Are," "Rape Me," "Pennyroyal Tea"- all open up with the verse in a low, moody style. Then the chorus comes in at full volume and nails you. So which comes first, the verse or the killer chorus?
[Long pause, then he smiles] I don’t know. I really don’t know. I guess I start with the verse and then go into the chorus. But I’m getting so tired of that formula. And it is formula. And there’s not much you can do with it. We’ve mastered that- for our band. We’re all growing pretty tired of it.
It is a dynamic style. But I’m only using two of the dynamics. There are a lot more I could be using, Krist, Dave and I have been working on this formula- this thing of going from quiet to loud- for so long that it’s literally becoming boring for us. It’s like, "OK, I have this riff. I’ll play it quiet, without a distortion box, while I’m singing the verse. And now let’s turn on the distortion box and hit the drums harder."
I want to learn to go in between those things, go back and forth, almost become psychedelic in a way but with a lot more structure. It’s a really hard thing to do, and I don’t know if we’re capable of it- as musicians.

Songs like "Dumb" and "All Apologies" do suggest that you’re looking for a way to get to people without resorting to the big-bang guitar effect.
Absolutely, I wish we could have written a few more songs like those on all the other albums. Even to put "About A Girl" on Bleach was a risk. I was heavily into pop, I really liked R.E.M., and I was into all kinds of old 60’s stuff. But there was a lot of pressure within that social scene, the underground- like the kind of thing you get in highschool. And to put a jangly R.E.M. type of pop song on a grunge record, in that scene, was risky.
We have failed in showing the lighter, more dynamic side of our band. The big guitar sound is what the kids want to hear. We like playing that stuff, but I don’t know how much longer I can scream at the top of my lungs every night, for an entire year on tour. Sometimes I wish I had taken the Bob Dylan route and sang songs where my voice would not go out on me every night, so I could have a career if I wanted.

So what does this mean for the future of Nirvana?
It’s impossible for me to look into the future and say I’m going to be able to play Nirvana songs in 10 years. There’s no way. I don’t want to have to resort to doing the Eric Clapton thing. Not to put him down or whatsoever; I have immense respect for him. But I don’t want to have to change my songs to fit my age [laughs].

( part one | part two )