Posts Tagged ‘Kurt Cobain’

DVD Review: Nirvana, “Live At Reading”

Nirvana - Live At ReadingCan you remember 1992? I certainly can, and what I remember is that trash TV — and to some extent, even the mainstream media — was filled with stories about Kurt Cobain and his bride, Courtney Love. They had been married in Hawaii in February of that year, and already there were lurid tales of addiction, arrest, and marital discord. In the midst of it all a daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, was born in August.

A lot of the stories questioned Cobain’s “health,” by which they meant drug addiction, but there were also rumors that Nirvana might be breaking up. It didn’t help things when the band decided not to undertake another U.S. tour to promote their major label debut, Nevermind, instead opting for select dates here and there. The reason given at the time was “exhaustion,” and everyone knew, or thought they knew, what that meant.

The band’s answer to all the rumors came at England’s legendary Reading Festival on August 30, 1992. Nirvana had played Reading the previous year, but at that time, they were halfway down the bill. When they returned in 1992, it was as the headliners. That night Nirvana played what Kerrang magazine called one #1 of the “100 Gigs That Shook the World,” and Nirvana fans voted the show “Nirvana’s #1 Greatest Moment” in a NME poll. (more…)

Dw. Dunphy On… The Easy Way Out

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I was over a friend’s house recently when his son burst into the living room proclaiming he was going to start a rock band with his friends. It was a scene I participated in many times during my youth, the thrill of the larger-than-life expectations undiminished yet by that dreaded “real world.” Being a supportive “uncle” I offered to show him some guitar chords and a few tricks he could probably get by with. Lord knows how some of these golden fakes served me.

The young boy looked at me with the most quizzical eyes, as if I had just recited The Iliad in Esperanto while standing on my head. “What are chords?” he asked.

“He’s talking about forming a ‘Rock Band’ band, not a real band,” his father confided to me. The boy gnashed his teeth and spun out of the room, infuriated by his father’s distinction. Yes, this kid was talking about forming a digital equivalent of a band with his friends through his X-Box, not the actual process of writing and performing songs but, in his mind, the two were one and the same. “Don’t be offended. He gets like that lately.”

I found the whole concept depressing. A few generations ago, the story went that The Velvet Underground weren’t huge but everyone who saw them play formed their own band. Although Nirvana was a lot more successful, they too spawned a legion of guitar slingers with this notion that it could be done. The thought that those days were past us and now the act of creativity was relegated to just as much vector spaceships spinning to blast ‘asteroids’ weighed heavily on me for a good long while. I’m not alone in this either. By doing a little reaseach – well, okay, more like a little web-surfing – I’ve found an undercurrent voicing this same opinion, that creative, artistic expression is slowly being co-opted by facsimile. Some go as far as dubbing it “art porn” though that may be too harsh. (more…)

Popdose Flashback: The Cult, “Sonic Temple”

Things should have been going swimmingly for The Cult. Their album Electric had succeeded in becoming the biker-rock record they hoped it would be – raw, straight-ahead and helmed by a fledgling production wunderkind named Rick Rubin. It gained some necessary traction in the sales and recognition departments as well, based in part on the single “Love Removal Machine.” By the time the band went on the road, however, the future for the Cult looked grim. By most accounts, the blame fell squarely on the shoulders of frontman Ian Astbury, his hedonism and earth-child eccentricities becoming far too difficult for the rest of the band to absorb. The Japanese leg of the tour was nixed as Astbury’s proclivity toward destroying the instruments every night was becoming too costly to continue.

That they returned in 1989 with the album Sonic Temple is, then, some sort of miracle. That they were able to wrest some noteworthy rock anthems from the process is even more remarkable. Longtime bassist Jamie Stewart recorded on the album, but quit the band not long after completion. Guitarist Billy Duffy, having been stripped of his guitar pedals and sonic tricks by Rick Rubin, was relieved not only to have Sonic Temple’s producer Bob Rock reinstate the pedals, but add string sections, walls of reverb and Iggy Pop, essentially undoing all the retrofitting Rubin placed on the band previously.

And Ian Astbury? Well, this is the man who would be Jim Morrison’s successor, so certain things remain consistent in his ouevre. The shamanistic posturing, the biker-bar swagger, his ability to pad a short and sweet lyric with nonsensical ad-libs and attaching a “baybeh” to almost any sentiment: they’re all on the album, but don’t knock it, because for the most part, it works. The reason it works is because when added to the hard-rock kick that most of the songs possess, the two halves become a whole that logic can’t divide. For instance, the big single of the album, “Fire Woman,” is not so far removed from AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long.” Astbury doesn’t really need to go into deep, psychological detail about why his junk is on fire. It just is; she’s just turning him on, and that’s all there needs to be said. Does that diminish the song in any way? Not really because, after all, this is prime stripper-approved rock ‘n’ roll, itself only a euphemism for mattress endurance testing. (more…)

Book Review: “Grunge Is Dead: The Oral History of Seattle Rock Music”

51ztxvyo7pl_sclzzzzzzz_1It’s hard to believe (for those of us who lived it, anyway) that it’s been fifteen years since Kurt Cobain committed suicide. On April 5th, 1994, the Seattle native left the world with the same cold-water shock his band Nirvana had on the world when the album Nevermind broke in 1991.

Some people saw Cobain’s death as inevitable; the signs were certainly there: There was the working title for 1994’s In Utero (a.k.a. I Hate Myself and I Want to Die). The lyrics for “All Apologies.” A prophetic MTV Unplugged set list (the caterwaul dénouement in “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” still sends chills up the spine). A near-fatal drug/alcohol overdose in Rome during a European tour. Those Courtney Love divorce rumblings. Quite a hit parade.

But to a larger degree, Cobain’s death has become a coda-like representation in our pop culture vernacular as the beginning of the end for the “grunge” era in Seattle. Greg Prato’s new book Grunge is Dead: The Oral History of Seattle Rock Music disagrees. The book attempts to set this (and gads of other misnomers perpetuated by “so-called experts, who didn’t show up until the ‘90s, as Pearl Jam’s Jeff Ament has said) straight.

Prato’s nearly 500-page digest does what no other documentary on the subject has before—it leaves the reflection to those who lived it, in their own words, without a filter. To that end, this is a truly great oral history. (more…)

Long, Cold Winter: The Music of “The Wrestler”


“The only place I get hurt is out there. The world don’t give a shit about me.”

I. Well, I’m Frustrated and Outdated

The first voice you hear is a dead man’s scream. It’s one of those full-throated primal belts, like Roger Daltrey’s in “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” Here it’s Kevin DuBrow, his scalded screech busting the floodgates for “Bang Your Head (Metal Health),” the second single from Quiet Riot’s landmark Metal Health (1983), the first slab of fuzz ’n’ meedley to ever reach #1 on the Billboard Albums chart.

The band was at its mainstream zenith then. Randy “The Ram” Robinson (Mickey Rourke) was probably just getting started, years of toil finally paying off as professional wrestling graduated from the sweathouse din of high school gyms to respectable arenas in metropolitan cities. It came with a price, of course. Regional territories were swallowed by ambitious, growing monoliths. But that wouldn’t matter for a while, not even to the Ram. Luckily, he was in his prime, synchronous with the era. He was the ’80s.

Someday that would come back to haunt him, but someday was just a harmless, nebulous future. For now we’re in his past. Wisely, director Darren Aronofsky (on a Robert D. Siegel script) never shows us this past except as a collage of scattered magazines and handbills against the ghostly chatter of ringside patter and a raucous anthem that rocked a long-gone summer, growled by a man who in 2007 was silenced forever.

But Ram still struts to this hoary buzzsaw, having plucked it during its popularity and transformed it into his ring-entrance music. When the riffs kick in to summon his fist-pumping form, the crowds respond as they would at a concert. They know what’s coming: a classic blast from their childhoods, riding into town with a near-suicidal need to entertain. And the outcome is always predetermined. Once their faded hero climbs the ropes and drops that old-school Ram Jam finisher — his greatest hit — it’s over, brother.

All over. (more…)

Being Kurt Cobain

My first impression of Kurt Cobain, even before I knew anything about him, was that he was the kid in school who was painfully quiet, but whose mind was silently screaming. This, I remember thinking, was a kid who had spent a lot of time alone. Not because he wanted to, of course, but because, from Day One, he’d been made to feel that he was alone.

Like you (one can only presume), I have felt the odd juxtaposition of loneliness within a crowded room and written it off as self-manufactured. In Kurt’s case, loneliness was but a byproduct of absolute, unadulterated alienation, he of the broken home with no dad and a mom who couldn’t have given two shits about him if it meant any bit of sacrifice on her part.

If he and Nirvana had arrived at any other time in the history of rock & roll, they’d have gone unnoticed, but, since they came on the scene with their songs of anger and alienation at a time when the youth of this world could no longer maintain a happy façade, their music was welcomed with open arms. Sure, it didn’t happen overnight. Their first album, Bleach, was only a moderate indie success, but it had led to a deal with major label, Geffen, and the strange planetary alignment that would result in the recording and release of an album that would change the world.

Upon its arrival, Nevermind changed little, if anything. I personally remember weeks of watching MTV’s “120 Minutes,” seeing their video, and not being at all moved by the band. Then one day some three months after the album’s release, I turn on the car radio and hear “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on the local AOR radio station. I do a quick check to see if this is, indeed, the right station, because they’re more prone to play an old Pink Floyd or Billy Squier song than something like this. Whether I’ve heard the song before or not, I cannot recall, but, at that very moment, it is the single most beautiful and powerful thing I’ve ever heard. To this day, I remember every nuance of that moment like others remember where they were when JFK was assassinated.

The next day, determined to get my hands on the album this amazing song is from, I run to the local record store and find that I am not alone in my desire to procure said album. As I stand at the register, eager to part with my cash, the guy behind the counter gives the cassette (!) an odd glance — he doesn’t seem to know who Nirvana is, but mentions that a lot of people have been in the past few days looking for the album and that he’d been telling them he didn’t have it. “I should probably order some more of these,” he says as I exit the premises. (more…)

Bookshelf: Danny Goldberg, “Bumping Into Geniuses”

Danny Goldberg – Bumping Into Geniuses: My Life Inside the Rock and Roll Business (2008)
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Most rock & roll memoirs are penned either by rock stars themselves (Clapton, Dylan) or by the original titans of the industry (Ertegun, Yetnikoff), and as our pal Pete Lubin discovered when he tried peddling his own account of his life in the biz, there’s a reason for this: The number of people who purchase books filled with rock-geek trivia — shit, the number of people who purchase books period — is woefully small. It’s surprising, then, to see Gotham taking a flier on an autobiography from Danny Goldberg — but as you’ll quickly discover if you pick up a copy, it’s quite a pleasant surprise.

Goldberg, for the non-geeks among us, was one of the biggest seat-hoppers in the game of high-stakes musical chairs played by the major labels in the ’90s — and before that he was, in order of occurrence, a Billboard staffer, Led Zeppelin’s publicist (and eventual label VP), and manager to Stevie Nicks, Bonnie Raitt, and Kurt Cobain. A man with that perfect combination of dumb luck and ears for talent, in other words — and a veritable treasure trove of behind-the-scenes stories.

Sadly for readers who pick up books like this in search of juice and dirt, Bumping Into Geniuses focuses less on who did what to whom and more on how incredibly fucking awesome it is to fall in love with rock & roll, and then fall ass over elbow into one pile of money after another until you’re sitting on top of the Warner Music Group without any real idea of how it happened. I’m oversimplifying things a bit — and surely Goldberg did have a very clear grasp of how he rose so far, so fast — but that’s the basic tone of the book: It’s a gee-whiz account of Goldberg’s many brushes with greatness. (The title, by the way, comes from Ahmet Ertegun’s quip to a teenage Goldberg that the secret to success in the business is to walk around bumping into geniuses.) (more…)

Hooks ‘N’ You: “Produced by Don Dixon”

Last week’s column opened by noting that, when you hear the name “Don Dixon,” you’re probably more likely to think of him in terms of his production career than for his accomplishments as a singer and songwriter. Although I followed this observation by noting that this tendency gets really annoying for those who’ve lived and loved to Dixon’s albums over the years, I also clarified that it should in no way be taken as a dismissal of his production work; the guy has had his hands on some of the best albums of the ’80s and ’90s, some of which you may have forgotten about. But, hey, that’s what I’m here for…

Popdose: I wanted to ask you about a couple of your production jobs…well, quite a few of them, actually, because I’m a big fan of a lot of the artists you’ve worked with. In fact, looking over your resume, it looks like you had a hand in about 7/8 of the American music I was listening to in the late ‘80s!

DD: I was busy!

PD: You were!

DD: And I made records quick. And cheap. That was the other thing. I made quick, cheap records.

PD: I’m a huge fan of the Connells’ Darker Days.

DD: I love the Connells. In fact, Arrogance just played with the Connells at an outdoor thing for a…well, it was kind of a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame thing. And the Connells still sound great.

PD: They used to play the Boathouse every other week, it seemed like, and I think I was there for most of the shows.

DD: I think I was only at the Boathouse once. We were there when Marti was opening for Chris Isaak, and I did some of the shows on that tour. I was doing some projects, so I wasn’t on every date, but she did a couple of months with him, and I think I was…no, I know I was at the Boathouse show, because I can remember exactly where the buses were parked. The Boathouse was kind of an odd show, because it was mostly theaters on that tour, and at the Boathouse, it was hard to fit all three buses in the lot.

PD: I can believe it. I’m sure they were all lined up next to the water.

DD: Uh-huh. So, anyway, the Connells. Let’s talk.

(more…)