"I don't want my daughter to grow up and someday be hassled by kids at school," he once said of Frances Bean Cobain, now 19 months. He also bought a shotgun and may be suicidal." All these dark machinations will make for an uneasy legacy-precisely the sort of legacy he didn't want. According to the AP, O'Connor's missing person's report read, in part, "Cobain ran away from California facility and flew back to Seattle. The rumor mill has it that Cobain and Love's marriage was on the rocks that his friends performed an "intervention," and that while Love was promoting a new album by her band, Hole, Cobain was fleeing a rehab clinic in Los Angeles. On April 2, the police were summoned once more-this time by O'Connor, who told them her son was missing. On March 18, Cobain reportedly locked himself in a room of his spacious Seattle home and threatened to kill himself Love is said to have called the police, who arrived on the scene and seized medication and firearms. But the truth about Cobain's last months was far messier than we'd been led to believe. Nirvana's spokespeople insisted that it was an accident, portraying Cobain and his wife, Courtney Love, as stable, happy parents whose drug days were behind them. In March, while in Rome, Cobain overdosed on painkillers and champagne. But the singer's self-destructive streak seems to have been bound up inextricably with drugs. "I told him not to join that stupid club."Ĭobain didn't overdose like Morrison and Hendrix, of course. "Now he's gone and joined that stupid club," she told the Associated Press. Cobain wasn't identified for hours, but his mother, Wendy O'Connor, didn't need anyone to tell her that it was her son who was found with a shotgun and a suicide note that reportedly ended, "I love you, I love you." The singer had been missing, and his mother had feared that the most troubled and talented rock star of his generation would go the way of Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix. The irony is that long before electrician Gary Smith found Kurt Cobain's body, it was clear that what Nirvana's singer really needed protection from was himself. It makes plain how far we still have to go when it comes to issues of suicide prevention and opioid addiction-and it's a stark reminder of how raw Cobain's death still feels to anyone who remembers Kurt Loder breaking the news. The piece is just as potent and relevant today, 24 years after Cobain's suicide. Newsweek writer Jeff Giles, with additional reporting by Melissa Rossi in Seattle, Charles Fleming and Mark Miller in Los Angeles and Sarah Delaney in Rome, grappled with Cobain's death and legacy in a piece published in the April 18, 1994, issue of the magazine.
(It didn't take long for violent meatheads and bros to infiltrate Nirvana shows.) And in the weeks before his death, rumor had it he was about to break up the band and go in a different creative direction. He struggled, unsuccessfully, with addiction and the consequences of Nirvana becoming the biggest band in the world. (And didn't he swear, in "Come as You Are," that he didn't have a gun?) But fame-and being the Voice of a Generation-never jibed with Cobain or his personality. When Cobain took his own life-joining a line of rock icons who died at age 27: Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison-it devastated listeners who felt they had someone, finally, speaking about, and to, them. (And, by all accounts, he very much didn't.) The 1991 album Nevermind and its seminal single "Smells Like Teen Spirit" put grunge into heavy rotation on MTV, initiated a flannel-and-torn-jeans fashion revolution and turned Seattle and the Pacific Northwest into a mecca for anyone (especially Gen Xers) who felt out of sync with the world around them. Cobain, the lead singer and driving force of the band Nirvana, fundamentally altered the landscape of music and popular culture in the '90s-whether he liked it or not. For music fans of a certain age, Kurt Cobain's April 5, 1994, suicide was as seismic, gutting and incomprehensible as the murder of John Lennon a generation earlier.
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