…or Soul apparently~ I’m sure this is a joke, but it’s hilarious nonetheless…
Monthly Archives: April 2009
Music Box: Kurt Cobain ~ Act Of Abandonment
February 20 1967 - April ? 1994
James Montgomery of MTV News remembers the loss of the idealism of youth.
Kurt Cobain: The Death Of The Scruffy Noble
Nirvana frontman represented the honor that came with never compromising, whether he liked it or not, in Bigger Than the Sound.
By James Montgomery
Fifteen years ago today, an electrician named Gary Smith was sent out to a gray clapboard home near Lake Washington in Seattle to install a security system. What he discovered, in the greenhouse above the garage, would change the face of rock and roll forever. It was the body of Kurt Cobain.
The Nirvana frontman had been missing for several days, after fleeing a rehab facility in Los Angeles. His mother, Wendy O’Connor, had filed a missing-persons report with Seattle police, advising them to look in Capitol Hill, where Cobain may have been attempting to score drugs. In actuality, he was already holed up in his Lake Washington home, in the greenhouse above the garage, where on the morning of April 5, he removed his hunting cap – which he wore when he didn’t want people to recognize him – tossed his wallet on the ground, wrote a one-page suicide note to an imaginary childhood friend named “Boddah” and ended his life with a 20-gauge shotgun blast to the temple.
Three days later, sometime around 9 a.m. PT, Smith discovered Cobain’s body. He called police (and a local radio station), and then there were the breaking-news bulletins and the vigils and the questions and the tears. And then it was all over.
Not the remembrances or the hand-wringing or even the speculation about Cobain’s death, mind you … that all continues to this day, in voluminous tomes and box sets and documentaries and the like. Rather, April 8 marked the end of an ideal, of a movement. That sounds hokey, but if I’ve learned anything in the 15 years since his exit, it’s this: When Cobain left, he took a lot more with him than just Nirvana.
This isn’t another piece meant to codify Cobain (or his band) or measure the length of their musical shadows. Suffice to say, Nirvana released three studio albums, and all of them rip. And Cobain possessed a growl that could crumble walls and a wail that could cut glass (to say nothing of his songwriting or his underappreciated sense of melody). Everyone knows this. Nirvana were probably our Beatles. Cobain was probably our John Lennon. Let’s move on.
What I want to talk about was everything that Cobain symbolized, whether he liked it (or most likely didn’t). He was hope, he was heft. He was the everyman, the end of the rock star, the punk dream realized. He had made it, and he was going to lift people up with him. He was cynicism and venom. He represented idealism and truth and the honor that came with never compromising. When he lived, rock music had importance, it had vitality. It was very possible that his songs could change the world. There was a scruffy nobility to him.
Of course, it is entirely possible that he was just the right man at the right time. Nobody represented the idealistic (and, at the same time, nihilistic) ’90s like Cobain did. But if you noticed, when he died, all that idealism, all that hope, all that import seemed to die with him. The very idea that a band (or a man) can change the world with music now feels beyond laughable. We have become scarred and jaded. A lot of us are no longer willing to believe in the power of a guitar or a lyric, because Cobain took that with him 15 years ago.
And that’s sad, because no matter what Cobain was, no matter what he symbolized or who he inspired, he was ultimately just a man. He had demons that proved too strong and too numerous, and they ganged up on him and dragged him away. And that taught us a lesson: Don’t deify, because you’ll just end up betrayed. We’ve spent 15 years doing the complete opposite – we no longer build up, we tear down. We don’t believe in things. We no longer strive for truth or subscribe to any particular ethos. Probably because we’re afraid to.
Two years ago, on the eve of his 40th birthday, I interviewed a host of people who knew Cobain well and asked them what he’d be doing if he were still alive. They said he would’ve retreated from public view (perhaps to a desert, as Butch Vig surmised); made deeply personal, decidedly anti-commercial music; and despised the way our society had turned out. I tend to agree with all that. It’s difficult (if not impossible) to imagine Cobain alive today … at least not the way we all remember him. He just wouldn’t fit. He couldn’t.
I was in 10th grade when the news broke. I remember watching Kurt Loder read the emerging details of Cobain’s death on TV, and I remember watching the vigils in the Seattle Center park, and I remember being very sad. At the time, I think it was because of the loss of our great and noble leader and the shuddering of an entire generation. Now, I realize it was because a little piece of me died that day too.
I lost the idealism of youth. And the idealism that comes with plugging in a guitar and playing it very loudly (and very badly). That’s never going to come back, either. Probably for any of us.
Mother Hindsight
Mom at 16
Of course, this was the most numbingly painful day in my life…saying goodbye to Mom. I wrote this for her memorial service, but I could not read it aloud – it was far too excruciating – so I asked Denise if she would read it (she was the most eloquent of all my friends) and of course she said yes. Tears emanated as we cried…I remember my brother Scott just sitting there, quiescent, during the whole service, still absorbing the fact that she was gone…I recall my friends still thunderstruck that this was reality. It was odd, there were no adults mom’s age at the ceremony, just most of her children and their friends…which showed where Mom was in her life. She had no “girlfriends” in her life, except for her daughters, and that came in the later years, at execrable costs. Lord knows her husband was never a friend (or a spouse)…she only knew her immediate family for most of her life after marriage. And the questions that arise about that part of her will always remain a mystery; it died with her. At the conclusion of the reading of this soliloquy, Bedelia sang Mom’s favourite song, “Wind Beneath My Wings” so unbelievably powerful, that it rocked the very core of our aching souls…It was so hard to say goodbye, but we knew…Mom was just a song away…
Goodbye, Barbara Jean
September 20, 1940-April 5, 1993
I don’t know where to really begin. I should first say thank you to all of you who were gracious enough to come ~ kind enough to be here in my family’s and my great sorrow.
I’m best at describing and expressing how I feel with pen and paper ~ but at this time, my voice cannot speak the words wrote, the words I feel, so I asked one of my soul sisters to read them for me.
What is there really to say? Everyone who knows me knows how much I treasure my mother. It wasn’t the conventional mother/son relationship…we were more like friends (Heh! Ma always loved a good cliché!)
We can take peace within ourselves and be thankful that she went away in her sleep ~ gently, quietly ~ finally content in the knowledge that we loved her ~ finally feeling there’s a need to smile. She clawed her way through 34 years of hell, escaping, at last, to a new form of happiness, which was her last few months. Evil incarnate no longer haunted her, mentally abused her [or us]. She was rid of the monster, freed of that anguish, and at last could say she was happy. She told my brother and me, for example, that this past Christmas was the best she’s experienced since she was a child.
I know I’ve mentioned this to a few of you, but I feel I should repeat it. Mom believed in fate. All the debates could not stop her beliefs. She felt that when it’s your time to go, you go. Period. She wasn’t a churchgoer, but she kept her own internal religious beliefs. Keeping these beliefs in mind, then, we must accept her philosophy and believe that, YES, it was her time. She was strong enough to wait long enough to escape doom before she just…let go. She held on long enough until she was content, until she realized it was okay now. Of course she knew that whenever it was her time, it would be hell for most of us, but she always told me that when it was, “…do not mourn too long”. Crying is natural, so, yes, cry ~ but also laugh ~ remember ~ never forget ~ but cry not forever. Besides, if we are going to believe it was her time, then tears will not bring her back. I used to tell her, “You’re nuts.” Then we’d laugh. But she really believed in that fate.
Yet, how does one not mourn when you lose someone who is part of your blood from day one? How do you not halt your heart from leaping? And then you start feeling angry ~ angry at life ~ angry at other people’s happiness ~ angry at survivors ~ angry at your family ~ angry at anyone who’s older than Mom ~ and ultimately angry at this entity she named God. “How could you do this to us God!?” you scream to her god. “How could you take away the one constant thread in our life and expect us to believe in you!? And without even the chance to say goodbye?!” Then you start hating her god and denouncing her god.
Then…I remember Mom. Then I realized I’m wrong to curse her god because to do so was to curse her belief system. Then the anger disappears and then you cry again ~ then sigh ~ maybe wonder a simple “Why?” I take comfort, then, when remembering Mom’s favourite poem ~ I’ve always loathed it because, well, as a non-believer I thought it to be pretentious ~ but she cherished it. It’s called “Footprints”, and she stood her ground. She loved it, believed it ~ she felt she lived it. So, again, if we are going to accept Ma’s beliefs, then we must accept that she felt she was the one being carried by this “lord” in the poem, and that now, she always will be.
She was the mother of us all. Can anyone in this room who knew her say that they called her anything but “Mom“? Any friend was automatically one of her “children”. Who else but she could bring together everyone who is here? Friends who lost touch years ago ~ constant companions ~ estranged but unforgotten family ~ friends who are strangers to other friends? All together for one reason…Mother of us all…
I don’t know if this vast, empty hole which houses Mom’s love will ever be filled completely, or if this sadness will ever cease. For some, I gather, the tears have stopped, for others the tears have not yet begun. I guess an overwhelming sense of loss will linger within me always, with every moment I breathe. But I tell you, we must all move on ~ go on. Mom would reprimand us (loudly, of course) if she thought her passing would halt our lives for more than one moment.
But Ma’s leaving has taught me a lesson ~ that bitterness leads to bitter lives. We must live ~ and when we wish to recall, just…remember. We have history ~ never stop thinking or talking about her and what she meant to us, negative or positive (no one is a saint in this world full of sinners). We have memories, photos, knowledge. The point of power is in the present. That’s what I believe because of its truth. We must believe in our present, and believe in our future ~ and never ever forget our past. Let the bitterness fade away. All we have is each other now…
I could go on for one million more pages, but I think its time to let go now…not to her spirit, which I still feel around us…but to her physical presence…the body is merely a shell to that spirit, anyway. Now, that spirit is within all our shells ~ all our lives. When we hear the night owl sing her song, it’s Mom. When we feel a quirt of cold breeze on our sweating brows, that’s Mom. When we hear Garth or Reba or Gary Morris or any of her other favorite singers sing on the radio, that’s Mom. When we turn on the television and see “Roseanne” or “Letterman” or the “Commish” or “Magnum” or the “Golden Girls” or any other of her favourite TV shows, that’s Mom. The world, our lives, our dreams are filled with her…so all we have to do is listen to the sky, and we’ll hear her…all we have to do is listen to her favourite songs, and you know she’s right next to you…inside you, until your time here is over. Then, no matter your beliefs, your spirit will walk to her when it is your time to greet her…in her heaven, on another plane of existence…wherever souls go…and, if you just listen…
…I think I hear her now…
…my mother…Mother hindsight…Mother of us all…
April 10, 1993
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**The intro to my mother’s eulogy was written about ten years ago, around 1999-2000. At the time, I was gathering together all my writings, my songs, and my musings for a collection I was working on, to be self-published. That never happened. So, on this 16th anniversary of the morning she died, I decided to post both the intro and the actual text of that memorial.
