By Matt McKnight
SEATTLE (Reuters) – Fans and admirers from around the world traveled to Seattle this week to pay tribute to Kurt Cobain 30 years after the troubled songwriter and lead singer of the seminal grunge rock band Nirvana took his own life.
Juan Prado Teno, a Chilean drummer and member of the fan group Nirvana Latino, said he identified with the raw energy of Cobain and Nirvana’s music, as well as the messages of their work that vigorously denounce homophobia, misogyny and racism.
“Nirvana to me is the philosophy of respect for women, of do-it-yourself, of rock and roll. This to me represents Nirvana and Cobain’s legacy,” Teno said as he stood outside the Central Saloon, a historic grunge venue.
Teno said he would be visiting the United States for the first time on the anniversary of Cobain’s death on Friday, April 5, 1994.
The singer, who was 27, was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in the Seattle home he shared with fellow rocker and wife Courtney Love, overlooking Lake Washington. He had been recovering from a drug and alcohol overdose the previous month.
According to excerpts from a suicide note read at a memorial service days later, Cobain took his own life because he no longer felt the passion to carry on with his music.
Nirvana’s edgy, punk-influenced sound and angst-filled lyrics penned by Cobain had propelled the band to the top of the pop music charts and put the Seattle grunge sound squarely into the mainstream.
But the lyrics that struck so deeply with Nirvana’s “Generation X” fans were rooted in Cobain’s troubled childhood and personal unhappiness, which seemed to worsen with the band’s success.
Brad Graham, 34, traveled from Kelowna, British Columbia, to a park near Cobain and Love’s last home together, stopping to pay homage to a wooden seat known to fans as Kurt Cobain’s bench and transformed into a improvised sanctuary.
“When I was definitely in my early twenties and confused about life and what I wanted from it, a lot of things resonated with me,” Graham said of Nirvana’s music. “A lot of frustration in music, that really hit home for me.”
Seattle journalist, author and music historian Charles Cross said he sees Cobain’s life and talent, even if abbreviated, as a profound gift from a “generational spokesperson”.
“Yes, to lose him at 27, so young and in the prime of life, is a horrible tragedy,” said Cross, who knew Cobain and wrote the biography “Heavier than Heaven.”
“But considering how difficult his life was and how often suicide and drugs were a problem, it’s a miracle how we managed to have as much Kurt Cobain as we did,” Cross said, adding that the people of Seattle feels “an extra layer of pain.”
“We felt like it was ours,” Cross said.
As he leafed through photographs taken in the 1990s, some of which were eventually collected in a book about Nirvana, rock ‘n’ roll photographer Charles Peterson reflected on the legacy of Cobain and Nirvana.
“For me personally, it’s really about the music, and the power of music and its staying power,” Peterson said. “I really don’t think that as a personality, as a celebrity, he would have the place that he still holds if it weren’t for the power and voracity of music.”