Heavier than Heaven: The Fall of Kurt Cobain

The first time he saw heaven came hours after an entire generation fell in love with him. It was his first death, but it was only the earliest of many little deaths that followed. For the generation smitten, it was a powerful and binding devotion—the kind of love that, even as it begins, you know is ordained to break your heart.

It was January 12, 1992, a Sunday morning. The temperature in New York City would eventually rise to 45 degrees, but at seven a.m., in a small suite of the Omni Berkshire, it was near freezing. A window had been left open to air out the room, and the Manhattan morning had stolen all warmth. The room itself looked like a tempest had engulfed it; scattered on the floor were clumps of dresses, shirts and shoes. Toward the suite's double doors stood half a dozen serving trays, covered with the remnants of several days of room service meals. Half-eaten rolls and stale slices of cheese littered the tray tops. This was not the typical condition of a four-star hotel room—it was the result of someone's warning housekeeping to stay out of the room.

Asleep in the king-size bed was 27-year-old Courtney Love. Her long blonde hair spread out over the sheets like the tresses of a character in a fairy tale. Next to her was an impression in the bedding, where a person had recently been. Like the opening scene of a film noir, there was a dead body in the room.

"I woke up at seven a.m. and he wasn't in the bed," remembered Love. "I've never been so scared."

Missing from the bed was 24-year-old Kurt Cobain. Hours earlier, Kurt and his band Nirvana had been the musical act on Saturday Night Live. Their appearance on the program proved to be an epochal moment in rock and roll, the first time a grunge band had received live national television exposure. It was the same weekend that Nirvana's major-label debut, Nevermind, knocked Michael Jackson out of the number one spot on the Billboard charts. While it wasn't exactly overnight success—the band had been together for about four years—the manner in which Nirvana took the music industry by surprise was unparalleled. Virtual unknowns a year before, the band's Smells Like Teen Spirit was one of 1991's most recognizable songs, its opening guitar riff signifying the true start of Nineties rock.

And there had never been a rock star quite like Kurt Cobain. More antistar than celebrity, he refused to take a limo to NBC and brought a thrift-store sensibility to everything he did. For Saturday Night Live, he wore the same clothes he had worn for days: a pair of Converse tennis shoes, jeans with big holes at the knees, a T-shirt advertising an obscure band and a Mr. Rogers—style cardigan. He hadn't washed his hair for a week, but had dyed it with strawberry Kool-Aid, which made his blonde locks look matted with dried (text continued on page 82) blood. Never before had a performer on live television put so little care into his appearance or hygiene, or so it seemed.

Kurt was a complicated, contradictory misanthrope. What appeared at times to be an accidental revolution showed signs of careful orchestration. He professed in many interviews to detest the exposure he'd gotten on MTV, yet he would call his managers to complain when the network didn't play his videos often enough. He planned every musical or career direction, writing out ideas in his journals years before he was able to execute them. Yet, as soon as he was bestowed the honors he had sought, he acted as if they were a terrible inconvenience. He was a man of imposing will, yet he was equally driven by a powerful self-hatred. Even those who felt they knew him best knew him hardly at all, as that Sunday morning would attest.

After finishing Saturday Night Live and skipping the cast party, explaining that it was not his style, Kurt gave an interview to a radio journalist, which finished at four in the morning. His working day was finally over, and by any standard it had been an exceptionally successful one: He had headlined Saturday Night Live and seen his album hit number one, and Weird Al Yankovic had asked permission to do a parody of Teen Spirit. These events, taken together, marked the apogee of his short career, the kind of recognition most performers dream of. Growing up in a small town in Washington, he loved Saturday Night Live, and had bragged to his friends that one day he'd be a star. By January 1992, he was the most celebrated figure in music. After just his second album he was already being hailed as the greatest songwriter of his generation; only two years before he had tried to get a job cleaning dog kennels.

But in the predawn hours, Kurt felt neither celebration nor vindication. If anything, all the media attention had only served to increase his usual malaise. He was suffering from what he described as recurrent "burning nauseous" pain in his stomach, exacerbated by stress. Fame and success seemed only to make Kurt feel worse. Kurt and his fiancée, Courtney Love, were the most talked-about couple in rock and roll, though some of that talk was about drug abuse. He had hoped that recognition for his talent would cure the emotional pains that had marked his early life.

In his hotel room, in the early hours of the morning, Kurt had taken a plastic bag of heroin, fixed it and injected it into his arm. This in itself was not unusual, since Kurt had been doing heroin regularly, with Love joining him in the months that they had been a couple. But on this particular night, as Love slept, Kurt had recklessly—or perhaps intentionally—used far more heroin than was safe. He slipped off the bed and landed facedown in a pile of clothes, looking like a haphazardly discarded corpse.

"It wasn't that he OD'd," Love recalled. "It was that he was dead. If I hadn't woken up at seven. I don't know, maybe I sensed it. It was so fucked. It was sick and psycho." Love frantically began a resuscitation effort that would become commonplace: She threw cold water on her fiancé, and punched him in the solar plexus to make his lungs move. When her first actions didn't get a response, she repeated the cycle like a paramedic working on a heart-attack victim. Finally,after several minutes of effort, Courtney heard a gasp. Kurt was breathing again. She continued to revive him by splashing water on his face and moving his limbs. Within a few minutes, he was sitting up, talking and, though still very stoned, wearing a self-possessed smirk, almost as if he were proud of his feat. It was his first near-death overdose. It had come on the day he had become a star.

In the course of one day, Kurt was born in the public eye, died in the privacy of his own darkness and was resurrected. It was an extraordinary feat, implausible and almost impossible, but the same could be said for so much of his life.

•

Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love first locked eyes in early January 1990, and within minutes they were tussling on the floor. The setting was the Satyricon, a dim nightclub in Portland, Oregon. Kurt was there for a Nirvana gig; Courtney had come to the show with a friend who was dating a member of the opening band, the wonderfully named Oily Bloodmen. Already an infamous character in Portland, Love was holding court in a booth when she saw Kurt walk by. Courtney was wearing a red polka-dot dress. "You've got Dave Pirner damage," she said to him, meaning the remark to sound like a small insult, but also a flirt. Kurt did look a little like Pirner, lead singer of Soul Asylum, as his hair had grown long and tangled—he washed it just once a week, and then only with bar soap. Kurt responded with a flirt of his own: He grabbed Courtney and then wrestled her to the ground. "It was in front of the jukebox," Courtney remembered, "which was playing my favorite Living Colour song. There was beer on the floor." She was glad her comment had gotten his attention, but she hadn't expected to be pinned to the floor by this little waif of a boy. For his part, Kurt hadn't counted on his opponent being quite so tough: Without his junior high school wrestling experience, she might have won the tussle. But the roll on the floor was all in jest, and he pulled her up with his hands and gave her a peace offering—a sticker of Chim-Chim, the Speed Racer monkey he had made his mascot.

As Kurt later told Michael Azerrad, author of the Nirvana biography Come as You Are, he had an immediate attraction to Courtney: "I thought she looked like Nancy Spungen. She looked like a classic punk-rock chick." The connection between Kurt and Courtney was sexual: Wrestling was a thing of Kurt's and an opponent as worthy as Courtney was a major turn-on.

They parted that night, but Courtney followed Nirvana's career the way a pitcher in the American League follows the exploits of a National League player. She read Nirvana's clips in the rock press, and she put the Chim-Chim sticker on her suitcase. She remained unconvinced about the band, however, because their early material was too metal for her. Like most rock critics at the time, she preferred Mudhoney, and after listening to Love Buzz in a record store, she passed on buying the single. When she later saw the band in concert she was struck by their strange physical appearance: "Krist was really, really big," she observed, "and he dwarfed Kurt to the point where you couldn't see how cute Kurt was because he looked like a tiny boy."

Her opinion of Nirvana, and the tiny boy, changed entirely when she heard (continued on page 158)Kurt Cobain(continued from page 82) the single Sliver in October 1990. "I bought Sliver at Bleecker Bob's," Courtney recalled. "When I played it, I was like, 'Oh my God—I missed this!'" On the B side was Dive, which became her favorite Nirvana song. "It is so sexy and strange and haunting," she noted. "I thought it was genius."

After Love's friend Jennifer Finch became involved with Dave Grohl, Nirvana and Kurt became a frequent topic of their girl talk. They nicknamed Kurt "Pixie meat," both because of his diminutive size, and because of Kurt's worship of the Pixies. Courtney confessed to Grohl she had a crush on Kurt, and when Dave told her Kurt was suddenly single, Courtney sent Kurt a gift meant to move their wrestling match to a different arena. It was a heart-shaped box filled with a tiny porcelain doll, dried roses, a miniature teacup and sea shells. Before sending it she rubbed her perfume on it like a magical charm. When the fragrant box arrived in Olympia, it was the best-smelling thing in the Pear Street apartment, thought this distinction wasn't difficult to achieve. Kurt was impressed with the doll; he collected dolls, and by 1990 they were one of the many media he used for his art projects. He would repaint their faces and glue human hair on their heads. The resulting creatures were both beautiful and grotesque, looking as much like child corpses as they did dolls.

Kurt and Courtney met for the second time in May 1991 during a concert at the Palladium in Los Angeles. Kurt was backstage drinking cough syrup straight from the bottle. In a bit of fate, Courtney opened her purse and displayed her own stash of drugs, which were more powerful. They wrestled to the ground again, but this time it was more a grope than a physical challenge. The vibe, according to those who witnessed it, was sexual. When Kurt let her up, the tension lessened and they talked shop. Courtney was quick to brag that her band, Hole, had finished recording Pretty on the Inside, with Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth co-producing. Kurt talked about his own album, which was still in production. Kurt was usually meek when meeting someone, but in his efforts to impress Courtney, he pulled out all the stops. As Kurt soon discovered, very few people could gain a verbal advantage over Love. She knew far more about the music business than he did, and Hole's career was accelerating as quickly as Nirvana's.

In their conversation, Kurt disclosed that he was staying at the Oakwood. Courtney told him she lived nearby. She wrote down her phone number on a bar napkin, and told him to call her sometime. She was earnestly flirting and he was flirting back.

Breaking every rule of dating, he called her later, sounding like the desperate, broken-hearted loser in Swingers. "There was a lot of noise in the background," Courtney recalled. Kurt pretended he was phoning only because he wanted to discover where she got her cough syrup. But what he really wanted was to talk to her more. And, as Kurt found out, Courtney could talk.

They talked for almost an hour and it was a conversation Kurt would remember for weeks. Though he was typically direct and short-tempered on the telephone, there were individuals who could occasionally bring out the conversationalist in him, and Courtney was one of those. He found himself able to say things to her over the phone he'd been unable to tell her in person just a few hours earlier. They talked about producers, critics, Sonic Youth, guitar playing, cough syrup brands and songwriting. She switched from subject to subject the way someone flicks the channels on a remote control. When Kurt described the conversation to his friend Ian Dickson, he began by declaring, "I have met the coolest girl in the whole world." As Dickson and his other friends began to complain, "Kurt would not stop talking about her. It was 'Courtney says this,' and 'Courtney says that.'" It would be four months before they would see each other again, but during that time, Kurt recalled their conversation and must have wondered whether it was real or just a drug-induced dream caused by too much syrup.

•

Early Friday, April 8, 1994 electrician Gary Smith arrived at 171 Lake Washington Boulevard, Cobain and Love's Seattle home. Smith and other workers had been at the house that week, installing a new security system. Police stopped by twice and told workers to alert them if Kurt arrived. He had been missing for days. At 8:40 Friday, Smith was near the greenhouse and glanced inside. "I saw this body lying there on the floor," he later told a newspaper. "I thought it was a mannequin. Then I noticed it had blood in the right ear. I saw a shotgun laying across his chest, pointing up at his chin." Smith called a dispatcher to call 911. His firm's dispatcher took it upon himself to tip off radio station KXRX. "Hey, you guys are going to owe me some pretty good Pink Floyd tickets for this," he told DJ Marty Reimer. Police confirmed that the body of a young male had been found at Cobain's house, and KXRX aired the story. Although early police reports did not identify the deceased, initial speculation was centered on Kurt.

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, Courtney had become a patient at Exodus Recovery, a drug treatment center, having checked in on Thursday afternoon. Earlier that day, she had been arrested after police had arrived at her "vomit-and-blood-splattered" hotel room and found a syringe, a blank prescription pad and a small packet they believed to be heroin (it turned out to be Hindu good-luck ashes). After being released on $10,000 bail, Courtney checked herself in for inpatient treatment.

Friday morning, her lawyer arrived at Exodus. When Courtney saw the lawyer's expression, she knew the news without having to hear it. The two looked at each other for several moments in silence until Courtney finally uttered a one-word question: "How?"

•

It was the last time their bodies would be together. She stroked his face, spoke to him and clipped a lock of his hair. She would store it in the heart-shaped box she had given him three years ago. Finally, she climbed on top of his body, straddling him, put her head on his chest and wailed, "Why? Why? Why?"

It would be four months before they saw each other again. Kurt must have wondered if it was real or just a druginduced dream caused by too much syrup.

Smith was near the greenhouse: "I saw this body lying there on the floor. I thought it was a mannequin."