Fever (27 page)

Although discomfort with rock fame is hardly a new dilemma, Cobain seemed to believe his quandary was original. There were times when it seemed all he really needed was a long sitdown with Pete Townshend, who had made such matters the stuff of great Who songs (and uneven rock operas) back in the 1960s and 1970s. The more commonplace comparison was to John Lennon, who complained about success as he declared the Beatles more popular than Jesus Christ.

Before the band's final European stint in early 1994, Nirvana gathered in New York City to shoot MTV's
Unplugged.
Mixing wariness about its massive audience with a belief in how far the music could redeem their professional misgivings, the set is now a modern classic. With Cobain mumbling an apology for opening with a sleeper (“About a Girl,” from the band's first album on Sub Pop), and moving through a sober cover of David Bowie's “The Man Who Sold the World” (a sketch for Cobain's cosmic despair), Nirvana made its venom compelling at the level of a whisper, and Cobain got as much out of his hushed growl as his considerable yammer.

Unplugged'
s fatalism is hard to miss; by this point the jig was basically up. Taping took place in December of 1993. Four months later, Cobain overdosed in Rome and emerged from a coma requesting a milkshake. Shortly after his family got him into his final California rehab in March of 1994, Love called the police to their home when Cobain locked himself in a room with a gun. Talk of an American tour was put aside until Cobain could commit himself to the road with confidence. At the end of March, within a week after being admitted, Cobain escaped from rehab, spent a few days missing, and turned up dead in his Seattle guest house lying next to the shotgun he had swallowed. The cable guy who found him called a radio station before he called the police.

MTV covered the story as if it were rock's Kennedy assassination. It broadcast its bank of Nirvana interviews and clips in heavy rotation, interviewed writers like
Rolling Stone
's David Fricke and Nirvana biographer Michael Azerrad, who trotted out the simplistic Lennon analogies. Thousands gathered for a public memorial in Seattle, and a shaken Courtney Love addressed Cobain's fans, reading his suicide note out loud.

Most editors settled for the usual lame commentary about how fame had killed another angry young man, and didn't even bother to dig up sudden-success show-biz precedents like the young comic Freddie Prinze, who shot himself in the flush of
Chico and the Man
stardom at age twenty-six in 1977, or punker Ian Curtis of Joy Division, who hanged himself in 1980. Instead, the Lennon comparisons resurfaced with a vengeance—never mind that Lennon had built an eighteen-year career and Cobain's lasted barely three. Never mind that Lennon consciously suffered the excruciating irony of being shot in the back by a “fan,” and Cobain killed himself because he didn't want fans. Never mind that Cobain chose to leave behind a wife and a daughter whose legacy now included the statistical caution that children of suicides are more prone to kill themselves. Cobain was sainted as the new pop martyr for Generation X, the generation that staunchly insisted it needed nothing of the kind. A lavish, glossy memorial book appeared collecting Nirvana coverage from
Rolling Stone.
Everything the man had to say was suddenly drowned in the very media frenzy he had used as an excuse to check out.

As the dust settled, Cobain's suicide seemed less symptomatic of the cost of fame than of our culture's blindness regarding addiction illnesses. The prevailing myth surrounding heroin users, drug addicts, and alcoholics continues to be that they are troubled arty types whose bad habits “force” them to self-destruct. That a growing self-help sobriety culture had already come of age in the late 1980s seemed irrelevant to most eulogizers and, more tragically, to Cobain himself. Cobain, the great misunderstood kid, was somehow more gifted and “sicker” than anybody else who was suddenly famous at a young age. This is just plain hypocrisy: if it were true, every famous youngster would wilt from the attention. Part of Cobain's charm was how he portrayed himself as unique, as if he were the only person who'd struggled with the competing notions of defiance and acceptance on a mass scale.

Nirvana's
Unplugged
tells a different story: it's the transparent, quietly riveting sound of a man set on killing himself, no matter how far the music transports him out of his isolation. (Key lyrics like “I swear I don't have a gun,” from “Come As You Are,” stick out like emotional blisters.) Broken up with asides to his band (“I didn't fuck it up,” Cobain marveled after Bowie's “The Man Who Sold the World”), the set has the disjointed pace of a band finding its way to a new plateau.
Unplugged
is a testament to how Cobain threw away an inestimable opportunity to snub convention and stand for something larger than the pettiness of show biz.

Everything that happened in the wake of Cobain's death seemed anticlimactic, and proof that the opportunity he abandoned was pretty well lost, at least for the time being. Seattle mates Pearl Jam ascended, acting as Nirvana's heirs apparent, although they did so without a single song that came close to the hilarious disgust and yammer of “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” “In Bloom,” “Serve the Servants” or “All Apologies.” And whether you like Pearl Jam or not, the band was not remotely a punk act. The more instructive analogy was to Ireland's U2: a spiffy, politically aware arena outfit with a self-aggrandizing front man. (Jon Pareles called Bono's attitude “sincere egomania.”) Taking on Ticketmaster before Congress for excessive service charges and throwing in with the Hollywood elite for the animal-lover vote made Eddie Vedder seem like a man of causes, not ideas. Pearl Jam became America's answer to U2 on a decade-delay tape loop, with Vedder aping Bono's Last Good Man routine. When asked if Vedder had ever cracked a good joke, one fan responded indignantly: “No. Things are different these days…”

Vedder also oversang to project intensity, virility, and confidence. He joined a parade of figures for an era in which oversinging became equated with Artistry: shriekers like Whitney, Britney, Mariah, Céline, and Cher, and insecure men like U2's Bono, Axl Rose, Fred Durst, or Michael Bolton. All this weeping and wailing was a vain attempt to cover up poor dancing skills. There's a hilarious moment in the Houston film
Waiting to Exhale
(1995) where the music comes up and the girlfriends all dance in a living room. Houston hides self-consciously behind the others, hoping the camera doesn't find her. But on another level, all this forced intensity—all this “apotheosis without struggle,” to use composer Michael Rose's phrase—signaled a new rush of insecurity about how to project confidence in song. It was yet another way that Cobain projected power in
Unplugged:
by taking things down to a scary hush, he sounded spooked, and capable of spooking everybody else.

Part of Cobain's dilemma seemed to be the way fame conferred anything but confidence, and there were casualties wherever you looked, from Michael Jackson's ping-ponging absurdities to Mariah Carey's and Whitney Houston's and [Insert Celebrity Here]'s breakdowns, no-shows, and rehab comebacks.

*   *   *

Paradoxically, the one figure who resisted abandoning what Cobain had stood for and refused to let 1994 be defined by Cobain's death was Cobain's wife, Courtney Love. Ending a two-year absence from the music business during which she married Cobain and had his child, Love released a prescient set of songs on an album she completed just before Cobain's suicide called
Live Through This.
This was deadpan punk hilarity with enough one-liners to keep the ironies jumping. Love, a former stripper, could make a simple dress look like derision itself. “Go on take everything, take everything, I want you to,” Love sang in “Violet,” and it meant something different each time you heard it. Love's punk didn't revel in revenge fantasies so much as pile on the petty insults until her weary feminist taunts sounded like truth received.

Then, in June 1994, just two months after Cobain died, Hole's bassist, Kristen Pfaff, was found dead of a heroin overdose in her bathtub. Undaunted, Love hired Melissa Auf der Maur, a resourceful player and a vivid singer, and kept moving. Hole began touring Europe in August, just as dinosaurs like the Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd began straying offstage, and built its reputation with an unsteady persistence. Reports of onstage confrontations and offstage mishaps dogged the band. By the time it reached America, the resolute ironies of
Live Through This
had won over a lot of skeptics, and the album was selling respectably (peaking at number 55 on the
Billboard
charts). Earning her fame in spite of who she was and what Cobain had done, Love made his death seem all the more wasteful in his reflected spotlight. By New Year's 1995, Love trounced the competition for Album of the Year in the
Village Voice
's annual critics' poll, which tallied votes from three hundred critics nationwide.

In May of 1995, when Courtney Love took the stage for her own
Unplugged,
the appearance was charged with passing-the-torch symbolism, and the world sat up to take notice. Sitting on a stool and running through her set matter-of-factly, Love's manner seemed coy for a punk rocker, but that may have just been her way of being nervous. By now her record had grown familiar, and her deadpan delivery only made her better lines leap out with greater force: “When you get what you want/And you never want it again…” (“Violet”). Halfway through the set, Love introduced her defining cover, Gerry Goffin and Carole King's “He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss).” Phil Spector produced the song for the Crystals back in 1962, pulled it defensively just after its release, and it resurfaced on the Spector box set
Back to Mono
almost thirty years later in 1991.

Love's version wrought a wizened resolve from the song's sexism and turned it into a kind of cleansing-away, as if to say, “This is the Dark Ages, where feminism and female rock started. This is chocolate cake compared to what I've been through.” A similar weathervane that season was Urge Overkill's deliciously wry cover of “Girl, You'll Be a Woman Soon,” a 1967 Neil Diamond hit, which Quentin Tarantino used to score Uma Thurman's death dance in
Pulp Fiction
(1994). Diamond's original is a litmus test for sixties misogyny, a guy who talks down to his date about putting out for him as more than a test of affection—as a test of adulthood. Urge Overkill accented the quaint sexism with deadpan élan. Tarantino played up the double meanings: when Uma Thurman cued the song up in the movie, it foretold her heroin overdose. When Love appeared on the cover of
Vanity Fair
soon afterward, and stirred up 1995's Lollapalooza with fistfights and clothes-shredding dives into the audience, the concept of sellout was so remote it was never uttered. Where Cobain killed himself over getting famous, Love seemed willing to kill her self-respect for it. Instead, her success seemed merely the just deserts of a woman who had somehow danced her way out from beneath an avalanche.

Love courted controversy, especially when negotiating with her husband's former bandmates over rights to their unreleased material. And it was hard to say which was more aggravating: a sturdy yet slick CD like
Celebrity Skin
(1999), where she turned in well-crafted songs alongside mostly mediocre acting work, or coauthor Billy Corgan's lawsuits accusing her of bad faith in songwriting credits. (Talk persisted that
Live Through This
was largely written by Cobain.) For all her faults, though, Love had good taste in material, and posited a new brand of feminist who refused to play rock star as role model. She stood apart not just from the punk-rock tradition her husband enlivened, but also from the stream of girl acts like Babes in Toyland, Liz Phair, Belly, Luscious Jackson, and the entire Northwest riot-grrrl movement with her political gusto and unabashed imperfections. She courted fame despite herself, and as punk's answer to Madonna, she made grunge womanhood something more than simply being Cobain's widow, mother to his child, and downscale leading lady.

If 1994 began by immortalizing Cobain as the rock star who died for his dignity, it progressed to discover that he was just another talented addict who copped out. Michael Jackson is at the opposite end of the spectrum, courting the coverage he supposedly despises; he's addicted to his celebrity in a way Cobain detested. But neither's self-destructive urges are heroic or enviable. Fame brings its share of unspeakable humiliations, but then, so do plenty of other jobs. For some real lessons on the price of fame and how healthy celebrity—and romantic—ambivalence can be, listen to Hole's
Live Through This.
Hers is a landmark of rock's survivalist impulse, and how immersion in craft can see you through times of utter peril.

*   *   *

Cobain and Love seemed like a Fellini parody of Sid and Nancy, but there's no way they could have sprouted from any other medium besides rock 'n' roll. This is true of all the figures in this book. When Hollywood fell all over itself to laud Neil Jordan's
The Crying Game
back in 1992, it was nothing short of comic that the man who sang the movie's theme song was Boy George, who had made cross-gender themes the stuff of grandiose pop soap operas at least seven years earlier (the soundtrack was an early comeback bid). Rock had paved the way for such themes in mainstream film, and had been doing so ever since Little Richard costarred opposite Jayne Mansfield in
The Girl Can't Help It
in 1956.

When Demi Moore posed nude while pregnant for
Vanity Fair
in August of 1991, nobody spoke of it in political terms—she was simply aping the nudity of John and Yoko's
Two Virgins
some twenty years later as pure self-promotion without the gentle humor. Sure, she looked gorgeous, and gorgeous was praise long due any pregnant woman. But Moore posed as a movie star and model, not as a woman with any hint of a political agenda. Would Woody Allen have suffered the same moral fallout—enough for him to break down and
Do press
—after his breakup with Mia Farrow and subsequent coupling with her adopted daughter, Soon-Yi, if he had been a rock star? Somehow, we expected more from him because he worked in
film.