“Sometimes I feel like I have to punch the clock every time I step on stage.” Kurt Cobain - Farewell letter before shooting himself. 1994.
“How was the Nirvana concert?” A 15-year-old boy. Ten days ago.
“Almost 12 years…” Me. Yesterday.
These three facts slowly crept into my brain. Digging. Digging. And I decided to write…
Flashback. A foggy February morning, I take the train. Destination Modena. To listen to Nirvana. They are great. Nevermind obliterated me. But not just me. Half the world looks to Seattle. Everything comes from there. Now it is the center of American and world music. After the fake and polished '80s. The rebirth of rock. Raw. Dirty. Pessimistic. Decadent. True. Grunge. Mother Love Bone, Mudhoney, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Screaming Trees, Soundgarden. "In Utero" has just come out. Songs with less sonic impact but with considerable musical depth. In short, I am truly overwhelmed. And now they are coming to Modena. In front of the Palasport, I'm excited, there's a tense atmosphere. Crowd at the entrance. Crushed. Tension. Excitement. The gates open and everyone runs under the stage. For the best spots.
Then Kurt and his two mates enter. Songs like lashes. Bleeding lashes. Kurt is not in the mood. Or rather, he plays and sings to the maximum. But he’s not there. He grips his sky-blue guitar. Looks straight ahead. Fixed. Blond hair in front of his eyes. I look at him and think: “He doesn’t give a damn about us, he's staring at the opposite wall of the palasport”.
Below, the boys push each other. A steaming riot. But for him, nothing exists. I have the sensation that he's made of ice. Fixed. Stuck. A blond mop striking his guitar, screaming into the microphone. Screaming, not singing. The songs. Those from the "Nevermind" era are a blow. Great. Powerful. Wild. Rough. At one point, in the middle of the concert, something happens. Someone in the audience, under the stage, throws an advertising newspaper distributed at the entrance. On the front page is the big face of Canadian singer Bryan Adams. The bassist, between songs, stops, sees the newspaper at Kurt's feet. He approaches and picks it up. Kurt doesn’t flinch. Krist Novoselic, turning to Cobain with a laugh, says something like, “Hey, these guys down here say you’re not as handsome as Bryan”. It makes me tender. I believe he wants to encourage the singer somehow. Urge him into some reaction. Kurt shifts his gaze from the opposite wall to the bassist for a brief moment. But it's a fraction of a second. He immediately launches into the next song. Nothing. "Come as You Are," "Smells Like Teen Spirit," "Lithium"... they stay under the skin. Technically masterful. Violent.
The concert ends. I return home at five the following morning. Happy and apathetic. One day, less than two months after that concert, a rhetorical news anchor tells me Kurt shot himself in the head. And tells us, his fans, that he was tired of punching the clock. A barrage of comments follows. Everyone affirming that Kurt was a junkie, a depressed, a semi-lunatic, a poor fool who wanted to become immortal. Everyone spouting comments. I am stunned. And sad. It's not easy. I feel strange. I saw a rock star two months ago. Now he has committed suicide. I wish I hadn't seen that concert. To not be part of the spiral that killed him. But these are also bull. It's just that, in the end, I can't fathom how someone like him, a singer revered by everyone, someone entering the history of rock, someone at the peak of their career would want and could kill themselves. But Kurt was a person, not a rockstar.
I suppressed everything for many years while more and more kids went around with shirts printed with Kurt's pale face. Like Hendrix. Like Morrison. Like Joplin. Just another pale face printed on a kid's shirt.
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