Original subtitles

"Don't read my diary when I'm gone.

OK, I'm going to work now.

When you wake up this morning, please read my diary,

look through my things, and figure me out."

Rome, the 4th of March 1994.

One of the world's greatest rock stars

has tried to kill himself-- Kurt Cobain.

His wife, Courtney Love, gives the paparazzi the finger

as she rushes to the hospital.

News agencies prematurely announce his death.

You know, he had an overdose.

And immediately, people said he had died.

But he went into a coma, and they revived him.

Even some of the band members were given a phone call

that Kurt was dead.

So it was announced as an accidental overdose,

when it was anything but.

It was an intentional suicide attempt.

Kurt Cobain's journals cover thousands

of pages-- sketches, lyrics, letters on loose sheets

and in notebooks.

Thoughts of suicide appeared early.

Kurt Cobain had a formative experience in his early teens.

He was on his way to school with two friends,

when they came across the body of a man in the forest.

He'd hanged himself.

The body hung at a grotesque angle, the limbs twisted.

Cobain stood there for an hour looking at the corpse

until the emergency services arrived.

Here was somebody who

suffered from clinical depression

probably from the time he was 10.

He talks about trying to kill himself

when he was 12 years old.

His own depression was enough to drive him to create art.

Generally the people that become entertainers

are people who have dysfunction.

And Kurt certainly falls into that category.

"I'm going to be a superstar musician,

kill myself, and go out in a flame of glory."

The environment that Kurt grew up

in in Aberdeen-- it had the highest

unemployment rate in Washington State in that era.

Suicide, drug abuse, alcoholism--

these were endemic.

Domestic violence-- these-- the rates of all these issues

were higher in Aberdeen than virtually

any city in Washington.

So when you grow up in that environment, where no one has

a job and it feels hopeless, it's

very hard to come out of that with a sunny disposition.

The northwest corner of the USA.

This is where he grew up, the hero of a whole generation,

the instigator of grunge.

This is where we hope to find people who knew him back then--

traces of the young outsider.

We're following the route a young man from the sticks

took on his way to becoming a legend of the music world.

Well, this is Aberdeen, Washington, victim

of the poor economy and stuff.

It was based on a timber industry which has dried up.

Kurt was born here back in February '67.

So yes, he was born in Aberdeen, Washington.

OK. Follow me on in.

I got something interesting for you inside here.

We have a concrete statue made by Randi Hubbard.

Her original intent was that the statue

be placed in a city park.

It was done at her expense.

The city had nothing to do with it financially and stuff.

But the city turned it down.

They feel it's a bad idea.

It glorifies drugs and stuff, you know,

and suicide and not-- I strongly disagree with that.

He's 100% responsible for putting a city on the map.

I'm sure you would have never heard of Aberdeen, Washington,

without Kurt Cobain.

My personal experience-- he was very decent person.

He had a heart.

He was a-- he was a good kid.

He liked pizza, and he liked, uh, macaroni and cheese.

Kurt Cobain grew up in Aberdeen

in humble circumstances.

His father, Don, was a motor mechanic at a gas station.

But Kurt himself described his childhood as happy.

He was given musical instruments at an early age--

a child with talent.

He'd come over to the house one time.

And he had a picture with him.

And he says, look, Grandpa.

He says, look what I painted.

And I was looking at it.

And I said, you didn't paint that.

I says, you traced it.

And he got mad.

And he says, I did not.

He says, you get me some paper.

And he says, I'll show ya.

And so he draws Goofy and-- and Donald Duck for me

and just-- just like that.

He'd just do it real fast.

And by God, they really looked good.

That's Goofy.

I mean, it only took him seconds to draw that too.

Kurt was a good little boy.

He was very, very happy.

Always happy all the time.

Beating on drums or something, on kettles, pots, and pans.

That's what we always thought he'd be,

was a drummer, not a guitarist.

"It took me five years to realize how rhythmically

retarded I was as a drummer.

So I sold some of my father's guns

then used the money to purchase my first

six-string electric guitar.

I learned everything I needed to know from one week of lessons,

which resulted in the famous musical knowledge

of the "Louie Louie" chords.

"Come as You Are."

Good.

"Come as You Are."

There you go, Kurt.

Play away.

When Kurt was nine, his parents divorced.

He said it was the end of his happy childhood.

When they got the divorce, his mother, I guess,

couldn't handle him.

And so his dad took him.

And on the weekends, him and Kurt

was-- go out camping or fishing someplace.

And that was the happiest Kurt had been all the time there.

He was just happy as hell.

He was with his dad.

His dad was with him all the time.

Two years later, the father married again.

Kurt couldn't get on in the new household for long.

So he went back to his mother, feeling

unloved and belonging nowhere.

But his parents' divorce had a huge effect on his writing.

And eventually, it-- it came out in many of his songs.

Of course, the lyric from the song

that starts off "In Utero," "That legendary divorce

is--" you know.

He talked about the divorce a lot in his lyrics.

I just want you to know

that I don't hate you anymore.

There is nothing I could say that I haven't thought before.

There was a time where he was kicked out of his mom's house

and he lived on the streets of Aberdeen.

And it was from that time that the legend of Kurt

living under a bridge began.

In my theory, an argument is that he

never lived under the bridge.

I'd say we go to the bridge right

here, 'cause this bridge is straight down the road.

We're almost there.

This is Grays Harbor Community Hospital.

When he was homeless, he'd go in.

You hang out at the-- an emergency room,

because, you know, everybody thinks you're just waiting

for somebody there and stuff.

You'd stay warm and dry.

That's the old Morck Hotel right there, the big yellow building

up on the left.

That's another one of the places Kurt used to crash a lot.

It's all closed down now too.

He crashed here late at night.

Nobody would-- you know, nobody would harass you and stuff.

And he'd just get up early in the morning

and take off and give him a warm, dry place

to stay at night.

Legend or reality, Kurt

Cobain himself contributed a lot to the idealized outlaw image.

Everybody knows where it's at.

Everybody comes here.

There's been upwards of 600 people a month coming here.

Now with the weather change, it's dropped off.

They wanted to see where Kurt Cobain originally hung out.

And it's been fascinating.

I don't have to travel anywhere.

I just sit by the side of the road and talk

to people who come here.

And it's been-- it's really been eye-opening.

And I really do appreciate the fact that this town produced

somebody of that talent.

This was a peaceful place

at the time back in the day.

This was totally secluded, both sides.

There was so much brush and stuff growing up in a way.

So yeah.

It was private.

And a lot of people did come down here and stuff.

It was a place where teenagers hang out.

They'd get high and stuff, obviously.

And for Kurt, it appeared to be an inspiration for him to come

down here and write music.

Tori Kovac has created a memorial park for Kurt Cobain

here.

Kurt's music-- there's a lot of it I don't like.

But it wasn't until actually when

he played "Unplugged" in New York

that his pure sound and emotion got to me.

Something in the rain, yeah, mmm.

"MTV Unplugged," recorded in 1993,

was an artistic high point for Nirvana.

It's a piece of granite

that's engraved with quotations from Kurt Cobain.

One of the quotes that I took from him

was, "Drugs are bad for you.

They will fuck you up."

And in this community, that has such a problem with drugs

and young people, I thought that the quotation

coming from Kurt Cobain to them was important to say.

The city of Aberdeen, whose property this

is on, they came to me and said, we need to remove that,

and blasted out the U-C-K. It made

some people feel better that they could exercise some power

over this terrible word.

Aberdeen in the mid '80s.

The town was in decline.

Kurt Cobain was 17, had dropped out of various schools,

and was picked up from time to time by the police

for graffiti spraying.

He was living from hand to mouth and surviving on casual jobs.

He had been so poor for most of his life.

He got food stamps, which is government assistance.

He'd gotten unemployment.

Well, he worked jobs.

He had several different jobs.

And he even worked with me carpet

laying a couple of times.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I was working at Burger King.

Kurt was working at The Polynesian, at ocean shores.

But yeah, we had day jobs, you know?

But, you know, life in Aberdeen's pretty boring,

you know, I guess, when you're young like that.

At some point, Kurt Cobain

moved into his own small house, together

with the bass player of the punk rock band, the Melvins,

his great role models.

Punk rock perfectly suited his attitude to life.

He also had a relationship

with Tracy Marander, who they lived as a joint couple.

And-- and I think she was very supportive to him

for a number of years.

And-- and then he begged and borrowed whatever he needed.

She is, in some ways, the patron saint,

the untold hero of Nirvana.

She not only paid Kurt's rent, clean the apartment,

kept him going.

So that was Kurt's first serious girlfriend.

And he was with her for at least three years.

And he wrote the song "About a Girl" about Tracy.

Aberdeen gets so much rain.

So I think that's why they have so many musicians

that come from this area, is the rain.

It forces you to stay inside.

It's just part of the environment.

Living down here, there's nothing to do.

So I think more or less, people picked up musical instruments

just out of boredom.

It was something to do.

You know, hang out with your friends, make noise, you know?

Kurt was happiest making noise with his friend

Krist Novoselic.

The two of them later formed the nucleus of Nirvana.

The drummers kept changing.

The video recording on the box set, the metal box set,

was recorded upstairs in this green building right here.

The video was shot right up here in this room here.

And a very small room, you know?

Kurt was singing into the wall.

It was always a necessity.

Whatever was needed to be done, he would

do it to further his music.

It was always Kurt, yeah.

Kurt, he was always the lyricist.

We practiced-- I'd say we practiced-- we practice seven,

eight hours the same song until-- just until Kurt

was happy with it, you know?

It was always pretty much focused

in those days around music-- survival and music

and survive to make or play music.

Ryan Aigner was responsible for getting Cobain

and co. their first gig.

He organized the band's appearance

at a place called Raymond.

So in here, I was pushing them out of that safety

of their little rehearsal room and saying,

let's go test this out somewhere.

And-- and so, Raymond was probably the wrong place

in some ways, you know?

But it also was a good galvanizing

effect, where they-- you know, they

sort of took one on the chin.

They weren't embraced and loved for everything they did.

The backwater audience was unsettled by the band.

The musicians were sort of odd and clearly had no interest

in playing to a load of hicks.

Raymond's kind of the wrong direction.

You see the metropolis, the urban.

That's where you think you're headed.

And Raymond-- has nothing to do with Raymond

or any other rural town.

It was just, you know, he wanted to go to Olympia-- Olympia was

the big city-- or at least east, because we

were as far west as you could possibly go, you know?

So let's go-- let's go east.

Aberdeen's population consists of highly bigoted,

redneck, deer-shooting, faggot-killing logger

types who ain't partial to weirdo new wavers.

The dream of becoming a professional musician

gradually gained pace.

Olympia, the capital of the state of Washington,

was the next stage-- a university city with a very

different atmosphere from the rundown

lumberjack backwater of Aberdeen.

Olympia was full of students and had a lively music scene.

There's still one rehearsal room after another in Band Alley,

as it's know.

And the ethos of Olympia is still creative and cool.

That was the first time I'd ever been to a party

where it was a solid mohawks.

And we played this party.

And some guy got on the mic and said, drummers from Aberdeen

sure are weird looking, you know?

They didn't think I was cool, 'cause

I didn't have a mohawk and but.

But I was in it for the music, so I didn't care.

Like Aaron Burckhard, Dave Foster is a former drummer

with Kurt Cobain's band.

With various bands, like Psycho Samaritan,

they're still following the lead set by Nirvana.

Kurt had names all weird.

Like, our fifth name was Nirvana.

We went through five names.

Our first name was Skid Row.

And then we played live here in Olympia, at the KAOS

radio station midnight show.

And the very next day, I showed up for band practice.

He drew a picture on an easel with a paintbrush

of a pen, a writing pen with this cap all chewed up,

you know?

And that was our second name, was Pen Cap Chew, right?

And then from Pen Cap Chew, we went to Ted Ed Fred.

And then we went to Bliss, was our fourth name.

And then the fifth name was Nirvana.

And that's when I got fired.

Here they are, Nirvana!

Well, they-- you know, they were

playing opening acts a lot midweek-- terrible shows,

nobody there.

Parties-- they did the KAOS radio thing.

And that was really a big turning point, 'cause

so many people heard that.

The tape was bootlegged.

And then things really started spreading.

And then when they would play, people would actually show up.

--green State College in Olympia, Washington.

Welcome KAOS 89.3 FM, Olympia's community radio.

Slowly the band turned into a professional enterprise.

Kurt Cobain moved to Olympia with Tracy.

The city became their creative focus.

On Pear Street, they moved into a house that was chaotic,

spartan, Bohemian.

- I - remember he had--

he always ate like a bird.

He never had a stove or a fridge.

At the house, he didn't have a stove or refrigerator.

He had a toaster oven, and that was it.

He was never the norm.

He was always Bohemian type, you know?

And he never-- I don't know.

He was just different.

Different, you know?

He had a picture of Bobby Sherman--

a portrait of Bobby Sherman in his bedroom, you know?

He just did weird things, you know?

He was always weird, different.

He just was really into his art.

And I mean, his whole house was covered with it-- you know,

sculptures, drawings.

Always playing his guitar.

He was pretty much a homebody.

He didn't like to go out.

Morbid motifs, collages with lots of flesh,

extracts from anatomy books.

Kurt Cobain had painted and drawn from a young age.

And to the end of his life, the visual arts

remained an abiding passion.

You know, he thought that maybe he could be an artist.

He never pursued it that much.

I mean, I've had the benefit of seeing a lot of his art

that no one's ever seen.

It's all locked in a vault somewhere.

A few items are in the "Cobain Unseen" book.

But I've seen 25 paintings of Kurt's

that I think-- I'm a music critic, not an art critic.

But I think they're very good.

They show a lot of talent, I think.

Art, as an alternative to the rock star's existence.

Years later, at the height of his fame,

Cobain used to withdraw for weeks on end and paint.

Kurt called me up one Sunday afternoon

and said, you have to come over right now.

And I said, Kurt, you know I-- it's a Sunday afternoon.

I don't know if I have film or I have to get cameras together.

And he's like, no, the flowers are going to wilt. I'm like,

what is he talk-- I said, OK.

So I ran over to his house.

And he made this collage on the floor of the living room.

And he wanted me to photograph it for the cover of "In Utero."

So not really my forte, but I set up and did it.

You know my-- my favorite shot from that

is Kurt and Frances-- Frances toddled

over to look at the collage.

And so I took just a few quick snaps.

Kurt and Courtney had probably been in their pajamas all day.

But you know, this is about 7 o'clock in the evening.

When he was living in Olympia,

Cobain only had thoughts of a career in music.

His journals of the period are full of interviews he

imagined giving as a rock star.

That was to remain a distant vision until 1988.

"Greetings.

Nirvana is a three piece spawned from the bowels

of a redneck logging town called Aberdeen, Washington."

Only together for seven months, they

have acquired a single, a demo, and an LP, success, fame,

and a following of millions.

Seattle, 1988.

Nirvana had arrived in the big city.

We are driving in Seattle on Leary Way in the area

kind of bowered Fremont.

And it's in this neighborhood which 25 years ago was far more

rundown that Nirvana came to record their first recording

session ever.

It's where they did "Love Buzz," the single.

And it's also where they recorded the album "Bleach."

This area used to be super-duper cheap.

You could buy a building here for nothing.

And nowadays, it's, like, super expensive

than lots of restaurants.

This little humble building to the left

here is the recording studio that Nirvana cut "Bleach."

In some ways, it's the place that made Nirvana Nirvana.

They were very well prepared, and they were good players.

And I also remember thinking, this guy's voice

is really interesting.

I like the way he sings.

Even then, you could tell.

You can listen to these recordings,

and you can hear the character of the voice is very good.

They did everything just, you know, almost one take.

It was literally like they played

live in the studio almost, literally just banged it out.

Trying to place the first demo with a record

company prove difficult. Tracy sent

out dozens of copies accompanied by forthright letters

from Kurt.

"We're willing to pay for the majority

of pressing of 1,000 copies of our LP

and all of the recording costs.

We basically just want to be on your label.

Do you think you could please send us a reply of 'fuck off'

or 'not interested' so we don't have to waste

more money selling more tapes?

Thanks.

Nirvana."

The demo did, in fact, result in their first record contract

with Sub Pop, a new Seattle label.

In Sub Pop, the label was just getting started.

And I knew those guys had a record label.

And they said to me, well, look, you

hear something good at the studio, run it by us, you know?

We're looking for bands to put on our labels.

So the Nirvana thing was a logical one to pass on to them.

And they didn't initially like it that much.

It was too metal.

But the label boss caught a Nirvana gig

and gave them a chance.

The first single, "Love Buzz," was a critical success

and was quickly followed by the album "Bleach."

Kurt himself paid for the cost of "Bleach."

It cost $606 to record.

There's probably no album in the history

of the world that was recorded so cheaply

and ultimately made so much money.

The area that we're standing in, back in the late '80s,

was really a hotbed of the music scene.

There are funny stories about that.

This neighborhood's a little bit dangerous, even still

today sometimes.

But when Kurt first came to Seattle,

he was so afraid he was going to get

mugged that he stayed in his car until the show began.

Kurt Cobain would have to get

used to life in the tour bus.

He was determined to go on tour straight after "Bleach."

On their first trips across America,

Nirvana was so poor that they had

to hope for a big enough audience at night

to be able to pay for the gasoline to the next gig.

The years on the road had begun.

In your room, I'm not older.

In your eyes, I'm not worth it.

Gimme back my alcohol.

Gimme back my alcohol.

Gimme back my alcohol.

Another myth is that people think Nirvana

was an overnight success.

Well, so here was somebody who very much wanted fame.

And so what that meant was put an album out, tour.

He played five tours before "Nevermind" came out.

They played thousands of shows.

They had toured Europe.

They had been everywhere at that point.

So it was hard work that made them famous.

The initial Nirvana shows just weren't that impressive really.

They were OK.

You could tell that there was something going on.

But they obviously needed to work on it

a little bit, which they did.

And so it was very--

usually very crowded in the van and very smelly.

And a lot of, you know, juvenile jokes going around.

And, uh, it was-- it was a good time

but-- but-- but I think pretty trying for everybody,

and I think-- I think especially for Kurt.

I mean, he suffered from a lot of health issues.

And I think that it was really, really trying for him.

And quite possibly those early years,

you know, may have forced him into drug use

so-- just because of his health issues.

Kurt Cobain shaped every aspect of the band

and its performances.

Nothing was left to chance.

He came into the-- came into the loft.

And I had this white backdrop paper set up.

And said, oh, God, that's just a boring white backdrop.

I'm like, well, I don't know.

What should we do?

He's like, well, let's draw something on it

or paint something on it.

I look around, and there happened

to be can of black spray paint.

So I was like, here, you knock yourself out.

And that's what he came up with.

And it is kind of a symbolic, and Chad was kind of always

posed under the minus symbol there.

On the way to the top, Nirvana replaced drummer

Chad Channing with Dave Grohl.

And Kurt split up with his longstanding supporter,

Tracy Marander.

What he needed now, he said, was someone

he could talk to about art.

The dead weight of the past had to be

jettisoned, both privately and professionally.

That was the change from the first demo

into "Bleach," and then continuing

from the "Bleach" album into the "Nevermind" record,

is the songs got a little simpler,

and the melodies got more complex.

Seattle, the 17th of April, 1991.

In a club called OK Hotel, Nirvana tried out a new song,

"Smells like Teen Spirit."

It's not enough to save you.

Oh, no, I'm not afraid of you.

Hello, hello, hello, how low?

Hello, hello--

The song was destined to be a worldwide hit.

The music press in Britain called Nirvana

the leading band of a movement that had

been given the name "grunge."

I'm a liar, and I'm famous.

Here we are now.

Entertain us.

The anti attitude of an ignored

and lost American youth.

Yeah!

Hey.

Yay.

The "Nevermind" album sold millions.

And "Smells Like Teen Spirit" became the anthem

of a whole generation.

Nirvana were now jetting around the world.

But their star status robbed them

of some of their credibility.

The outsiders were being swallowed up by the mainstream.

"I kind of feel like a dork writing about myself

like this as if I were an American pop rock

icon demigod or a self-confessed product

of corporate-packaged rebellion.

But I've heard so many pathetic, second-rate Freudian

evaluations from interviews from my childhood

up until the present state of my personality

and how I'm a notoriously fucked up heroin addict,

alcoholic, self-destructive, yet overtly sensitive,

frail, fragile, soft-spoken, narcoleptic, neurotic little

piss and who at any minute is going to OD, jump off a roof,

wig out, blow my head off, or all three at once.

Oh, please, God.

I can't handle the success!"

Here we are now.

Entertain us.

I feel stupid and contagious.

He desperately wanted to be famous.

But once he became famous, he found that there were people

counting on him to do things.

And Kurt did not respond well to that.

Nirvana.

The winner is Nirvana, "Smells Like Teen Spirit."

I'd like to thank my family and our record label

and our true fans.

Yeah, I think Kurt Cobain had troubles because

of the intense pressure on him from the media

and fans and the industry.

You know, he was an overnight sensation.

He didn't want to be the spokesperson

for a generation, I think.

He didn't like all that attention.

That's-- last time I saw him, actually, was at a Breeders

concert in Olympia.

And I was sitting in the back.

And all of a sudden, here comes this guy that sat next to me.

And we looked at each other, and it was Kurt.

You know, he's like, Dave?

I'm like, Kurt?

And we hugged and shit and started talking.

And he had on, like, some goofy half-pulled-down shit.

You know, it was hard to recognize him.

And these two girls walked up and said,

aren't you Kurt Cobain?

And he's like, Dave, I gotta go.

And he split.

A public life which the star also used as a means

to an end.

I'd like all of you people in this room

to know that Courtney Love, the lead singer

of the sensational pop group Hole

is the best fuck in the world.

A stressed-out Kurt Cobain's provocative appearance

in a TV show.

He got to know Courtney Love, the singer with the rock

band Hole, on his way up.

The two had star status in common,

as well as drugs and a background

of dysfunctional families.

At their first meeting, Courtney is supposed

to have punched Kurt in the stomach,

her way of showing affection.

They became the Sid and Nancy of the media society.

Their breakdowns in excesses were

meat and drink to the popular press, which both loved

them and hounded them.

They married in Hawaii in 1992.

Two characters in a play,

where one is the villain one day, and the other is the hero.

And the next day, it switches.

It at times was combative.

But at other times, it was not combative.

But you add these other external elements.

You add fame.

You add money.

You add drugs into that picture.

And you add not just fame but huge fame.

And it's a very tumultuous mix.

In 1992, their daughter, Frances Bean,

was born.

Kurt loved his child more than anything else.

A journalist alleged that Courtney Love had taken

drugs during her pregnancy.

This led to a long drawn-out and grueling

battle with the authorities about custody of the child.

Life in the fast lane took its toll.

But Kurt Cobain also exploited the image

of the vulnerable artist.

This was from the Reading Festival

in 1992, the second time they played that.

And this was the show where Kurt was wheeled

out in a wheelchair, pretending that, you know,

that he was sick.

And there were rumors going around

that because of this drug addiction

he wouldn't be able to play the show.

And it was just absolute epic.

Again and again, Kurt Cobain withdrew completely,

taking refuge in painting and in drugs.

For a time, he refused either to make another record

or to go on tour.

But finally, a new album did appear, "In Utero."

It was on the following tour that Cobain's health gave out.

A concert in Munich was cut short.

It was destined to be his last.

This here's a picture

I was talking about of Kurt alone onstage from behind,

and this is from 1992.

And yeah, you just see that body language

there, I mean, his curvature of the spine and just this sense

of being up there all alone, you know, just really

alone in the world at that point,

because they were getting so big.

An isolation that was largely due to drugs.

Kurt didn't truly become

a drug addict until after "Nevermind" was even released.

He certainly had experimented with opiates.

And they come up in some of the lyrics on that album.

There's no denying that.

But even Kurt in his diaries talks

about how drugs were messed up.

What I saw as being a guy who is basically

the same age-- 18 or 19 or 20 years old--

he didn't even drink that much.

He hardly ever drank.

I never really saw him use a lot of drugs.

That was just not-- I mean, a lot of us did, not Kurt.

He liked to be in control most of the time.

I didn't see this person who passed out at parties

or got sick.

That's not who I knew in 1986, 1987, through 1989.

To devote himself undisturbed to drugs,

Kurt Cobain moved into cheap motels

on the outskirts of Seattle.

He was in those sleazy motels

for part of that time.

He was trying to escape.

Heroin's effect is such that somebody is high,

they don't want to do anything.

They want to get off the couch.

Kurt was not very productive during this drug periods.

At the height of his addiction,

Kurt Cobain was spending hundreds of thousands

of dollars a year on drugs or rehab.

Well, there were so many turning points.

In the life of somebody that's an addict,

it's 1,000 slow suicides.

With Kurt, though, clearly the intervention

that happened in Seattle in late March of 1994, before Kurt

went to Los Angeles, he went and bought a shotgun

and hid it in his house.

And then he agreed to go to rehab.

Los Angeles.

While Kurt Cobain was in a rehab clinic,

Courtney Love was trying to get clean in the luxury

Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills.

After a few days, Kurt Cobain abandoned rehab.

I remember running into him about two weeks

before he passed away.

And he actually gave me his phone

number, his new phone number.

He was like, oh, give me-- give me a call.

I want to hang out with you.

It's like, I don't think he had a lot of friends at that point,

because, well, he was a drug addict.

And drug addicts just hang out with other drug addicts

or-- you know, in the house watching TV.

"I feel compelled to say

fuck you, fuck you, to those of you who have absolutely

no regard for me as a person.

You have raped me harder than you'll ever know.

So again, I say fuck you.

Although this phrase has totally lost its meaning, fuck you!

Fuck you!"

I don't know.

What would you think?

I don't have anything to say about it, really.

It's-- I wasn't very happy about it.

I felt like the world was just that much less exciting place

to be now all of a sudden.

And-- and I also felt like there were several times when

I wanted to call or reconnect with him and thought,

I should give him a phone.

And I never did.

And I instantly just knew that I'd be regretting

that for the rest of my life.

I was at home.

And I remember holding my-- I had my five-month-old daughter.

And it came over the news, right?

And I just had just chills, you know?

And I set my daughter down.

I was like, whoa.

And then the phone rang.

And that was "Entertainment Weekly" saying, oh, Kurt died.

We need photos.

I'm like, you're kidding.

And I thought, oh, that bastard, like, you know, drug overdose.

Just it pissed me off.

My mom called me and said, you've

been listening to the radio or watching the news?

And I'm like, no.

And she goes, well, you better sit down.

And she goes, yeah, Kurt shot himself.

And I'm like, is he dead?

I was just, like, in shock.

And she's like, yeah, he's dead.

Fuck, I couldn't believe it.

When they called us, first, she says-- she says she got it.

And she called us and said, well, he done it.

And I asked Iris, the one who was on the phone,

and I said, done what?

And she said, he committed suicide.

And, uh, it shook her up to be ill.

This was a public park.

Kurt did occasionally come over to this bench.

Courtney did say after his death that she scattered some

of his ashes over here and also some

in the house under some trees.

So there is a public memorial in Seattle to Kurt.

There's no official statue.

There's no anything.

No park named after him.

This park has become the unofficial kind of memorial

to Kurt Cobain.

For me, it's a very sad place as well,

to imagine that-- to imagine that there was a point where he

was so distraught living in this beautiful house with all

the talent he had, and yet he wanted to die.

And I have empathy for it, but it's also very sad

to think that that's the choice that he made

and that he felt that hopeless in his life.

His house was somewhere over here?

- That's his house. - Oh, this?

Oh.

He died in a green house that was

in the back of the property, which has been plowed down.

I feel like that's the view that MTV would put on the news,

like, right here, just kind of that piece.

Aspiring cameramen went up the street behind,

climbed on a ladder, and then shot down on his house.

So that's also the picture that everyone remembers.

And sadly, there was a picture of Kurt dead lying

in the green house that a photographer shot from a ladder

in the back there.

So did you know him?

I did, yeah.

Cool.

I'm sorry.

This is the last-- this is the last song of the evening.

What else should I be?

All apologies.

What else should I say?

Everyone is gay.

What else should I write?

I don't have the right.

What else should I be?

It would be nice to eventually start playing acoustic guitars

and be thought of as a singer and a songwriter

rather than a grunge rocker, you know,

because then I might be able to take advantage of that

when I'm older and sit down on a chair

and play acoustic guitar like-- like Johnny Cash or something,

you know?

And it won't be a big joke.

Who knows?