Married and Buried: Punk As A Four-Letter Word, Part One

Posted in Music, Retrovirus, We Miss The Nineties |

Like many, I was affected enough by Kurt Cobain’s suicide to write about it. But, to be honest, I was never really a Nirvana fan. Most of the people I knew who liked Nirvana were the kinds of guys who would make sexist comments to my face or cut class to play volleyball with their frat brothers. Nirvana’s startling, sudden ascendancy to being The Band That Mattered rubbed me the wrong way.

When I heard Nirvana hired Pat Smear as a touring guitarist, however, I was impressed. And after I saw Dave Markey’s 1991: The Year Punk Broke, I began to warm up towards them a bit more, watching their MTV Unplugged special and thinking they weren’t half bad. Even with my limited knowledge, I was savvy enough to realize they were much cooler than Stone Temple Pilots. After all, on the cover of Rolling Stone, Kurt Cobain wore a DIY Flipper t-shirt, a band I remembered fondly from the 1981 Let Them Eat Jellybeans compilation.

Still, I was distrustful. Cobain seemed so surly and humorless all the time. Was his punk rock cred just a guise? Before I had a chance to figure it out, he was dead.

The news of his death broke on Friday, April 8, 1994. I remember feeling stunned that someone who’d been so famous and well-loved was screwed up enough to take his own life. (I was fairly naïve about celebrity at the time.) The continuing media coverage of Cobain’s death was disgusting. MTV rapidly stitched together a montage of video clips to pay “tribute” to the band that had boosted their sagging credibility. Newsweek used Cobain’s photo in a suicide cover story. Soon “Smells Like Dead Cobain” t-shirts started popping up.

Ironically, it was only after Cobain’s death that I was able to give Nirvana’s music a chance. The more I listened to them, the more I was irritated with mainstream culture for co-opting what was obviously a good band; I was equally irritated with myself for avoiding their music for so long.

Courtney Love in better times.

I wasn’t ambivalent about Courtney Love’s band, Hole. I thought Live Through This was smashing. I perceived Love’s negative press as a witch-hunt and although I witnessed much of her media coverage, I wasn’t convinced that she was evil.

Through my fanzine, I got a press pass to interview Veruca Salt, who was opening for Hole at their New Orleans show. After I finished the interview, mayhem ensued: Love was distraught, demanding that everyone leave the backstage area. People seemed genuinely scared. What followed was the biggest train wreck of a show I would ever see.

Love was a disaster: makeup smeared, clothes disheveled, hair askew, ranting about possibly being pregnant with Trent Reznor’s baby. It was horrific. I can’t recall if the audience heckled her, stood in stunned silence, or simply left. I was so bothered that I wrote an “Open Letter To Courtney Love” for the next issue of the zine. Essentially, I was torn: anyone whose husband killed himself, leaving behind a small child, had an obvious right to be distraught and ranting. But there was an undeniable histrionic aura, like an attention-starved teenager throwing a fit.

Within a year, she and daughter Frances were living in New Orleans while author Poppy Z. Brite was writing Love’s biography. One day, my friend Laura, who carried my zine in her indie record shop, called me. Courtney Love had been to the shop, read my “Open Letter,” and demanded to speak with me, leaving a note for me to read. I asked Laura to tell me what the note contained, my heart pounding. The note seemed like something your friend would put in your high school locker, not like something Courtney Love would pen after reading a less-than-flattering show review. Courtney thanked me for the letter, telling me it was “super nice,” which I thought was weird. I guess she seized upon the sympathetic parts and ignored everything else.

A few days later, I attended the Cheap Trick show with my zine partner. Suddenly, Courtney Love and the rest of Hole walked by. We approached her and she immediately invited us backstage with her to meet Cheap Trick.

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