April 1994: The sad and lonely funeral of Kurt Cobain and the end of Nirvana.

Loading...

Kurt Cobain's sad ending and Nirvana's ending.

27 years after the death of Kurt Cobain: how were the last after his tragic end

The Nirvana leader committed suicide on April 5, 1994. His body was found, three days later, at his home in Seattle.

About 4,000 followers of Kurt Cobain, who committed suicide last week at his home in Seattle (USA), attended a vigil organized on Sunday night to dismiss a character who will fall into rock mythology as a figure torn and obsessed with death. During the act, a recording was heard in which Courtney Love, the singer's widow, read some passages of the note that Cobain left before committing suicide. "I am a very erratic and temperamental person, and I no longer feel passion," said the note from the 27-year-old guitarist and writer.

Love also asked attendees, mostly young men with tousled hair, plaid shirts, and ripped jeans, to call Cobain a jerk to show their love, and attendees responded by crying out the insult in tears. Anger and pain, constant in Cobain's life, were the last goodbye. "I have not felt the emotion in many years. I have felt guilty for many years," the note said. "Sometimes I felt like I should have an alarm clock pushing me onto the stage. The fact is, I can't fool any of you. The worst crime is hiding it." Cobain also quoted in his farewell letter the verse from a song by Canadian musician Neil Young: "It is better to burn out than to disappear little by little." Love asked the public not to believe those words, and she also said that she skipped some paragraphs of the letter, because they were addressed to her and "you don't give a shit." The record house of Nirvana and the representative of Cobain maintained absolute silence yesterday on other contents of the note and the funeral, of which all the details are unknown.

"I feel just like you," Love said in the speech, which had been taped a few hours after Cobain's body was found at his home with a shotgun blast to the head. "I don't know how it happened. I knew it was going to happen, but it could have been in my 40s." On more than one occasion, the press had covered domestic disputes over the singer's marriage, and Kurt Cobain was known to be fond of collecting firearms at his home.

Courtney Love, who will present her band's new album Hole today, was at a private funeral on Sunday night in which Chris Novoselic, co-founder of Nirvana with Cobain, said that "no band is special and no musician should be treated as the royalty". "Music critics and observers agree that Nirvana has gone down in history, as the other two members of the group are not going to look for a substitute. Cobain's body was not found at the funeral.

Love has claimed that she was not present at her home, a luxurious mansion in Seattle, when Cobain committed suicide. In January of this year, this former topless dancer turned rock singer had told Rolling Stone magazine: "There is no trace in my life that indicates that I have dated guys who are not losers; that is my style." Kurt Cobain, who was addicted to heroin, also made an obsessive effort to get rid of his star image, and the fact that he was becoming a millionaire by exploiting the frustrations of a generation of young people was something that depressed and did grace alike.

In apparent reference to the long battle he was fighting against his heroin addiction, Cobain wrote that he needed to be "somewhat dazed, numb, and then regain the enthusiasm he had as a child." He also referred to the feeling of "nausea and burning in the stomach" that he had had for years. Love said he had long feared Cobain would attempt suicide, but regretted following the advice of those who recommended that he treat Cobain "with rough love," a therapy that forces addicts to face their problems alone. "We should all have let him keep that stun, we should have let him continue with what made him feel better ... instead of trying to skin it," Love said.

At the end of the Seattle funeral, Nirvana Serve's song to servants was heard through a giant loudspeaker, when a jet of water shot into the center of the fountain in the plaza.

Loading...