| Kurt Cobain |
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The son of a mechanic and a waitress, Kurt Cobain grew up like most children of working-class people. The divorce of his parents when he was ten apparently provided the first major blow to his happiness. Some release from his tedium was achieved through music, and throughout high school Kurt put together a series of different young bands; but only the encounter with Krist Novoselic, who shared his enthusiasm for punk, changed forever his music perception and opened the way to the “Nirvana”
Kurt and Krist worked through a variety of band names and personnel between '85 and '86 before settling on a trio formation with drummer Chad Channing at the end of 1986; by 1987 they were the “Nirvana”. Fueled by the sounds of 70s heavyweights like Black Sabbath, punk acts like The Sex Pistols and contemporaries such as The Melvins and Mudhoney, Nirvana crafted their own mixture of punk, metal and folk-rock and established itself as part of the Seattle grunge scene.
The first album release was “Bleach” which caused a fair amount of buzz on the college-radio "indie" scene, and resulted in a deal with the a corporate label a year later. The band subsequently began recording its first major label album “Nevermind”.
Initially, the label, for “Nevermind” was hoping to sell 250,000 copies, which was the same level the band had achieved with other works. However, the album's first single "Smells Like Teen Spirit" quickly gained momentum, thanks in part to significant airplay of the song's music video on MTV. As it toured Europe during late 1991, the band found that its shows were followed by a huge fan base and that, "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was almost omnipresent on radio and music television. By the end of 1991, the album, was selling 400,000 copies a week in the US alone. In January 1992, the album displaced Michael Jackson's “Dangerous” at number one on the Billboard album charts, and also topped the charts in numerous other countries. The album would eventually sell over seven million copies in the United States.
In September 1993 the band released the album “Utero” which debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 album. That October, Nirvana embarked on its first tour of the United States in two years. For the tour, the band added Pat Smear of the punk rock band Germs as a second guitarist.
In this midst the band success, Kurt Cobain married Hole front woman Courtney Love; apparently reasoning that he would feel better if he was attached to someone even more screwed-up than himself. In any event, this proved not to be true: emotional, physical and substance abuse problems continued to worsen, and he found it increasingly difficult to deal with the demands of his fame.
By the end of 1993 Cobain's drug addiction had begun to overwhelm the rest of his life. In early 1994, the band embarked on a European tour. In Rome, on the morning of March 4, Cobain's wife, found Cobain unconscious in their hotel room and he was rushed to the hospital. A doctor from the hospital told a press conference that Cobain had reacted to a combination of prescription Rohypnol and alcohol. The rest of the tour was canceled.
An intervention was organized, and Cobain was convinced to admit himself into drug rehabilitation. After less than a week in rehabilitation, Cobain climbed over the wall of the facility and took a plane back to Seattle. On Friday April 8th Cobain's body was found in his home, he had committed suicide, but still doubts are surrounding his sudden death.
The below documentary gives an inside view of the life and mystery surrounding the Kurt Cobain’s death.
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