I can still tell you where I was sitting and who I was on the phone with when I heard Kurt Loder say it.
All I remember is the BFD everyone was making about it. It didn’t really register with me as I didn’t know their music.
Good god, I honestly don’t remember. I’m early GenX - late teens in the '90s - but wasn’t at all into grunge. I’d have been more affected if it had been Ani DiFranco or one of the Indigo Girls, but music wasn’t that important to me then.
Condolences to all my cohorts who did grieve, though.
having spent the year 1992 at a midwestern state university (being a foreigner), all the frat houses had their speakers in their windows while playing basketball in the yard and that meant healthy doses of:
- nirvana (nevermind)
- PJ (ten)
- Metallica (black album)
- RHCP (Sex magik…)
- Soundgarden
- Black Crows (shake your moneymaker)
… so it was part of my life’s soundtrack … having said that, neither of those bands do a lot for me today as I think all of their best work is overplayed (I do have some of those disks on my cel, tho) …
I took notice, was not really surprised (he had episodes shortly before, just like Ami Winehouse did) … and thought "Shirley, media-hell will break lose and its gonna be Kurt 24/7 for the next week …
That was exactly what I liked the most in music ca. 1992. Just add in the Smashing Pumpkins, Pavement, Faith No More, the Screaming Trees, Soul Asylum, the Jayhawks and Rage Against The Machine. There was a lot of good music in the early 90s.
I don’t even remember what year it was when I first heard the news.
didn’t we all? …
but that - to a certain extent - makes this musik today a bit “emotionally unaccessable” for me, as I dont feel that teenage-angst anymore 
so, it’s not just any music, but music with a certain significance - but that significance is no longer part of me … hard to discribe
Jarrett / Garbarek / Mehldau / Chet Baker / Nils Petter Molvaer are my poisons of choice, nowadays
most likely the year he died…
“Teenage angst has paid of well, now I’m bored and old”. … The point is, I wasn’t a teenager anymore (born in 1968), but I was in the same age bracket as all those bands and artists and the music related to me like no contemporary music before.
I was 25, at my first post-college place of employment, having moved to Seattle to start my career. I had been a huge fan of Bleach and loved Nevermind, but was at that point kind of burnt out on Nirvana and was listening to a lot of back catalog 4AD artists and Liz Phair and things like that. But I was still pretty shocked by the news.
At the time, I lived a couple blocks from the fountain at the Seattle Center where fans gathered for a makeshift vigil. I dropped by for a while but generally felt a little out of place and eventually wandered back to my apartment. I recall things got a little ugly later when the cops came in to force people to leave.
I think a couple years earlier I might have stayed and participated, but my thought was to get some sleep as I had an early start at work the next day. I felt a real divide between me and the kids there although I was barely not one of them. I guess worrying about rent and bills will do that to you.
This one’s a little morbid.
There had been news reports of Cobain having an overdose in March 1994. A group of us were discussing it at work and I said that it sounded to me like it had been a half-hearted suicide attempt rather than the accident it was being reported as.
A month later I went in to work and a co-worker told me I had apparently been right and that Cobain had actually committed suicide.
seems we are m/l the same age bracket @EinsteinsHund and @Pork_Rind … and I had the same feeling in 94 …
I had outgrown them … I also started to work (which prob. fostered the cesure/shift you mention compared to a student’s lifestyle) and I also got the feeling the Cobain “got old and did the same stupid things all other rockstars did” …to a certain extent turned into rock establishment with his scandals which of course dragged him into all those tabloids and women’s magazines
Our college quiz bowl team had traveled to a tournament at Maryland. Most of us were waiting for our plane at a BWI terminal, but one of my teammates had met up with a high school friend of his who went to school somewhere around there. He came back and told us. I asked him if he wasn’t confusing it with the earlier reports @Little_Nemo mentioned above; he said he wasn’t. (He wasn’t.)
I was out of high school and in the Army when the band broke. That puts them a little out of my wheelhouse. I remember sitting in a rock bar outside of Fort Hood. The music was predominantly hair metal and hard rock. In between sets of the band they played Teen Spirit. It was the first time I heard the song. I immediately recognized things had changed. It’s the only time in my life I got struck by a song like that.
And yet I have no memory of hearing he died. I remember being told by my parents that Elvis died. A few years later they told me John Lennon died. I remember very clearly when I found out Stevie Ray Vaughan died. He meant more to me than just about anyone. Zero memory about Cobain.
Francis Cobain posted today about her father, who she never really got to know.
It barely registered for me. I was aware of their music but didn’t listen to it.
I was 31. Nevermind was still among the dozen or so CDs in my car. His death wasn’t a shock or anything; just another pop sacrifice to the 27 club. By 1994, such deaths were almost a cliche.
As I was not a fan of his music, his death did not affect me a jot. However, I do remember thinking that committing suicide at the peak of his success was a terrible waste when so many people would never reach such heights yet deserve to.
Mental health issues were not something I was very conscious of at the time. Though a small part of me will always find situations like his maddening.
i heard it when MTV stopped what they were doing at about 6 am PST …I didn’t think much of nirvana since I’m more of a new wave/punk with a bit of metal-type and thought it all was a bit much
I was at work when the news came on the radio.
I was a little surprised when a (male) co-worker started crying.
mmm