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Seattle, Washington, in the early 90s the music capital of the world.
# With the lights out its less dangerous
Home to grunge, teen spirit and the kings of alternative rock, Nirvana.
# I feel stupid and contagious
# Here we are now
# Entertain us
# A mulatto
The band that brought the sound of the American underground
to a mass audience.
The moment they took the stage it was like hysteria, like Beatlemania.
People crying and screaming and...
The hair at the back of my neck went up.
In Kurt Cobain, Nirvana had an artist of rare power
who gave a voice to a generation.
Every time he touched the guitar it was beautiful.
Every single time.
He was amazing. He really had something that I've never seen in anyone else.
Nirvana's success had put Seattle on the map.
Now, even the band that had laid the foundations of alternative rock
descended on the city,
R.E.M.
Hi, this is Mike Milles of REM and you're listening to KC...
# That's me in the corner
# That's me in the spotlight losing my religion
When REM and Nirvana came together
it would lead to the great might-have-beens of rock history.
I said to Kurt, "You wanna play with us?" He was, "Man! I'd like nothing more."
All I could think about was what a freaking tour that would be
to have us and them on the same stage, on the same night.
But the chances of the two biggest rock bands on the planet
sharing a stage was slim,
as Kurt Cobain plunged into a spiral of depression and drug-addiction
that no one could save him from.
I created a project that he had to flight to Georgia to work with me on,
in an attempt to pull him out of headspace that he was in in Seattle,
in his house all alone, but it didn't work.
Sadly.
This is the story of the age of alternative rock,
when a handful of bands restored
authenticity, meaning and passion to the music.
And the lasting legacy of the artist who continues to cast a powerful shadow
over the whole of rock.
Kurt Cobain is the last great rock star,
and I think that's one reason there still remains so much fascination with him.
An electrician arrived at Kurt Cobain's luxurious home early in the morning.
... we need to notify the family.
Apparently it was a suicide at the age of 27.
In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan's presidency
served up an American dream of growth and prosperity
for some.
It's morning again in America.
Today more men and women will go to work
than ever before in our country's history.
Now you have everything you wanted.
Including you?
Unless you voted for Reagan,
you didn't have a great time under Reagan.
It's morning in America for people who contributed to that campaign,
who shared those ideals.
It wasn't morning in America for anyone else.
It was like the sun had just set.
# It's the end of the world as we know it
# and I feel fine
There was an immense frustration in the country that was palpable
and we certainly shared it as political activists, as people who...
felt like the very idea of America was being pulled out from under us.
# The other night I dreamt of knives,
# continental drift divide. Mountains sit in a line
# Leonard Bernstein...
Reaganomics delivered shock treatment to the American economy,
sweeping aside the idealism values of the 1960s.
Those unable or unwilling to conform were in for a rough ride.
We got no prospects,
you know, what are you gonna do, work at McDonalds? Deliver papers?
You feel like not only are you in a minority
but you feel like you're in a minority nobody gives a shit about.
# Well a person can work up a mean mean thirst
# After a hard day of nothin' much at all
In the depressed logging town of Aberdeen in Washington St.,
Kurt Cobain was part of that minority.
A high-school dropout from a broken home,
Kurt entered a downsize world of dead end jobs in 1985.
He ended up getting a job back at the high school
that he had dropped out of. He was the janitor.
So you can imagine the shame that he must have felt of
coming in the halls and seeing kids that were his classmates just months before,
and they're going off to college and what he's doing is mopping the floor.
Kurt's experience was not unique.
He was part of "Generation X", children who felt alienated
and excluded from conventional society,
who would never enjoy the prospects
their baby-boomer parents had taken for granted.
Kurt would find a soulmate in Aberdeen,
who shared a similar background and outlook,
Krist Novoselic.
A lot of it had to do with our personal situations, family things and
maybe ideals and promises broken.
It boiled down to alienation and recognising
we'd look at the mainstream culture
and see that it didn't have a lot to offer us.
The real lives and emotions of America's alienated youth
weren't reflected in the studio polished rock
that filled mainstream radio and MTV.
# But what I need to make me tight are
# Girls, Girls, Girls
# Long legs and burgundy lips
I was not getting what I needed from Ted Nugent.
I was a young guy going to a school I hated,
like a lot of young men, you hate the school, the teachers,
you want to burn the place to the ground,
and you want something or someone to represent that for you.
Van Halen sang about girls... Fine!
But there wasn't the "white riot, I wanna riot" thing happening.
And there was no sense of dislocation in that music,
where I... I'm out. I hate all of y'all.
Henry Rollins' search for an alternative would lead him to join a band
whose fearsome reputation would thrill and inspire
Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic,
Black Flag.
I got a six-pack, and nothing to do.
I actually went to see Black Flag play in Walla Walla, Washington, in 1984.
And they had this idea that they were gonna tour the hinterlands
and bring the message to the people.
And it was amazing.
# Thirty-five dollars and a six pack to my name
# Six-pack!
# Spent the rest on beer so who's to blame
# Six-pack!
Black Flag played an adrenaline charged brand of punk known as 'hard core',
a sound that captured the frustration and rage experienced by many
growing up in Reagan's America.
# I got a six pack in me alright!
It was this post-punk, letting out that angst,
and just that very honest fury of youth
and all that confusion and pain into this very short bursts of music.
# Now I got a six so I'll never run out
# Six pack!
Some people are gonna listen to Black Flag and they're gonna love it,
and some people... it's gonna scare them.
Black Flag earned the reputation of staging shows
which frequently descended into violence.
# Six pack!
What do they know about partying?
Or anything else?
He runs this place.
You'd set up to play in some town and then here comes the mayor,
and a news team, and a reverend.
And here comes the Christians protesting and lighting candles,
going like, "Oh my God! No! Help our children!"
# I don't care what's inside
# We're not gonna kill you!
We're like four starving vegetarians in a van,
so they're ready for this fire-breathing beast,
and we're like, "Hi, we're Black Flag. We hate everyone"
It's all right ma'm. They've gone.
# Gimme, gimme, gimme
# I need some more
Finding somewhere to play was a challenge for the bands
on the growing alternative scene.
Unable to fill cavernous arenas and ballrooms,
they had to create their own improvised circuit.
What Black Flag had to do was basically
blaze their own trail, and they cobbled together
this kind of underground railroad of indie rock.
All across America, a whole generation of alternative rock bands
from Black Flag to R.E.M
came of age in venues as eclectic as the bands themselves.
There was a small circuit of clubs, pizza parlors and gay bars
and tiny places around the country that would open their doors
and have really shitty sound systems and let these bands play.
There were times when Black Flag would play on a Friday and R.E.M. on a Saturday
and the next week we'd play the Friday and they'd play the Saturday.
We were chasing each other for years.
And pretty soon there was a circuit.
And when there's a circuit there's a scene.
And when there's a scene there's a community.
And when there's a community then you've got something really interesting.
That community united a wide variety of bands
who shared the same independent spirit and circumstances,
and a fierce determination to make it on their own terms.
Touring bands in a van get by. And what do you get in return?
300 hundred sweaty, adoring fans a night,
and your freedom, your musical freedom.
And maybe you missed some meals
or the cops came and shut your show down,
but man, you weren't flipping burgers, and you weren't filling slurpies.
And there was something to be said for that.
Life on the road was an essential rite of passage for all alternative rock bands.
But for R.E.M, a band that had formed in 1980,
in the tiny university town of Athens, Georgia,
it would also prove to be a springboard to far greater success.
And it began with a song inspired by a cold war radio station,
Radio Free Europe calls on Presov.
# Calling all in transit, calling all in transit
# Radio free Europe, radio...
'Radio Free Europe' instantly laid out the R.E.M. blueprint.
Peter Buck chiming guitar chords,
Mike Mills and Bill Berry's energetic rhythm section,
but it would be Michael Stipe's enigmatic vocals and performances
that became the band's early trademark.
# That this isn't country at all
I was just an incredibly shy person and not terribly confident.
I had terrible acne and used my hair to cover my face a lot.
I mumbled when I talked and mumbled when I sang.
So all that combined into what I guess came across as some modicum of charisma.
And people were very taken by it.
# Calling all in transit, calling all in transit
# Radio free Europe, radio...
Michael Stipe's mystique helped make 'Radio Free Europe' a critical hit,
as the new breed of bands began to receive airplay
on another alternative network,
'Call It Radio'.
# Read about your band in some local page
# Didn't mention your name, didn't mention your name
It was that separate world of what is now called alternative rock,
which at the time was only called college rock
because the only place you heard it on the radio was on college stations,
it's the classic Replacements' song 'Left of the Dial'.
# ...in a long, long while
# I'll try to find you
# Left of the dial
It's a song about where you tuned manually,
you turned the little knob to the left of the dial,
to the 88.9s and the 90.1s,
all the stuff that was below the commercial band.
You had to look for it,
and people who really wanted something more out of music,
who wanted more out of life, something more out of their guitars,
that's where you went.
As more and more people turned to the left of the dial
they discovered that even fast and furious alternative rock bands,
such as Hüsker Dü were, like R.E.M., embracing melody and harmony.
# Going out each day to score
# She was no whore but for me
# Celebrating every day
# The way she thought it should be
# And I don't know what to do
When Hüsker Dü started introducing melody
that introduced a whole new audience of people.
It wasn't kind of the thuggish, thick-necked guys
who just wanted to go to a show and bash into each other.
You started to get people with glasses and girls.
# For what she believed
# And I don't know what to do
# Now that pink has turned to blue
Major labels homed in on Hüsker Dü and bands like The Replacements,
but R.E.M. were the anointed ones of college radio,
and in 1987 they began work on the album
that would launch them into the mainstream,
'Document'.
We never intended to have a commercial sound
because to us that was anathema. Commercial sound equals death.
But we decided to make some records
that were more like what we sounded like live.
And that's a very heavy guitar dominated sound.
The band recruited Scot Litt,
the producer who had previously worked with pop group Katrina and the Waves,
to help them craft a more dynamic sound
that would yield their first top ten hit.
# This one goes out to the one I love
# This one goes out to the one I've left behind
# A simple prop to occupy my time
'The One I Love' was a dark love song based around the arpegio guitar sound
Peter Buck created by plucking rather than strumming the stings.
Peter Buck has the best right hand in the business.
It is the essence of the R.E.M. sound, certainly musically speaking,
because he decided to *** the thrashing,
the full chord whatever thing that everybody else was doing,
'cause that's the easy part.
The hard thing is working with your right hand.
Michael Stipe delivered his most clear and direct vocal yet,
even though the lyrics offered up
a dark and tangled tale of manipulation and deceit.
# Fire!
'The one I love' is a song that I didn't want to put on the record.
I thought it was too mean, and too brutal and...
It was just a mean song.
As it turned out, I think in recording, Scott and the band
recognised that this might actually be
a song that could get played on the radio.
So we turned the voice up a little.
It's a great song, but the thing is, it's a sneaky one.
It's a dagger in the back. It's not a love song, obviously,
for anyone who really takes time to listen to it.
The song was punctuated by dramatic cries of anguish.
# Fire!
Producer Scott Litt emphasized the drama of the vocal
by adding a harmony from drummer Bill Berry.
See? That kind of thing. That's Bill doubled there.
Two of his voices on one track.
That's how we would thicken things up.
And then the great ending.
R.E.M.'s success showed that alternative rock
was becoming a big business.
And it would change the lives
of the bands that had eked out a humble living on the road
just a few years before.
I remember sitting with Michael Stipe in his home in Athens, Georgia,
in his kitchen. He puts the phone down.
And he said, "What does a gold record mean?"
And we had to call the office back and go, "What does that mean?"
He goes, "It's half a million!"
"You sold half a million records?" And I was there with Stipe
when that came over the wire.
And it was so cool that neither of us knew.
And that was probably the last time he didn't know, forever.
In Aberdeen,
gold records were distant dreams for Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic,
but by 1988 they had the makings of a band,
with Kurt on guitar and vocals,
Krist on base and Chad Channing on drums.
Here we have your typical American hard rock band
sitting up for a day's practice.
This goes into your guitar.
I found in Cobain's journals at one point
a list of names he was considering, and they included things like
Poo Poo Box, Spina Bifida, Whisker Biscuit and a few others.
You just have to go back and say, if this band had been named Poo Poo Box,
can you imagine them overtaking the world
and selling 10 million copies of their record?
Kurt finally settled on Nirvana.
But for an aspiring band in Washington State
there was only one place to go, Seattle.
The band drove up in a truck that someone had borrowed
and I remember Novoselic telling me
there was actually a functioning woodstove in the back.
It's like the 'Beverly Hillbillies',
essentially it's what they looked like coming into Seattle.
Seattle's vibrant music scene
had spawned bands like Soundgarden and Alice in Chains
with a dark, intense sound inspired by 70s heavy metal,
and with lyrics full of alienation and self-loathing... grunge.
And it had been unleashed on the wider world by the band Mudhoney
with the song 'Touch me, I'm sick'.
# I'm a creep, yeah, I'm a jerk
# Come on
# Touch me, I'm sick
For the most part I just stood back and let them go at it.
I enjoyed what they were doing.
I thought, "This is really noisy.
"Are you sure you want it to be this noisy, guys?
"You really want the guitars to sound this dirty? Mmm, Ok."
# ...girl - everything I got
'Grunge' means this kind of music that's dripping with bits of garage rock,
and punk and metal and it's just like hard, outrageous and
at the same time, just kind of like living underneath a rock, in a way.
# If you don't come
# You'll die alone
Nirvana channeled the grunge sound on their debut album, 'Bleach',
recorded for just 600$ on indie label 'Sub Pop', by Jack Endino.
But included one song the hinted at Nirvana's crossover potential,
despite Kurt's reservations.
When it came the time to record 'About a girl',
which is the pop song in the record,
Kurt felt like he had to sort of make an excuse for it.
He was a little uneasy about it.
He said, "Bear with me here, Jack.
"I've got this song, it's kind of a pop song.
"I hope the Sub Pop guys like it
"and that they don't think it's too commercial or something."
# I'm standing in your line
# I do, Hope you have the time
# I do, Pick a number too
# I do, Keep a date with you
# I'll take advantage while
# You hang me out to dry
# But I can't see you every night free
Kurt Cobain's concerns about the song
went to the heart of the alternative rock dilemma,
the more popular it became
the more it risked loosing its independence and integrity.
R.E.M. though, showed that there might be a way forward.
They'd grown on their own terms
and Michael Stipe relished the bigger stage,
but it came with a burden of responsibility.
Yeah, I had become the voice of a generation,
of political activism through the Reagan years,
and I was suddenly expected to have all the answers,
and to have encyclopedic, academic knowledge on say, the greenhouse effect.
And I didn't realise what I had done, what I was doing was speaking out
about things I was concerned about as a person.
# I believe in watching you
# I believe in what you do
# I believe in watching you
# I believe in what you do
# I believe in watching you
# I could turn you inside-out
R.E.M.'s 1989 'Green' Tour had been exhilarating but exhausting.
After a decade on the road,
they'd earned the creative freedom to do whatever they wanted.
Even if that meant laying down their guitars.
We had been on tour from April 5th of 1980, the first show that we ever did,
until the end of 1989. We had not stopped touring
or recording and at the end of the Green World Tour,
I think Bill Berry is the one who said, I can't do this,
we need to take a break, and so we took a long break.
Peter was, I think, afraid of becoming a rock icon
so he put down the electric guitar, he was sick of it,
and picked up a mandolin.
R.E.M.'s new sound would be perfectly crystallised in a song
that was to become their defining chart hit.
# Oh, life is bigger
# It's bigger than you
# And you are not me
# The lengths that I will go to
The success of 'Losing my religion' owed much to a striking video
that put Michael Stipe firmly in the spotlight.
# Oh no, I've said too much
# I haven't said enough
# I thought that I heard you laughing
Peter Buck plucked the strings of the mandolin
in the R.E.M. arpegio style,
but he couldn't resist adding a subtle chime of electric guitar.
That's a guitar called a 'Robin', Peter used to call it his 'Robin'.
It's an electric guitar but it's in the octave of the mandolin.
There's the mandolin.
And this doubling guitar doesn't need to strum along really,
so we just... just having downbeats arpegiated.
Scott Litt enhanced the lushness of the sound with a string section.
Violins, violas...
Again the movement in the track.
# I think I thought I saw you try
# That was just a dream
# Try, cry, why try?
The video cemented R.E.M. as MTV favourites,
even though the band hadn't been convinced that the song would be a hit.
Why would anyone be surprised?
Its a 5'30'' song with a mandolin as the lead instrument.
There's no chorus. Why wouldn't that be a hit?
That should be a hit everywhere.
There's R.E.M. before and after 'Loosing my religion',
it was a huge, huge international hit.
And I went from being a fairly well known but fringe pop star
to being a full blown celebrity.
We'd like to especially thank 'College Radio'
for supporting us all these years and putting us here tonight.
And we'd like to thank the fans
from twelve years back all the way to yesterday.
Everybody, thank you so much.
That took some getting used to.
But I actually enjoyed it.
'That's me in the spotlight' pretty much shined the spotlight right on me.
R.E.M.'s success showed Kurt Cobain it was possible to court a big audience
without sacrificing passion and authenticity.
I've always thought about R.E.M as a commercial band in the first place.
They just happen to be a good, passionate commercial band.
And there've always been good, passionate bands in rock 'n roll
throughout the history.
It's just up to fans and people involved in the music industry
to make sure that it doesn't get as stale and as bad
as it has within the last 10 years.
Especially in the Reagan era.
Kurt Cobain was searching for a sound
that could be both commercial and passionate,
and in the spring of 1991, with new drummer Dave Grohl in the band,
Nirvana hit on a musical dynamic
that would send a buzz of excitement through their rehearsals.
What we would do is we would go in to this rehearsal space to write songs,
and the first half an hour of every practice we would just freeformed jam,
just go for it.
Sometimes it was total noise, and sometimes there was a song there.
But so what we would do is we would see how quiet we could get
and to see how loud we could go.
There's that whole dynamic of loud-quiet, loud-quiet.
Maybe that's what you get when you combine heavy riff rock with pop music,
and then you have a song that actually has a big hook chorus
and you have a heavy loud rock band that just really pushes it forward.
# Taken time is
# All but true
# You're the reason
# I feel pain
# Feels so good to
# Feel again
It was a sound that Kurt Cobain had always dreamed of,
noise and melody, hard guitars and harmonies,
and it first discovered it in the music of alternative rock's unsung heroes.
Kurt had always talked about what would happen if you
started a band that melted Black Sabbath and The Beatles.
So, all along he was just thinking about aggression and tunefulness.
And that was The Pixies.
# Gouge away
# You can gouge away
# Stay all day
The Pixies had formed in Boston in 1985 and begun crafting a minimal sound
based around the simple dynamic of quiet-loud.
Quiet in the verse, loud in the chorus.
Or the other way around. 'Gouge Away' the chorus is....
# Gouge away
# You can gouge away
# Stay all day
# If you want to
And then... the verse is...
# ... aggravation
# Some sacred questions
# You stroke my locks
The verse is up and then...
# Gouge away
# You can gouge away
What The Pixies did was take soft and loud
and do all sort of interesting things in that,
so their guitars kind of veer off. They're not just going in a straight line.
The Pixies unique sound
owed much the band's raw, untrained musical imagination,
and bassist Kim Deal's desire to avoid the usual rock clichés.
A lot of it is our limitations, like when the end of the song's coming,
I don't know we've ever gone.
I don't think that... Honestly...
This is one of five maybe- on the hand,
that I have done this in my life, right there.
I think I did pretty good.
It felt good.
The Pixies minimal approach
was summed up on a classic song of surreal confusion.
# With your feet in the air...
'Where is my mind'
# Try this trick and spin it, yeah
# Your head will collapse
# But there's nothing in it
# And you'll ask yourself
# Where is my mind
Kim Deal helped propel the song with a simple base line
resisting the urge to overelaborate.
But you can't believe how some people cannot do that,
and will not do that.
Especially real base players.
I'm looking at you.
What they'll do is sort of go...
Because there's this little drum thing that happens,
or maybe it's a guitar thing.
And they want to help push every little moment,
they want to be involved.
They won't just pedal through something.
The Pixies provided the final ingredient Kurt Cobain had been looking for.
Nirvana had arrived at a sound that blended the fury of grunge
with a new feel for melody and the mass commercial appeal of R.E.M.
And in April, 1991,
Nirvana performed a raw version of a new song
that would draw all those elements together
to become alternative rock's defining anthem.
This song is called 'Smells like teen spirit'.
The band built up the drama and tension in the song
by using the Pixies' quiet-loud trademark.
What happened was that we played that riff over and over again,
and then Dave or I would stop.
"Just slow this down. Like the moment you slow this down
you have a kind of a dynamic." And once we did that, it made sense.
# Come out and play
# Make up the rules
# I know I hope
# To die the truth
'Smells like teen spirit' I really remember thinking,
that is such a Pixies rip. It is, the baseline,
and the chord-key single note guitar thing over the drums.
I mean it was almost thrown away at one point just because
just seemed too much like the Pixies.
# A dirty word
With 'Smells like teen spirit' Nirvana had the basis for a hit.
But they needed a producer who could harness their live energy
and shape it into a more radio-friendly sound.
Actually, truth be told,
I was one of the people that was on the short list to produce 'Nevermind',
and I passed.
Do you want to stop now?
# ...and contagious
# Here we are now
# Entertain us
# A mulatto
# An albino
The band finally settled on a producer with underground credentials
and a pop touch, Butch Vig.
I knew I just wanted to set them up in a big room and try to capture
the energy in the initial performance.
Make sure that was the most important thing about the song.
But I also wanted to make it sound bigger and much more focused
than 'Bleach' was.
In order to achieve a richer sound on the 'Nevermind' album,
Butch Vig created multiple layers of Kurt's voice.
A process known as doubletracking that the singer initially resisted.
He really didn't like doing things over again,
but he loved The Beatles so I knew I could use an excuse if I had,
and that was that John Lennon always doubletracked his vocals.
He hated the sound of his voice and because Kurt was such a Beatles fan,
every time I used the John Lennon reference he'd go, "Ok."
# With the lights out its less dangerous
# Here we are now
# Entertain us
# I feel stupid and contagious
# Here we are now
# Entertain us
'Teen Spirit' was plain to see in the song's video,
but its title had less rebellious origins.
The physical sensation. Teen Spirit.
The only anti-perspirant made for our generation.
Teen Spirit.
With five fragrances.
Kurt's former girlfriend used a deodorant called 'Teen Spirit',
prompting a mutual friend called Kathleen Hanna
to create a historic piece of graffiti.
So one night we went out and got all fucked up, me and Kurt and Kathleen Hanna.
And Kathleen had some spray paint and
in Kurt's bedroom she sprayed, "Kurt smells like Teen Spirit'.
So it's kind of like saying, Kurt has coodies,
or Kurt smells like this girl.
But Kurt didn't know that it was the name of a deodorant
and he just simply saw it and said, "Oh. Teen Spirit. That's a great line."
And it wasn't until the song actually came out that somebody said,
"It's strange your wrote a song about a woman's deodorant."
And he said, "I did?"
# A mulatto
# An albino
Cobain had a surprise of his own in store
for the end of the 'Teen Spirit' video.
A shot of a janitor that harked back to his first job in Aberdeen.
Kurt would continually dwell on his troubled youth in his music.
And he revisited the darkest hours he'd spent sleeping rough
in the haunting song 'Something in the way'.
We did 4, 5 takes of the song and it just didn't happen.
And out of frustration Kurt walked in the control room
and laid down on the couch,
and started sort of singing the song and kept playing quieter and quieter,
to the point it was almost a whisper.
# Underneath the bridge
# The tarp has sprung a leak
And I just said, stop right here,
and I unplugged the phone, I turned off the air conditioning,
I sealed the doors and said, everybody stay out of here.
And I brought a couple of mikes in,
and just recorded him on the couch.
# And I'm living off of grass
# And the drippings from my ceiling
# It's okay to eat fish
# 'Cause they don't have any feelings
He did live in abandoned houses. He lived in hallways.
He would go sneak into the hospital he was born in
and sleep in the waiting room,
because no one would come and say, why are you here,
they thought he was waiting for someone.
# Something in the way
And, I swear to God, when he sang it the first time,
the song is maybe three minutes long,
I swear to God I held my breath the whole time.
# Something in the way
Kurt Cobain gave a voice to an audience
who saw the pain and confusion of their own lives
reflected in his music.
There was a passion and quality in the recording that sounded
exciting and dangerous and something they hadn't heard before.
There was an audience out there that I think had been set up for that,
by bands like R.E.M. or Hüsker Dü or The Replacements.
And all of a sudden, to have this record
that sort of encapsulated all those bands and so many things at the same time,
it had this sheer energy and this intense impact,
people went crazy for it.
In January, 1992, 'Nevermind' finally topped the US charts.
The outsiders had won.
Grunge fever began in earnest
as bands like Pearl Jam and Smashing Pumpkins joined the party.
The mainstream media scented a youth cult right for exploitation.
Being fashionable used to mean looking good.
Well, thanks to a fad that started in the Pacific Northwest,
high fashion now means... Well, you decide.
Grunge is the fashion trend launched by the hard driving guitar music
known as the Seattle sound.
The grunge look is an urban-lumberjack- anything-goes ensemble
of duck boots, tattered shirts, and long underwear.
And the grunge is spreading to the trendy Hollywood health spots.
Even the New York fashion shows.
This is the spring look for 1993.
It basically created a huge spasm of greed.
Labels wanted desperately to sign another band like Nirvana.
Where there's one there must be more.
Let's sign everybody we can.
Seattle definitely lost its innocence in a lot of ways.
Kurt Cobain felt that loss of innocence personally
as he was thrust into the spotlight.
Fame and fortune provided little consolation.
You can't buy happiness, I mean, that made me happy for a little while,
but I was probably just as happy with, I don't know...
I look back on going to second-hand stores and stuff like that,
and finding a little treasure like that, and that actually meant more to me
because it was more of a stab in the dark.
All of a sudden he's got that MTV crowd.
Like, "Whoooo! I'm multi-platinum?
"Everywhere I go I'm now mobbed?
"I still go to the Salvation Army store to buy my clothes
"but I can't go in now
"because they know I go there so there's like 80 kids waiting in front.
"To see what I'm gonna buy.
"And they've pressed up to the glass so much they cracked the glass of the store."
This was all happening to that guy.
Some people can handle it, some people can't.
Kurt Cobain wasn't the only one longing for a simpler, more innocent time.
From their hometown of Athens, Georgia, R.E.M had watched alternative rock
grow from a tiny independent community
into a fully-fledged commercial enterprise.
And they now began to craft an album that took stock
of what had been won and lost on the way.
My grandparents were getting very old
and I was reflecting a lot on death, and passage
and sorrow and mourning and all this stuff.
And that really influenced the material for 'Automatic for the people'.
It's a pretty sombre record, but quite beautiful, I think.
And it captured something very real.
'Automatic for the people' is steeped in memories
and one song based around Mike Mill's simple piano refrain
harked back to the golden days of the band's youth.
Honestly I think we were here in this very studio,
and I was playing it and I wasn't really thinking anything of it.
I was just doing it because it was something I had and I was working on,
and Michael heard it and said, "Keep going, keep going."
And I think he heard something that took him to a place.
It was actually somewhat autobiographic. It came from a real thing.
# I forgot my shirt at the water's edge
# The moon is low tonight
A lot of people in Athens had parties and then at 2 in the morning
everyone would go out to a pond or a lake and jump in the water,
get drunk and sleep with each other.
That was kind of the inspiration for the song 'Nightswimming'.
# Nightswimming deserves a quiet night
# I'm not sure all these people understand
# It's not like years ago,
# The fear of getting caught,
# Of recklessness and water
'Nightswimming' was infused with the spirit of Athens, Georgia,
but the band decided to put the finishing touches to the album
in the new music capital of Seattle,
where a friendship would blossom between R.E.M. and Nirvana.
Peter had moved to Seattle and had become friends with
this band called Nirvana.
We went out there to make the record, to finish the record
and ended up hanging out with those guys a lot.
They were so awesome and cool.
They loved R.E.M. and we loved what they had done.
It was a great moment in time.
Michael Stipe would even become godfather to
Kurt Cobain and his wife Courtney Love's daughter.
Kurt himself told me that the band he had come to admire most was R.E.M.
Because everything they had achieved they had done it without compromise.
And he had seen everything that he had been a part of
suddenly become part of this machine that he despised.
And there was nothing he could do about it.
Michael Stipe recognised the kindred spirit in Kurt Cobain,
but one whose emotional honesty left him vulnerable.
Kurt Cobain had this incredible sensitivity...
It's kind of what did him in in the end, really,
he was just a very delicate creature, for a lot of reasons.
But he was very real,
and he showed his emotion very clearly in his work.
And a lot of that emotion was just incredible rage and anger.
That rage boiled over in the spring of 1993,
as Kurt Cobain grappled with the responsibilities
of fatherhood and stardom,
and the demons of depression and addiction.
With just a trace of grim irony Kurt joked that Nirvana's next album
would be called 'I hate myself, and I want to die'.
# 'Cause everybody hurts...
It's as if the moment he reached that pinnacle stardom
it was too bright and he had to drop it,
and he began retreating from that moment on.
Moving away from stardom, moving away from all that he had sought,
and moving deeper and deeper into drugs.
You don't have to be Freud to analyse
that clearly there was something about getting what he wanted
that made him still feel unfulfilled.
Eventually released as 'In Utero',
the album featured darkly tender love songs
and thinly veiled attacks on the music business.
# Teenage angst has paid off well
# Now I'm bored and old
'Serve the servants' is a lot about... I mean, the first opening lines
that say 'Teenage angst has paid off well now I'm bored and old',
that is certainly about my ideas about grunge rock
and what I've experienced in the last few years.
Kurt was still torn between the underground and the mainstream,
rock and pop, rage and melody.
'In Utero' may have alienated some of the fans of 'Nevermind'
but Kurt never lost his gift
for creating music with the potential to reach a global audience.
That gift was glimpsed for one last time
during an extraordinary MTV acoustic concert
later turned into an album by R.E.M. Scott Litt.
'Nirvana Unplugged'.
# Come as you are
# As you were
# As I want you to be
The rehearsals were a catastrophe.
Everybody there thought this show is not gonna happen.
Kurt was struggling with drug withdrawal.
# Take your time
Even the ever reliable Dave Grohl struggled at first.
It didn't sound good.
Usually I have these massive fat sticks
and I beat the hell out of the drums.
And I got these little cocktail drum set and we'd
run through a song and Kurt would turn to me and say,
"Do you think you can play a little bit softer?"
"Yeah sure. I'll play little bit softer." And at the end of the song
he'd go, "Yeah, just bring it down a little bit more. A tiny bit."
All right, so I'd just barely...
And he'd turn around and say, "Just a little bit more."
"What the fuck am I doing here? I won't play if you don't want me to.
"I'll shake a rattler or something."
But the MTV producer was on hand to spare Dave Grohl's blushes.
We got to the gig and the producer said, "Have you ever tried these?"
And he just hands me these sticks like bundles of chopsticks or something.
"Hotrods", yeah, they're made up of these little wooden dowels
and it's got a flappy kind of sound.
Basically the sharpness is diffused.
# Memoria
I'll never forget after we did 'Unplugged' how happy Kurt was.
He was so happy.
He was this person right there on the center.
He was really, really happy after that. He was relieved and...
We pulled it off.
That happiness would be short-lived.
Behind the scenes Kurt was beginning to unravel,
tormented with depression and heroin addiction.
He attempted suicide in Rome just four months later.
The last couple of months of Kurt's life were a train wreck.
People were doing the best they could to get him help,
but it's almost a spiritual question that gets raised,
what can you do for somebody who, at that point,
is so much wanting to destruct their own lives?
Members of the music community tried to offer support.
R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe, gravely concerned at unfolding events,
made a desperate attempt to rescue Kurt
from his spiraling descent.
We talked about collaborating.
It was really in the last days of his life.
I created a... in an attempt to pull him out of the headspace he was in in Seattle,
in this house, all alone, the last weeks.
I created a project that he had to fly to Georgia to work with me on
and we had a deadline and bla, bla, bla...
It was really just an attempt
to pull him out of the headspace space that he was in
and it didn't work.
Sadly.
Despite last edge interventions by those closest to Kurt Cobain
the singer was found dead in his Seattle home on April the 8th, 1994.
He had shot himself three days earlier.
When Police arrived, they found a suicide note quoting Neil Young's lyric,
'It's better to burn out than fade away',
and the stereo still turned on.
What we do know, when he died,
that R.E.M. was the last CD in his CD player.
The Police found the CD player on and they found R.E.M. in it.
Now, whether that was the last thing he listened to,
there's some degree of speculation about that.
We do know, of course, what he said in the suicide note.
And in my years as a journalist I don't think I've ever felt
more haunted than actually looking at the suicide note
and seeing how hard he had pressed down with his pen
to make sure that his words were clearly read.
Just three years after alternative rock had achieved his greatest triumph,
it had lost its most iconic, enigmatic figurehead.
To some, it almost seemed
that Kurt Cobain had already recorded his own epitaph.
A haunting version of song 'Where did you sleep last night',
by blues legend Leadbelly,
that captured all the passion, belief and raw emotion
that alternative rock had so dramatically reclaimed for its audience.
# My girl, my girl, don't lie to me,
# Tell me where did you sleep last night
Well, there were some crazy things
again that are filled with irony about 'Unplugged'.
Kurt wanted lilies.
Basically he set the set up. It looks like a funeral.
# My girl, my girl, where will you go?
# I'm going where the cold wind blows.
# In the pines, in the pines,
# Where the sun don't ever shine.
# I would shiver the whole night through
# Her husband, was a hard working man,
He ends the show with the Leadbelly song
and that song basically strips the music of Nirvana all back to a blues.
And it becomes a requiem.
It's a perfect requiem for Nirvana.
# But his body never was found.
# My girl, my girl, don't lie to me,
# Tell me where...
After Kurt's death,
Scott Litt had to revisit the singer's most harrowing performance
as he put the finishing touches to the 'Unplugged' recordings.
Getting through that song was the hardest thing.
And those were with me, Krist and Dave.
And I remember feeling like there were ghosts in the room.
# My girl, my girl, where will you go?
# I'm going where the cold wind blows.
# In the pines,
# …the pines,
# ……… sun,
# ……….shine.
# I shiver the whole...
# night through!
It had to end right there.
Right with that scream, right with that song,
right with that howl.
For those left behind,
there will always be sadness for the loss of a unique talent,
and regret for what might have been.
If I could change anything I wish that Kurt was still alive.
That's the only thing.
That's it.
I'm sad that he died so young
because I think he was just moving out of a phase of writing
into a new phase that I think might have been extraordinary.
But he didn't make it.
Kurt Cobain was a brilliant artist.
He could have done whatever he wanted to do,
and been really good at it.
That's it.
Transcription and synchronization by Fry.
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