“My fault”: The rock band Kurt Cobain regretted trashing
Success breeds imitation. It’s true in every enterprise in the world—especially the arts. The more commercialised the world gets, the more see prequels, sequels and spin-offs, Brat summers breeding ever more TikTok trends and country music comebacks giving rise to kitsch imitations. So, when Nirvana arose and made arguably one of the biggest splashes since The Beatles, it was only natural that their coattails would become clogged up, mostly by industry figures trying to cash in.
As Bruce Springsteen once explained when speaking to Guitar World in 1995 about Nirvana following the uproar of three lauded studio albums and the sad death of Kurt Cobain, “That’s a band that reset the rules of the game. They changed everything, they opened a vein of freedom that didn’t exist previously. The singer did something very similar to what Dylan did in the ’60s, which was to sound different and get on the radio.”
Except, like Dylan before them, they didn’t look and sound entirely different for long. Springsteen might have opined, ”There are a lot of very fundamental rules that they reset, and that type of band is very few and far between,” but once the rules were reset, others could join the game. That’s exactly what happened. Naturally, Cobain wasn’t all that fond of it.
“We’ve never had a fight ever, I’ve just always hated his band,” the grovelling frontman said of Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam. He saw the group as phoney imitators, telling Flipside, “Those bands have been in the hairspray/cockrock scene for years and all of a sudden they stop washing their hair and start wearing flannel shirts. It doesn’t make any sense to me. There are bands moving from L.A. and all over to Seattle and then claim they’ve lived there all their life so they can get record deals. It really offends me.”
In truth, that wasn’t quite accurate. Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament had been in Seattle-based bands since 1984; it was only Eddie Vedder who had to travel up from San Diego in 1990 following the death of their former vocalist Andrew Wood. They had previously operated as Mother Love Bone but they retired the name after Wood’s tragic heroin overdose.
Yet, Cobain’s point wasn’t entirely misplaced, either. When Pearl Jam’s star began to rise they were quickly cajoled into joining the grunge craze. The band were relentlessly out on tour, with Ament even commenting, ”Essentially Ten was just an excuse to tour,” and while they were away, their record label was busy flogging them to a recently enfranchised mass of youngsters as ‘the new Nirvana’. The problem was – like Springsteen being sold as ‘the new Dylan’ before them – Nirvana hadn’t gone away, and the comparison wasn’t all that accurate—ultimately, functioning as being reductive of both.
But in the end, Cobain reconciled that his gripe wasn’t with Vedder or the band but rather with how they were being marketed. As he later clarified to Rolling Stone, ”I slagged them off because I didn’t like their band. I hadn’t met Eddie at the time. It was my fault; I should have been slagging off the record company instead of them. They were marketed — not probably against their will — but without them realizing they were being pushed into the grunge bandwagon.”
They weren’t alone when it came to unwittingly clambering aboard either, that’s just the way things go when it comes to commercial culture.
