Duff McKagan: the last musician to see Kurt Cobain alive
A dark shroud was cast over the entire cultural landscape when Kurt Cobain was found dead in his home in early 1994. After becoming one of the biggest names in music overnight, the spokesman for the next generation was taken away, leaving the rest of the grunge movement to concave around him. Although Cobain may have become a recluse in the final months of his life, one of the biggest names in the hard rock scene was one of the few to see him in the hours before his death.
Before his death, Cobain was already starting to spiral downward into addiction. After signing on for the worldwide tour for In Utero, the frontman was starting to slowly disassociate from reality, resulting in a disastrous stop in Rome when he overdosed on sleeping pills and champagne.
Once he came to, Cobain was taken off the road for a few weeks and was given an intervention, settling in a rehab centre in California. As his wife Courtney Love began undergoing her rehabilitation plans, Cobain would spring himself from the facility after only a few days, scaling the building wall before returning home to Seattle.
Though it’s unclear what he was planning on doing once he arrived, Cobain had a chance encounter with another musician when sitting in first class on the flight. Rather than the typical grunge rockers from the local scene, Cobain came face-to-face with Duff McKagan of Guns N’ Roses, who was just winding down after the band’s final tour stop for Use Your Illusion.
While McKagan had been a Seattle resident before moving to Los Angeles, Cobain had a checkered past with the members of the LA rock band. After feuding with Axl Rose for years, the Nirvana icon would describe the group as the shining example of everything he disliked about rock music at the time. By the time McKagan saw him, he knew that the frontman was in a bad way.
In the documentary The Last 48 Hours of Kurt Cobain, McKagan talked about how he thought that Cobain needed someone to talk to, having been through his own share of problems with addiction. Unfortunately for McKagan, he would miss Cobain by inches once they landed at the airport.
As McKagan recalled, “When I met him, he was really down. And this friend picked me up, this guy, Eddie. Kurt and Eddie went out to have a smoke, and I said, ‘Maybe we should take him back to the house for a little bit’. It wasn’t like I foresaw anything by any means, but he was down, and he was on his own. So Eddie went back out to get Kurt, and right then, his car had picked him up, and he was gone.”
Looking back on that time, McKagan would also get the chance to say his piece to Dave Grohl, recounting in Sonic Highways, “Fuck, I didn’t call you guys, and I was one of the last people to ever see him. So I just wanted to say I’m sorry that I didn’t call.” Even though the bands may not have seen eye-to-eye throughout their career, Cobain’s passing wasn’t about the different trends. This was a death in the musical family, and those wounds are always the hardest to heal.
