The jam session Michael Stipe hoped would save Kurt Cobain’s life: “In a really bad place”
The first time Michael Stipe met Kurt Cobain, in Krist Novoselic’s basement in Seattle, he experienced a feeling he never had before.
“The first time I looked into his eyes, I just went, ‘I get it. He is all that. He is a very special person,’” he said. Thus ensued a spirited camaraderie only those with a bone-deep shared understanding could muster.
Like many, Stipe saw the real human in cobain. He saw the emotion behind the façade, and the genuine artistry that could develop past the slow, sluggish, gritty grunge masterpieces we all came to know and love. Stipe knew he was a great person, but he knew he was also the kind of person who had the potential to shapeshift through different artistic eras – something Cobain never had the luxury of actually exploring.
“Kurt was a great songwriter, and he was also in a steady transition,” Stipe later told Dazed. “As an artist, he had reached the end of one thing and was ready to explore the next phase.”
Stipe became enamoured with Cobain upon their first meeting, but the admiration also went both ways. In fact, REM was Nirvana’s North Star from the early days, influencing everything from the way Cobain wrote lyrics to a song’s arrangements. Cobain even once called them “the greatest”, and not just because of their music, but because of how they managed their success, too.
Cobain continued his unrestrained praise right up until becoming a hapless victim of his own pressures. In 1994, only a little while before his death, he spoke about how Stipe was still his guiding light when it came to his next venture in music. “I know we’re gonna put out one more record, at least, and I have a pretty good idea what it’s going to sound like: pretty ethereal, acoustic, like Automatic for the People,” he told Rolling Stone. “If I could write just a couple of songs as good as what they’ve written…”
As we know, this project never came to fruition, nor did any potential collaboration between the two musicians. But that wasn’t for lack of trying. In fact, Stipe knew of Cobain’s struggles enough to attempt to devise a project to try to snap him out of it, but his efforts to talk his friend off the cliff weren’t so successful.
“I was doing that to try to save his life,” Stipe admitted to Interview in 2011. “The collaboration was me calling up as an excuse to reach out to this guy. He was in a really bad place.”
“That’s where it’s become part of mythology,” he continued. “I simply constructed a project to try to snap Kurt out of a frame of mind. I sent him a plane ticket and a driver, and he tacked the plane ticket to the wall in the bedroom, and the driver sat outside the house for 10 hours. Kurt wouldn’t come out and wouldn’t answer the phone.”
Although it’s anyone’s guess how revolutionary their collaboration might have been, Stipe honoured Cobain’s legacy in any and every way he could following his passing. In 2014, when Nirvana were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, he made sure to highlight not just their achievements but how much they defined an entire moment. Which meant representing an entire “community” of diverse outcasts, from the goths and queers to the “fed-up” and the “bullied”.
He also made sure to mention how exactly Cobain managed to spearhead “the echo chamber of that collective howl”, which came from the core of his very being, of being an outcast himself. But it also came from being a true poet in every sense of the word, whose capability went beyond surface-level lamentation and into the gorgeously pained spectrum of someone who never knew peace.
