‘Montage of Heck’: Kurt Cobain’s eclectic 36-minute mixtape
We didn’t get long enough with Kurt Cobain. That’s a statement we could say about the long list of artists who were gone too soon, people like Janis Joplin, Jeff Buckley, Jimi Hendrix, Amy Winehouse, and so many more. It’s the biggest tragedy in the art world, the way the sensitivity of the artist is so often left unsupported and becomes fatal.
But through the work they left behind, and the clues of them that fans are still finding, the world gets a chance to still know them better. In this instance, the world gets a chance to get to know Kurt Cobain better through the discovery of this mad mixtape he made when he was just getting started.
It’s a strange thing to be talking about decades on from his death. I dread to imagine a timeline in which my own old playlists were being analysed years after I’m gone, scanned for information and clues about who I was. But at the same time, I know it would be revealing. Music taste says a lot about a person. Looking back through my own old mixtapes, it’s like I can see everything: first loves, first heartbreaks, first nights out.
The art we interact with becomes a map of us. It becomes a huge part of us and how we express our feelings and experiences, using these outside references to try and articulate things that are hard to find the words for. Kurt Cobain would obviously go on to find the words as his songwriting developed and he became able to distil angst into poetry like no other. But before then, he was the same as the rest of us.
The creation of this eclectic project was reportedly in 1988, although it’s not totally known exactly when he started it, how he worked on it or even how long this mixtape was built for. He was apparently 21 at the time, Nirvana had only just begun.
Before Nirvana, there was a distinct musical loneliness in Cobain’s life. In school, he couldn’t find anyone he meshed with or who he could play music with. It wasn’t until he met his bandmate Krist Novoselic that that changed, and even still, it took months and months of begging and persuasion from Cobain to get him to form a band.
The mixtape feels like a timestamp of that ‘before’ moment, simultaneously capturing the isolating of Cobain’s interactions with music as he began putting together this tape of songs and film soundbites as if to harness inspiration but with no other outlet, as well as capturing early clues for what it was he wanted to do.
It’s called ‘Montage Of Heck’ and it’s a weird and wonderful mix. There are songs from artists like Queen, Cher and George Michael, as well as more expected artist picks like The Velvet Underground. Interspersed with the music though, there are cut up sound clips from ’60s, ’70s and ’80s TV shows, making it a more multimedia experience, as well as additions from Cobain as he cut into songs with clips of him making noises like retching into a low quality mic – putting his own stamp on the project.
He never spoke about it, and for a long time, it lay undiscovered in the artist’s archives, so there’s no real understanding to be found in terms of when and why Cobain made it or what it meant to him. His girlfriend at the time, Tracey Marander, had her own theory, stating simply, “I think he just did it because he was bored.” But even without Cobain here to explain it, there is so much to be found there and learnt from, providing another insight into his creative and musical brain.
