The only rock star Kurt Cobain ever truly admired: “I didn’t ask him for an autograph”
Kurt Cobain was never coy about his influences.
In fact, the Nirvana frontman would often ascribe his finest moments to the inspirational heroes of music’s underground and pop heights. Their ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ breakthrough was downplayed as merely “ripping off” Pixies’ quiet-loud verse-chorus songcraft, ‘About a Girl’ was said to have been penned after Cobain spent the entire afternoon listening to his beloved Meet the Beatles! record and aping the Lennon-McCartney style, and the band never formally denied lifting Killing Joke’s thunderous ‘Eighties’ riff for Nevermind’s ruminative ‘Come As You Are’.
For many fans who came to Nirvana’s legacy across the 2000s, the published Journals collection of notepad doodles and diary notations likely formed not just a crucial insight into Cobain’s fraught psyche, but an essential introduction to punk and alternative music’s heritage.
Later, to stand as an essential shopping list for any intrepid teen first piquing a curiosity over music outside their parents’ CD collection, Cobain’s ‘Top 50 Albums’ entry likely proved a foundational trove of curated recommendations and key LP pointers, from Mazzy Star, Butthole Surfers, Swans, and an impressive three whole albums from Wipers, among the litany of selections.
However, one rock icon stood the tallest amid Cobain’s fervent fandom. Speaking to Much in 1993 during the promotion for In Utero, the Nirvana frontman reflected on the one artist whom he looked up to the most at Seattle’s Edgewater Inn by the city’s Duwamish River. “I met Iggy Pop, before we were rock and roll stars,” he revealed to VJ and journalist Erica Ehm. “Iggy Pop is pretty much the only person that I’ve met that I really, really admire.”
When asked if meeting the former Stooges singer met expectations, Cobain answered in the affirmative without hesitation, “Yeah, it was a big excitement, he was great. I didn’t ask him for an autograph. I tried not to bother him the way that I thought that I might be bothered…”
Whether you’re grunge, punk, glam, indie, post-punk, or even plain old classic rock, most roads lead back to Iggy Pop’s topless gyrations. Standing as a central pivot between his early 1960s youth’s beat rock’s innocence to the feral garage scorching Detroit’s oil-slicked underground as the counterculture slipped into self-parody, Pop and The Stooges pointed the way for rock’s sorely-needed wild abandon, soldiering far beyond the violent mysticism pointed to by The Doors’ Jim Morrison when rock began to lose its teeth in prog’s bloated loom.
No one was expecting it, least of all the man himself, but Pop has endured as an unlikely national treasure off his Radio 6 Music residency and sage elder presence among the contemporary music world. A long road travelled since his days of self-mutilating on stage and smoking spider web.
Such mythos and punk pedigree made no less of an impact on the alternative world as Cobain, jotting down The Stooges’ 1973 LP Raw Power right at the top of his ‘Top 50 Albums’ list around the time of his Much interview.
