Is this Patti Smith song a tribute to Kurt Cobain?
Gone Again, the 1996 studio album by Patti Smith, is imbued with a sense of loss. From the late 1980s onwards, the punk pet laureate lost countless friends and family members. The first of these was photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, Smith’s first friend In New York. A year later, Television keyboardist Richard Sohl passed away, and four years after that, Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith, the love of Patti’s life, succumbed to heart failure.
That’s to say nothing of Jeff Buckley, one of the guest vocalists on Gone Again, who drowned shortly after the album was released. By then, Smith was already surrounded by ghosts, which partly explains why so many of the songs on this beautiful album feel like acts of communion. Perhaps the most poignant of these is ‘About A Boy’, in which Smith paints a portrait of a young man wandering through a “deep and dismal” land. For this unnamed character, the real world is a liminal space to be traversed, endured and ultimately overcome. In Smith’s lyrics, he is forever on the move: “From a chaos” “toward another kind of peace/ Toward the great emptiness.”
While there’s not much evidence to support such claims, it’s generally held that ‘About a Boy’ was written about Kurt Cobain, who died in 1994. “My reaction to Kurt Cobain was much more emotional,” Smith later recalled. “I was heartbroken when he committed suicide. I loved Nirvana. And I knew that Kurt Cobain was very fond of my husband and the MC5. We felt so badly. We just wished that we would have known him, and been able to talk to him, and had some positive effect on him. Seeing Robert [Mapplethrope] struggling for his life, and doing everything to live, and then seeing this very gifted boy kill himself was painful to factor”.
That image of Cobain as a “very gifted boy” reoccurs throughout ‘About a Boy’, the title of which is itself potentially an allusion to Nirvana’s ‘About A Girl’. of course, Smith’s initial verse complicates this interpretation. “I stood among them,” Patti sings. “I stood alone/ Boy boy/ Just a boy/ Just a little boy.” In Smith’s lyrics, Cobain is just one of the countless ghosts she must now live alongside, many of them belonging to young men “who will never grow old.”
Considering Fred and Kurt both died in 1994, it’s possible that ‘About A Boy’ is not so much a tribute to one fallen singer but a reappraisal of what it means to pass from one realm to another.
