The message Neil Young tried to tell Kurt Cobain
Towards the start of the 1990s, Neil Young was quickly turning into the lovable strange uncle of rock and roll. After spending most of the ‘80s unsure of where to take his music, his album Freedom started a new renaissance for Young, being heralded as ‘The Godfather of Grunge’ once the sounds of Seattle began picking up steam. Though Young maintained a healthy relationship with some grunge bands, he did admit to never breaking through to its biggest star.
Unlike Young’s ‘anything goes’ mentality in his career, Kurt Cobain wasn’t so lucky. After quickly being thrust into the ‘Voice of a Generation’ role, Cobain was not equipped to handle fame. After a troubled childhood, Cobain used music as an art to express himself, which became overblown once ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ took over the airwaves.
Even though he might have chased his dreams on the album Nevermind, the fallout made him more isolated from his fans and bandmates, given that every media outlet now wanted a piece of him. Though Cobain never made any strides to get in contact with Young, the Canadian saw him as a restless spirit and had tried to contact him on a number of occasions.
After Cobain was found dead in his home from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Young was mortified when he heard his words featured in his suicide note, quoting a line from ‘Hey Hey My My’ which read: “It’s better to burn out than to fade away”. Looking back on the time that he tried to help, Young mentioned how hard it must have been for Cobain to go through the media circus, telling TIME: “He was forced to do tours when he didn’t want to, forced into all kinds of stuff. I was trying to get a hold of him – because I had heard some of the things he was doing to himself”.
Young even had a whole speech prepared to tell him over the phone, only for Cobain to keep falling through the cracks, recalling in the Pearl Jam documentary Twenty: “I was gonna say, ‘Listen, you don’t have to do anything anyone fucking tells you to do. Just cancel the gigs.’ I had a whole thing that I was going to tell him, but I never got the chance”.
Despite Cobain slipping through his fingers, Young used the rest of his goodwill for the Seattle community to help Pearl Jam get back on track. As they were spiralling after Cobain’s death, Pearl Jam felt lost before Young took them under his wing, making the album Mirror Ball with every member sans Eddie Vedder as his backing band.
Stone Gossard would later recall how special it felt to get approval from one of their heroes, saying, “It was like him telling us, ‘You’re great, guys. You can still do it’ at a time when we needed to hear that”.
The death of Cobain was still on Young’s mind years later, writing the song ‘Sleeps With Angels’ shortly after Cobain’s death as a way to pay tribute to him. While Young couldn’t reach the voice of grunge towards the end, he will always have the memory of Cobain, a shining star that burned too bright too quickly.
