The singer Kurt Cobain wanted to work with before he died: “He and I were going to record”
There isn’t a single rock and roll star on the planet who was a better contrarian than Kurt Cobain.
As much as people loved listening to Nirvana when they first killed off hair metal, Cobain was always the one either cutting himself down when talking about Nevermind or shouting the praises of the kind of bands that wouldn’t have a hit in their lives if he hadn’t said anything. He almost revelled in being a bit against the grain, but things started to change a little bit once he became famous.
The whirlwind of fame was never going to be easy, but Cobain seemed to be thrown into the deep end with no real way out. He didn’t need all of the baggage that came with being the voice of a generation, and since he was more focused on making the best music that he could, he didn’t see the point in the paparazzi trying to be a voyeur into his life every single time they asked about his relationship with Courtney Love or how he was looking after his daughter when she was born.
A lot of that anger was already present on In Utero, but after laying himself bare that much, he didn’t want to spend the rest of his days making caustic music. He wanted the chance to bring it down a notch, and while MTV Unplugged was a hint of what was happening in his head, one of the unsung heroes from that era of the band was Michael Stipe from REM.
Cobain had already called the Athens natives one of his favourite bands of all time, and when you listen to a lot of their songs, you can hear why. Even when they made some of the most abrasive songs of all time, ‘Lithium’ and ‘In Bloom’ sound like they could have fit on records like Document or Green. That is, if Peter Buck suddenly felt the need to trade in all of his jangly guitars for effects pedals whenever he performed. But even though the band weren’t far along in recording their next album, Stipe was already becoming a fixture of what the band wanted to do.
They had let all of the aggression out of their system on tunes like ‘Scentless Apprentice’, but Stipe remembered running through songs that would have been on the next Nirvana project had Cobain not passed away, saying, “I know what the next Nirvana recording was going to sound like. It was going to be very quiet and acoustic, with lots of stringed instruments. It was going to be an amazing fucking record…. He and I were going to record a trial run of the album, a demo tape. It was all set up.”
Then again, that’s not what you hear when looking at a song like ‘You Know You’re Right’. The band’s final official recording is a lot more abrasive and in line with what they had been doing on In Utero, but considering how much Cobain loved performing a more subdued set as one of his final major shows, it’s not like the band couldn’t have taken a few cues from what Stipe had been doing with REM.
Automatic for the People was already a good sign that even the biggest underground bands of all time could grow up with grace, and a lot of those songs could have easily found their way into Cobain’s repertoire. The pieces were all there for Cobain to make a more refined album, but all of it is only wishful thinking for anyone listening to them after April of 1994.
But judging by what REM was working on, it feels like Monster was the kind of album that Stipe wanted to make as a reaction to their old work. He had seen the ugliness that had come into Cobain’s life towards the very end, and after seeing him take his own life, it’s almost poetic that their next record would sound a lot more angry in the same way that Cobain did on his records.
