Kurt Cobain documentary: Montage Of Heck

No mention of this on ILM so far? Gonna be interesting for sure.

Courtney Love was thanked profusely by the director for her trust. "I dare you to find someone else who'd hand you the keys to their storage facility," he cracked, "and say 'Go through all my shit, make a fucking movie and I'll see it when it's done.'"

http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/features/sundance-2015-kurt-cobain-montage-of-heck-20150125?page=2

http://www.stereogum.com/1731471/kurt-cobain-montage-of-heck-has-unreleased-beatles-cover-not-dave-grohl/news/

I've always found Kurt Cobain a truly interesting guy, not really for his public persona, but for his obviously very rich and very insular inner life. This became especially apparent after reading his published journals, which were fascinating, funny, dark, and brilliant all at once-- but which also admittedly left me feeling like a very bad person for reading someone's private writings after their death. This movie maybe takes the exploitation even a step further... but I'm still going to see this. I can't help it. I think he's probably one of the last musicians I can honestly say I've felt was worth spending time learning more about. Maybe showing my age here, but I can't really think of anyone from the last decade that I think would warrant this kind of treatment, as we discussed in this thread.

yeah KC is a compelling person still.

i thought the vaults were scraped clean judging by the abysmal bonus content on the in utero and nevermind reissues. very excited to see/hear new stuff, especially the taped excerpts with david fricke for rolling stone, his last major interview...

have you heard rae sremmurd, poliopolice?

somebody on metafilter posted this about "olympia bros" and it made me imagine the pacific nw that kurt grew up in:

*This is a fairly unique species that should be studied by scientists or something. Equal parts frat boy, redneck/hick/rural kid, and eco hippie/bonghead. So like basketball jerseys, with hemp necklaces, and a lifted hot rodded truck that isn't just some brodozer with chrome wheels but obviously gets mudded and has some scars. Known to talk about water reclamation projects/living in sustainable housing and say "what up n****" to their white friends 10 seconds later. Way in to psychedelics AND playing madden. Rents an RV and buys 12 30 racks... to go to the oregon county faire or rainbow gathering.

that combination of rural redneck and heroin druggy dirtbag.

yeah, that's oly & demenses, woop

> have you heard rae sremmurd, poliopolice?

no, i have no idea what that random assortment of letters is

drummers ear?

>*This is a fairly unique species that should be studied by scientists or something. Equal parts frat boy, redneck/hick/rural kid, and eco hippie/bonghead. So like basketball jerseys, with hemp necklaces, and a lifted hot rodded truck that isn't just some brodozer with chrome wheels but obviously gets mudded and has some scars. Known to talk about water reclamation projects/living in sustainable housing and say "what up n****" to their white friends 10 seconds later. Way in to psychedelics AND playing madden. Rents an RV and buys 12 30 racks... to go to the oregon county faire or rainbow gathering.

or, to quote Chris Ott, the ultimate fuckin bro shit stoner lame-ass jam band battle of the bands music smith fucking stratocaster velvet fucking top hat fucking scarf-wearing paisley bullshit ever"

so happy that dave grohl's role in this will be small

i thought i read that it was only because of timing of Sundance festival that he wasn't included in the final cut much (interviews took place too close to submission date), but the director expects to add a lot more of him.

(for post-Sundance version)

shit i didnt read the "a lot more of him" anywhere. goddammit. w/e

well, more of him. more meaning, "more than zero"

damn

poliopolice otm re: cobain

seeing as we're doing 'people we hope don't come within a mile of this' then Charles R Cross. him.

Richard Lee

what's wrong with Charles R Cross? I thought Heavier Than Heaven was a good bio (i mean i've read it almost a dozen times since it's the only comprehensive KC book really)

i recall reading on here at some point that he wouldn't give Nirvana the time of day until after KC was dead but maybe that's not so. i'm sure it's a great bio i must read it as i know it's meant to be the best, most respected one.

i haven't read it in a long time so i don't know if it's aged well from a writing perspective, but i always thought the Azerrad book was pretty indespensible, if for no other reason than that he spent a lot of time with the band before it ended and then added to later editions after Kurt died, as opposed to the entire thing being written from an obituary-ish perspective like every other bio of Kurt/Nirvana.

LIKE MOST BABIES SMELL LIKE BUTTER

(xpost) Also read the Azerrad book a number of years ago, and even though I might quibble with a couple of his choices, thought it was excellent then, and suspect I wouldn't feel any different today.

I mentioned on the documentary thread that I have a ticket for the Cobain film in a couple of weeks. I don't, as of yet, get the unwieldy title at all.

Name of one of his early noise collage tapes I believe.

second only to Do Re Mi as the best posthumous Cobain crate find: https://vimeo.com/35576701

there's hilarious clip in this movie of KC doing a Chris Cornell impression

The Chris Cornell impression was hilarious. I liked this but I didnt love it. It's certainly well made but it doesnt reveal anything that I dont already know about the guy. There's a teenage anecdote that's straight out of Gummo, which I'd never heard before (and might possibly be a lie). Theres scenes of him nodding out with baby Frances in his hands which I found pretty disturbing. I still feel that theres something about the guy that this documentary failed to get at and it cant be explained as easily "troubled childhood+fame+ultra-sensitivity = Suicidal Kurt". I'm not sure what I thought about the abrupt ending skipping the circumstances of his suicide. Is it dignified not to mention it or is it a deliberate evasion so as not to make Courtney look bad?

My feeling was that the director just wanted to make an interesting clipshow/highlight reel but was forced by the documentary form to create some half-assed narrative arc, and his distaste for having to do that was fairly evident.

How come Krist Novoselic was in this and Grohl wasn't?

i heard they glossed over how courtney killed him

How come Krist Novoselic was in this and Grohl wasn't?

― tayto fan (Michael B), Wednesday, April 15, 2015 2:18 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

why wasn't Chad Channing in it? He was a drummer for Nirvana as long as DG was. Krist was a close friend of Kurt's, at least in the beginning - KC and DG were never close friends and I don't think he'd be able to give more insight than Chad.

Is this the only music documentary in history that doesn't have enough Dave Grohl in it

it already has too much DG in it just by association. dude should join one of those missions to Mars and talk about rock there

why wasn't Chad Channing in it? He was a drummer for Nirvana as long as DG was. Krist was a close friend of Kurt's, at least in the beginning - KC and DG were never close friends and I don't think he'd be able to give more insight than Chad.

― flappy bird, Wednesday, April 15, 2015 3:07 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i was introduced to chad channing riding the winslow ferry in my first week in seattle when my friend peter flagged him down, iirc he had just split from nirvana like that month? Or maybe I am fudging my memory to make myself eyewitness to history and he had already been gone a bit. it must have been like... may? of 1990. Anyway peter was like 'that guy was drumming for this band nirvana, they're good'.

that is my only story of this sort other than that I killed biggie

what pct of this doc is interviewees? (not Kurdt)

After playing the "Teen Spirit" video for my class last week (anniversary of death), I wanted them to see the trailer for the documentary. I looked at it first at low volume, seemed basically fine. Missed the "getting laid" line. Oops...only one or two seemed to notice, and I quickly called their attention to something else.

lol @ the though of the "Teen Spirit" video being totally fine to show students, but not the phrase "getting laid"

lol @ the thought of dropping the 't'

Roughly 20% is interviews

I don't believe in the Courtney Killed Kurt conspiracy theory bullshit btw. Just thought it odd Grohl wasn't in it but yeah, fair enough he wasn't one of Kurt's closest confidants perhaps.

5 seconds of topless Courtney if anyone's interested. (who the fuck was shooting that scene though??)

ew

lol @ the thought of the "Teen Spirit" video being totally fine to show students, but not the phrase "getting laid"

I know what you mean, but that's the world we live in, right? What's powerful and disturbing about the "Teen Spirit" video (and the song) is allusive, ambiguous. Play it for a bunch of parents--and at this moment in time, I probably even have one or two who were fans--and I don't think they'd make a big fuss. (When I talk about the song/video, and how I interpret it, I probably come right up to the line of what I should and shouldn't be saying--with the out that I make sure to add, "This is what I think he believes; not me, of course.") Show a trailer with the phrase "getting laid" in it, that's a problem, even though I'm sure there are jokes far more graphic on a typical Family Guy.

i was watching this today and he seems so good! happy. healthy. or at least he looks healthy. less than a year away from killing himself. so sad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fe7q8yDPJFo

i had never seen this before today. just a couple of months before he dies. on a goofy t.v. show.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKeqgqm269E

so crazy how fast the nirvana timeline is from nevermind to death. and how much footage/documentation there is for that period.

I remember seeing that first interview at the time--pretty sure it's MuchMusic's Erica Ehm (our Martha Quinn).

They sound really great on that Serve The Servants clip.

this is from another goofy talk show around the same time, this one is really disturbing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUb69RIqfO8&spfreload=10

man, i haven't watched even just ten seconds of a kurt interview in years, and all of a sudden it's like i'm hypnotized again...

so crazy how fast the nirvana timeline is from nevermind to death.

In retrospect, yeah. At the time, it seemed to go on forever. He died before their fame arc trended downward, so they were basically omnipresent on all fronts for 2 1/2 years.

Pretty good band this - shame he had to kill himself. They really could have been something.

5 seconds of topless Courtney if anyone's interested. (who the fuck was shooting that scene though??)

It was Eric Erlandson from Hole, or at least I thought I caught a glimpse of him in the mirror.

Did anybody here see the film about Patty Schemel? Parts of it were pretty 0_o, I'd imagine there's a little bit of overlap with this.

Yeah I liked the patty movie. Especially the parts about being produced to death.

He died before their fame arc trended downward
man, had he lived cobain probably would've loved destroying nirvana's legacy piece by piece until he was back playing someone's living room for three people.
or maybe not, maybe he would've cleaned up and turned into ... dave grohl?

nah i think you're right, he would have gone for a prolonged lou-like bloody-mindedness

xp shudder

Their "fame arc" had nowhere else to go.

As John Lydon said, "If you don't want to be a pop star, JUST STOP."

I can't imagine that he would ever turn into Dave Grohl. Obviously I didn't know the guy, but if my Myers-Briggs reading is right, I'm almost positive he was an INFP, and very often people with this personality type have very strong ideals that haunt them... often so strong that they have difficulty reconciling them with the realities of the world.

Pretty sure he would want to be playing to 3 ppl in a living room.

btw Courtney is doing a Q&A at one of the Tribeca screenings

another thing that's interesting about this documentary is just how funny KC was both alone and with Courtney. At times, it's hard not to think about how they'd be great at writing sketch comedy.

Obviously I didn't know the guy, but if my Myers-Briggs reading is right, I'm almost positive he was an INFP, and very often people with this personality type have very strong ideals that haunt them...

dog

They should just go ahead an do a CSI: Nirvana episode.

It is a weird and sad irony that all the exploiting of his death is a sort of cottage industry that provides for his surviving family.

Way too much junky home-movie footage in the second half--I found all that very tedious. The first half was good.

One more day???

How come Krist Novoselic was in this and Grohl wasn't?

― tayto fan (Michael B), Wednesday, April 15, 2015 2:18 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Dave Grohl was working on a Foo Fighters project when Bret Morgen was doing interviews. They did an interview after the movie was already completed, like two weeks before sundance or something. Morgen didn't feel like re-editing the movie at that point.

Brett morgen.

No disrespect to Grohl but he has, at this point, very few undocumented thoughts. I feel we know more about Grohl's breakfast cereal preferences than we do about our own, at this point. Step away from the camera for a sec, dude. Thanks. Carry on. Ms. Love? Enough of you as well, for now, thanks.

Schemel, Novoselic, Channing, Smear: there. See? It's quieter now. Come on out, that's it.

I was disappointed too. It feels incomplete and not at all inside looking out. There's more distance to it than any other Cobain/Nirvana documentary. I feel like it should've been an 8 hour miniseries. As much as the promotion stressed how crazy and different and Definitive it is, I don't think it offers much new insight. Cobain was hyper sensitive to being ashamed or embarrassed? tell me something i don't know. I really liked the post-fame recluse second half though, really funny ("Come into the breakfast nook!"). Courtney's line "I flirt with chairs" is amazing.

from the av club:
It’s become a cliché to say that something reveals the man behind the legend, but the Cobain seen and reminisced about here really does seem more human, in his mess of conflicting desires, than the anti-celebrity celebrity who continues to grace magazine covers two decades after his death. “He wanted to be a success,” insists one interview subject. “Praise was hard for him to take,” says another.

nothing new here... every book and documentary hammers that point home, that he was conflicted, wanted to be the biggest rock star in the world but also stay at home and shoot heroin and paint and make tape collages. Cobain remains as unknowable as ever...

that conundrum is hardly unique to KC among performers... one thinks of Brando saying that acting was a childish profession, yet apparently he heavily anntated scripts even for what we think of as his elderly paycheck roles.

annOtated

Sounds like the opposite of mystery to me. "He was conflicted, wanted to be the biggest rock star in the world but also stay at home and shoot heroin and paint and make tape collages." Exactly. Both of those paths sound pretty attractive. Wanting both of them is perfectly understandable, and very human. What's unknowable about that?

H8 the trend for crappy animations or extended rotoscoping that modern day music docs seem to employ.

I don't think I want to watch this

H8 the trend for crappy animations or extended rotoscoping that modern day music docs seem to employ.

So otm, though I think the trend for crappy animations extends beyond music docs.

Cobain is unknowable because of how little extant footage and work he left behind. He was just getting started.

The animated sequences in this were among the best parts of the film.

Cobain comes off very holdenesque in this one, especially in first part

face-down in a pool/Sunset Blvd Holden I assume

The animated sequences in this were among the best parts of the film.

OTM - that longer sequence with the story about the disabled neighborhood girl was like something out of Charles Burns' BLACK HOLE!

i mean...everyone is sort of unknowable, there's parts of yourself that die with you i think no matter what

but especially the act of suicide seems unknowable

For some people I think sympathy for depression was knowable. I don't think Kurt Cobain is unknowable. When he sings "They'll give you breathing holes" I can relate to that. I've been in some shitty places mentally, and hung around bad people. I made it out alive, but I don't think it's because I valued life more than Kurt Cobain. Heroin has killed some of my good friends and I think if anything was to blame for making him unknowable it's that.

Watched it for a fourth time tonight and lost it near the end at the cut from Kurt as a toddler to Kurt and Frances in the bathroom...

it is the "wanting to be a massive rock star" side of Kurt that fascinates me the most, because from everything i've seen of him, he never seemed to act like he wanted any of that.

Hate to sound too reflexively cynical - too 2015ish - but isn't some of that a calculated posture? Like George Washington. Always wanting to be seen as being dragged into the spotlight against his will.

There's that anecdote about Courtney buying a Volvo, because she wanted it and (goodness knows) they could afford it. Kurt is like, take it back. We can't be seen as the sort of people who own a fucking Volvo.... That strikes me as pretty image-conscious. The George Washington of grunge.

H8 the trend for crappy animations or extended rotoscoping that modern day music docs seem to employ.

The other annoying documentary trend is to litter the intros with increasingly tiresome 1950s stock footage... which this one also does.

Is there any stock footage in this film? Thought it was all stuff from Kurt's and Kurt's family's archives?

Can't think of anything more 90s than to turn the life and times of Kurt D. Cobain into an HBO "Dream On" episode.

it is the "wanting to be a massive rock star" side of Kurt that fascinates me the most, because from everything i've seen of him, he never seemed to act like he wanted any of that.
--charlie h

Uh so he just accidentally signed to a major label....

don't think it's true then or now that everyone who signs to a major label wants to achieve the levels of fame Nirvana did

prosaically I would imagine that the prospect of a steady source of income for a while might be quite appealing to someone who didn't grow up with much money or employment history

Is there any stock footage in this film? Thought it was all stuff from Kurt's and Kurt's family's archives?

Yeah, your standard government-issued post-war affluence propaganda shit that was supposed to ironically set the stage for Kurt's non-idyllic childhood.

"don't think it's true then or now that everyone who signs to a major label wants to achieve the levels of fame Nirvana did"

Perhaps but I don't think dude was looking to live in obscurity either.

Cobain said that when he was a kid he wanted the Sex Pistols to be the biggest band in the world. I don't think he had a problem with striving for success as a band, as long as the music was good. Did he want to be a rock star? I'd say yeah, he did. It's not like he shied away from multiple MTV specials, red carpets, Saturday Night Live (twice), the cover of RS, all that stuff. I don't think he was all that conflicted about it, not really.

i think it's pretty simple, actually. here's a kid who was basically set to be a worthless nobody and he wanted validation for his existence, but one he realized what validation meant, he realized it would consume him.

Stunning insights.

worst mystery ever

I didn't say it would be a stunning insight.

I just think people are conflating fame and validation. There's a difference. People seek fame to achieve validation, only to realize that fame comes with a lot of baggage. You can get validation in other ways.

but hey, instead of talking, let's just snipe at each other instead

I think a single sentence that attempts to simply sum up an entire person's life and death qualifies as a stunning insight.

People seek fame to achieve validation

I'm sure some people do, but I dont think KC did. He didn't want to be a rock star because rock stars are famous. If he wanted to go that route he would have moved to LA and started a glam rock band.

be careful what you etc

People seek fame to achieve validation
I'm sure some people do, but I dont think KC did. He didn't want to be a rock star because rock stars are famous. If he wanted to go that route he would have moved to LA and started a glam rock band.

― ©Oz Quiz© (Adam Bruneau), Tuesday, May 5, 2015 4:17 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

he wanted it both ways. did you notice how often he brought up Axl Rose in the movie? the whole bit about being too "needle sick" to go on tour with GNR in the summer of 1992. as much as he despised Axl's racist/sexist/homophobic attitude and lyrics, he was jealous of Axl's ability to be a "proper" frontman. it's even in his suicide note, when he wishes he could be like Freddie Mercury, but still feels like he's punching in a time clock before walking on stage. he once said he was validated beyond all expectations when Nirvana was playing to packed clubs, that even 50 or 100 people that loved his music was enough. i'm not so sure, but that doesn't mean he was desperate to pack arenas full of jocks. in everyone's mind, alternative music's ceiling was Devo, Blondie, or the Talking Heads. he talked a lot about Cheap Trick and The Knack, mainstream bands that were big but not gigantic and still had underground credibility...

he talked out of both sides of his mouth.

Kurt knew his music was better than Axle's. He thought it was whack that they were so corny and yet so famous. I agree. guns n roses are and always were shit-house.

It's an incredible documentary. A few snippets of interviews I had seen before but the footage with Francis showed what a loving dude he was. Incredible man. Sad loss.

Looking forward to watching it tonight. I agree Axle Rose is a clown and his success as a frontman will be forever baffling.

why god does every current documentary feel the need to use like waking life style animation

Just watched this and quite enjoyed it. I think my favorite bit was an interview segment where the interviewer was asking questions about whether they were rich and successful and stuff and Dave and Krist are trying to take the questions seriously and Kirt just obviously doesn't give a shit and eventually just puts his head down and checks out.

Also, I have always found it interesting that as much as Kirt always claimed to hate the mass success and being famous, when the In Utero promo cycle came around he was all in with videos, multiple MTV specials, magazine covers, interviews and all that shit. While at the same time Pearl Jam (who were actually the biggest band in the world at the time) were like "fuck it. We don't want to do that shit" and they didn't. But maybe I am miss remembering things? I know they didn't do any videos.

I should never type posts on my phone. My apologies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bd4l3JyivVw
Great interview

i wasn't trying to suggest in my comment upthread that Kurt wasn't, consciously or unconsciously, chasing some kind of elevated rock star prominence. i mean, of course he made a very involved decision to sign with a major label; had his convictions been more resolute, he may well have chosen to engineer his trajectory as a musician according to a much more organic & independent ethos. i just always found him, in interview at least, to be almost defensively assertive & self-aware in his identification with nonpartisan values, and extremely vigilant about distancing himself from other artists who, in many respects, were inhabiting the very same orchestrated milieu that he was (GNR and Pearl Jam spring to mind). maybe he simply became (increasingly) scathing of corporate rock star hallmarks by virtue of his (increasingly) forced association with them. and i guess the important thing is that the music managed to celebrate Kurt as an Artist & Individual, rejecting the order & hierarchy of the industry that supported it.

Pearl Jam had videos, and they did TV. I even remember Adam Sandler doing an Eddy Vedder impression on SNL monologue. MTV had "Jeremy" and "Alive" in heavy rotation.

But they backed out of doing videos after Jeremy, I think was the brontosaur's point.

Well at least they waited until after winning 4 MTV video awards.

lol. Nice.

For the most part I enjoy watching this, even though I haven't listened to Nirvana since high school. When I think of Nirvana I never think of Courtney Love or Hole, probably because I never liked her or her band, but after watching it I guess she did really play an huge role in his life. This was a depressing read http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2011/11/courtney-love-201111

Sure, Pearl Jam made videos, got super famous, made that money, became the biggest band in the world and then they stopped making videos. I just find it interesting that there is an example of a group from the same scene at the exact same time that just checked the fuck out on chasing fame via the traditional platform of the time. I just bring it up because being a teenager at the time if felt like there was kind of a Pearl Jam vs. Nirvana thing going on. Like you were either a Pearl Jam kid or a Nirvana kid. Pearl Jam felt like the group that was palatable enough for parents and jocks, and Nirvana was for the weirdos and outcasts. That's probably mostly in my head, because everyone seemed to have both Nevermind and Ten, but that's how it felt to me. Pearl Jam was classic rock with flannel. Nirvana were the ones that too arty to give a fuck about fame, In Utero was made to alienate people, etc. But then the In Utero promo cycle seemed to undercut that narrative.

Like you were either a Pearl Jam kid or a Nirvana kid. Pearl Jam felt like the group that was palatable enough for parents and jocks, and Nirvana was for the weirdos and outcasts. That's probably mostly in my head, because everyone seemed to have both Nevermind and Ten, but that's how it felt to me.

It felt that way for me too. I only have Nevermind.

Hah yes i was a teen at the time too. Totally get what you mean, I probably even had this exact conversation in 1994. Pearl Jam was def marketed as "the real authentic grunge deal". I don't want to take away from their actually cool DIY politics (confronting ticketmaster is some ballsy stuff) but I think I just like the music and unabashed weirdness of Nirvana more.

I think that perception is largely accurate tbh xp

It depresses me that Pearl Jam is still around and releasing semi-decent songs like "Sirens" and Nirvana ended abruptly 21 freaking years ago. Jesus. If Kurt hadn't killed himself I can't imagine what he would have done in all that time. (Though there's a chance he would have split the band up, released a crappy "electronic" solo album in 1997, gained tons of weight, and would be posting YouTube lessons for playing "Drain You" today.)

Watching the movie, I was struck by how devastated his family/friends are to this day. It's still fresh.

Oh, I was on the Nirvana side of the divide for sure. This morning I was trying to think of it as like a Beatles vs. Rolling Stones divide, but I wasn't alive in the 60s so I don't know if that really makes sense. I also can't quite decide who should be who in that comparison. At the time I would probably would have said Nirvana=Rolling Stones, Pearl Jam=Beatles, but these days I would go the other way. Nirvana seems to overshadow everything that was going on in the early 90s rock, and maybe it's because the best music won out over time, but its obviously more than that. And why is "Come as you are" the song I hear the most on the radio these days? I never liked that song that much.

and 20 years on the f*cking foo fighters are still around touring with band posters all over berlin. if kurt had known that in 1994 he would have had pity with us and i am sure he wouldn't have pulled the trigger...

Like you were either a Pearl Jam kid or a Nirvana kid. Pearl Jam felt like the group that was palatable enough for parents and jocks, and Nirvana was for the weirdos and outcasts. That's probably mostly in my head, because everyone seemed to have both Nevermind and Ten, but that's how it felt to me.

Looking back on it, I bet what was really going on was there were kids who thought there were Nirvana kids or Pearl Jam kids and they were all Nirvana kids. And there were kids that liked both, and the Nirvana kids just called them Pearl Jam kids, because Nirvana kids thought they were cooler than everyone else.

I don't know, I think you were more on the mark when you alluded to the fact that Pearl Jam was actually the biggest band in the world by the end of, say, 1992.

It seems just as likely to me, if not more so, that the Pearl Jam circle encompasses the Nirvana fans, not vice versa.

tho not perfectly, obviously! Not trying to say that all Nirvana fans worshipped at the altar of Vedder

Maybe. As a Nirvana fan, I certainly looked down on the tastes of Pearl Jam fans. Heck, as a Nirvana fan I kinda looked down on other Nirvana fans that weren't getting into cool shit like Sonic Youth or whatever, but I was kinda of a 13 year old asshole.

Pearl Jam the biggest band in the world? In the US, maybe. Nirvana were definitely the more successful of the two in the UK. fwiw

um, in 92-93 neither nirvana or pearl jam sold as many albums as billy ray cyrus so this is all a matter of perspective

(Nirvana also sold way more than Billy Ray Cyrus in the UK, but)

94 seems more relevant and was kind of ground zero for that thought. Vs. almost sold a million that first week. Either way we all know that the World = the US. Or not. My bad.

"If Kurt hadn't killed himself I can't imagine what he would have done in all that time."

I think Kurt's range was pretty well established at the time of his death so I doubt he would have done anything particularly surprising in the intervening years (although he certainly could have recorded some good/great material in that time).

Yeah, "the world" was hyperbolic. I was mainly going by US sales (Ten outsold Nevermind and Vs. outsold In Utero, and both sets of albums came out within a month of each other), and also by my own experiences of the two's relative popularity at the time. Metallica was bigger than both of them, and of course Garth Brooks and Whitney Houston were bigger than the whole lot.

finished watching this -- im not really one to get nostalgic but fwiw this did an A+ job of making me miss kurt and his band

Pearl Jam and Nirvana were both equally loved by any "heavy metal" or "alt" kids.

Another vote for this in suburban D.C., though the real cool kids were Fugazi all the way (I remember it was confusing for a lot of people when Pearl Jam covered Fugazi and Ian MacKaye showed up at a Pearl Jam show, etc.)

I was firmly in the Smashing Pumpkins camp circa 1993-94. In white Midwest suburbia it definitely seemed like a three-way race (though everyone had all three bands' albums anyway).

yeah but there were a solid 2 years where Nirvana and Pearl Jam were gigantic before SP really entered that sphere

I think Kurt's range was pretty well established at the time of his death so I doubt he would have done anything particularly surprising in the intervening years (although he certainly could have recorded some good/great material in that time).

― One bad call from barely losing to (Alex in SF), Wednesday, May 6, 2015 10:15 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the actual "Montage of Heck" tape collage shows how wide his range was. it's remarkable how clear his personality and his obsessions are in that piece. that shit sounds EXACTLY like Eric Copeland's "Strange Days." He'd be a more interesting Thurston Moore, playing noise shows in basements and warehouses and selling his latest tape of collages and prints. he could've done anything

Still haven't seen this yet. I was going to watch it tonight but we saw "Over the Edge" instead. Pretty amazing movie about a bunch of anarchist kids.

"That movie pretty much defined my whole personality. It was really cool. Total anarchy." Kurt Cobain (Come As You Are, Michael Azzerrad)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ereen__ld8g

you know Over The Edge plays a somewhat prominent role in Montage of Heck? or no?

they play a phone interview Kurt did w/ Buzz Osborne where they talk about the film and show clips of it and whatnot.

Cool! I didn't know that. Yeah it's a pretty amazing movie, I guess he was the same age as these kids.

quite a coincidence that you watched it tonight instead of Montage...

Well it was his favorite movie. I'm on a big nostalgic kick the past few weeks (birthday, old friends in from out of town, first video art show in a few years next friday, etc) so my friend suggested this cos we used to watch it when we were rebellious teenage youth. Not surprising that it is Kurt Cobain's favorite movie at all. Pretty amazing and believable performances from these kids, indulging in trashy decadence and nihilism. Some amazing cinematography of somebody looking out a screen door while their best friend runs towards the sunset of a suburban wasteland. There are some long takes that are pretty great. It's low budget but well-made, and I guess based on a real story. In a large way it is a story of police brutality. "Man, I swear that I don't have a gun" could be dialog from this movie.

> I have always found it interesting that as much as Kirt always claimed to hate the mass success and being famous, when the In Utero promo cycle
> came around he was all in with videos, multiple MTV specials, magazine covers, interviews and all that shit. While at the same time Pearl Jam (who
> were actually the biggest band in the world at the time) were like "fuck it. We don't want to do that shit" and they didn't.

Would have like know more about the band's management on this point. Seems like more, I dunno, empathic (?) management would have taken better care. Kelly Curtis was there from the Mother Love Bone days and was while Andrew Wood became a heroin addict.

*was there while...

Would have like know more about the band's management on this point. Seems like more, I dunno, empathic (?) management would have taken better care.

He was very close to Danny Goldberg, Nirvana's manager - there's a shot in Montage of Heck where you can see he's put Danny as his daughter's guardian should he and Courtney die, along with his sister. I don't think there's any evidence they were ever pressured to do stuff they protested doing.

I never really thought of Courtney Love as a villain in the Cobain story, and even less so now. It's clear their relationship was mutually beneficial (as sick as it sometimes was).

Just finished watching this. Lots of conflicting thoughts about the man now, seeing angles of him I've never so much as contemplated before. He's tragic, but sort of a drama queen too.

i have so much to say about this, sorry in advance for tl;dr

- i mostly hated this except for the courtney & frances footage.

i will still cry at the drop of a hat thinking about all this stuff, i was a huge fan...but i felt almost nothing watching this.

so.

animating his journals felt like that shitty movie ben stiller's character makes of winona's home movies in reality bites. hated that so much. sooooo much.

THE MEANING OF LIFE IS PIZZA
PUH PUH PUH
PIZZA

the only music in this is nirvana music. especially in that first hour. if youre telling his story use the music that influenced him! he didnt come out of the womb playing all apologies on a toy piano

and the choir version of smells like teen spirit
with the slowmo video
like jeeeeezus fucking christ could you be any more on the nose
fucking hell

it just deifies him so much and thats not what anyone needs 20 years on. he needs humanizing. i dont think this got anywhere near the person except at the v end and i think that the first 3/4 says a lot about the way his family still, continually, wants us to see him

the v early scenes with his mom bugged me

i have always felt weird about wendy, esp when they had such a complex & difficult relationship. don too, though he's not nearly the 'spokesparent' that wendy is now.

there is so much between the lines of what little her and don say. that in itself is it's own movie

idk i just hate that they're there talking about their little boy etc and yet the *stepmom* is the one who has to lay out the 411 that we all know: ie that no-one wanted him.

that's what i want to know about. to me that silence is the crucible where he was formed.

but the family made the movie possible and i get why there's not much interrogation of that part of his life. but still. it just becomes another brick in the mythology wall.

and then the second half at first feels like it will collapse under the weight of all the media bullshit that we know, like this is a Behind The Music

*CAVEAT*
the only thing that saves this doc for me it is the footage with courtney &/or frances. that's the only time it feels close to human.
their love is/was v genuine imo & translates well, even with the junkie haze.
like, some of the best footage of him is him smiling at courtney holding the camera
shes so crazy & babbly & he's so chill
and they are so fucked up
they just seem like a young couple into each other
"daddys gotta go...ROCK"
bathtubs, haircuts
that happy footage is made sad bc he's dead but it was real when it happened & i am glad there was a lot of that warts & all footage in there in the second half.
for any faults she may have, courtney has always been p upfront about their marriage, she seems less bound up in nostalgia.
that footage saved the doc
***

overall idg why this is being hailed unless pppl just hadnt thought about him in a while & forgot what they knew & loved being taken on a trip down memory lane

sorry for long post

Yea the use of nothing but Nirvana music seems a little too much considering one of the things that was great about him was how openly he talked about all the stuff that he lived and influenced him- glad the reason I got so much from him apart from the songs was getting into stuff like The Raincoats, Wipers, Flipper etc through him.

He loved.

Glad also supposed to be one? Phone typing.

I saw this and liked it a lot.

It's crazy how short a time period he was famous. Just a little over 2 years. Lana Del Rey has been in the public eye longer than he was.

VegemiteGrrl nailed my issues with it. The parts most people didn't know about were facile mythology and the stuff everyone did know was mostly rehashing. Even the touching Kurt & Courtney home movie stuff was covered almost as well in Hit So Hard.

I liked this, but holy hell was it too long

i liked this mostly, as well, but it has a problem that many music docs seem to have: music is treated as the soundtrack of the subject's life rather than, really, the organizing principle and passion of it. you'd think the music was just stuff that happened in between everything else rather than the center of the whole thing.

http://thetalkhouse.com/music/talks/buzz-osborne-the-melvins-talks/

Buzz says it's a huge load of bullshit. Of course, he was really close to the situation too and has a palpable hatred for Courtney Love, so I wouldn't take his words as gospel either.

So a documentary about two people who are "masters of jerking your chain" may be factually inaccurate? Well I never...

Gonna finally watch this tonight. I keep getting distracted.

Everyone should see "Over the Edge" if they haven't.

Has anyone ever taken Kurt's "stomach pain" as anything other than an excuse so he could take drugs and be sick?

thats always how ive thought of it yeah

idk in MOH his mom says he dealt with it from his teens. but prolly a little of both.

LOl buzz. He's probably right.

rip otm. His stomach probably hurt also from taking ritalin as a kid. In the movie he says he would take it at night.

Saw this, it was good, but way too long. Too many parts with animated writing on the screen, it became hard to read and from there hard to sit through.

I enjoyed a lot of the animation, especially the stuff that was obviously his drawings. The performances were good but I've already seen most of that stuff in "Live Tonight Sold Out".

I'm really bent out of shape about the possibility that his stomach condition was a deliberate lie to excuse his drug use. I don't buy it, Buzz was jerked around just as much as anybody else in Cobain's life, but I've never even considered that it was a complete lie. That is really upsetting to me.

it's v reminiscent of Lenny Bruce's excuses

Junkies always have excuses. Whether there is a small basis in reality here or not seems small hash.

Exactly. As I said elsewhere, I assumed "never trust a junkie" was up there with "look both ways before crossing" on the list of Stuff Everybody Just Knows, but apparently not.

....what a fucked-up little dude he was. Weak, too. Makes his whiny singing all the more apropos. Loud quiet loud akin to love hate love.

Was that his real x-ray in the movie? Cos his mom is talking about the doctor seeing his stomach swelling up in x-rays.

It's dumb to characterize his entire life based on the final years when heroin destroyed his life. Incredibly reductive and dehumanizing, but hey, feel free to think that way if you want. I have friends that died from the stuff and I don't think it's because they were weak but because heroin is a demon bitch.

Did he lie when he was on heroin? No duh.

...sounded like he was pretty fucked-up just dealing with his family issues as a youngster.

aka being a teenager

aka being a pussy

way too much of the footage has been seen before but that's the problem with any rock doc in the YouTube era i guess. also yeah a surprising amount of this stuff already exists on the big-selling, popular official Nirvana DVDs (Live Tonight Sold Out, the extended Unplugged, The Year That Punk Broke, Reading 1992 etc), i thought yer man would at least avoid *that* stuff. kinda like seeing a Beatles docu that's got whole chunks of Yellow Submarine and Help in it.

how comes the Melvins doofus thinks "90%" is bullshit when a huge amount is just home video footage??

and if "After 49 minutes, I was ready for it all to be over, but Montage of Heck just went on and on," what did he sit through it twice for??

Probably because he knew he was going to have to talk about it whether he liked it or not.

there's a new Courntey-arranged-to-have-him-killed doc it appears. i wonder how this one differs from the Broomfield doc

http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/soaked-in-bleach-2015
https://thedissolve.com/reviews/1643-soaked-in-bleach/

LOL otm. Why would anyone watch this twice. Maybe he really wanted to see "All Apologies" MTV Unplugged for the 433rd time.

Bloomfield's doc is v funny and not at all to be taken seriously as "conspiracy" imo, he's just good at getting good stuff out of kooks

Broomfield

CL wants to stop Soaked In Bleach being 'shown' in cinemas but it's already all over the net so i dunno why she's bothering. it seems to have made way more headlines as a result of her cease and desists, Streisand Effect style.

i watched soaked in bleach last weekend. unlike the lol broomfield film, it was really persuasive. the last thing my self-esteem needs at this point is to become one of those people that think cobain was murdered, but dammit I might be one of those people now.

Yeah it was pretty damming. Also kinda felt like an episode of Unsolved Mysteries or something.

kim gordon said in an interview a while back that she and a bunch of ppl who knew cobain were not convinced by the suicide verdict.

murder story is way more implausible than the suicide, is the thing

I used to think so but now I'm not so sure

So Buzz was 3 years older than Kurt and is some authority on what Kurt was up to when Kurt was 14 and Buzz was 17? That's a massive age difference for teenagers and not the sort of thing you would go around telling everyone. Doesn't make the tapes "bullshit".

Krist being a closer friend also being involved makes me think it's more likely the stories were true.

Believing in Kurt being murdered is no different to thinking 911 was an inside job or man never landed on the moon.

thanks courtney

Just saw this. I kind of hated how mythicizing it was. He wasn't a troubled genius, he was going through puberty. The only genius thing he did was realize how to sell it.

It would have been interesting to know what path he would have chosen if he were still alive. The Grohl path of selling out while fading out, the Novoselic path of retiring quietly, the Courtney path of going batshit crazy or taking a hint from Sonic Youth and keep releasing experimental music with a steady underground fanbase.

dueting with Michael Stipe would seem to imply the Grohl path

but to survive he would have had to go through rehab and divorce Courtney so who knows how that would have played out aesthetically

“I wanted to have the adoration of John Lennon but have the anonymity of Ringo Starr,” Cobain told MTV News .

It could have gone either way really.

Ringo is anonymous much to his own chagrin. Dude is one of the busiest legacy touring artists there is.

Believing in Kurt being murdered is no different to thinking 911 was an inside job or man never landed on the moon.

― mickcsmith (micarl), Thursday, June 25, 2015 6:39 PM (1 hour ago)

that is ridiculous

it does strain credulity but by all means please summarize this convincing new evidence presented in Bleached

The film has exactly the same format as all the batshit crazy inside job type films. Not so crazy. What's ridiculous is thinking it's not possible he killed himself.

I heard Kurt killed himself as a dare

Buzz Osbourne did it

I heard Kurt killed himself as a dare
kind of like this theory

One of my friend's younger brother's friends said it when we were smoking weed about 14 years ago.
Never been able to shake it off since

the dude was so real he offed himself ... just cuz buzz osbourne dared him to do it.

Great example of internet trolling from 10th April 1994 here.

looks like a bro
http://prevettlaw.com/?page_id=5

haven't seen the film but ppl get murdered every day, kurt cobain being murdered is not a completely outlandish notion on the level of a moon landing hoax.

it doesn't exactly jibe with the evidence

a suicidal person, a suicide note, a crime scene that looks like a suicide etc.

evidence was from what i kind sort of remember:

-the shell casing was on the wrong side of the room
-he had so much heroin in him he should have been unconscious
-love carried around suspicious handwriting examples/practice
-love planted a story about kurt threatening suicide by writing to a paper as his mother
-they were in the process of getting a divorce and had signed a prenup so she would have gotten nothing
-police biased towards declaring suicide for junkies

all of that is incidental/circumstantial and none of it points to murder

something always seemed a little strange and off to me about that suicide note, it reads like a rambling farewell-to-showbiz screed up till the very end

things being odd, people having motives, small details not making sense /= evidence of commission of a crime. his fingerprints are on the gun, we know where the gun came from, he was a guy who clearly thought about killing himself a lot, was depressed/prone to self-loathing. I mean come on now.

bear in mind I find Courtney Love to be p loathsome, careerist to the point of insanity, etc. but that she would hire someone to kill him and get away with it strains credibility on so many fronts - she was a drug-addled famewhore do you really think she had the wherewithal to commission such a perfectly executed crime? And that she would pay a crazy nutjob like El Duce to do it, and that he would credibly pull it off? I mean, why wouldn't she just take the path of least resistance and engineer an OD? Or just tell Kurt to kill himself (he probably would've done it?) Did Kurt just let El Duce into his home, give him the gun he'd recently bought from Dylan Carlson, and then let El Duce kill him, leaving behind no sign of El Duce's presence or a struggle or anything? The whole scenario is ridiculous. Bloomfield's film is great because it mines just how crazy the intersection of the NW scene and celebrity was, he's good at lifting rocks and exposing ugliness and insanity - but it's clear by the end of the film he doesn't really buy any of the murder theory stuff, he was just following where the story led.

How do you know what this guy thought about?

telepathy

I don't believe any of the Cobain murder conspiracy theories at all, fwiw.

but seriously when someone talks - in their work, in their personal diaries, in public statements/interviews - about how unhappy they are, wanting to kill themselves, etc. idk I don't think that was all a constructed persona, dude had issues.

I wasn't saying the evidence points strongly to CL hiring someone to murder him. It just points strongly to him not being the one who pulled the trigger of the shotgun.

People get murdered and arranged to look like suicides all the time, it's not rare. Junkies even more so. Police departments also rush to declare deaths suicides all the time, for obvious reasons.

I am curious what evidence you have for this "junkies get murdered and arranged to look like suicides all the time" claim

Ok fine "apparently, according to criminologists and coroners" and not literally all the time

xpost I believe that the documentary points to the Cobain's babysitter Cali Dewitt as the murderer

Looking through the old archived posts from Usenet (alt.music.nirvana) in 1994 it would seem that Kurt Cobain murder conspiracy theories pretty much sprang up merely months after Kurt was found dead, but for every person putting a conspiracy theory forward, there seems to be many more deeming those conspiracy theories to be laughable.

Anyone who points to "oh, but he looked happy in this footage so he wouldn't have killed himself" is a fucking idiot who has no idea how mental health issues work, btw.

^^^^ this forever

it reads like a rambling farewell-to-showbiz screed up till the very end

It likely was. He psyched himself up to actually go through with it.

can we talk about beethoven's suicide note in comparison?

http://pitchfork.com/news/61395-kurt-cobain-solo-material-to-be-released-as-montage-of-heck-the-home-recordings/

i can't believe a tracklist hasn't been released for this yet, doesn't bode well

I loved the animated sequences in this.

Also wondered who was filming the often very intimate home movies a lot of the time.

his dealer

Eric Erlandson, apparently

Something something exploiting Kurt yet again.

I find it annoyingly calculated that every Nirvana product always comes out in November.

Finally! an 11-minute "Do Re Mi"!! yes!!!!

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/inside-montage-of-heck-albums-trove-of-unreleased-kurt-cobain-20151007?page=4

1. "The Yodel Song"
2. "Been a Son (Early Demo)"
3. "What More Can I Say"
4. "1988 Capitol Lake Jam Commercial"
5. "The Happy Guitar"
6. "Montage of Kurt"
7. "Beans"
8. "Burn the Rain"
9. "Clean Up Before She Comes (Early Demo)"
10. "Reverb Experiment"
11. "Montage of Kurt II"
12. "Rehash"
13. "You Can’t Change Me/Burn My Britches/Something in the Way (Early Demo)
14. "Scoff (Early Demo)"
15. "Aberdeen"
16. "Bright Smile"
17. "Underground Celebritism"
18. "Retreat"
19. "Desire"
20. "And I Love Her"
21. "Sea Monkeys"
22. "Sappy (Early Demo)"
23. "Letters to Frances"
24. "Scream"
25. "Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle (Demo)"
26. "Kurt Ambiance"
27. "She Only Lies"
28. "Kurt Audio Collage"
29 . "Poison's Gone"
30. "Rhesus Monkey"
31. "Do Re Mi (Medley)"

I want.

http://www.alternativenation.net/kurt-cobains-ex-girlfriend-courtney-love-threatened-to-cut-off-my-head-burn-down-my-house/