1994 Words on Nirvana Unplugged

HEY KURT: I'M STILL HERE

Kurt Cobain would hate who I've become. But that's not his fault.

He didn't live to see me here. With my argyle socks and desk-drawer full of designer cards with messages already written inside the jacket. I don't even own a pair of jeans I could wear to make the socks look like the convenient coverings of an individual with spirit.

And even if I did, I'd give myself away by being wrapped up in things that he'd know were trivial. Like my telephone. And the internet, which lives inside my phone. And the dropping of "tele" as a prefix to phone doesn't seem like it'd comfortable for him to hear from my son who's affixed to the techno-toy which neatly carries my secrets and my son in its hip pocket from the tender age of 3.

I wonder if he'd let Francis Bean carry a phone. He couldn't stop her. He couldn't stop Courtney from anything. Including kill him, maybe. But I don't believe that.

I tell my son he has 2 more minutes with the phone. After that, he's expected to rejoin the dinner conversation.

Now I'm the adult, handing out deadlines.

Adults want to draw clear lines around everything. Homework, curfew, shorts weather, coat weather, inside voices, foot stomping, what's music and what isn't.

"Do you understand me?" is their favorite question. They expect a straight-forward answer. Either yes, so the adult can move on. Or no, so the adult can threaten to take something away.

But what if the kid has nothing to lose?

WHERE WE STARTED: ONE BABY TO ANOTHER

"The water is so yellow, I'm a healthy student."

No, you're really not. A professional student is what you are.

High school. College. Fraternity. GRE. LSAT. They have an acronym for everything.

They. Cue the Naive Melody.

I wonder if you liked the Talking Heads, Kurt. They say you did.

I listen to the Talking Heads in my law office sometimes. They're one of the few bands whose music doesn't distract me from my work or snap our secretaries out of their hypnosis.

The Talking Heads sorta died as you were getting started. In my eyes, at least.

I only knew you in the end. That was our beginning.

I hope you don't mind the collective pronoun ("our"). I know you were ferociously defiant of homophobia, so whatever weirdness that comes from me referring to me and you as an entity shouldn't ruffle your feathers that way. You wouldn't be interested in a "no homo" preface to me describing you and me as "us".

But I imagine you'd shudder a little at the idea that me, a southern lawyer, the poster-child for so many of the symptoms of American Sickness that you tried to tie down and drown, clings to an image of Us.

But I was up there with you in your--whatever they're called. Performances was never the right word. They weren't shows either. I'm convinced of that, though you did your best to make them an experience considerate of an audience presence.

Pennyroyal Tea Parties, maybe.

Your concerts were open and harsh on things that deserved it, like a fire that attacks newspapers first because they're the most flammable, with excuses and the taglines about how things are. Pretending to point us to where things are better.

You sorta helped kill that world. Newspapers. They've been replaced by a world I imagine you'd hate even more. Social media.

They've uploaded some of your old interviews on social media sites, like YouTube. YouTube is this place where old footage comes back to life. I've watched some old interviews of you on there. These interviews that I imagine you only agreed to participate in because they would never see the light of day.

You have two long interviews on there, standing in a giant tower that overlooks a body of water in Seattle. Maybe it's the Needle. In one of them, you and the band (Kris and Dave) talk to a reporter who has a heavy German accent. I bet you figured they'd only air that in Germany, and no one would see it.

If you only knew. Me in my Nashville law office, watching that interview, during work-days comprised of things that would make your face the color of the chest on the In Utero album cover. Red like an infection.

What is it about Germany that made shy American celebrities grant long interviews to their reporters in the 90s? My two heroes of the 90s, you and David Foster Wallace, have my two favorite interviews on YouTube and they're both with journalists who have heavy German accents.

90s America did seem very industrial, which is how I think of Germany. We probably had stuff in common with them then. They'd just seen the Berlin Wall fall down and no one realized it, but we were all trying to replace that ultimate symbol of manual labor: a structure erected by human hands with no technology for the completely socioeconomic purpose of keeping like people separate. That was a tangible evil. The world misses tangible evils.

If book burnings happened today, like they used to in Germany, it wouldn't be the same.

Even when you were alive, those types of censorship bonfires had already turned weird. People burned CDs. They were all plasticky and it was like the Darth Vader bonfire where your gut's like "Umm Luke, I don't think that's good for the environment of Endor."

The CDs you sold in the 90s, I don't know if they were made in another part of the world, but they would be today. And people wouldn't buy them. Not even in America. They'd find the songs on YouTube. They'd click and endure 5 seconds of the pre-video commercial, then click "Skip Ad," for the imperfect segue that only America could build (and stomach) as toll-road between art and capital.

I bet you'd dig parts of YouTube, though. I read somewhere that you liked to watch documentaries. You'd find some good ones on Netflix, but I think you'd especially enjoy the old PBS and BBC ones on YouTube.

One of the best things on YouTube is finding covers of classic songs by all-time performers.

One of my favorite is The Great Pretender by Sam Cooke. It moves slow like the words are being poured from a person whose job it is to make things seem less hard than they actually are.

You talk slowly in those YouTube clips. Reminds me of hearing your interviews on MTV for the first time, back in middle school. I used to try to emulate the way you talked. One day I put on a big dress and wig and went to school. I was a HS football player in makeup. My parents took pictures and were really concerned. I didn't do it because I was gay and I didn't do it during Homecoming week on the Powder Puff day when cool boys cross-dress for what always, to me, seemed like a thinly-veiled audition at mocking the rest of the student body by how much more symbolically beautiful they looked in a gender-bending way than the rest of us did in our best takes at idiosyncratic gender-specificity.

But I moved on from that about when you moved off from shows that had become just that.

That always seemed the one thing you couldn't tolerate.

Shows.

WERE YOU EVER REALLY THERE: A POISON APPLE

I was a healthy student of the things that inspired you. The bands and albums. Burroughs and Beckett.

I had an older cousin who loaned me the classics that inspired you. The Pixies, Black Flag, Stooges, PJ Harvey, Sonic Youth. Never Neil Young though.

What did she know? You weren't gone yet so she couldn't have known you'd quote him in your suicide note and make all your big-time fans uneasy about Rust.

I don't blame Neil. None of us do.

I think your fans started to accept your tragedy before you left. I got a firm grip on the hourglass when I first was consumed by, and adopted as scripture, everything in Unplugged.

"I've only had three glasses of tea, but thank you."

But why'd you have to quote Neil in your suicide note (if it was your note and your suicide, which I believe it was & was, respectively)?

You knew--or you must've expected--Neil wouldn't take that well.

It's not fair to pick out that one thing from all the stuff you wrote and sang. And yes, Kurt, I get you didn't mean to. Neither of us did. But we fucking buried him. Neil doesn't talk about it. He talks about everything but he won't talk about that.

Was it Neil's fault? Not your death, our generation.

I wasn't technically, as far as chronology goes, part of your generation. You died at an age that I wouldn't see for another decade, or feel for another two.

But we went to school together. We walked outside, not on the same days with the same teachers, but we looked out on the same fog from here to Germany. Cars still had bumper stickers back then. Kids still wore black. Parents still wondered what they did all day.

Things were different.

I wasn't in the class when you walked out into the fog. But I heard about it.

I found out about it from people you would've wanted dead. Not just gone but dead. I know this for a fact. They hated gays and beat up girls. I was not one of them, but I was among the crowd they were in with.

I was with them when I heard your music for the first time. I was in a dorm at the University of North Carolina. We were at a summer camp, provisioned with styrofoam coolers from our SUV parents. I imagine one of them bought the Bleach album we played in a portable tape player they loaned us.

I had a shaved head full of Reddi Whip aerosol. I was, though barely a teenager, obese. I wore designer athletic gear. In that world, I was your opposite.

The other kids were too. But I felt different from them right then. We smashed the styrofoam coolers for different reasons in Granville Towers that day.

I would keep going back to your stuff. I'd keep looking for something in the ambient studio noises that echoed in my head when one of your songs died and another tried to crawl off the floor.

At a certain point, your music became a memory for those kids I camped with at UNC. They moved on from their most blatant crimes. I imagine them chuckling a little at the era when your music seemed spellbinding.

But for me, when it starts, I still feel like I'm sitting on the side of the road without a tire jack, just me and you staring at flat rubber on asphalt.

Why couldn't you be Bono? He knew ways to fix stuff. He had blueprints for the world at Farm Aid or Disaster Relief or AIDS research or whatever other honorable battlefields he buried flags in.

Or Thom Yorke? Or Michael Stipe?

Did it have to be Courtney? There were so many girls. So many Courtneys.

I guess it could've been worse. You could've survived that Courtney and become Adam Duritz.

But I knew you wouldn't. That's why I allowed myself to consume Unplugged with the hope that there could be more of you. But I saw the sweat growing inside the hourglass and I could almost hear it eating away at the sand crystals and I could almost imagine how loud it sounded inside there.

I bet it echoed like a coughing fit behind Pat Smear.

Maybe the only answer was to leave the car with a flat tire on the side of the road that I called "ours," and figure out a way to walk.