Fifteen years ago today, the body of Kurt Cobain was discovered above the garage at his Seattle home, ending an era of musical revolution and for many, the end of an age of innocence. In marking this somber occasion, I have posted an article I did in October of 2007 for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, interviewing Nirvana biographer Michael Azerrad about his involvement with the film "About A Son," and about his time spent with Cobain.
Come as you are: Kurt Cobain biographer Michael Azerrad: On "Kurt Cobain: About a Son" (Originally published on October 17, 2007 in the San Francisco Bay Guardian)
As singer, songwriter and frontman for Nirvana, Kurt Cobain helped lead a musical revolution in the early 1990s whose effects on popular music and culture are still felt today—yet after his death in 1994 at the age of 27, he continues to remain a figure somewhat shrouded in mystery. The new film “Kurt Cobain: About A Son” aims to show a more personal side of the gifted musician, told in his own words.
Director A.J. Schnack has taken interview tapes of Cobain done with music journalist Michael Azerrad for his 1993 book “Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana”—considered by many to be the definitive biography of the band—and filmed scenes of the places that played an important role in Cobain’s life, including his hometown of Aberdeen, Washington, along with Seattle and Olympia, to accompany the introspective and revealing words of the late musical icon.
The project came to fruition when Schnack was working on a documentary about They Might Be Giants, titled “Gigantic: A Tale of Two Johns,” and he included an appearance from Azerrad, who in addition to the “Come As You Are Book” has written hundreds of articles about music, along with the excellent tome “Our Band Could Be Your Life,” a look at some of the most influential underground music artists of the 1980s and early 1990s.
During production of that film, Azerrad and Schnack went out to lunch, and over the course of their conversation the subject of Kurt Cobain and Nirvana came up.
“I guess he was curious about Nirvana because his nephew was starting to really get into Nirvana, and I think his nephew had been born a couple of years before Kurt died, and had a different kind of a take on him then people who were alive when Nirvana was around typically have,” says Azerrad.
“I just kind of mentioned the tapes in passing, and after I saw ‘Gigantic’ completed, A.J. broached the idea of perhaps making a film using these tapes, and I was very open to it. For the past couple of years, actually, I had been thinking about such a thing, in extremely basic and abstract terms.”
Schnack came up with a proposal which involved a three part structure to it, shooting in each of the three cities where Cobain had lived. Adding a soundtrack of music that the late singer listened to, along with an original score, the only narration would come from Cobain himself, directly from the 25 hours of interview tapes that had been made with Azerrad in December of 1992 and March of 1993.
“They were done touring, and they were writing and rehearsing for ‘In Utero,’ so it was actually a really great time to speak to him, because he wasn’t exhausted or grumpy. He was in reasonably good health, and was very much in love with his wife and his child, so he was in about the best mood he was going to be in, in the last couple years of his life.”
The interviews, in which Cobain would be much more open and relaxed than in most others, would usually take place at his house in Seattle, where he would typically invite Azerrad to come over around midnight.
“We’d sit and talk about other things beside the book, maybe watch some MTV, and play with the baby, things like that, and then at some point he would say, ‘Okay, I’m ready to talk.’ He’d grab a pack of smokes, and we’d go up to the kitchen, and sit at his kitchen table, and just talk until the sun came up.”
“That’s why you get this very intimate tone to these interviews; it’s not your usual ‘sit in the record label conference room under fluorescent lights’ type deal, he was just at his home, he was outside of the promotional cycle, and it was in the wee hours of the morning. When you’re in that kind of a situation, you’re going to say things that you wouldn’t have said in a more formal situation.”
Azerrad also had a much deeper and more personal relationship with Cobain than most other writers—the two found that they had much in common after their first interview, done for a Rolling Stone cover story that appeared in April of 1992.
“It turned out that my parents divorced when I was ten, and his parents divorced when he was ten. So that was kind of a really big point of connection, and then other things would happen—he mentioned that he was really into the ‘Motorcycle Song’ by Arlo Guthrie, and I said, ‘Oh, I used to listen to that too when I was a kid! I’d run around my house and pretend I was a motorcycle!’ And then he’d say ‘That’s what I used to do!’”
“It was just all kinds of points of connection like that, and so he knew, that unlike with a lot of journalists, he knew that I understood him on a pretty deep level, even though we were so different—he was the high school educated kid from the depressed logging town, and I was the bespectacled, East Coast rock critic. But we still could relate on some really important levels, we listened to the same music, KISS and Black Sabbath, and Aerosmith and Cheap Trick at precisely the same age, and then we discovered punk rock, and that changed our lives, and confused us too.”
“When I had done that Rolling Stone cover story, I’m pretty sure that was the first article that connected his childhood, and his whole experience as a kid with the screaming, and the anger of the music, and I think he understood that I understood where he was coming from. The opportunity came up to do this book, and I discussed it with Kurt, and I said, ‘I don’t want this to be an ‘authorized’ book,’ and he said, ‘No way, that would be too Guns N Roses.’ That was all I wanted; I didn’t want to write a book that they were going to censor, basically, and Kurt said that was fine, because the whole idea was to give the book credibility.”
Cobain died just six months after the release of the “Come As You Are” book, which deeply affected Azerrad.
“It was really hard for me to listen to Nirvana music, especially ‘In Utero’ stuff, because the pain is so clear, it’s really a scream for help, it’s just too painful to listen to if you knew him. The tapes were kind of easy to ignore, because they were just sealed up in a box somewhere in my house, I didn’t even think of looking into them.”
When it came time to open up the interview tapes for “About A Son,” Azerrad initially approached them with a sense of trepidation.
“I was a little scared to hear them—it was pretty sad. But then A.J. asked if he could listen to one, and I thought, ‘It’s been over ten years, and I’m a grown man, and I can do this.’ As soon as we put in the tape and started listening, I got really happy, because I felt like, ‘That’s the guy I used to know and really love,’ and I enjoyed those interviews a lot, and it made me feel a lot better. It was just so nice to hear his voice, and again, as I mentioned, this was at a time when he was in really good shape. It was a nice reminder that he wasn’t always the ‘troubled, suicidal drug addict,’ there was more to him then that.”
When it came time to pick out the particular portions of the interviews for inclusion in the new film, both Azerrad and Schnack independently selected what they thought should be included, and then met to discuss what they had decided on.
“[When we] put our heads together about what we had chosen, there was about 80 percent overlap, it was kind of stunning—so we were very much on the same page,” says Azerrad.
The interviews, which were originally made on cassette tapes, were then digitally transferred by Azerrad, who says that although the recordings were pretty clean, some portions did require cleaning up, and some were aided by skillful work on the part of Steve Fisk and Ben Gibbard, who wrote the original score.
“One of the reasons that score by Ben and Steve was so intelligent is that at one point there is some Bruce Springsteen music playing in the background as I’m doing the interview, and they actually wrote some music that superimposed onto this Springsteen song so you couldn’t actually figure out what song it was, it’s rhythmically and harmonically sort of a smoke screen, and it’s incredibly clever.”
“Some of the interviews you can hear were done over the phone, so it sounds like someone’s talking on a phone, but all of that just combines to make it feel incredibly contemporary, because you’re not seeing Kurt’s face on the screen, you’re not seeing vintage 1992 Kurt Cobain, you’re just hearing someone speak. That person could be speaking today, and there’s nothing he says in there that’s particularly dated, it’s still all true, and it’s still all relevant and applicable to our experience, so that feeling of hearing a tape recorder, it just feels like you taped your friend talking.”
Azerrad says that the finished film came out even better than he had hoped it would, and that he’s very pleased with the final project, one that he and Schnack saw as a labor of love.
“There’s something about the synergy of the geography of Washington State, which the cinematographer captured so perfectly, and people from the Northwest consistently comment on how spot on the portrayal of it is. The combination of the cinematography and the locales, and the music that Kurt listened to, and just the sound of his voice, it’s just a very synergistic thing. It’s way more vivid and powerful and moving than I imagined it would be.”
The writer acknowledges that the film may not be for a general audience, as it does not take the standard approach of a narrative documentary—but that was never the intent.
“It’s an unusual film, sometimes it’s very literal—when Kurt is talking about accompanying his dad to the lumber mill—the footage is actually of the lumber mill. But sometimes Kurt is talking about something and you’ll see a picture of a dead bird on a forest floor, and that’s not literal, that’s poetic, and a lot of this film is about poetry, combining things together in unique ways to produce complex feelings and sensations and ideas that you couldn’t get any other way.”
“It’s all about being evocative and poetic; we really felt that was the only way we could get across what we wanted to get across, which was that Kurt was a complex, contradictory human being, of several different extremes, just like we all are. We really wanted to counteract that perception of him as the stormy, suicidal drug addict, the ‘tragic Kurt’—I mean that was one aspect of him, but there were so many others.”
Azerrad says that Cobain’s bandmates Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl have received DVD copies of “About A Son,” but that he hasn’t heard from them about it. He also says that the film was made with the blessing of Courtney Love and the Cobain estate, and though he thinks it would probably be very painful for Love to watch, there is somebody in particular he would like to see the film.
“If there’s one person in the world I hope sees this movie, it’s Frances Bean Cobain. This is the first movie where Kurt speaks for himself, and that’s such a rare thing, he did precious few interviews where people could actually hear him speak. His life has been so dissected by other people and so many opinions—a lot of them ill informed—have been ventured about him, that it’s kind of a relief to hear him speak for himself. It just debunks a lot of myths, and the most credible way is to hear it from the man himself.”
