Kurt Cobain's haunting voice recently wafted back online with a long-lost home recording of the Beatles' (mostly) minor-key ballad "And I Love Her."
It's an odd juxtaposition: the grunge rocker tackling an early Paul McCartney stab at a serious love song. But with his languorous take on the song's lively signature riff and his down-stroked chords, Cobain turned the cover into a tune that wouldn't have been out of place in Nirvana's classic “MTV Unplugged in New York” set.
The song and other unearthed Cobain recordings, home movies, drawings and paintings provide fodder for the documentary “Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck,” which gets its TV premiere Monday on HBO with the promise of giving glimpses into the restless mind behind "Nevermind." The film, by Brett Morgen, also offers an opportunity to re-examine an introverted artist who appears to have done much of his living internally even as his talent exploded on the world stage.
Cobain exists in a kind of pop culture limbo, his legacy still evolving two decades after his suicide at age 27. He’s a difficult character to get a hold on: He had a brief run (three studio albums with Nirvana) forged in punk-inspired grunge, but laced with a melodic thread that owes more to Liverpool than the Seattle scene powerhouse probably would have cared to admit. His drug use, his stormy marriage to Courtney Love and the circumstances of his 1994 death, long the subject of whispers, sadly too often overshadow the song catalog he created with Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl.
Grohl remains a musical dynamo and a keeper of the Nirvana flame. It’s unclear whether Cobain, the early 1990s king of angst and apathy who sneered at the teen spirit of the bygone post-Reagan era, will stand the test of years. His music, though, packs an edgy energy and embodiment of youthful frustration that bodes well for timeless appeal.
It’s tempting, if folly, to speculate on what kind of songs Cobain would be producing if he were around today. The digital world might have unnerved him, but also perhaps would have inspired new anthems of disillusionment born from the isolation that can come with hyper-connection.
We can judge only from what Cobain gave us in his short life – which thankfully now includes the newly discovered materials, representing both building blocks and clues left behind by a performer who came as he was, and, in a sense, never left.
U.S. & World
Jere Hester is founding director of the award-winning, multimedia NYCity News Service at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism. He is also the author of "Raising a Beatle Baby: How John, Paul, George and Ringo Helped us Come Together as a Family." Follow him on Twitter.
