kurt cobain

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Nevermind Turned 25 and the Cover Show at Sunnyvale Did Not Completely Drain Me

(Flyer via Brookladelphia)

(Flyer via Brookladelphia)

As the story goes, no one guessed that Nirvana’s Nevermind would become one of the defining rock records of the ’90s, let alone top the charts at number one.

Actually, scratch all that. Considering that Nevermind sold more than 30 million copies, it’s one of the top-selling albums of all time (that’s double-platinum 12 times over, aka a “diamond” selling record), which puts Nirvana up there in some pretty stratospheric company: Michael Jackson (Thriller), Pink Floyd (The Dark Side of the Moon), The Beatles (1). That’s not only a good indication that Courtney Love’s drug dealer is rich as shit, but it means that Nevermind has transcended the album and become something much more complicated– shared experience, a universal language, even a kind of philosophy on life (albeit a pretty angsty-teenager one that doesn’t look so great post-college).

But holy crap that’s a lot of heavy baggage to carry around. When was the last time you could listen to Nevermind or anything Nirvana recorded at all without feeling kind of weird about it?

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Watch Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck in the Theater, Then Hear The Home Recordings

Montage_of_Heck_The_Home_Recordings_(Deluxe)Earlier this year, during a chat with Montage of Heck director Brett Morgen, we broke news that a Kurt Cobain solo album was in the works. As of Friday, the posthumous album, culled from over 200 hours of home recordings found on 108 stored cassettes, is now out in the world, and it’s every bit what Morgen promised.

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Nirvanamania: Rarities Leaked, More Coming, Plus a Montage of Heck Q&A


Back in May, when Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck was screening at IFC Center before its HBO release, director Brett Morgen revealed to Bedford + Bowery that an album of previously unreleased Cobain material was on the way. Now he tells Billboard a little more about it, saying that the as-yet untitled release, out in early November, will consist of everything “from thrash to ragtime and everything in between,” including audio montages and “a sketch comedy routine featuring Kurt voicing all of the characters.”
While you wait on tenterhooks for that, Morgen has a few more gifts for you. For one thing, he’ll be doing a q&a tomorrow, August 7, after a screening of Montage at IFC Center (that’s right: the film is back in theaters, and will be at IFC through August 13). Snag a ticket (still available) and ask him about the above outtake from the film, which he shared with Opie with Jim Norton today. In it, Cobain, in bed with a puke bucket, talks about his chronic stomach pain and jokes about heroin — “needles, needles, keep ’em coming!”
As if all of that isn’t enough for Cobain die-hards, a slew of recordings claiming to be Nirvana rarities surfaced online this week, including the demo that Cobain’s pre-Nirvana band Fecal Matter made in 1986 and alternate takes and demos from Nevermind and In Utero. Head over to Reddit to have a listen.

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Nevermind the Bollocks, Here’s John Lydon Giving St. Vitus a Taste Of His New Memoir

(Photos: Daniel Maurer)

(Photos: Daniel Maurer)

It’s not often you see Monty Python and John Lydon in the space of a week, but there was Britain’s other living legend at St. Vitus last night, chatting with Pitchfork’s Jenn Pelly about his new autobiography Anger Is an Energy. The book, out this week, tells how a childhood bout with meningitis shaped his personality (“I’m a shy, sensitive kind of fellow,” he insisted to the incredulous crowd at St. Vitus) and then goes on to recount his trailblazing and troublemaking with the Sex Pistols, Public Image Ltd., and, of course, his later dalliances with reality tv (that time he showed off his “fried-egg breasts” in I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here!) and butter commercials (“the most anarchistic thing I’ve ever been presented with”).

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Montage of Heck Portrays Kurt Cobain ‘As Intimately As Humanly Possible’

An unseen image of Kurt Cobain at home featured in the film “Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck” (© The End of Music, LLC/ Courtesy HBO)

An unseen image of Kurt Cobain at home featured in the film “Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck” (© The End of Music, LLC/ Courtesy HBO)

At SXSW last month, Brett Morgen got right to the point as he introduced his new documentary about Kurt Cobain, who died 21 years ago this past Sunday: “I know a lot of you have been waiting over 20 years to see some of this footage,” he told over 1,000 people at Austin’s Paramount Theatre. “So let’s just start the fucking movie.”

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A Sitting With the Man Who Shot Kurt Cobain

(Photos: Daniel Maurer)

(Photos: Daniel Maurer)

It’s 1993 all over again: yesterday Kim Deal of the Breeders released a new video, tickets go on sale today at noon for Helmet and Smashing Pumpkins shows, and last night at NeueHouse photographer Jesse Frohman remembered Kurt Cobain’s last American photo session, images from which are gathered in a new book.
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Hunter S. Thompson Carved From a Phone Book, David Bowie Made With a Typewriter

(Photo: Daniel Maurer)

(Photo: Daniel Maurer)

For Raoul Duke fans, the highlight of Select Fair, which opens on West 18th Street today at noon, has to be this Hunter S. Thompson bust, carved by Alex Queral from three glued-together phonebooks.
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Listen to Two New Nirvana Covers On Kurt Cobain’s Birthday

In honor of what would have been Kurt Cobain’s 47th birthday (and what is Aberdeen, Washington’s first Kurt Cobain Day) Dead Stars, the band that went as Nirvana for Halloween, just released a cover of “Old Age,” a song Nirvana recorded in 1991 that didn’t see the light of day until the box set came out in 2004.
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Last Chance to Worship Dead Celebrities at This Freaky Pop-Up Reliquary

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Jean-Michel Basquiat

The celebrity cemetery on Broome Street has no headstones, graves or flowers. Through Sunday, the Whitebox Art Center will display 51 portraits from British painter Robert Priseman’s “FAME” series, depicting stars who “died prematurely from suicide or as a result of a self-destructive lifestyle.”
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Watch the Melvins Cover the Butthole Surfers With Sir Gibby Haynes Himself

The Melvins played House of Vans in Greenpoint last night and we still haven’t recovered our hearing. Among the reasons: Dale Crover, looking half his age thanks to a Justin Bieber haircut, was joined on the double drums by newcomer Coady Willis (well, relative newcomer: he’s been drumming with the Melvins for some years, but we’re talking about a band that’s been pummeling audiences for three decades. Kurt Cobain drove them to shows back when Nirvana was something only Buddhists talked about.)
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