It’s been 25 years since Kurt Cobain died. Emily Edrosa, lead singer of Auckland group Street Chant, looks back on how his band Nirvana changed her life.
Kurt Cobain performing with Nirvana at Sony Music Studios in November 1993 for the television series 'MTV Unplugged' Photo: Screen capture
This story was first published in 2014.
There's a shopping centre up the road from my mum's house. They call it a mall, but it’s not a mall. It’s got a Paper Plus, a Configure Express, a Vodafone shop, a Shearing Shed and a Countdown. It sucks. This shopping centre doesn't seem likely to be the setting for any life-changing events, but it probably was for mine.
There used to be a Sounds CD shop there where I'd hover around the shelves every weekend, almost never being able to afford anything. For what seemed like years, I noticed the alternative section with an old, beaten up CD single that never sold.
All I knew about this band was that it was rock music and that the lead guy had killed himself, but those two pieces of information were fascinating enough to warrant buying it; my parents had just split up and puberty was inches away.
Right after I bought that Smells Like Teen Spirit CD my dad made me go with him to Mitre 10. I stayed in the car to listen to my purchase. As I listened to the single and the angry b-sides, I experienced my first sense of belonging since starting high school.
Along with that belonging was also a feeling of alienation - alienation from everyone else in my life. Prior to this, I had only listened to Top 40 or really bad pop-punk. Luckily because of the internet I could research everything about Nirvana and find all their music really easily. I created my own world.
I had just begun guitar lessons and every night and weekend I would spend hours learning their whole back catalogue and writing songs using the same power chords I was learning from Nevermind.
My research suggested to me that there were two types of Nirvana fans – the type that Kurt liked and the type he didn't. I made sure I was in the former group by listening to The Wipers, Sonic Youth, Bikini Kill, Young Marble Giants, Mudhoney, etc. It all stuck, so I guess Kurt Cobain got me into indie music - or what indie meant in his era, anyway.
When people first starting coming to Street Chant shows, the tag “grunge” was thrown around a bit. I was never that comfortable with the term, especially as it started to become more of a fashionable revival thing. Simple chorded pop songs with distortion just seemed like the most natural thing on earth to me, so why would I create music in any other way?
I remember when we covered ‘School’ around this time people would go absolutely crazy from the opening riff. I would fluke a solo, or just make noise and it went off every time. It was the perfect song to cover at a really special time for our band and our friends.
In 2011, Street Chant went on tour with The Lemonheads across America and the last show of the tour was in Seattle. The show was the most un-punk rock thing ever, as people sat down to watch the bands and ate fancy steaks and stuff; the coolest bit was how Nirvana’s sound guy Craig Montgomery did our sound.
The next day Alex (Street Chant’s drummer) and I drove our van up to Kurt’s house. It was in a really flash neighbourhood and not at all what I expected. There was a basketball hoop in the front yard which made me laugh, it all seemed so un-Kurt.
We went to the park next door and wrote on the park bench that has become a de facto memorial to Kurt, full of sentiments from people all over the world and little notes stuffed in the cracks.
We walked up behind the house to where the press must have gone to take the famous photos peeking into the greenhouse where he killed himself, the ones where you can see Kurt's Chuck Taylors. The greenhouse was gone though.
The park bench in Seattle that's been turned into a memorial for Kurt Cobain. Photo: Emily Littler
We played at a dive bar that night and I ended up talking to a lady who mentioned being friends with Kurt. I thought it might just be something everyone in Seattle said until she added me on Facebook and I recognised her name from his biographies as one of his best friends.
I suppose there was always this inhumane distance about his death, never hearing Nirvana or being aware of them while Kurt was alive, but meeting her and seeing his house bought a whole new reality to it all that I had never considered.
I only listen to Nirvana about once a year now but I feel like my first great musical passion (ok, obsession) will always be with me, from my unconscious blueprint for song writing to the ideologies I try and live by in my adult life by: punk rock, feminism and empathy.
Thanks Kurt.
Related:
A poster for Nirvana's New Zealand show before the band blew up and the show got moved to the Logan Campbell Centre, given to Emily by 95bFM DJ Troy Ferguson. Photo: Emily Littler
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