“To Create and Not Take Away”:
Nirvana, pt. 1

April 17, 2006

Reading through the Kurt Cobain Journals, a selection of beautifully reproduced handwritten entries from the notebooks of Kurt Cobain, I understood something about how unique and experience it is to work with manuscripts. It is one thing to encounter these ideas in the neat square type of a printed book, something else to look at the rough scribblings and raw ideas that Cobain jotted down. In print an idea looks like a settled and accomplished thought, but in these notebooks every idea seems dependent on a context, and even a mood..

On several occasions Kurt Cobain strays into autobiography. On one occasion he narrates something like a calling. The setting was not a forest or hill.. something that a student of American religious callings might expect.. take for example a 19th century version narrated by the evangelist Charles Finney:

North of the village, and over a hill lay a grove of woods, in which I was in the almost daily habit of walking… Nevertheless, instead of going to the office I turned and bent my course for that grove of woods, feeling that I must be alone and away from all human eyes and ears… [I] found a place where some large trees had fallen across each other, leaving an open place between three or four large trunks of trees. There I saw I could make a kind of closet. I crept into this place and knelt down for prayer. [The Memoirs of Charles G. Finney (1989), ed. Garth M. Rosell and Richard A.G. Dupuis, pgs. 18-19]

If the lonely woods is the locus classicus for a divine calling, then the parking lot of a grocery store must be the last place to expect such a calling. But the parking lot to a grocery store is exactly where Kurt Cobain found his future:

Montesano Washington a place not accustomed to having live rock acts in their little village A population of a few thousand loggers and their subservient wives.

We piled into the parking lot behind the Thriftway as other zombies slouch bobbed with combes in their back pockets…

They played faster than I had ever imagined music could be played and with more energy than my Iron Maiden records could provide. This was what I was looking for. For, AH Punk Rock

The other stone[r]s were Bored and kept shouting, Play some Def Leppard. God I hated those fucks more than ever I came to the promise land of a Grocery store I found my special purpose. [60-1]

It is interesting just how closely this parallels Christian narratives of a calling. Cobain has to be saved from “those fucks” the stoners, a group with which he clearly identified at this point. His vision of salvation comes in the form of punk rock, which provides a different kind of energy.. something more spiritual, even. At the end of the quotation Cobain allows himself some irony: “I came to the promise land of a Grocery store.” It was not the pristine woods.. the thick deciduous green of the Pacific Northwest.. the place where even Gus Van Sant in his film Last Days cannot help but situate his mumbling version of Cobain. The decisive moment came in the parking lot of a small town grocery store. But that is the very point: this is not a grasping after the sublime, but a discovery of unknown energy in a grungy setting.

Then there is that magical sentence: “I found my special purpose.” He would not just be the next Melvins though.. and he would be playing to crowds that this Thriftway parking lot could never hold. Through punk rock Cobain got an identity and purpose. In a letter dismissing an early drummer, Cobain explains what he is after:

Getting a name on a record isn’t shit. Anybody can do it, but there’s a big difference between credentials & notoriety, and self respect through music. [16]

Which I take to mean that he was not after the external trappings of the rock star dream, but after an internal, self-defined feeling of mastery.. the knowledge that he has done something that is good and that is truly his own creation. It is a salvation not through faith, but through creation. If there is one thing for which I have un-alloyed admiration for Cobain, it is his sense of the importance of creation:

I guess in a way anyone with enough ambition to create and not take away is someone who deserves respect. [245-6]

And no matter what you may think of Cobain.. his final suicide and drug habits.. he most certainly did succeed in creating something. And if he failed to find respect in his own eyes.. he nevertheless won our respect, and his words should be our motto: to create and not take away.