Woody Guthrie, Meet Kurt Cobain

November 16, 2006

Emily and I are finishing up a biography of Woody Guthrie. Our running debate has been whether Kurt Cobain is parallel or not to Guthrie. Emily says no, and I think her argument is based on the fundamental value system with which Guthrie operated. He was a union man and communist sympathizer. If he had a natural venue during his peak years, it would be a union hall fundraiser. His lyrics reach out to a community, and announce something positive: "This Land is Your Land!" or "You can;t scare me I'm stickin' with the Union!" Nirvana hardly stood at the vanguard of altruism. This is the band that sent up that sappy 60s song: "Come on people, smile on your brother, everybody get together try to love one another right now.." Cobain sings the words, but there is no mistaking his savage dislike for them.

Perhaps that should end the argument. But I kept latching onto all the other ways that these two men saw the world similarly. As a member of the Almanac Singers, Guthrie was dismayed by the demands put on them to play up an image:

...Guthrie refused to wear a costume—but then his everyday work clothes and scuffed boots might pass for one...

Despite the group's stubborn refusal to become an act, Steiner would not give up. The more the agent worked to secure bookings, the more belligerent Guthrie became, and the more hostile to the values of the entertainment industry. "I noticed in New York and in Hollywood, and I stuck me head a good piece in both directions," he wrote later, "that the sissier, the smoother, the slicker, and the higher polished that you get, and the fartherest from the truth, that the higher wages you'll draw down." [239]

It is hard not to see a bit of the Punk/Grunge aesthetic there. First, there is the non-outfit outfit—a uniform that stridently denies it is a uniform. In Guthrie's case it was work clothes and scuffed boots, while for Cobain it was the ripped jeans and flannel shirts that easily present themselves to the imagination upon hearing the word "grunge." Second, Guthrie insists on some kind of an authentic voice that could be found as he eschewed anything highly polished. Cobain lived by that creed.. and his slashing messy guitar solos testify to it.

Guthrie also delivered a critique of the pop music industry:

"The Monopoly on Music pays a few pet writers to go screwy trying to write and re-write the same old notes under the same old formulas and the same old patterns. Every band on the radio sounds exactly alike... Do the big bands and the orgasm girls sing a word about our real fighting history? Not a croak." [286]

In Guthrie's time there was not a lot of money to be made with this non-pop outsider attitude.. and the hardest thing in reading about Guthrie is to realize just how far the popular music landscape has shifted since his time. A meteoric talent like Guthrie would have found himself signed to a fat record deal and making television appearances. suddenly he would be part of the establishment! But despite the rise of outsider stars the world of soulless pop (at least in rock mythology) is always there to be attacked. This same patterned pre-cut pop world served later as Cobain's bogey man: "Here we are now, entertain us/ Something stupid, and contagious.." fuck all that! he seems to be saying.

That is the core of my argument as to why Guthrie and Cobain would have understood each other. The crux of the issue perhaps depends on how one imagines Cobain would respond to Guthrie's musical credo:

I hate a song that makes you think you're not any good. I hate a song that makes you think you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing... Songs that run you down or songs that poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or your hard traveling.

I am out to fight those kind of songs to my very last breath of air and my very last drop of blood. [285]

Those are lines that thrilled me years ago as I listened to them read on the Woody Guthrie tribute album recorded in the 60s.

What would Cobain say to those lines? He is not exactly positive about life.. This is the guy who sings over and over at the close of a song: "I think I'm dumb.. I think I'm dumb.. I think I'm dumb.." But does self-destructive and angry lyrics count as songs that make others think they are no good? Or is savaging oneself, oddly, a way of putting others at your same level.. and giving them pride? My reading is that Cobain is the poet of inarticulacy.. and stands for the right of everyone.. even the dumb ones.. to pick up a guitar and start singing. I think Woody would have liked that attitude.. and seen in it something positive.. but Emily disagrees.