Nirvana’s frontman shoots from the hip.
It’s 4 o’clock on a cold Seattle afternoon, and Kurt Cobain, the lyricist-guitarist-lead singer of Nirvana, is sitting in a downtown hotel room, playing with his 5-month-old daughter, Frances, while his wife, Courtney Love – lead singer of her own band, Hole – applies her makeup. At the moment, the Cobains (including the baby) are on the cover of Spin magazine – which has named Nirvana as Artist of the Year – and the band’s new album, Incesticide, is due out within the week. The Nirvana media machine should be in high gear.
But, no.
What’s surprising is what’s not in the Cobains’ room: no entourage, no groupies, no publicists, and no signs of the high life – in any sense of the term. Cobain, in fact, is wearing a pair of fuzzy green pajamas. And he and Love are in Seattle for the sole reason of trying to speed the deal on a modest house they’ve been trying to buy. The only concession to Cobain’s being what he mockingly calls “a rock icon” is the pseudonym under which he has registered, Simon Ritchie.
It’s a joke – Ritchie was the real name of Sid Vicious, the Sex Pistol who died from a heroin overdose – and it shows that the Cobains have a sense of humor about being tagged by the press as a modern-day Sid and Nancy. If the Cobains are being reclusive these days, they explain, it’s not because they feel they’ve been strung up by the media, which they feel have painted them as a pair of junkies without a cause. “Everyone thinks we’re on drugs again – even people we work with,” says Cobain resignedly as Love paints on a perfect baby-doll mouth. “I guess I’ll have to get used to that for the rest of my life.”
While Cobain, 24, is quiet and thoughtful, Love is tailor-made for the media attention, blessed and cursed with what seems as an almost genetic inability to censor herself. Within the first five minutes of The Advocate’s arrival, she is spinning a story about an ex-flame and his lingerie fetish: “He had to wear nylons to have sex-not just any nylons but flesh-colored nylons. And he couldn’t buy them, he had to find them.”
