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Your support makes all the difference.The tragically fallen are always more interesting than the enduringly gifted – witness this year’s documentaries about Amy Winehouse and Kurt Cobain, to the latter of which this 2CD compilation of fragments serves as de facto soundtrack. I
t’s an odd, dissatisfying affair – but then, it couldn’t really have been any other way: even when penning and recording generational rock anthems, Cobain always left the listener feeling as if they were intruding on some private anxiety, one’s very interest imposing upon the fragile icon the acclaim that he most appeared to dread.
Brett Morgen, best known for his Robert Evans biopic The Kid Stays in the Picture, was shocked when, invited to trawl through Cobain’s archive for material, he came across a cardboard box containing more than a hundred cassettes of home recordings the late songwriter had made.
They turned out to be a combination of sketchy demos for unrecorded songs, recitations of semi-autobiographical stories, surprisingly tender acoustic guitar instrumentals, playful tape-machine experiments such as the one that gives this album its title, Kurt testing out his amps and pedals, and the most abject cover of The Beatles’ “And I Love Her” you’ll ever hear.
Hundreds of hours of this stuff were whittled down to fit the needs of Morgen’s documentary, and further reconfigured for this album, to offer a troubling portrait of a troubled soul. If you just want the “songs”, such as they are, there’s a single-disc version without the other bits – but that would be a fool’s errand, the songs being the least interesting things here.
Most of the time, they feature Cobain strumming away vaguely, muttering lyric ideas or vocal melodies, then bawling “chorus!” or “bass part!” before giving rudimentary demonstrations.
Divided into two sections, “Montage of Kurt” opens with Cobain saying, “I love Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan too”, before delving into varispeed tape nonsense, fizzy-drink noises and primitive echo effects whose origins and rationale can probably be discerned from the reference to “bongwater”.
Weed obviously played its part in much of this activity – both in freeing up Cobain’s imagination, and also by exacerbating the anxieties that made him so reclusive and self-reliant that he would happily spend hours on his own playing like this. Confirmation of this comes in one of the package’s more startling tracks, “Aberdeen”, a semi-autobiographical tale of a fat, loser adolescent, dumped from one relative to another, who drifts to the wrong side of the tracks, literally. “I accumulated quite a healthy complex, not to mention a complexion,” reads Cobain, formally. “Then I discovered the most ultimate form of expression ever: marijuana!”
From there, it’s a one-way tumble into white-trash life, vandalism and stolen booze. The protagonist is only dissuaded from suicide by being a virgin, so elects to correct this by having sex with a sub-normal girl. Even though he can’t, in the event, complete the act, the ensuing self-disgust leads him to lie down on railroad tracks to kill himself. But he’s such a loser, the train changes tracks at the last minute.
Though some details are clearly drawn from his own life, it’s not actually “true”, except in offering allegorical hints at the humiliation and self-loathing that would eventually contribute to Cobain’s own suicide. As such, it’s by far the most interesting of these fragments from his tragic, tattered life; though whether that’s enough to justify raking through the rest remains in doubt.
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