"I miss the comfort of being sad......"

Hard to believe it was 20 years ago that so much potential ended as abruptly as it began.  The whole world was forced to take notice just 3 years prior and just like that, music was taken out of its 80's comfort zone, and hitting the road on what promised to be a wild journey with an unknown destination or ETA.  I was a product of the 80's who wasn't very impressed with what passed for popular music the first time I heard "Smells Like Teen Spirit."  I was 17 years old and hanging out with a couple of high school buddies at a pool hall when it came on.  I hated heavy metal music at that time, and the guys I was with and I sometimes cut up on headbanger stereotypes when the mood struck us or we were just plain bored.  I didn't want to admit that I might like the song. I also didn't know that it wasn't heavy metal, at least not the way I knew it at the time.  It wasn't long before I bought 'Nervermind' and I along with everyone my age was craving more.  We didn't have to look hard.  Soon 'Teen Spirit' was next to songs called 'Outshined' and 'Even Flow' on the tapes I was making to play in the car. 

Whatever it was called, grunge, alternative, punk, the music world was turned upside down.  But the commercial engine was already starting to turn that would one day morph it into the sustainable business model oriented product called post-grunge that would mask the sincerity and purity of what was coming from the west coast in the very early 90s.  The end began with a shotgun blast in April of 1994, and was bookended almost 8 years later to the day in April of 2002 when the lifeless remains of Alice In Chains' Layne Staley were discovered in his apartment.

We hardly got the chance to really know this genre before the patriarchs were gone and it was left to the likes of Scott Stapp, Gavin Rossdale, and a whole host of other pseudo-imitators and the audience that couldn't tell the difference to inherit the legacy.  Once this corporate movement hijacked the ride, the destination became Nickelback and Evanescence, and the sincerity that started with Nevermind remains unfinished and unexplored....an incomplete legacy.

In a few days, Nirvana will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  This is appropriate as the real story of Nirvana is an unknown enigma that takes a backseat to the mythology of Kurt Cobain.  He is loved and maligned, sometimes by the same people; and much like mythological characters of rock and roll like Jim Morrison, those who knew him each seem to have an individual and unique take on who he was and what their relationship with them was like.  I have a deep admiration for the writing talents of both men, and yet I doubt I would want to share an apartment with either one of them.  These were profoundly volatile people who led turbulent lives as a byproduct of the depth and complexity of how they processed what took place in their world.  Kurt is often described as sweet, kind, and sensitive.  While there may be truth to this, this is part of the mythology that doesn't accurately describe the reality of what it may have been like to really have him in your life.  Cobain, like Morrison, had a deeply dark side that is well documented, but is redeemed through the beauty of what is honest and sincere about what he created through his painful existence.  This is what needs to be immortalized in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

"I just want you to know that I
Don't hate you anymore
There is nothing I could say
That I haven't thought before"

Somewhere, a very talented kid knows there is more to music than what has been force fed to the masses by the Ryan Seacrests of the world and is fed up with it.  How Kurt's legacy is defined can be a roadmap for how to once again break the mold for the right reasons; but this time without having such tragic results.