25 years have passed since the death of one of music’s most influential figures of all time.
Warning: This story contains content relating to death and suicide.
Danny Goldberg, former manager of Nirvana, has described his fondest memories with the band, in an interview with Independent. On March 25, 1994, Goldberg joined nine significant people in Kurt Cobain’s life for an intervention. Courtney Love, Cobain’s former partner, had ordered an intervention to address his spiralling depression and drug use.
Only three weeks on, Cobain overdosed on champagne and Rohypnol – which Love took as his first suicide attempt. Only a number of days prior, police were called to his Seattle home, where he’d locked himself in a room with guns and pills. These stories were recounted in the intervention, which involved several of his music industry friends – including Krist Novoselic – urging him to get clean.
Cobain “insisted” he needed a therapist, and not the recommended rehab which was offered to him. Goldberg urged him to quit heroin for good. Cobain argued that, if, per say, William Burroughs could live a long and creative life as a ‘junkie’, then why couldn’t he?
Goldberg recounts, “He was in a bad way,” the former manager says. “The main memory I have is feeling so shitty about how hard it was for me to get through to him and how deeply depressed he seemed to be. It was not a great situation in terms of connecting with him personally because there were so many other people there and I’m sure he felt under siege in his own house.”
Watch Nirvana play ‘Lithium’ at Reading in 1992:
Goldberg admits that Cobain’s former partner was scared of him. “Courtney was scared. She’d witnessed that he was going through a very tough time and thought maybe other people talking to him would get him to get some help.”
“I spoke to him on the phone when I got home and talked to him one last time. I couldn’t shake him out of being depressed, I couldn’t cheer him up or get him to feel there was hope. I was just hoping that if the drugs got out of his system then he could think more clearly and that would be a good time to have better conversations with him. Of course I never was able to have such conversations.”
For a short while, the intervention did pay off. Cobain checked himself into the Exodus Recovery Centre in LA. Throughout his stay, the late rock singer had conversations with counsellors and therapists around his erratic behaviour and struggles with depression. Yesterday marks 25 years since Kurt Cobain’s life ended.
Goldberg’s book, Serving the Servant, recounts Cobain as a conflicting character. On one hand he could be kind, confident and funny, but at the same time, be despairing, argumentative and sarcastic. Goldberg met Cobain six months prior to the recording of Nevermind. He recalls Cobain being something of a “shrinking violet, but assertive when it came to his career.”
Goldberg recounts Cobain having a hatred towards himself. “He felt guilty about it [doing heroin] and also felt particularly bad that it was publicly known.”
Later in the interview, Goldberg confirms that Kurt Cobain did kill himself. “It’s ridiculous,” he states. “He killed himself. I saw him the week beforehand, he was depressed. He tried to kill himself six weeks earlier, he’d talked and written about suicide a lot, he was on drugs, he got a gun. Why do people speculate about it? The tragedy of the loss is so great people look for other explanations. I don’t think there’s any truth at all to it.”
“I keep coming back to thinking about his smile,” he says. “There was something about the look in his eyes at certain times that was so beautiful, both amused and loving at the same time, that’s what I come back to.”
Danny Goldberg’s book Serving The Servant is available online and in book stores internationally.
