With The Lights Out

Everytime I listen to Nirvana I can’t help but feeling sad, not over the anguish Kurt Cobain must have felt during his life, but over the tremendous promise wasted when he killed himself. I was listening to a random iPod mix recently when this track came on that blew me away. It was an infectious riff from a warmly overdriven and saturated guitar accompanied only by highhat and bass drum – no vocals. The melody is so simple that you are forced to concentrate purely on the sound of the distortion, which despite the repetitive ohm-like nature of the tune, varies widely with the progression of the song and is rich with the bleeding overtones of modern high-gain.

I have my iPod hooked up directly to my car’s stereo and placed in my glovebox so that I am not tempted to look at the screen while driving. The whole way home from work I was wondering which of the multitude of new artists I’ve recently loaded it could be. Of course it ended up being a demo track called "Grey Goose" off of With The Lights Out, the Nirvana box-set released last year. It’s moments like these when I sigh the heaviest. The idea that this remarkable light of musical creativity has gone out of the world forever depresses me to no end. I’ve actually started to think the only way I can truly love an artist is if I find out that they’ve committed suicide.

Not that I blame them. I have been there and know the void they stare into, though thankfully I can see enough positives in life to outweigh the gloom. Plus I am not so unfortunate as to be burdened with the prodigious talent that dooms musical genius to an average life expectancy of 32.7 years, seemingly the going rate these days. Kurt Cobain is not the first time this has happened to me, the following artists reveal a pattern of devotion which should be disturbing to any psychiatrist.

Ian Curtis – lead singer of Joy Division – by hanging. Nothing is more haunting to me that the sound of Curtis’ voice, it eats deeper into my soul with each gloomy verse. Joy Division is the one band whose every song I love. It sounds depressing to say that they have written the soundtrack to my life, because I couldn’t be that goth, but it’s closer than anything else has come. One of the most moving songs is "Atmosphere", whose lyrics underscore the general theme of alienation which runs throughout Curtis’ verse:

People like you find it easy
Aching to see, walking on air
Hunted by the rivers, through the streets
Every corner, abandoned too soon

I could go on, typing from memory the lyrics to nearly all of their songs with a footnote on how each made me feel the first time I heard them.

Jeff Buckley – muse of God – accidental drowning. Well at least his death wasn’t intentional – or people don’t tend to think so. There was nothing in his personality to indicate such a self destructive tendency. Instead his death is described as a fanciful dip into a tributary of the Mississipi, though perhaps ill-advised given he was fully clothed at the time. Jeff’s dreamy spirit in life probably most contributed to his death.

Given that it was an accident you would think I would be less burdened by his early demise except for the fact that he was one of the most brutally talented musicians in the history of modern music. I’ll never forget when my friend Marie first lent me his Grace cd to listen to on my way home. As I was parking my car on the street, the song “So Real” came on and I couldn’t move. When the song finished I turned my car off and began sobbing.

I just couldn’t believe that someone could be so talented, that after hearing just one of his songs I could so closely identify with him, and that he was (again!) already dead. Worse still was later when my friend Steven gave me a live DVD of him performing in Chicago in ’95 - it was at the same small venue down the block from my apartment where I had seen Sonic Youth that fall. Had I known about him I could have seen him perform just 6 months prior to that fateful swim in the Wolf River.

Elliott Smith – acoustic balladeer – self inflicted stab wound in the heart. Rounding out this quartet of melancholy is the artist most recent to pass, this time definitely by his own hand and in a manner which expresses the innate creativity of his being – even his suicide was a metaphor. He is actually someone who’s music I listened to more closely after I found out he had killed himself.

There it was, right in the middle of my cd collection, his eponymous album staring me in the face. I had no excuse for why I hadn’t listened to it much, and I felt guilty about just now tuning in. I mean, what if it was bad? Perhaps his death would affect me only as much as those of the lead singers of INXS, The Gin Blossoms, and Blind Melon (in descending order of apathy.) But it wasn’t bad, it was fucking good, and I was suddenly ashamed of myself. From “Needle in the Hay” to “Clementine” to “St. Ides Heaven” – each lyric more perfect than the last.

Only later when watching Good Will Hunting would I recognize his lasting contribution to the success of that pseudo-indie film with the lyrics to “Between the Bars”:

Drink up baby, stay up all night
The things you could do, you won’t but you might
The reflection you’ll see, that you’ll never be
The promises you’ll only make

The fact that most every song he has written has to do with drug or alcohol abuse may be a subtle clue as to what led him down his eventual path. I can only judge myself, however, for not taking the opportunity to see him at the Fillmore when he played there in 2001.

And so the pattern continues. It makes me want to scare up some Arcade Fire tickets. You know, just in case.