Axl and Kurt

For whatever reason last night while Mila was keeping us awake I started thinking about that strange rivalry between Axl Rose and Kurt Cobain. It started late one night months ago when I was watching VH1 or some such and found myself trying to remember what I thought of Guns n’ Roses, and how weird and portentous the feud between frontmen Axl Rose and Kurt Cobain was, and whether there is a larger point buried in it.

GNR was very big right when I was in junior high school, and I remember they were everywhere during those years. But by the early 90s the tide had gone out. They entered their baroque period, with the lavish, expensive videos, stadium tours of dubious quality, and Axl veering into a singular rockstar eccentricity while his bandmates just veered. Then came the grunge revolution, and Seattle’s indie scene became the Platonic “alternative” music ideal, with sonic mix of punk and metal and its flannel-clad, latte-fueled aesthetics.

At the time it was clear where the humor was, but looking back the picture becomes blurred. Although GNR came from the worthless Sunset Strip hair metal scene, they had the talent and creativity to beat it, and it is remarkable how well many of their songs hold up. Meanwhile grunge has has revealed itself to be just plain hilarious: all along maybe it was just metal that took itself way too seriously. I can’t listen to Soundgarden or Alice in Chains without chuckling. Nirvana was a rather large exception, and I think they knew it and it was one of those pressures that made them so uncomfortable in the limelight.

One point of friciton in these tectonic shifts was the famous feud between Axl and Kurt. There are stories Axl had wanted Nirvana to tour with them, which came to naught in some incidents at the 1992 MTV Music Awards involving Courtney Love and Axl’s entourage. There are many variations and rumors about what exactly happened, but Kurt seems to have seen Axl as a phoney, washed-up rockstar, while Axl saw Kurt as a heroin-addled whiner. At this moment, each of them seems to have had a point.

Over the weekend I saw an article in the Guardian by a filmmaker who traced Cobain’s last few mysterious days before his death. There are some very interesting moments…

In Seattle, we met up with Duff McKagen, bassist in Guns n’ Roses who’d bought a ticket on Delta Flight 788 to Seattle on April, 1 1994, and found himself sitting next to a crumpled figure wearing sunglasses.

It was the first irony of Cobain’s final week. Having jumped the wall of the Exodus Recovery Center near LA… Kurt found himself sitting next to a junkie rock star on the flight home. Duff is amazingly frank about what happens when two drug addict musicians meet up on a plane. “You cop some dope and then talk about quitting… ‘Yeah, this is the last time right?”

Or this…

Back in Seattle, Cobain proceeded to start scoring inordinate amounts of heroin, heading on out to the seedy-as-fuck Aurora Avenue to score them in Room 226 of the Marco Polo Motel (checking in as “Bill Bailey,” the real name of Axl Rose).

As much as I like Nirvana, I don’t regard Cobain nearly as highly as his fans do. I want to think this was a weird kind of solidarity and connection, a sense that when you strip away the personae they had to put on, they were just people trying to make art and live their lives. But alas, I fear when Kurt dragged himself into the hotel and gave that name, there was nothing more on his mind than a silly joke, made by a floundering jerk.

The years since have seen Cobain’s legend explode – as seen by his remarkable posthumous earning power. Meanwhile Axl has vanished into the studio, working on that mysterious single album that may or may not ever be finished, and is almost certainly going to be so worked over that it can’t be very good. Instead of being a slave to drugs, he’s a victim of his own perfectionism and difficult temper.

Sometimes you see kids running around in t-shirts with images of dead rock stars – Jimi, Janis, John Lennon, etc etc. This thanatos is the great drawback of rock culture, and we could do without it. It’s the kind of thing that turns Jim Morrison from the singer of a pretty good band into, as Lester Bangs dubbed him, a “bozo Dionysus” with an annoying afterlife.