Honoring Cobain: Restless in Seattle

Is there any appropriate way to mark the one-year anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s suicide?

With April 8--the date that Cobain’s body was found in his Seattle home--rapidly approaching, the issue is a dilemma for the city’s rock community.

“We’re still mulling it over,” says Marco Collins, music director for radio station KNDD-FM (“The End”), which co-sponsored a public vigil at the Seattle Center two days after Cobain’s body was discovered. “We’re trying to decide what is or is not appropriate, what’s tasteful and not morbid.”

Danny Housman, music editor of the weekly paper the Stranger, believes there’s nothing to mull over.

“Any public event around this is misguided, because it’s so against the spirit of someone who was so private and made such personal music,” he says. “There might be some impromptu memorial, though. You have enough lonely kids who might want to come in and light some candles and play some music.”

The publication has no plans for a special issue or article commemorating the date. Neither does Seattle’s other weekly, the Rocket, though it recently featured Cobain on the cover of a special issue in which Nirvana’s “Nevermind” was voted by critics as the most important album in Northwest rock history.

Others in the Seattle community would also like to see the anniversary pass without notice, but for entirely different reasons. Even last year, some criticized the city for participating in celebrating the life and music of a suicide victim with a history of drug use.

“We got a certain amount of scrutiny from some taxpayers who thought it was an inappropriate expenditure,” says Jim Weyerman, who as deputy director of the Seattle Center produced the vigil. “But we had a sincere interest to head off any ongoing effect throughout the youth community in terms of copycat suicides.”

There is one event that will in effect serve as a remembrance, though mostly as an accident of timing. Sub Pop Records, the label that launched Nirvana, last year coincidentally scheduled its own annual anniversary party for April 8. The party went on, but in a somber mood.

Sub Pop spokesman Nils Bernstein expects this year’s party, an invitation-only affair planned for April 15, to also bear the heavy emotions of last year’s.

“This year we’ll have the anniversary again,” he says. “But it’s also the anniversary of something else. It’s so intertwined that it will hark back to that regardless of what we want to do.”