Why I hated KURT COBAIN and still regret it to this day

hey everybody it's Mike here from the art of guitar I cannot believe it's been 30 years since Kurt Cobain passed away I do remember that time period quite well and I wanted to talk a little bit about it and tell you what it was like when Nirvana suddenly took over the world back in the day but let's go a little bit before that I remember a specific concert that was kind of life-altering it was called Clash of the Titans and it was Meade death with Anthrax Slayer and Alice and chains now allice and chains came out and I knew Man in the Box but that was about it so they came out and I believe they started with weed da young and it's real heavy it was just killer but they just didn't seem to fit the bill correctly they were like an alternative band back then especially compared to the metal bands that were about to follow them on stage I just remember how the music just sounded a little bit different and Lane Staley I didn't know his name at the time but he would hold the microphone and he would shake his head kind of like he was saying no instead of headbanging so all of us traditional metal heads you know were trying to headbang but he's up there with shorter hair doing the uh back and forth no thing now even though a lot of us didn't really know too much about the opening band Allison Chains we all knew that they kicked total ass you know it's undeniable when you see them even in their earliest clips that they're just a solid tight band that was going to make it huge but at the time you know there's still a bit of a mystery to us you have to keep in mind that this was a night for metal you know now I look back I call it like old school metal but at the time you know all this stuff was new and exciting to me so Mega Death you know had just come up with Rust in Peace we had Anthrax coming out a Slayer came out and I swear it's like the sky changed like the clouds rolled in you know someone describe Black Sabbath one time like this and I swear this happened when Slayer came out suddenly the mosh pit started to grow and just get scary you know the music started and I started to see people coming out of the mosh pit with bloody noses and they'd be directed to the medical tent and that kept happening through their entire set and of course seeing mega death and their Rust in Peace lineup one of the most legendary lineups ever for Mega Death in my opinion uh it was just something else to see that back then so I left that show remembering of course all my favorite thrash bands and heavy metal bands but Alice and Shane still stuck in my head and later on they would become one of my favorite bands of all time I would watch MTV I'd listen to the radio back then we had 93X was our Rock and metal station and I recall there being a lot of metal ballads like hard rock ballads so you had bands like Winger with a song called miles away which is actually a really really great song we also had fly to the angels seem to always be on the radio as well as uh she talks to angels you know it's one of those things where a lot of songs about angels back then but to go along with these ballads we actually had some real intense awesome tunes like shotgun Messiah came [Music] out uh they were just a little late to the party I think if they would have come out two years earlier they would have been one of the biggest bands of all time but shotgun Messiah came out with heartbreak Boulevard and that's one of those songs I call it the swan song because it was one of the last real big rock hits that I remember happening before Nirvana hit at least on our Airwaves here in Minnesota also you know Metallica's Black Album came out that year and so you had Enter Sandman and sad but true and nothing else matters and The Unforgiven all of that was being played on infinite repeat as well this time in my life is seared into my brain because it's when my sister finally got her license and she had this huge Buick boat of a car and she would take us to you know like subway to get lunch and on the way there we always blasted her radio and that's the very first time I ever heard those first four legendary [Music] chords I keep trying to imagine the look on my face the first time I heard the song Smells Like Teen Spirit because it was so different and so new to us at the time now you listen to it and if you're younger you grow up hearing it your whole life you know just like when I grew up I heard zezy top and you know Azie I was born my whole life but to hear Nirvana and to hear Kurt Cobain singing for the very first time time it was so different I instantly loved KT Cain's vocals I just couldn't understand anything he was saying I kind of felt like how my mom describes heavy metal sometimes she' be like yeah I just can't understand the words but uh for me it was that way with Kirk oay and I was like I'm getting like every fifth word I'm kind of understanding but I'm not really sure what he's saying in the chorus when the solo came for Smells Like Teen Spirit I was very disappointed and I thought I can't believe this guy's just playing the vocal Melody for the guitar solo here I am used to guys like Marty fredman just shredding like [Music] crazy and then I hear [Music] this now this is pre- internet so I had no idea what the band even looked like I didn't even know their name actually because the DJ didn't say their name at the beginning the song just started so it was just this big mystery of this weird new song that I heard but I imagined it in my head like it was a five-piece band and I pictured the singer looking like Mark slaugh I don't know why just like a like a pale looking dude with dark hair I thought and this is a strange event but I went to school not too long after that and I saw a kid with a notebook sitting on his desk and on it was written Nirvana and just something told me that that was special that word was special for some reason like who writes Nirvana on their folder if it it's not meaningful in some way well a few days after that I caught the video on MTV so I caught it when it was halfway through and as they were playing I looked at the kick drone because that's usually where the band puts the name of their band and it says Shaka for some reason I was like okay so the band's called Shaka that's kind of interesting whatever and then at the very end of the video you know the text comes up on the screen and it said Nirvana and I'm like oh and I put two and two together I'm like the kids folder the song it all makes sense now there's some kind of weird Beatles wave happening right now something big is coming but as I watched the video for Smells Like Teen Spirit I was just so confused because in my head I pictured that five-piece band with Mark Slaughter singing but instead there's this guy with short blonde hair wearing like different style of clothes and we ever saw around where I lived and uh you know they had the cheerleaders and it was just a very bizarre surreal type video and it was also crazy to me to see that the band was only a three-piece band and they were making that much sound so it's really cool to me when a band only has three members I know in the studio you could add extra tracks and everything like that but it just sounded like a huge band coming through the speakers it's only three people and then it just caught traction you know everybody started talking about this band Nirvana and the radio station started playing Come As You Are In Bloom lithium uh those kind of songs they just kept playing it on rotation so it's almost like we're being forced fed and back then we only had a few stations to listen to so it's kind of like we were forced to listen to Nirvana and we all slowly started to like it collectively and with every new Nirvana release it almost felt like someone was stabbing the music scene that we knew of and was just twisting the knife with each release and the thing we knew for so long was slowly bleeding to death until it was gone completely the fashion at school started changing I noticed people that used to wear Hard Rock t-shirts like skid and mly crew and all that and Guns and Roses were suddenly wearing the clothes that looked a lot like the Nirvana video so this wave of fashion just kind of came and hit us it's a lot like if you're younger you may have remembered when Mumford and Sons got big and all of a sudden it's like overnight everybody looked like a damn Lumberjack or something not only were people changing the way they dressed but they were changing their haird as well so people that had long hair they would cut it up to like their shoulders to have that Kurt Co Bain sort of like straight across look and the worst part was that a guy that I was kind of on bad terms with I just didn't like him for stupid reasons he was dating the girl of my dreams but you know when you're young and all that kind of stuff so I kind of hated the guy he ended up looking just like Kurt Cobain so he did the haircut and his face already kind of resembl Kurt Cobain so this is really childish but I thought you know now I can't let Kurt Cobain it's like the friend of my enemy is now my enemy it's a stupid way to think but it's a a very human thing it seems like if somebody you just despise like something it's almost like you have to hate that thing too so here I was torn because I actually really lik Nirvana's music you know I didn't love it because I was a metal head and I was into Metallica and Meade death and all that stuff but you know I I thought it was cool you know I was just like all right this is a cool kind of music maybe I could just integrate it into what I like whatever I don't have to fall completely into it like everyone else seems to be but because I decided now I have to hate kirco Bane it kept me at a distance from the band so I was just kind of a passive fan and I really can't downplay how collectively as this metal shred guitar players were're in a group we all decided we couldn't love Nirvana for a long period of time we were like who's this kir Cain guy he's more of a songwriter who strums cours you know that's kind of what weird talking like we're like he's over there just playing Melodies on his guitar and I want to hear you know tremolo picking and fast tapping and all this crazy stuff but uh you know he forced us to look at music in a different way and you can't deny that all of a sudden people were focusing a lot more on songwriting than being flashy of course after that there was just the rest of the wave came we had Pearl Jam we had sound garden we had all this SE Seattle music hitting us at once and uh you know every new release that came out it was kind of exciting cuz I'm like how far can this really go so the grunge alternative era was in full swing that 93X station that I first heard Smells Like Teen Spirit on they changed practically overnight all of a sudden I turned it on and they were playing RMS it's the end of the world as we know it it's the end of the world as we and they played it I believe for like a day or two straight so as soon as the song got done it would start right back up again and that was strange because there was just like this talk between everybody like what's going on you know that's so weird that is something going on at the station is just looping the same song over and over again but when it came back it had changed its name to 93.7 The Edge and now they were playing mostly alternative and Grunge music they would go back and play Old alternative from the 80s which was pretty cool but uh yeah it was just a different thing now we had nowhere to go for our heavy metal EX for Indie stations that barely dialed in it was like half static so if you wanted to hear something real heavy uh good luck well my teenage metal band thrash metal band we were not deterred at first we were still full steam ahead we wanted to be you know the next Metallica so we kept doing what we did even though we felt the influences starting to creep in a little bit but I recall one time we played somebody's birthday party in their basement and this person was kind of in that alternative world you know and everybody there were wearing like baggy clothes and plaid and all that stuff well there's two bands that night the band that opened for us fit the bill perfectly they're kind of an alternative type band and everybody loved them they were really good too then we come up to play and we're playing headbanging type you know thrash metal and it just felt like oil and water it was a really strange concert because I'm sitting here playing you know heavy riffs and usually I'm used to looking up and seeing people headbanging and stuff instead these kids were kind of like standing around like what do we do to this weird music and that's when it hit me that everything had reversed and suddenly we were the aliceon chains of this concert you know back when Allison Chains was alternative they stuck out and they weren't really fitting in and now because we stuck to our guns and we were thrash metal in an alternative scene now we were like the allice and chains the only difference though is we never got huge besides not allowing myself to like ktk Cobain I really started to take in the grunge movement and the alternative movement and really started to love these bands I mean how undeniable is sound garden you know and I already liked Atlas and chains you know from before but then Smashing Pumpkins you know just all this really great guitar-based music was getting huge and even though the kind of music I loved was being pushed aside you know even the hair metal stuff I was missing that as well uh there was still guitar-based music that took its place at least now you have to realize how short of a period of time this is now so late 91 uh never mind came out and Nirvana basically took over then in the next couple years this is really crazy to think about they record in utero which is their next release and they actually recorded that here in my home state uh they were in Canon Falls I believe padm Studios so that was a big deal around here to know that they were here recording they released the album in late 93 and then in early 1994 Kurt Cobain is found dead that's how fast all this stuff happened within that three-year span Nirvana came out of nowhere seemingly to us and changed everything changed the world kind of like the Beatles did and then Kurt Cobain's dead and that's the end of that that was a weird day in school the day we all heard the news uh just people were hanging up signs in the hallway in memory of Kurt Cobain and everybody just seemed really somber you know even like teachers people that didn't really listen to Nirvana they still felt the impact of that uh like I keep saying we didn't have too much for choices back then so it's not like we all knew a thousand bands you know there's only a handful of huge bands at the time and so when somebody like that passes away it's kind of a blow to everybody that day and for about a year afterwards I felt extremely guilty for keeping Kurt Co like at an arms distance just because I hated this guy for stupid reasons and I really owe a lot to KT Cobain you know like even after he passed away a ton of my students wanted to learn Nirvana songs on guitar and a lot of us teachers kind of didn't like that at first we're so used to teaching ACDC and Metallica now we're learning all these alternative you know uh guitar parts from these grunge bands and it was kind of weird feeling and we didn't like it at first but after all that we look back and it's actually a really good memory at least for me because we actually were teaching music that had guitar guitar major guitar parts in it in time you know autotune took over students would bring in Mumble rap songs or soundtracks and say I want to learn how to play this on guitar when there's really no guitar in any of the music they're bringing in so it made me look back on the Nirvana influence days as like a really good nostalgic memory now and I guess this video is kind of to repent for you know my attitude towards Kurt Cobain at the time uh you know this plus the videos that I have put out in the past on my channel one of them being one of my biggest videos actually it's the seven levels of Smells Like Teen Spirit it's about four million views now so I feel like I'm trying to honor Kurt Cobain any way I possibly can just to make up for that early time when I was being stupid I think he used the quote it's better to burn out than to fade away and that's the crazy part is they did burn out fast you know obviously after you passed away but they never faded away so I guess he got his wish and I should probably take the time to apologize to Chris that's the guy that I hated back in the day uh for dating the girl of my dreams cuz who knows if I maybe would have dated her that's all I would have done was just hang out with her and I probably wouldn't have played guitar as much and I probably wouldn't be sitting here right now who knows that's how I justify things in my head all right everybody thank you so much for watching it was a lot of fun I love going down memory lane as you know and now we'll catch you at the next video thank you bye-bye

Channel: The-Art-of-Guitar

Views: 81,335

Keywords: the art of guitar, lesson, how to play, lessons, six string, acoustic, electric, learn, learning, amps, method, tutorial, fender, gibson, ibanez, beginner, beginners, just starting, chords, scales, picking, arpeggios, the color system, the caged system, kurt cobain, nirvana, dave grohl, kris, novoselic, in utero, nevermind, 1991, clash of the titans, why I hated, the friend of my enemy, is my enemy, alice in chains, grunge, takeover, seattle, pearl jam, soundgarden, alternative, shotgun messiah

Id: ZX9OSGYCKTo

Length: 14min 41sec (881 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 07 2024