“The worst crime I could think of would be to put people off by faking it and pretend as if I was having 100 percent fun.” - Kurt Cobain, in his suicide note
Kurt Cobain was found dead from a self-inflicted shotgun wound 20 years ago. This essay is adapted from one that originally appeared on the blood, dirt & angels website. No doubt the romance of dying young-the wish for extinction-is as old as the first sentient flickerings throwing shadows on the cave walls of our inner skulls.
Early death is not romantic; Neil Young lives and so does Johnny Rotten. It’s better to grow fat and slack, to become a middle-aged has-been touring your back catalog than to check out at 27. The cult of the good-looking corpse has been around at least since 18th-Century English poet and forger Thomas Chatterton died at age 18 from arsenic poisoning.
Still, the lionization of the young dead is an indivisible part of the rock ethic. “Die young, stay pretty,” went the lyrics of a Blondie song. Pete Townshend once expressed the desire to die before getting old. Even the venerable Young, a consummate rock survivor whose elegies for heroin casualty Danny Whitten and suicide victim Cobain made for beautiful and haunting art, once sang, “It’s better to burn out than to fade away.”
Death has historically been a great career move. It can turn a sloppy mediocrity like Jim Morrison into something like a rascal god, a Dionysian visage smoldering from the cover of Rolling Stone beside the legend “He’s Hot, He’s Sexy, He’s Dead.” They mobbed the record stores after Tupac Shakur’s murder.
Rock ’n’ roll is a genre founded in blood and hype. It was born backstage in a Houston theater on Christmas Eve 1954 when a young Memphian named John Marshall Alexander Jr. chambered a bullet in his revolver, spun it around and snapped it closed. He put the muzzle to his head and pulled the trigger: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the late great Johnny Ace.
Unless you want to go back to Chatterton, or Franz Liszt, Johnny Ace was the first rock star. And the first rock ‘n’ roll suicide.
The mid-1950s were transitional, when the music we call rock ’n’ roll was just about to emerge from rhythm and blues. Johnny Ace’s posthumous hit “Pledging My Love” is as good a candidate as any for the first full-blown rock ’n’ roll song. Not because it is stylistically much different from any number of rhythm and blues songs that had been released in the previous few years - Jackie Brenston’s 1948 side “Rocket 88,” for instance, certainly had a rock ’n’ roll feel - but because of the circumstances of its release.
“Pledging My Love” was a harbinger of a revolution in American popular music and culture. Postwar prosperity empowered an adolescent audience, allowing teen-agers to emerge as a potent market force for the first time in the history of the world. This audience differed from their parents in that they demanded a specific musical performance of a song, a unique and distinctive performance against which all subsequent performances would be viciously judged. For the first time, recorded performances were more important than the songs themselves (in the mid-1960s, Mick Jagger sang, “It’s the singer not the song”). The posthumous success of Johnny Ace’s “Pledging My Love” made this clear: Despite the availability of several cover versions, for the first time record buyers chose to make a ballad by a solo black male singer signed to a small independent label the definitive version. It was Johnny Ace’s “Pledging My Love” that was the hit; and Johnny Ace was Johnny Ace largely because of his Russian roulette suicide. (Or was it murder? Rumors abound.)
Six months later, the cult of the good-looking corpse was cemented when a tone-deaf bongo player named James Dean crashed his Porsche and was taken up bodily into the pantheon of pop heroes, a martyr to the wild life. Dean was a rock star despite his lack of musical acumen. And so was Sal Mineo, Dean’s co-star in Rebel Without a Cause and the singer of “Start Movin’” (a vanity hit in 1957) who was stabbed to death in 1976. (Natalie Wood wasn’t a rock star-she was too girly and too glamorous-but her drowning death argues for her street credibility.)
It wasn’t always death by recklessness or the impulse to self-extinction; the still-whispered rumor that a drunken Buddy Holly shot the pilot notwithstanding, a lot of rock deaths were purely accidental. Holly and John Lennon certainly didn’t ask for what they got; neither did Mia Zapata, the murdered lead singer of the Gits. Jimi Hendrix certainly could have imagined a better end.
Still, there is hardly a major rock ’n’ roll band or artist untouched by early death. Brian Jones quit the Rolling Stones and drowned a week later. Keith Moon, probably the greatest rock ’n’ roll drummer ever, overdosed on sedatives. Richard Manuel of The Band hanged himself in a hotel room. In 1980, Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham died at band mate Jimmy Page’s home in Windsor. Bonham had consumed what the coroner estimated as 40 shots of vodka in 12 hours and died in the same fashion as Hendrix and Bon Scott of AC/ DC. A dozen years before Lennon’s murder, elaborate rumors circulated that Paul McCartney had died and been replaced in the Beatles by a lookalike, Billy Shears (who sounded more like Ringo, but never mind).
In the late ’60s and early ’70s junior high school hallways across the country buzzed with rumors of rock star death: Donny Osmond decapitated by a guitar string; Elton John pulling a Sylvia Plath down on his knees with his head in the oven. Most of the time the rumors were as false as they were wild, but after Janis, Jim and Jimi, after Duane Allman’s motorcycle crash (and a year later, Berry Oakley, at almost exactly the same spot), we came to expect our rock stars to check out early. We aren’t surprised when River Phoenix twitched to death on the sidewalk in front of a nightclub, his body marinated in chemicals. Heath Ledger’s death was accidental, but in retrospect, hardly surprising. Ditto Amy Winehouse. Ditto Philip Seymour Hoffman.
It’s been 20 years since Cobain, the troubled millionaire, blew out his own lights with a shotgun. And I still think about that sometimes, about how sad and worthless the death was, and wonder about what might have happened. It’s a shame he didn’t have the chance to grow into a fat mediocrity, a figure of fun.
If you fool around with social media, you might be aware of the Dutch beer commercial that tastelessly posits a desert island where all the murdered and self-slaughtered culture heroes escaped to. There Kurt and Elvis and Marilyn Monroe and Jimi loll on the beach, getting old and cheery with good beer and anonymity. It’s probably not too soon to convert these tragedies to comic purposes, but it still hit me in the gut when I saw it.
Cobain was maybe not a great talent; Nirvana was about over when he checked out. But I don’t know. One of the silliest things Scott Fitzgerald ever wrote was that line about there being no second acts in American lives.
It gets better, kids. It almost always gets better.
Perspective, Pages 80 on 04/06/2014