0.13 Dark pop  (Page 8/13)

Two weeks later, on October 14, the legislature approved a joint state/county fee and tax package to raise money for what now was to be a $320 million stadium. On October 23, the county council approved the measure, passing new taxes on restaurant and tavern meals and auto rentals. Although councilmembers voting in favor of the measure insisted that this was a “different funding package” than that rejected by their constituents, the vote was seen by many—myself included—as an act that should have been impossible in the world’s leading democracy: the overturning by elected officials of a popular vote.

While adult Seattle was assiduously pursuing big-league status and attention, its children were collapsing under the weight of national attention. Grunge musicians, having been thrown without warning onto the world’s center stage, almost immediately fled to the wings, or to the deeper, more reliable darkness beyond.

By far the most dramatic collapse was that of Nirvana lead singer Kurt Cobain, who was grunge’s most celebrated and most tormented figure. Almost from the day Nevermind made him famous, Cobain withdrew into heroin addiction, where he remained in what one of his doctors told him was a slow suicidal spiral until finally he committed suicide with a shotgun in April 1994. Cobain had nearly died of a heroin overdose a year before, attempted suicide with drugs and alcohol earlier in ‘94 while on tour in Italy, and barricaded himself, threatening suicide, in a room with several guns during another 1994 incident in which the police were called to his home and confiscated his firearms. Each time, his wife intervened to save his life.

This last time he made sure no one could intervene. Just before he was to leave for Los Angeles to enter a drug rehabilitation facility, Cobain took his friend Dylan Carlson to a sporting goods store and had him buy a shotgun and some shells for him. Cobain took the gun and stashed it in a compartment behind one of his bedroom walls. He flew to Los Angeles and signed into Exodus Recovery Center, and three days later left undetected and flew back to Seattle. For five days, while Love Who was herself undergoing drug treatment in Los Angeles. sent friends and private detectives all over Seattle trying to find him, Cobain spent his last days on earth determinedly alone, preparing his successful suicide. Sometime during the night of April 7, he climbed into the upstairs of a caretaker’s cottage on his property, injected himself with black tar heroin, and shot himself in the head with the shotgun Carlson had purchased.

While it seemed that the whole city stopped dead in its tracks as the news spread on April 8, it also is true that Cobain’s travails were so well known that no one in Seattle was surprised by his death. For the previous year, at least, Nirvana observers had been on a death-watch. Almost from the time the band first became famous, Cobain’s loved ones, friends and fans had been watching him decline and expected him to die.