With the release of their most successful album “Nevermind” in 1991, Nirvana changed the Rock and Roll industry at the time that started to focus more on Grunge bands. Their career was sadly cut short after Kurt Cobain‘s death at the age of 27 in 1994 but their legacy and influence continued to impact millions of musicians around the world. Over the years many famous artists talked about Cobain and Nirvana, including the legendary The Who guitarist and main lyricist Pete Townshend.
What is Pete Townshend’s opinion on Nirvana
Pete Townshend recognizes the importance of Nirvana and especially their groundbreaking album “Nevermind”, having described it as a breath of fresh “Punk” air. However, he doesn’t like the message Kurt Cobain indirectly gave fans by seemingly deciding to “die before he got old”. When the book “Kurt Cobain: Journals” was released, he was asked by The Guardian to review it. He said: “As a songwriter and rock architect, I was interested to look behind the creative process of Kurt Cobain. Nirvana’s second album, ‘Nevermind’ was a breath of ‘Punk’ fresh air in the musically stale early Nineties.”
“So I picked up this book searching for connections. Where might a particular lyric idea have begun? What, for example, is behind the smart, striking and ironic wit of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’? If this sounds rather professorial, that’s me, the first proprietor of the Rock academy of lyric analysis.” He also lamented that he decided not to give Kurt a call in the 1990s. At the time, a mutual friend asked him to reach out to the Nirvana leader and try to convince him he had to get clean.
He said:
“When Cobain was in deep trouble with heroin addiction in 1993, I was visiting New York regularly in connection with my own abuse story, Tommy, which had hit Broadway. I met Michael Azerrad who had written ‘Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana’. Azerrad asked if I would contact Cobain, who was in constant danger of overdosing. I had chosen this year to give booze another gentle try after 11 years. When Azerrad approached me, I was not drunk, nor unsympathetic. But I did not make the necessary judgment I would make today that an immediate ‘intervention’ was required to save his life.”
“It is desperately sad for me to sit here, 57 years old, and contemplate how often wasteful are the deaths of those in the Rock industry. We find it so hard to save our own, but must take responsibility for the fact that the message such deaths as Cobain’s sends to his fans is that it is in some way heroic to scream at the world, trash a guitar, smash it up and then overdose. Read this book to see that the human spirit, even at its most sublime, can effect monumental damage on itself and its fellow souls if addiction enters the story. I mourn for Kurt. A once beautiful, then pathetic, lost and heroically stupid boy. Hard rock indeed,” Pete Townshend said in 2002.
Kurt Cobain said he hoped to die before he turned into Pete Townshend
In 1965, Pete Townshend wrote “I hope I die before I get old” in The Who’s hit “My Generation”. In 1991, Cobain said he hoped to die before he turned into Pete Townshend, who was 46 at the time. “It just happens when you reach a certain age (songwriting decline). But there’s still people like Neil Young. There’s still a handful of people like that who’ve never lost their sights.”
“To mature, to me, to use examples of other bands, is to wimp out. To put up an image that isn’t sincere anymore. I mean, Pete Townshend can’t possibly do what he did in his early early twenties now. Hope I die before I turn into Pete Townshend. That’s why I hope to destroy my career before it’s too late. Before I look ridiculous. There are plenty of things I would like to do when I’m older. At least just have a family, that would satisfy me,” Kurt Cobain told Jerry McCulley.
At that time, The Who’s most recent album was “It’s Hard”, released in 1982. The band had reunited in the previous years before entering a new hiatus until 1996. But during those inactive years, Pete Townshend continued to write and record. He released four solo studio albums: “All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes” (1982), “White City: A Novel” (1985), “The Iron Man: The Musical by Pete Townshend” (1989), and “Psychoderelict” (1993).
Pete Townshend said Nirvana members were Who fans
Although Kurt said that, according to Townshend, Nirvana members were fans of The Who. He told that to Mojo, when talking about how Grunge artists were able to carry on throughout the years. “But the punk movement in the UK changed things. It created a particularly British mechanism (chuckles), which is: ‘We love you, but you’re a complete and utter c**t! And we think everything that you did up until the point that we were born was really really great. But since we’ve been born, you’ve just turned into a big pile of rubbish.’ And this is you know, Britpop, it’s The Jam and it’s Oasis…”
“The difference with Pearl Jam and I think also with Nirvana – who were also Who fans – is that they were able to kind of roll with it, I suppose, and live with it. You see it in a huge way in country & western music, in particular in America. Maybe in folk music, where the older artists are not just respected and lauded but also allowed to continue, not to just roll over and die. A lot of my midlife shit was about the idea that I too felt that I should roll over and die. And I think that is very much a British thing. That you mustn’t outstay your welcome. And you must also embrace new ideas. They call it neotericism. It’s when you value the new more than the old, whether or not the new or the old is better,” Pete Townshend said in 2022.
Pete said the Rock industry was too young to know how to save people like Cobain
Pete had already lost John Entwistle and Keith Moon to drugs and didn’t like the message some fans might get from that. He believes that the music business is dangerous if a person can’t handle the fame, pressure, and fortune mentally. In his opinion, back then they didn’t know what to do to help someone who was addicted. “Young is what the heart is and the soul is. So in a sense, if I can own it in that way, then maybe I’ll feel more comfortable about it. But I certainly, I don’t like the idea that a Kurt Cobain blows his brains out because he thinks that he’s had instructions from Pete Townshend, pop guru.”
Pete Townshend continued:
“I think what that was about was, is that there was nobody there that knew how to stop him. It wasn’t that nobody cared, but you know, if there’s a tragedy at work there, it is that this business of ours, this rock and roll industry is too young, to ill-equipped, too young, to new to have built up ways of helping people that have got a problem. We don’t know how to do it. There are too many kind of, and one could be cynical, and say that, you know, ‘The poor fucker was worth more dead than alive.’ It’s not true, of course it’s not true. It’s just not true.”
“The temptation to think that somehow, that James Dean is worth more dead than alive, that Jimi Hendrix is worth more dead than alive, you know? And in the case of people like Brian Jones, Janis Joplin, and particularly Brian Jones and Jimi Hendrix, these were people that were my friends. These are not fucking marquee names, these are not icons. These are not people that you wear on tee shirts. These were people that I knew, people that I cared about, you know. People that were like me,” Pete Townshend told Steve Harris in 1996. Entwistle passed away after a drug overdose at the age of 57, six years after this interview.