Cobain + Staley: Two Icons & Two Reflections ⋆ Mississauga Life ✫ Spirit of the City

Coincidence—meaningless, meaningful coincidence—is the foundation of mythology.

It’s been 10 years to the day since Layne Staley, former frontman of Alice in Chains, is believed to have succumbed to heroin and cocaine addiction in Seattle, Washington. We can only say believed because the singer’s last years were a tragic spiral of isolation and drug abuse; it wasn’t until April 19 that police kicked down his door to find the singer dead, bathed in television light. Rolling Stone ran a cover of the blond-haired Staley, bearing a quote from Canadian folk legend Neil Young: “The Needle and the Damage Done.”

Staley’s fateful day came eight years to the day after the April 5 death of another blonde-haired grunge icon: Kurt Cobain. Also in Seattle, also the result of heroin. Unlike Staley, though, Cobain’s death blindsided the generation that’d believed in him; if his demise was the shock that killed the grunge juggernaut, then Staley’s was its anticipated echo. Cobain’s suicide note bore another Neil Young quote: “It’s better to burn out than to fade away.”

Young would later dedicate his album, Sleeps with Angels, to Cobain’s memory.

Today, two MississaugaLife writers and devout music fans—myself and assistant editor Leo Graziani—reflect on the passing of two icons whose art ignited the collective imagination of a whole society, but ultimately swallowed their own lives.

Respectively, Leo (35) and I (24) represent Generation X and the Millennial Generation. Our relationship to the music and the men behind it couldn’t be more different; by the time I was old enough to have seen a Nirvana concert, they were already putting out the With the Lights Out box set. Leo’s reflection is an intensely personal account of a massive cultural implosion; mine is the detached recollection of an observer, a historical passenger watching the televised aftershock.

But what we do share is the same thing that a kid born today, who puts on Nevermind in 2026, will share with us: a strange, but very real, emotional attachment to the imprint left by Nirvana and Alice in Chains on the musical landscape.

Leo

I was 18 years old when Kurt Cobain committed suicide. I heard about it when a friend phoned me up and said:

“I’m sorry, dude.”
“Sorry for what?”
“I’m just sorry.”
“For what? What are you talking about?”
“You didn’t hear?”
“No. Heard what?” I was starting to get a little annoyed with him.
“You really need to turn on the radio right now.”
“Which station?”
“Doesn’t matter.”

So I went over to the living room where the family stereo was set up, and I turned on 97.7 FM. And there it was, in sombre tones: Kurt Cobain was found dead in his home from a self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head.

A little background before we proceed: I was—and still am—a huge Nirvana fan. I was 15 years old when the Nevermind bomb dropped, obliterating everything I knew about music until then. It was massive. I was even lucky enough to catch them live at Maple Leaf Gardens in ’93, on the In Utero tour. They’re one of my all-time favourites.

I sat in front of the stereo, just listening. I couldn’t believe it. Kurt’s dead? That’s not fair! He can’t be dead! I didn’t want to move from the stereo, but the yelling of my parents saying to come to dinner—it’s a big deal in an Italian house—eventually overpowered my trance. So I threw in a blank cassette and hit record while we ate. I still have that tape.

The next day, in true melodramatic teenage fashion, I wore a black armband to school. A lot of students misinterpreted it, and I was verbally crucified by a teacher for it too: “Why are you wearing that, son? ’Cause your hero died?” That’s verbatim, folks. And I tried my best to defend myself, but it wasn’t very good. It wasn’t until years later that I understood what I was mourning: not the man, but the music.

I didn’t know Kurt Cobain personally, and no matter how intensely I rocked out to his songs, the obfuscating lyrics only ever allowed you a little peek in his head at best. (For the record, I understand the lyrics now.) I never bought into that messianic image of Cobain, the whole voice-of-a-generation, the-next-John-Lennon thing that all the music media outlets were calling him. I think that’s looking upon the whole thing with too-nostalgic eyes. Despite his importance in rock history, and despite my almost fanatical devotion to the band, I recall feeling that the whole thing was overblown to death.

No, for me, Nirvana just plain and simply rocked. There was something almost primal about how they sounded that spoke to me in my lizard brain. Nirvana songs were the first songs I learned to play on guitar. And no Kurt meant no more Nirvana. They would never make another record. The magic of that band was gone.

Years later, when they released “You Know You’re Right” from the vault, I felt the void left by the absence of Nirvana. It made me sad and made me remember just how awesome they were. Yet at the same time, I was happy to hear another song. It was bittersweet.

I didn’t know until today—or at least I didn’t make the connection—that Layne Staley of Alice in Chains also died on April 5… but in 2002. I remember hearing about his death (I still have the issues of Rolling Stone that cover both Cobain’s death and Staley’s) and was, of course, upset by the news.

Alice in Chains was another one of my favourite bands—what can I say, I was a grunge kid—and here was another unique voice silenced. I loved their sludgy heaviness, their delicate acoustic sound—especially on Jar of Flies and their Unplugged album—and their amazing harmonies. But Layne’s death didn’t have the impact that Kurt’s did, for me, and that may be because I was 26 instead of 18. Regardless of age, it was terrible news and I miss that band a lot.

I never got to see Alice in Chains in concert, and I don’t know that I want to now. I know they’re still around and I know they’ve got a new singer in William DuVall, and I hear he’s great… but something about it just doesn’t feel right. Simply put, he isn’t Layne, no matter how much he sounds like him.

So it’s April 5, 2012—10 years after the death of Layne Staley and 18 years after the death of Kurt Cobain. I don’t know about you, dear reader, but I plan on cranking up every Nirvana and Alice in Chains album I have, and maybe drinking a tallboy or two in their honour. The music makes me feel 15 again. Maybe that’s the best way to remember Kurt and Layne.

Chris

I was born in 1987, so I was seven years old when Kurt Cobain died in ’94. Needless to say, I was more into eating my Crayola than I was into grunge. In fact, it’s one of my very first encoded memories: the image of a teary Courtney Love, reading Kurt’s suicide note to a crowd of thousands, imploring them to repeat after her: “Kurt is an asshole.”

In retrospect, this memory is hued with the red glow of what the music ended up meaning to me. At the time, though, it was a black mass without context, a profoundly strange and surreal ritual of public mourning that seemed important though I couldn’t have said why.

Unlike the kids who grew up with grunge and could’ve known only dimly the downward-arcing star they were hitching their psyches to, for my Millennial Generation Cobain and the suicide mythology came as a package deal. Nirvana fandom was the already-sacrosanct church of teenage alienation, and Cobain its already-canonized patron saint. There’s no doubt that his posthumous marketing—as an angel of broken glass and cigarettes, held still in the photographic, revisionist perfection that’s only available to artists who die young—was a little sick, but I can’t say I was bothered by it.

That Layne Staley would take the same dismal voyage into rock and roll Valhalla in 2002, then, wasn’t a surprise. This was, in fact, what the whole mythos was about (to us): dying young, biting the hand that fed you and rejecting what was offered.

I guess this is the part where I’m supposed to say that, a decade later, I feel shortchanged by the whole ordeal; that the corporate machinery retailed death to me, the angsty teen, and I ate it right up unquestioningly only to find I’d been given sugar pills or worse.

The funny thing is, I don’t feel that way. Both these artists, and their work, and their stories (bleak, uncompromising, sincere, ironic, and without redemption) are psychological landmarks in my life, designating a certain feeling that lasted a certain number of years. And that’ll be their legacy to subsequent generations of listeners: they will remain signposts, marking the entrance and endpoint of teenage ennui.

To me, there’s nothing wrong with that. That feeling deserves an outlet.

Cobain + Staley: Two Icons & Two Reflections

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