Kurt Cobain died twenty years ago today. Remember where you
were? I was on my first and only trip to L.A., staying in Westwood, near UCLA.
On the TV in the room was a special—I suppose I was watching MTV—about Cobain
on which I saw a video for “Heart-Shaped Box” and the entirety of the Unplugged
in New York MTV special (if I weren't away from home I wouldn't have seen any of it, no cable). There are some striking performances in that show, but
none more so than the song that ends the set, Lead Belly’s “Where Did You SleepLast Night.”
Flash forward about four years and Kajsa and I were riding
in a car, me driving, playing a new tape I’d made for her. It was not unusual
for us to play these tapes while driving aimlessly about Connecticut. The tape
ends with this song. I remember cranking up the volume as this song got going.
I was eager for her to hear it and I could tell it really drilled her, her eyes
kind of watered at the end, y’know, how, listening to it, you think it’s gotten
as unhinged as it's going to get and then it goes further. And then, well, you’re
kind of speechless. It was a great feeling to have her share it with me.
The great shame in all this is not getting to see how much
further Cobain could’ve gone. Watching the show in 1994, with him newly deceased,
I found it hard to believe. He seems so affable, mellow even, in front of the
crowd, very easy-going and at home. And his ability to pour such angst and
drama into his songs and singing seemed to suggest that he had it sussed.
Whatever you can’t work out with people you get up on stage and give back to
them sonically. I guess that’s always been how I’ve imagined the performing
life. I know that many performers suffer from having to perform and suffer from
the kind of life—the public life, in short—that it makes unavoidable. I suppose
I assumed it was a give-and-take. You take the energies you soak up from all
that exposure and you pour it out when you get back up there again.
That’s the way I feel about this song anyway. Cobain creates
the tension that he rides here to the end. It’s a feeling of desolation,
desperation, and disillusion. The woman the song addresses has maybe been
unfaithful, but at some point that seems not even to be the concern. The fact
that she can only say “in the pines in the pines where the sun don’t ever shine
I’ll shiver the whole night through” or “I’m going where the cold wind blows” becomes
a statement for the fatality of this situation. I imagine he’s killed her or is
about to and that’s her final resting place. What’s wonderful is that all the sense
of violence about to break out and also a terrible mourning are so fully
contained in Cobain’s vocal.
Cobain cites the song as being by Lead Belly (or Hugh
Ledbetter), though the song was around before Lead Belly did it and Cobain
doesn’t follow Lead Belly’s version completely. Lead Belly sings “Black girl, black girl” rather
than “my girl, my girl” and she speaks the lines about her husband’s head found
in a driving wheel but his body never was found. In that version the song seems
to be addressing a woman whose man has died or been killed and now, bereft, she’ll
be wandering in the pines. The Nirvana version doesn’t communicate that situation
at all. Here “her husband” is described and could well have been killed by the
speaker, or his death is what has left “my girl” vulnerable. It could be said
that the anguish expressed by Cobain’s vocal could be the girl’s, continuing
the story of her lonely life in the pines, but I find in Cobain’s handling of
the finish a kind of rage and recoil. If
nothing else, this version makes us feel the horrible fatality of the girl’s
situation.
In any case it’s a chilling, aching and unforgettable
version.
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