DUFF MCKAGAN: 'I Didn't Have A Sense' That KURT COBAIN Was Going To Die Two Days After I Saw Him

Former GUNS N' ROSES bassist Duff McKagan, who shared a Seattle-bound flight with Kurt Cobain just days before the NIRVANA frontman's suicide, and was one of the last people to speak with Cobain, talked about the encounter during a recent interview with Austria's Mulatschag TV.

Said McKagan (see video below): "I was really fucked up [when I saw Kurt]. I mean, I wrote about it in my book, It was, like, 87 words. We were both fucked up. It wouldn't have been a big deal… It was something, like, even at that time… we were just two fucked up guys, but we were both in big bands and we landed at the airport and we kind of talked about… I mean, my pancreas blew up four weeks later. He died two days later. So that's where we were both at at our lives — at the end of our ropes. I didn't have a sense that he was gonna die in two days, but again, a lot of my friends and peers were dying, or had died, and I was getting numb to it, getting used to it. And even when I got a call that he died, I didn't fall out of my chair. It just happened. And I was too fucked up to really take it in. I was, like, 'Oh, another one fell.'"

Although medical examiners determined that Cobain died on April 5, 1994, his body was discovered by an electrician three days later on April 8 — a little over 20 years ago.

The mystique around Kurt Cobain's life and early death has continued to grow in the nearly two decades since he passed away. NIRVANA bassist Krist Novoselic told The Pulse Of Radio a while back that he finds aspects of the fascination with his former bandmate unsettling. "There's a cult that's developed around the media perception of the person, Kurt Cobain, which has nothing to do with the person I knew," he laughed. "You know, it's a cult of personality, the cult of celebrity. NIRVANA really impacted a lot of people and connected with a lot of people, and when you deal with things on that level, it's very positive, but there's some negative aspects of it too, like, you know, just obsession."

NIRVANA was inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame on April 10 — five days after the 20th anniversary of Cobain's death — alongside KISS and others.