New Film Gives A Glimpse Into The KURT COBAIN Few Knew

August 25, 2006

James Montgomery of MTV.com reports:

When journalist Michael Azerrad first met Kurt Cobain in 1992, he half-expected to find him shooting up heroin or smashing a guitar or screaming bloody murder into a microphone. After all, that's all he'd heard and read about Cobain — that he was "a known heroin user," a paranoid maniac and an absolute terror to interview.

But instead, at the end of a long hallway in a Los Angeles apartment, Azerrad came toenail-to-painted-toenail with Kurt Cobain: a slightly off-kilter, but ultimately ordinary, 25-year-old.

"All I knew was that he was a guitar-smashing junkie who screamed," Azerrad said. "Courtney [Love] greeted me at the front door of their apartment, and we walked down this long hallway, with a bedroom down at the end. And I was just dreading what I was going to find in that bedroom. But what I found was a man lying in bed, with his feet pointed towards the door. His feet were sticking out from underneath a blanket, and his toenails were painted red. He was extremely nice, told me to come in and sit down. And then he offered me some grapes."

Azerrad interviewed Cobain for a Rolling Stone cover story, but he got more than a feature out of their initial meeting. The two struck up a fast friendship — "We bonded over the fact that both of us were small kids who didn't relate to the jocks in high school," Azerrad laughed — that would last for the remainder of the NIRVANA frontman's life.