Kurt Cobain would have been 40 on February 20, 2007. When I saw that, I had to go and make sure there wasn’t a typo. 40? What? It seemed like yesterday he was just 27, having ended his life by his own hand. I don’t know where the time went, and I don’t even want to go back and figure it out.

With music having such a big part of my life, Kurt Cobain was a breath of fresh air back in 1993. 1993 was the first year I found my own music. Up until then, I had my father’s music, which was great, but I finally had something for myself. I had something I found. So, some 13 years later, it’s hard to go back and relive those few moments of pleasure I had with Nirvana and Cobain. It was too short. Too quick.

I had just received my first computer back in March, 1994. Sadly, within a month, I was reading news article after article of Kurt Cobain’s death. I saved a bunch of them, along with some pictures. These are the oldest files I have. I’ve saved them all these years, from computer to computer. I have included one such article.

News story copied from Prodigy in 1994

SEATTLE–Rock singer Kurt Cobain killed himself because he no longer felt the passion needed to go on with his music, according to excerpts of his suicide note read at a memorial service Sunday.

“I’m too much of an erratic, moody person and I don’t have the passion anymore,” Cobain said in the note, read by his sobbing widow Courtney Love and played in a tape recording to about 3000 grieving fans of the singer’s hugely popular grunge-rock band Nirvana.

Cobain’s body was found Friday in an apartment over the garage of his home in an exclusive Seattle neighborhood. Cobain, 27, died of a self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head, police and coroner’s officials said.

Sadness was mixed with anger at the candlelight vigil for the musician, whose anguished lyrics gave voice to a generation and made Nirvana one of the most popular rock groups of the 1990s.

At the urging of the tape-recorded message from Love, fans shouted an obscenity at Cobain’s memory. But many wept as they listened to the final words of the singer/songwriter who put the Seattle punk-rock subculture onto the international map.

“Sometimes I feel as if I should have a punch-in time clock before I walk out on stage,” Cobain said in the note. “The fact is I can’t fool you, any one of you. It simply isn’t fair to you or to me.”

In an apparent reference to his long battle with heroin addiction, Cobain wrote that he needed “to be slightly numb in order to regain the enthusiasm I once had as a child.”

He also referred to the “burning, nauseous” stomach that plagued him for years.

Love said she often had feared Cobain’s suicide, but said she regretted listening to people who recommended that she treat Cobain with “tough love,” referring to a philosophy of forcing drug addicts to face their problems alone.

“We all should have let him have his numbness, we should have let him have the thing that made him feel better…instead of trying to strip away his skin,” Love said.

Last week, Cobain was reported missing from a California drug rehabilitation center where he went to recover after collapsing in Rome and falling into a 20-hour coma induced by champagne and prescription drugs.

Cobain often had expressed an unhappiness that went beyond the bitter lyrics he wrote and which he blamed in part on his upbringing in a broken home in the gritty, coastal timber town of Aberdeen, Washington.

He also despised the loss of privacy that came with the huge success of Nirvana’s 1991 breakthrough album “Nevermind,” which was followed by last year’s “In Utero.”

In all, more than 10 million copies of the band’s records have been sold, and many stores quickly sold out of Nirvana’s music after news spread that Cobain had become another rock ‘n’ roll casualty, joining a list of drug-plagued stars such as Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin, all of whom also died at 27.

Love, in her expletive-filled commentary on the note, said parts were intended personally for her and their 20-month-old daughter Frances Bean

Cobain, but that much of it was written for Nirvana’s fans.

“I’m really sorry,” Love said. “I don’t know what I could have done.”

As the memorial service ended, Nirvana’s song “Serve the Servants” was played through loudspeakers and a 60-foot fountain erupted at the heart of Seattle Center, a futuristic complex of buildings and plazas built for the 1962 World’s Fair.

(From a Reuters story by Martin Wolk)

Copied from the PRODIGY(R) service 04/11/94 2:57 PM