Original subtitles

Seattle, Washington, in the early 90s the music capital of the world.

# With the lights out its less dangerous

Home to grunge, teen spirit and the kings of alternative rock, Nirvana.

# I feel stupid and contagious

# Here we are now

# Entertain us

# A mulatto

The band that brought the sound of the American underground

to a mass audience.

The moment they took the stage it was like hysteria, like Beatlemania.

People crying and screaming and...

The hair at the back of my neck went up.

In Kurt Cobain, Nirvana had an artist of rare power

who gave a voice to a generation.

Every time he touched the guitar it was beautiful.

Every single time.

He was amazing. He really had something that I've never seen in anyone else.

Nirvana's success had put Seattle on the map.

Now, even the band that had laid the foundations of alternative rock

descended on the city,

R.E.M.

Hi, this is Mike Milles of REM and you're listening to KC...

# That's me in the corner

# That's me in the spotlight losing my religion

When REM and Nirvana came together

it would lead to the great might-have-beens of rock history.

I said to Kurt, "You wanna play with us?" He was, "Man! I'd like nothing more."

All I could think about was what a freaking tour that would be

to have us and them on the same stage, on the same night.

But the chances of the two biggest rock bands on the planet

sharing a stage was slim,

as Kurt Cobain plunged into a spiral of depression and drug-addiction

that no one could save him from.

I created a project that he had to flight to Georgia to work with me on,

in an attempt to pull him out of headspace that he was in in Seattle,

in his house all alone, but it didn't work.

Sadly.

This is the story of the age of alternative rock,

when a handful of bands restored

authenticity, meaning and passion to the music.

And the lasting legacy of the artist who continues to cast a powerful shadow

over the whole of rock.

Kurt Cobain is the last great rock star,

and I think that's one reason there still remains so much fascination with him.

An electrician arrived at Kurt Cobain's luxurious home early in the morning.

... we need to notify the family.

Apparently it was a suicide at the age of 27.

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan's presidency

served up an American dream of growth and prosperity

for some.

It's morning again in America.

Today more men and women will go to work

than ever before in our country's history.

Now you have everything you wanted.

Including you?

Unless you voted for Reagan,

you didn't have a great time under Reagan.

It's morning in America for people who contributed to that campaign,

who shared those ideals.

It wasn't morning in America for anyone else.

It was like the sun had just set.

# It's the end of the world as we know it

# and I feel fine

There was an immense frustration in the country that was palpable

and we certainly shared it as political activists, as people who...

felt like the very idea of America was being pulled out from under us.

# The other night I dreamt of knives,

# continental drift divide. Mountains sit in a line

# Leonard Bernstein...

Reaganomics delivered shock treatment to the American economy,

sweeping aside the idealism values of the 1960s.

Those unable or unwilling to conform were in for a rough ride.

We got no prospects,

you know, what are you gonna do, work at McDonalds? Deliver papers?

You feel like not only are you in a minority

but you feel like you're in a minority nobody gives a shit about.

# Well a person can work up a mean mean thirst

# After a hard day of nothin' much at all

In the depressed logging town of Aberdeen in Washington St.,

Kurt Cobain was part of that minority.

A high-school dropout from a broken home,

Kurt entered a downsize world of dead end jobs in 1985.

He ended up getting a job back at the high school

that he had dropped out of. He was the janitor.

So you can imagine the shame that he must have felt of

coming in the halls and seeing kids that were his classmates just months before,

and they're going off to college and what he's doing is mopping the floor.

Kurt's experience was not unique.

He was part of "Generation X", children who felt alienated

and excluded from conventional society,

who would never enjoy the prospects

their baby-boomer parents had taken for granted.

Kurt would find a soulmate in Aberdeen,

who shared a similar background and outlook,

Krist Novoselic.

A lot of it had to do with our personal situations, family things and

maybe ideals and promises broken.

It boiled down to alienation and recognising

we'd look at the mainstream culture

and see that it didn't have a lot to offer us.

The real lives and emotions of America's alienated youth

weren't reflected in the studio polished rock

that filled mainstream radio and MTV.

# But what I need to make me tight are

# Girls, Girls, Girls

# Long legs and burgundy lips

I was not getting what I needed from Ted Nugent.

I was a young guy going to a school I hated,

like a lot of young men, you hate the school, the teachers,

you want to burn the place to the ground,

and you want something or someone to represent that for you.

Van Halen sang about girls... Fine!

But there wasn't the "white riot, I wanna riot" thing happening.

And there was no sense of dislocation in that music,

where I... I'm out. I hate all of y'all.

Henry Rollins' search for an alternative would lead him to join a band

whose fearsome reputation would thrill and inspire

Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic,

Black Flag.

I got a six-pack, and nothing to do.

I actually went to see Black Flag play in Walla Walla, Washington, in 1984.

And they had this idea that they were gonna tour the hinterlands

and bring the message to the people.

And it was amazing.

# Thirty-five dollars and a six pack to my name

# Six-pack!

# Spent the rest on beer so who's to blame

# Six-pack!

Black Flag played an adrenaline charged brand of punk known as 'hard core',

a sound that captured the frustration and rage experienced by many

growing up in Reagan's America.

# I got a six pack in me alright!

It was this post-punk, letting out that angst,

and just that very honest fury of youth

and all that confusion and pain into this very short bursts of music.

# Now I got a six so I'll never run out

# Six pack!

Some people are gonna listen to Black Flag and they're gonna love it,

and some people... it's gonna scare them.

Black Flag earned the reputation of staging shows

which frequently descended into violence.

# Six pack!

What do they know about partying?

Or anything else?

He runs this place.

You'd set up to play in some town and then here comes the mayor,

and a news team, and a reverend.

And here comes the Christians protesting and lighting candles,

going like, "Oh my God! No! Help our children!"

# I don't care what's inside

# We're not gonna kill you!

We're like four starving vegetarians in a van,

so they're ready for this fire-breathing beast,

and we're like, "Hi, we're Black Flag. We hate everyone"

It's all right ma'm. They've gone.

# Gimme, gimme, gimme

# I need some more

Finding somewhere to play was a challenge for the bands

on the growing alternative scene.

Unable to fill cavernous arenas and ballrooms,

they had to create their own improvised circuit.

What Black Flag had to do was basically

blaze their own trail, and they cobbled together

this kind of underground railroad of indie rock.

All across America, a whole generation of alternative rock bands

from Black Flag to R.E.M

came of age in venues as eclectic as the bands themselves.

There was a small circuit of clubs, pizza parlors and gay bars

and tiny places around the country that would open their doors

and have really shitty sound systems and let these bands play.

There were times when Black Flag would play on a Friday and R.E.M. on a Saturday

and the next week we'd play the Friday and they'd play the Saturday.

We were chasing each other for years.

And pretty soon there was a circuit.

And when there's a circuit there's a scene.

And when there's a scene there's a community.

And when there's a community then you've got something really interesting.

That community united a wide variety of bands

who shared the same independent spirit and circumstances,

and a fierce determination to make it on their own terms.

Touring bands in a van get by. And what do you get in return?

300 hundred sweaty, adoring fans a night,

and your freedom, your musical freedom.

And maybe you missed some meals

or the cops came and shut your show down,

but man, you weren't flipping burgers, and you weren't filling slurpies.

And there was something to be said for that.

Life on the road was an essential rite of passage for all alternative rock bands.

But for R.E.M, a band that had formed in 1980,

in the tiny university town of Athens, Georgia,

it would also prove to be a springboard to far greater success.

And it began with a song inspired by a cold war radio station,

Radio Free Europe calls on Presov.

# Calling all in transit, calling all in transit

# Calling all in transit, calling all in transit

# Radio free Europe, radio...

'Radio Free Europe' instantly laid out the R.E.M. blueprint.

Peter Buck chiming guitar chords,

Mike Mills and Bill Berry's energetic rhythm section,

but it would be Michael Stipe's enigmatic vocals and performances

that became the band's early trademark.

# That this isn't country at all

I was just an incredibly shy person and not terribly confident.

I had terrible acne and used my hair to cover my face a lot.

I mumbled when I talked and mumbled when I sang.

So all that combined into what I guess came across as some modicum of charisma.

And people were very taken by it.

# Calling all in transit, calling all in transit

# Calling all in transit, calling all in transit

# Radio free Europe, radio...

Michael Stipe's mystique helped make 'Radio Free Europe' a critical hit,

as the new breed of bands began to receive airplay

on another alternative network,

'Call It Radio'.

# Read about your band in some local page

# Didn't mention your name, didn't mention your name

It was that separate world of what is now called alternative rock,

which at the time was only called college rock

because the only place you heard it on the radio was on college stations,

it's the classic Replacements' song 'Left of the Dial'.

# ...in a long, long while

# I'll try to find you

# Left of the dial

# Left of the dial

It's a song about where you tuned manually,

you turned the little knob to the left of the dial,

to the 88.9s and the 90.1s,

all the stuff that was below the commercial band.

You had to look for it,

and people who really wanted something more out of music,

who wanted more out of life, something more out of their guitars,

that's where you went.

As more and more people turned to the left of the dial

they discovered that even fast and furious alternative rock bands,

such as H�sker D� were, like R.E.M., embracing melody and harmony.

# Going out each day to score

# She was no whore but for me

# Celebrating every day

# The way she thought it should be

# And I don't know what to do

When H�sker D� started introducing melody

that introduced a whole new audience of people.

It wasn't kind of the thuggish, thick-necked guys

who just wanted to go to a show and bash into each other.

You started to get people with glasses and girls.

# For what she believed

# And I don't know what to do

# Now that pink has turned to blue

Major labels homed in on H�sker D� and bands like The Replacements,

but R.E.M. were the anointed ones of college radio,

and in 1987 they began work on the album

that would launch them into the mainstream,

'Document'.

We never intended to have a commercial sound

because to us that was anathema. Commercial sound equals death.

But we decided to make some records

that were more like what we sounded like live.

And that's a very heavy guitar dominated sound.

The band recruited Scot Litt,

the producer who had previously worked with pop group Katrina and the Waves,

to help them craft a more dynamic sound

that would yield their first top ten hit.

# This one goes out to the one I love

# This one goes out to the one I've left behind

# A simple prop to occupy my time

'The One I Love' was a dark love song based around the arpegio guitar sound

Peter Buck created by plucking rather than strumming the stings.

Peter Buck has the best right hand in the business.

It is the essence of the R.E.M. sound, certainly musically speaking,

because he decided to *** the thrashing,

the full chord whatever thing that everybody else was doing,

'cause that's the easy part.

The hard thing is working with your right hand.

Michael Stipe delivered his most clear and direct vocal yet,

even though the lyrics offered up

a dark and tangled tale of manipulation and deceit.

# Fire!

'The one I love' is a song that I didn't want to put on the record.

I thought it was too mean, and too brutal and...

It was just a mean song.

As it turned out, I think in recording, Scott and the band

recognised that this might actually be

a song that could get played on the radio.

So we turned the voice up a little.

It's a great song, but the thing is, it's a sneaky one.

It's a dagger in the back. It's not a love song, obviously,

for anyone who really takes time to listen to it.

The song was punctuated by dramatic cries of anguish.

# Fire!

Producer Scott Litt emphasized the drama of the vocal

by adding a harmony from drummer Bill Berry.

See? That kind of thing. That's Bill doubled there.

Two of his voices on one track.

That's how we would thicken things up.

And then the great ending.

R.E.M.'s success showed that alternative rock

was becoming a big business.

And it would change the lives

of the bands that had eked out a humble living on the road

just a few years before.

I remember sitting with Michael Stipe in his home in Athens, Georgia,

in his kitchen. He puts the phone down.

And he said, "What does a gold record mean?"

And we had to call the office back and go, "What does that mean?"

He goes, "It's half a million!"

"You sold half a million records?" And I was there with Stipe

when that came over the wire.

And it was so cool that neither of us knew.

And that was probably the last time he didn't know, forever.

In Aberdeen,

gold records were distant dreams for Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic,

but by 1988 they had the makings of a band,

with Kurt on guitar and vocals,

Krist on base and Chad Channing on drums.

Here we have your typical American hard rock band

sitting up for a day's practice.

This goes into your guitar.

I found in Cobain's journals at one point

a list of names he was considering, and they included things like

Poo Poo Box, Spina Bifida, Whisker Biscuit and a few others.

You just have to go back and say, if this band had been named Poo Poo Box,

can you imagine them overtaking the world

and selling 10 million copies of their record?

Kurt finally settled on Nirvana.

But for an aspiring band in Washington State

there was only one place to go, Seattle.

The band drove up in a truck that someone had borrowed

and I remember Novoselic telling me

there was actually a functioning woodstove in the back.

It's like the 'Beverly Hillbillies',

essentially it's what they looked like coming into Seattle.

Seattle's vibrant music scene

had spawned bands like Soundgarden and Alice in Chains

with a dark, intense sound inspired by 70s heavy metal,

and with lyrics full of alienation and self-loathing... grunge.

And it had been unleashed on the wider world by the band Mudhoney

with the song 'Touch me, I'm sick'.

# I'm a creep, yeah, I'm a jerk

# Come on

# Touch me, I'm sick

For the most part I just stood back and let them go at it.

I enjoyed what they were doing.

I thought, "This is really noisy.

"Are you sure you want it to be this noisy, guys?

"You really want the guitars to sound this dirty? Mmm, Ok."

# ...girl - everything I got

'Grunge' means this kind of music that's dripping with bits of garage rock,

and punk and metal and it's just like hard, outrageous and

at the same time, just kind of like living underneath a rock, in a way.

# If you don't come

# You'll die alone

Nirvana channeled the grunge sound on their debut album, 'Bleach',

recorded for just 600$ on indie label 'Sub Pop', by Jack Endino.

But included one song the hinted at Nirvana's crossover potential,

despite Kurt's reservations.

When it came the time to record 'About a girl',

which is the pop song in the record,

Kurt felt like he had to sort of make an excuse for it.

He was a little uneasy about it.

He said, "Bear with me here, Jack.

"I've got this song, it's kind of a pop song.

"I hope the Sub Pop guys like it

"and that they don't think it's too commercial or something."

# I'm standing in your line

# I do, Hope you have the time

# I do, Pick a number too

# I do, Keep a date with you

# I'll take advantage while

# You hang me out to dry

# But I can't see you every night free

Kurt Cobain's concerns about the song

went to the heart of the alternative rock dilemma,

the more popular it became

the more it risked loosing its independence and integrity.

R.E.M. though, showed that there might be a way forward.

They'd grown on their own terms

and Michael Stipe relished the bigger stage,

but it came with a burden of responsibility.

Yeah, I had become the voice of a generation,

of political activism through the Reagan years,

and I was suddenly expected to have all the answers,

and to have encyclopedic, academic knowledge on say, the greenhouse effect.

And I didn't realise what I had done, what I was doing was speaking out

about things I was concerned about as a person.

# I believe in watching you

# I believe in what you do

# I believe in watching you

# I believe in what you do

# I believe in watching you

# I could turn you inside-out

R.E.M.'s 1989 'Green' Tour had been exhilarating but exhausting.

After a decade on the road,

they'd earned the creative freedom to do whatever they wanted.

Even if that meant laying down their guitars.

We had been on tour from April 5th of 1980, the first show that we ever did,

until the end of 1989. We had not stopped touring

or recording and at the end of the Green World Tour,

I think Bill Berry is the one who said, I can't do this,

we need to take a break, and so we took a long break.

Peter was, I think, afraid of becoming a rock icon

so he put down the electric guitar, he was sick of it,

and picked up a mandolin.

R.E.M.'s new sound would be perfectly crystallised in a song

that was to become their defining chart hit.

# Oh, life is bigger

# It's bigger than you

# And you are not me

# The lengths that I will go to

The success of 'Losing my religion' owed much to a striking video

that put Michael Stipe firmly in the spotlight.

# Oh no, I've said too much

# I haven't said enough

# I thought that I heard you laughing

Peter Buck plucked the strings of the mandolin

in the R.E.M. arpegio style,

but he couldn't resist adding a subtle chime of electric guitar.

That's a guitar called a 'Robin', Peter used to call it his 'Robin'.

It's an electric guitar but it's in the octave of the mandolin.

There's the mandolin.

And this doubling guitar doesn't need to strum along really,

so we just... just having downbeats arpegiated.

Scott Litt enhanced the lushness of the sound with a string section.

Violins, violas...

Again the movement in the track.

# I think I thought I saw you try

# That was just a dream

# Try, cry, why try?

The video cemented R.E.M. as MTV favourites,

even though the band hadn't been convinced that the song would be a hit.

Why would anyone be surprised?

Its a 5'30'' song with a mandolin as the lead instrument.

There's no chorus. Why wouldn't that be a hit?

That should be a hit everywhere.

There's R.E.M. before and after 'Loosing my religion',

it was a huge, huge international hit.

And I went from being a fairly well known but fringe pop star

to being a full blown celebrity.

We'd like to especially thank 'College Radio'

for supporting us all these years and putting us here tonight.

And we'd like to thank the fans

from twelve years back all the way to yesterday.

Everybody, thank you so much.

That took some getting used to.

But I actually enjoyed it.

'That's me in the spotlight' pretty much shined the spotlight right on me.

R.E.M.'s success showed Kurt Cobain it was possible to court a big audience

without sacrificing passion and authenticity.

I've always thought about R.E.M as a commercial band in the first place.

They just happen to be a good, passionate commercial band.

And there've always been good, passionate bands in rock 'n roll

throughout the history.

It's just up to fans and people involved in the music industry

to make sure that it doesn't get as stale and as bad

as it has within the last 10 years.

Especially in the Reagan era.

Kurt Cobain was searching for a sound

that could be both commercial and passionate,

and in the spring of 1991, with new drummer Dave Grohl in the band,

Nirvana hit on a musical dynamic

that would send a buzz of excitement through their rehearsals.

What we would do is we would go in to this rehearsal space to write songs,

and the first half an hour of every practice we would just freeformed jam,

just go for it.

Sometimes it was total noise, and sometimes there was a song there.

But so what we would do is we would see how quiet we could get

and to see how loud we could go.

There's that whole dynamic of loud-quiet, loud-quiet.

Maybe that's what you get when you combine heavy riff rock with pop music,

and then you have a song that actually has a big hook chorus

and you have a heavy loud rock band that just really pushes it forward.

# Taken time is

# All but true

# You're the reason

# I feel pain

# Feels so good to

# Feel again

It was a sound that Kurt Cobain had always dreamed of,

noise and melody, hard guitars and harmonies,

and it first discovered it in the music of alternative rock's unsung heroes.

Kurt had always talked about what would happen if you

started a band that melted Black Sabbath and The Beatles.

So, all along he was just thinking about aggression and tunefulness.

And that was The Pixies.

# Gouge away

# You can gouge away

# Stay all day

The Pixies had formed in Boston in 1985 and begun crafting a minimal sound

based around the simple dynamic of quiet-loud.

Quiet in the verse, loud in the chorus.

Or the other way around. 'Gouge Away' the chorus is....

# Gouge away

# You can gouge away

# Stay all day

# If you want to

And then... the verse is...

# ... aggravation

# Some sacred questions

# You stroke my locks

The verse is up and then...

# Gouge away

# You can gouge away

What The Pixies did was take soft and loud

and do all sort of interesting things in that,

so their guitars kind of veer off. They're not just going in a straight line.

The Pixies unique sound

owed much the band's raw, untrained musical imagination,

and bassist Kim Deal's desire to avoid the usual rock clich�s.

A lot of it is our limitations, like when the end of the song's coming,

I don't know we've ever gone.

I don't think that... Honestly...

This is one of five maybe- on the hand,

that I have done this in my life, right there.

I think I did pretty good.

It felt good.

The Pixies minimal approach

was summed up on a classic song of surreal confusion.

# With your feet in the air...

'Where is my mind'

# Try this trick and spin it, yeah

# Your head will collapse

# But there's nothing in it

# And you'll ask yourself

# Where is my mind

# Where is my mind

# Where is my mind

Kim Deal helped propel the song with a simple base line

resisting the urge to overelaborate.

But you can't believe how some people cannot do that,

and will not do that.

Especially real base players.

I'm looking at you.

What they'll do is sort of go...

Because there's this little drum thing that happens,

or maybe it's a guitar thing.

And they want to help push every little moment,

they want to be involved.

They won't just pedal through something.

The Pixies provided the final ingredient Kurt Cobain had been looking for.

Nirvana had arrived at a sound that blended the fury of grunge

with a new feel for melody and the mass commercial appeal of R.E.M.

And in April, 1991,

Nirvana performed a raw version of a new song

that would draw all those elements together

to become alternative rock's defining anthem.

This song is called 'Smells like teen spirit'.

The band built up the drama and tension in the song

by using the Pixies' quiet-loud trademark.

What happened was that we played that riff over and over again,

and then Dave or I would stop.

"Just slow this down. Like the moment you slow this down

you have a kind of a dynamic." And once we did that, it made sense.

# Come out and play

# Make up the rules

# I know I hope

# To die the truth

'Smells like teen spirit' I really remember thinking,

that is such a Pixies rip. It is, the baseline,

and the chord-key single note guitar thing over the drums.

I mean it was almost thrown away at one point just because

just seemed too much like the Pixies.

# A dirty word

With 'Smells like teen spirit' Nirvana had the basis for a hit.

But they needed a producer who could harness their live energy

and shape it into a more radio-friendly sound.

Actually, truth be told,

I was one of the people that was on the short list to produce 'Nevermind',

and I passed.

Do you want to stop now?

# ...and contagious

# Here we are now

# Entertain us

# A mulatto

# An albino

The band finally settled on a producer with underground credentials

and a pop touch, Butch Vig.

I knew I just wanted to set them up in a big room and try to capture

the energy in the initial performance.

Make sure that was the most important thing about the song.

But I also wanted to make it sound bigger and much more focused

than 'Bleach' was.

In order to achieve a richer sound on the 'Nevermind' album,

Butch Vig created multiple layers of Kurt's voice.

A process known as doubletracking that the singer initially resisted.

He really didn't like doing things over again,

but he loved The Beatles so I knew I could use an excuse if I had,

and that was that John Lennon always doubletracked his vocals.

He hated the sound of his voice and because Kurt was such a Beatles fan,

every time I used the John Lennon reference he'd go, "Ok."

# With the lights out its less dangerous

# Here we are now

# Entertain us

# I feel stupid and contagious

# Here we are now

# Entertain us

'Teen Spirit' was plain to see in the song's video,

but its title had less rebellious origins.

The physical sensation. Teen Spirit.

The only anti-perspirant made for our generation.

Teen Spirit.

With five fragrances.

Kurt's former girlfriend used a deodorant called 'Teen Spirit',

prompting a mutual friend called Kathleen Hanna

to create a historic piece of graffiti.

So one night we went out and got all fucked up, me and Kurt and Kathleen Hanna.

And Kathleen had some spray paint and

in Kurt's bedroom she sprayed, "Kurt smells like Teen Spirit'.

So it's kind of like saying, Kurt has coodies,

or Kurt smells like this girl.

But Kurt didn't know that it was the name of a deodorant

and he just simply saw it and said, "Oh. Teen Spirit. That's a great line."

And it wasn't until the song actually came out that somebody said,

"It's strange your wrote a song about a woman's deodorant."

And he said, "I did?"

# A mulatto

# An albino

Cobain had a surprise of his own in store

for the end of the 'Teen Spirit' video.

A shot of a janitor that harked back to his first job in Aberdeen.

Kurt would continually dwell on his troubled youth in his music.

And he revisited the darkest hours he'd spent sleeping rough

in the haunting song 'Something in the way'.

We did 4, 5 takes of the song and it just didn't happen.

And out of frustration Kurt walked in the control room

and laid down on the couch,

and started sort of singing the song and kept playing quieter and quieter,

to the point it was almost a whisper.

# Underneath the bridge

# The tarp has sprung a leak

And I just said, stop right here,

and I unplugged the phone, I turned off the air conditioning,

I sealed the doors and said, everybody stay out of here.

And I brought a couple of mikes in,

and just recorded him on the couch.

# And I'm living off of grass

# And the drippings from my ceiling

# It's okay to eat fish

# 'Cause they don't have any feelings

He did live in abandoned houses. He lived in hallways.

He would go sneak into the hospital he was born in

and sleep in the waiting room,

because no one would come and say, why are you here,

they thought he was waiting for someone.

# Something in the way

And, I swear to God, when he sang it the first time,

the song is maybe three minutes long,

I swear to God I held my breath the whole time.

# Something in the way

Kurt Cobain gave a voice to an audience

who saw the pain and confusion of their own lives

reflected in his music.

There was a passion and quality in the recording that sounded

exciting and dangerous and something they hadn't heard before.

There was an audience out there that I think had been set up for that,

by bands like R.E.M. or H�sker D� or The Replacements.

And all of a sudden, to have this record

that sort of encapsulated all those bands and so many things at the same time,

it had this sheer energy and this intense impact,

people went crazy for it.

In January, 1992, 'Nevermind' finally topped the US charts.

The outsiders had won.

Grunge fever began in earnest

as bands like Pearl Jam and Smashing Pumpkins joined the party.

The mainstream media scented a youth cult right for exploitation.

Being fashionable used to mean looking good.

Well, thanks to a fad that started in the Pacific Northwest,

high fashion now means... Well, you decide.

Grunge is the fashion trend launched by the hard driving guitar music

known as the Seattle sound.

The grunge look is an urban-lumberjack- anything-goes ensemble

of duck boots, tattered shirts, and long underwear.

And the grunge is spreading to the trendy Hollywood health spots.

Even the New York fashion shows.

This is the spring look for 1993.

It basically created a huge spasm of greed.

Labels wanted desperately to sign another band like Nirvana.

Where there's one there must be more.

Let's sign everybody we can.

Seattle definitely lost its innocence in a lot of ways.

Kurt Cobain felt that loss of innocence personally

as he was thrust into the spotlight.

Fame and fortune provided little consolation.

You can't buy happiness, I mean, that made me happy for a little while,

but I was probably just as happy with, I don't know...

I look back on going to second-hand stores and stuff like that,

and finding a little treasure like that, and that actually meant more to me

because it was more of a stab in the dark.

All of a sudden he's got that MTV crowd.

Like, "Whoooo! I'm multi-platinum?

"Everywhere I go I'm now mobbed?

"I still go to the Salvation Army store to buy my clothes

"but I can't go in now

"because they know I go there so there's like 80 kids waiting in front.

"To see what I'm gonna buy.

"And they've pressed up to the glass so much they cracked the glass of the store."

This was all happening to that guy.

Some people can handle it, some people can't.

Kurt Cobain wasn't the only one longing for a simpler, more innocent time.

From their hometown of Athens, Georgia, R.E.M had watched alternative rock

grow from a tiny independent community

into a fully-fledged commercial enterprise.

And they now began to craft an album that took stock

of what had been won and lost on the way.

My grandparents were getting very old

and I was reflecting a lot on death, and passage

and sorrow and mourning and all this stuff.

And that really influenced the material for 'Automatic for the people'.

It's a pretty sombre record, but quite beautiful, I think.

And it captured something very real.

'Automatic for the people' is steeped in memories

and one song based around Mike Mill's simple piano refrain

harked back to the golden days of the band's youth.

Honestly I think we were here in this very studio,

and I was playing it and I wasn't really thinking anything of it.

I was just doing it because it was something I had and I was working on,

and Michael heard it and said, "Keep going, keep going."

And I think he heard something that took him to a place.

It was actually somewhat autobiographic. It came from a real thing.

# I forgot my shirt at the water's edge

# The moon is low tonight

A lot of people in Athens had parties and then at 2 in the morning

everyone would go out to a pond or a lake and jump in the water,

get drunk and sleep with each other.

That was kind of the inspiration for the song 'Nightswimming'.

# Nightswimming deserves a quiet night

# I'm not sure all these people understand

# It's not like years ago,

# The fear of getting caught,

# Of recklessness and water

'Nightswimming' was infused with the spirit of Athens, Georgia,

but the band decided to put the finishing touches to the album

in the new music capital of Seattle,

where a friendship would blossom between R.E.M. and Nirvana.

Peter had moved to Seattle and had become friends with

this band called Nirvana.

We went out there to make the record, to finish the record

and ended up hanging out with those guys a lot.

They were so awesome and cool.

They loved R.E.M. and we loved what they had done.

It was a great moment in time.

Michael Stipe would even become godfather to

Kurt Cobain and his wife Courtney Love's daughter.

Kurt himself told me that the band he had come to admire most was R.E.M.

Because everything they had achieved they had done it without compromise.

And he had seen everything that he had been a part of

suddenly become part of this machine that he despised.

And there was nothing he could do about it.

Michael Stipe recognised the kindred spirit in Kurt Cobain,

but one whose emotional honesty left him vulnerable.

Kurt Cobain had this incredible sensitivity...

It's kind of what did him in in the end, really,

he was just a very delicate creature, for a lot of reasons.

But he was very real,

and he showed his emotion very clearly in his work.

And a lot of that emotion was just incredible rage and anger.

That rage boiled over in the spring of 1993,

as Kurt Cobain grappled with the responsibilities

of fatherhood and stardom,

and the demons of depression and addiction.

With just a trace of grim irony Kurt joked that Nirvana's next album

would be called 'I hate myself, and I want to die'.

# 'Cause everybody hurts...

It's as if the moment he reached that pinnacle stardom

it was too bright and he had to drop it,

and he began retreating from that moment on.

Moving away from stardom, moving away from all that he had sought,

and moving deeper and deeper into drugs.

You don't have to be Freud to analyse

that clearly there was something about getting what he wanted

that made him still feel unfulfilled.

Eventually released as 'In Utero',

the album featured darkly tender love songs

and thinly veiled attacks on the music business.

# Teenage angst has paid off well

# Now I'm bored and old

'Serve the servants' is a lot about... I mean, the first opening lines

that say 'Teenage angst has paid off well now I'm bored and old',

that is certainly about my ideas about grunge rock

and what I've experienced in the last few years.

Kurt was still torn between the underground and the mainstream,

rock and pop, rage and melody.

'In Utero' may have alienated some of the fans of 'Nevermind'

but Kurt never lost his gift

for creating music with the potential to reach a global audience.

That gift was glimpsed for one last time

during an extraordinary MTV acoustic concert

later turned into an album by R.E.M. Scott Litt.

'Nirvana Unplugged'.

# Come as you are

# As you were

# As I want you to be

The rehearsals were a catastrophe.

Everybody there thought this show is not gonna happen.

Kurt was struggling with drug withdrawal.

# Take your time

Even the ever reliable Dave Grohl struggled at first.

It didn't sound good.

Usually I have these massive fat sticks

and I beat the hell out of the drums.

And I got these little cocktail drum set and we'd

run through a song and Kurt would turn to me and say,

"Do you think you can play a little bit softer?"

"Yeah sure. I'll play little bit softer." And at the end of the song

he'd go, "Yeah, just bring it down a little bit more. A tiny bit."

All right, so I'd just barely...

And he'd turn around and say, "Just a little bit more."

"What the fuck am I doing here? I won't play if you don't want me to.

"I'll shake a rattler or something."

But the MTV producer was on hand to spare Dave Grohl's blushes.

We got to the gig and the producer said, "Have you ever tried these?"

And he just hands me these sticks like bundles of chopsticks or something.

"Hotrods", yeah, they're made up of these little wooden dowels

and it's got a flappy kind of sound.

Basically the sharpness is diffused.

# Memoria

# Memoria

I'll never forget after we did 'Unplugged' how happy Kurt was.

He was so happy.

He was this person right there on the center.

He was really, really happy after that. He was relieved and...

We pulled it off.

That happiness would be short-lived.

Behind the scenes Kurt was beginning to unravel,

tormented with depression and heroin addiction.

He attempted suicide in Rome just four months later.

The last couple of months of Kurt's life were a train wreck.

People were doing the best they could to get him help,

but it's almost a spiritual question that gets raised,

what can you do for somebody who, at that point,

is so much wanting to destruct their own lives?

Members of the music community tried to offer support.

R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe, gravely concerned at unfolding events,

made a desperate attempt to rescue Kurt

from his spiraling descent.

We talked about collaborating.

It was really in the last days of his life.

I created a... in an attempt to pull him out of the headspace he was in in Seattle,

in this house, all alone, the last weeks.

I created a project that he had to fly to Georgia to work with me on

and we had a deadline and bla, bla, bla...

It was really just an attempt

to pull him out of the headspace space that he was in

and it didn't work.

Sadly.

Despite last edge interventions by those closest to Kurt Cobain

the singer was found dead in his Seattle home on April the 8th, 1994.

He had shot himself three days earlier.

When Police arrived, they found a suicide note quoting Neil Young's lyric,

'It's better to burn out than fade away',

and the stereo still turned on.

What we do know, when he died,

that R.E.M. was the last CD in his CD player.

The Police found the CD player on and they found R.E.M. in it.

Now, whether that was the last thing he listened to,

there's some degree of speculation about that.

We do know, of course, what he said in the suicide note.

And in my years as a journalist I don't think I've ever felt

more haunted than actually looking at the suicide note

and seeing how hard he had pressed down with his pen

to make sure that his words were clearly read.

Just three years after alternative rock had achieved his greatest triumph,

it had lost its most iconic, enigmatic figurehead.

To some, it almost seemed

that Kurt Cobain had already recorded his own epitaph.

A haunting version of song 'Where did you sleep last night',

by blues legend Leadbelly,

that captured all the passion, belief and raw emotion

that alternative rock had so dramatically reclaimed for its audience.

# My girl, my girl, don't lie to me,

# Tell me where did you sleep last night

Well, there were some crazy things

again that are filled with irony about 'Unplugged'.

Kurt wanted lilies.

Basically he set the set up. It looks like a funeral.

# My girl, my girl, where will you go?

# I'm going where the cold wind blows.

# In the pines, in the pines,

# Where the sun don't ever shine.

# I would shiver the whole night through

# Her husband, was a hard working man,

He ends the show with the Leadbelly song

and that song basically strips the music of Nirvana all back to a blues.

And it becomes a requiem.

It's a perfect requiem for Nirvana.

# But his body never was found.

# My girl, my girl, don't lie to me,

# Tell me where...

After Kurt's death,

Scott Litt had to revisit the singer's most harrowing performance

as he put the finishing touches to the 'Unplugged' recordings.

Getting through that song was the hardest thing.

And those were with me, Krist and Dave.

And I remember feeling like there were ghosts in the room.

# My girl, my girl, where will you go?

# I'm going where the cold wind blows.

# In the pines,

# �the pines,

# ��� sun,

# ���.shine.

# I shiver the whole...

# night through!

It had to end right there.

Right with that scream, right with that song,

right with that howl.

For those left behind,

there will always be sadness for the loss of a unique talent,

and regret for what might have been.

If I could change anything I wish that Kurt was still alive.

That's the only thing.

That's it.

I'm sad that he died so young

because I think he was just moving out of a phase of writing

into a new phase that I think might have been extraordinary.

But he didn't make it.

Kurt Cobain was a brilliant artist.

He could have done whatever he wanted to do,

and been really good at it.

That's it.