Credit: Far Out / Alamy
There was no real warning for what was going to happen to the rock and roll world when Nirvana hit the scene.
No one would have guessed that a bunch of random guys from Seattle were about to become one of the biggest names in music, but even if Kurt Cobain didn’t want to become the voice of a generation, every single kid felt like they did when they heard the song ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ for the first time. But even if Cobain liked the idea of putting other bands in their place, there was one moment that ensured that he would always have enemies in high places, too.
First of all, it should be known that Cobain was the last person to go along with the program. If you told him to go right, he would go left, and vice versa, so he wasn’t exactly thrilled about doing the more corporate version of what rock was. He figured that he would have better things to do than delivering promo spots and trying to be fake happy or interviewers, but he could at least lean into it a little bit.
Take his appearance on Headbangers Ball. This was the kind of show that appealed exclusively to heavy metal kids, and the thought of Cobain wearing a dress to the show turned everything on its head. He wasn’t afraid of being looked at as androgynous by the more homophobic viewers at home, but the biggest decision he made around that time was turning down Guns N’ Roses when they went out on the Use Your Illusion tour.
Before everything blew up, Axl Rose was already a pretty big Nirvana fan and was even seen wearing merch from the band around the time Nevermind was blowing up. He seemed genuinely interested in what Cobain had to say, but Cobain couldn’t have cared less about opening for Guns and Metallica. Both bands were already about the more macho posturing that was happening at the time, and Cobain wasn’t going to be caught dead cosigning Rose’s misogynist lyrics.
Even though guitarist Kirk Hammett tried to talk down Cobain at the time, he knew that there was no way that Nirvana was ever going to give up their integrity for the tour, saying, “I had to make the phone call to Kurt [Cobain] to talk to him about the possibility of joining our tour and he just went on and on about how he just didn’t like what Guns N’ Roses stood for. I said to him: ‘Just go out there and represent Nirvana – just play the show and then that’s it.’ I pleaded with him, but he just wasn’t having it. So there you have it.”
Nirvana weren’t exactly aching for opening slots when they eventually went out with Red Hot Chili Peppers, but the rest of Cobain’s career would have Rose as his archenemy in a lot of ways. Even if Guns were still one of the biggest bands in the world, Cobain did everything he could to make Rose look like a pampered rock star, to the point where he even tried to spit on the piano that he was going to use to play ‘November Rain’ on MTV.
Further reading: From The Vault
Rose wasn’t going to take any of that shit, but his way of responding only served to make Cobain look cooler. Compared to all of the alpha-dog energy that Rose was trying to pull off during that time, all Cobain could do was shrug his shoulders and let it roll off of him, as if he was looking at a school bully trying and failing to get his lunch money every single time he threatened him.
Cobain didn’t ever bother trying to reconcile with Rose for the rest of his life, but there was no reason why he should have, either. Nirvana were already becoming a band that could far outmatch anything that Guns N’ Roses did, and even if Rose is still out there playing the best shows that he can, Cobain was happy to lead the world away from the kind of lyrics that Rose was singing every night.
ADD AS A PREFERRED SOURCE ON GOOGLE 