Back from the Dead

It's been ages. Long enough for the powers that be to eliminate the two Peeping Tom songs I rec'd on YouTube in the last post. Fah.

This entry will mostly be about Nirvana and how they are one of the handful of bands that made me into the warped person I am today. Imagine being 13 years old and one of your favorite singers just fucking kills himself. Imagine you and all your friends in shock the next day at school. And then imagine the media clusterfuck that comes with this and feel like he was still being exploited after death.

The great thing about Nirvana, if you're learning to play guitar, is that the songs are relatively simple. Guitar solos clock in at a max of 10 notes strung together. Many of the songs use the same chords. It's not rocket science yet it's just as genius. Kurt knew punk rock, took its spirit and infused it into a more darker alternative kind of music we're grudgingly forced to call 'grunge'. Now, today, ages after I first listened to these songs, I have finally taken it upon myself to learn them and play them. I can play "About A Girl", "In Bloom" and "Heart-Shaped Box." More or less. I read somewhere that after Kurt learned how to play 3 songs on the guitar, he started writing his own. Punk fucking rock.

I bought Kurt Cobain's journals from the bargain section at Barnes & Noble some time ago for $7.98. He's obviously not perfect. Yes, he was a drug addict. He was a flawed human being like all of us and he would be the first person to acknowledge that he is no hero worthy of worship. But how can you not admire a guy that wrote "Geeks Unite" in his journals and once wrote that he wished he was gay just so he could piss off homophobes?

I bring Kurt and Nirvana back from the dead when I play their songs on my cheap electric guitar attached to a Grunge distortion pedal. I bring them back from the dead when I play Disc 2 of "With the Lights Out." I can't concentrate when I listen to the demos. The purity, the spark, the germ of a song born. This is what it is to love music, to live music.