On March 1, 1994, Nirvana played what turned out to be their final show at Terminal Einz in Munich, Germany. The band had been scheduled to play a second night at the venue the following evening, and a March 3 show at the Stadhalle in Offenbach am Main, Germany to complete the first leg of their European In Utero tour, before starting the second leg in Prague on March 11, but Kurt Cobain asked the band’s agent Don Muller to cancel the remaining dates as he felt too ill to perform.
“Kurt wanted to go home,” Dave Grohl recalled in 2009. “He intentionally blew his voice out so that we could all go home. We were having good shows, but by the time we got to Germany I don’t think Kurt wanted to be there any more.
“The last time we’d toured Europe we were still Nirvana, from Seattle, now we were NIRVANA!’ Things had changed.”
(Image credit: Rolling Stone)
Though 1994 started with Nirvana on the cover of the January 27 issue of Rolling Stone magazine, the interview Kurt Cobain gave to journalist David Fricke was anything but celebratory.
The 26-year-old musician spoke candidly and emotionally about the challenges that he and the band were facing, admitting that he considered that, creatively, Nirvana were “stuck in a rut”. He also acknowledged that his ongoing battle with heroin addiction was causing friction with Grohl and Krist Novoselic.
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Following the cancellation of the band’s European shows, Nirvana’s rhythm section returned home to Seattle while Cobain and his wife Courtney Love remained in Europe, so that Love could conduct promotional duties ahead of the scheduled April release of Hole’s second album, Live Through This. On March 4, after swallowing 50 to 60 Rohypnol pills, Cobain overdosed in the couple’s suite at the Hotel Excelsior in Rome. In his right hand he held a fistful American dollars. In his left hand was a suicide note.
‘Like Hamlet, I have to choose between life and death,’ it read. ‘I choose death.’
Cobain didn’t die, but back in Seattle, Dave Grohl learned that his friend was in a coma in Rome’s Policlinico Umberto Primo hospital.
I didn’t tell Kurt that someone had told me that he’d died, but I told him that I was terrified and so worried.
Dave Grohl
“I flew home via Heathrow and San Francisco,” Grohl recalled. “And I wake up at five in the morning to an emergency phone call. And it’s some guy, going, ‘Dave? Is this really Dave Grohl?’ I’m like, Yeah, who is this?And he’s like, ‘I’m John, I live in Boston and I’m a huge fucking fan, and I just wanted to say you guys are great.’ So I’m like, How did you get my phone number? And he said, ‘I just told the operator it was an emergency.’ So I’m like, Okay, that’s cool, just don’t phone back…
“Five minutes later the phone rings again. And someone goes, ‘Dude, turn on CNN…’ And I see Kurt, in Rome. So that’s when I knew, Oh no, it’s over…
“And so Krist and I get on the phone. And then someone says, ‘He’s okay, he’s just in a coma, he’s not dead.” It was so chaotic and crazy. I mean, there are certain people in your life that you just know they’re not gonna make it. So in the back of your mind you emotionally prepare yourself for something like that to happen … not that it makes it easier, but so that when it does happen your world won’t collapse completely. But it was so weird, and surreal, that 28 hours ago I was hanging out with these people. But then someone called and said that he died, and I lost it, I just fucking lost it. This was just twenty minutes later. And then someone rings up again and goes, “Oh, no, he didn’t die.” It was bad.”
Grohl spoke with Cobain after Nirvana’s frontman returned to the US on March 12, having been discharged from hospital four days earlier.
“We talked on the phone,” Grohl recalled. “I didn’t tell him that someone had told me that he’d died, but I told him that I was terrified and so worried. And he was really apologetic, like, ‘So sorry, I was partying and drinking and I wasn’t paying attention to what I was doing’. And I said, Listen, I don’t think you should die!’ And then… well, then, you know what happened.”
On April 8, an electrician working at Cobain and Love’s home in Seattle reported seeing a body at the house. That same day, the body was formally identified as Kurt Cobain. An autopsy concluded that Cobain had died three days earlier, from a self-inflected shotgun wound. He was 27.
Nirvana – All Apologies (MTV Unplugged) – YouTube
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Sections of this article originally featured in This Is A Call: The Life and Times of Dave Grohl