(Credits: Far Out / HBO Documentary Films)
Sun 8 February 2026 13:00, UK
Watching Nirvana become one of the biggest of all time was bound to be an extremely mixed blessing for Kurt Cobain.
He had tried his best to follow in the footsteps of his heroes like Michael Stipe and John Lennon, but when he came out with some of the catchiest tunes that the grunge era had ever heard, being looked at as the voice of a generation was going to do a number on someone who still held onto their punk credentials. But if he had the spotlight on him for that long, Cobain was going to make sure that he stayed in control of his image every step of the way.
Throughout every interview he ever gave, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone else who didn’t like the idea of being a rock star as much as Cobain did. He felt that the superficial side of rock and roll was completely dumb, and since he was being lumped in with the rest of the hard rock acts out at the time, it’s not like Cobain was going to fit in with bands like Poison and Warrant when he appeared on Headbanger’s Ball.
He was the antithesis of the Los Angeles brand of rock and roll in many respects, and chances are a lot of fans had a hard time adjusting to what he was doing. There was still a lot of macho posturing going on in the rock and roll world, but even in a world where Guns N’ Roses was looked at as rough and dangerous at the time, seeing Cobain on MTV wearing a dress during an interview was bound to be a culture shock.
Cobain wanted nothing to do with the crowd of big hair and lipstick, but it’s not like he hated hard rock outright. He hated the presentation that a lot of those bands had back in the day, but it’s not like Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith were terrible on principle. They had great tunes, but their fixation on sex and misogynistic behaviour in their lyrics was always going to be a big turn off after Cobain learned tunes like ‘Whole Lotta Love’.
And while Van Halen fit somewhere in that era of rock legends, a frontman like David Lee Roth seemed like the opposite version of Cobain in many respects. ‘Diamond Dave’ wanted to be a virtual cartoon character every time he went onstage, but even when the rest of the band ditched him for Sammy Hagar, Cobain still couldn’t handle the idea of putting on a show in the same way they did when they reached stadiums.
Nirvana were still comfortable playing small clubs, but when you’re playing to stadiums of people, you can easily get disconnected, and Cobain wanted to make sure that everyone still felt safe at his shows, saying, “Another concern that we had is that if we were to have this massively mainstream audience, we were going to come across a lot of problems in live shows with macho guys beating up on girls, starting fights, and things like that. You know, the typical things that you see at a Van Halen show. We didn’t want to have to deal with something like that.”
Cobain was willing to put his money where his mouth was as well. He would willingly point out any piece of trash in the crowd that was assaulting a woman, and even when they were playing the biggest gigs of their career, he wasn’t above sabotaging his own songs because the crowd was being disrespectful to their opening acts before they went on.
Anyone would have been happy to have an audience that big when they reach the mainstream, but that wasn’t an audience that Cobain wanted to serve in the first place. He didn’t expect to get that famous, and even if they were playing the same circuits that Van Halen did, his shows needed to be a lot different than the cesspools that he was used to seeing every time he went to a show.
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