† NillaMora †

by Paul Cashmere

Nirvana

 

'Nirvana Live at Reading' is being prepared for a November DVD release.

The band played a 90 minute set at the well-known music English music festival on August 30,1992, not long after breaking worldwide with 'Smells Like Teen Spirit'.

Nirvana headlined the festival that year on a bill with Nick Cave, PJ Harvey, Public Enemy, Teenage Fanclub and The Wonderstuff.

Lead singer Kurt Cobain came on stage in a wheelchair for that event. Already, the stories of his abuse were weekly news.

Their performance was described as "good but not exciting". The obligatory smashing of the instruments was described as "carefully orchestrated".

Regardless, the performance was historic and is coming soon to a lounge-room near you.

The setlist featured Breed / Drain You / Aneurysm / School / Sliver / In Bloom / Come As You Are / Lithium…

Music Previews By Shawn Conner

More than 13 years after Kurt Cobain's death, it's easy to forget the extent of Nirvana's influence. The Seattle grunge titans sparked a revolution that would spread across the world, including to a small town in northern Denmark.

Just ask Christian Hjelm, the vocalist for Copenhagen-based Figurines.Hjelm and two other band members–guitarist Claus S. Johansen and keyboardist Jens Ramon–hail from a tiny village called Vestbjerg. It was there that a teenage Hjelm gravitated toward what would become known as alternative rock.

"I remember the first electric guitar I bought, a very cheap one," Hjelm says, reached at a Copenhagen nightclub called Vega. "I clearly remember making up songs that were a lot of distortion and power chords, and with my 12-year-old voice trying to sing like Kurt Cobain."

As Hjelm notes, he and his bandmates had passed that stage by the time they started playing together…

By Patrick MacDonald

Seattle Times music critic

NEXT

 

Kurt Cobain narrates the story of his short life in a new documentary.

Movie review

"Kurt Cobain About a Son," directed by AJ Schnack, based on "Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana" by Michael Azerrad. 97 minutes. Not rated; for general audiences. Varsity. Q&A sessions follow the 7:10 p.m. shows today (with Azerrad and photographer Charles Peterson) and Saturday (with Azerrad and composer Steve Fisk).

For a look at the late Nirvana singer's other film appearances, see today's Northwest Life section.

This isn't so much a movie documentary as it is an audio book with visuals.

You…

By Ted Fry

Kurt Cobain crowd-surfs in a scene from the new documentary "Kurt Cobain About a Son."

 

Mythic Northwest luminary Kurt Cobain gets his latest due in the surrealistic docudrama "Kurt Cobain About a Son," opening today at the Varsity Theatre. The enigmatic rocker has been on screen before, and no doubt will be again (in documentary or dramatic form). For completists, what follows is a rundown of some of the available films Cobain has graced, in body, voice or spirit:

"Nirvana Live! Tonight!

Sold Out!" (1994)

As concert films go, there have been many better in the technical details. But in capturing the base, primitive punk ethos that was at the core of the Nirvana phenomenon, there are few equals. The extensive DVD compilation was cut together using a number of live performances from the "Nevermind" era, with as much improvement in sound and…

From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer article by Bill White running Thursday:

"Kurt Cobain About a Son" is remarkable, not only for its first-person oral history, but for how Wyatt Troll's cinematography captures the Puget Sound area as Cobain might have experienced it. Hearing his voice as the aerial cameras explore his hometown of Aberdeen induces a sense of intimacy that is unprecedented in movies about rock stars.

From the review by White that runs today:

"The soundtrack is rich with the music Cobain listened to, and the images reflect what he saw during his years in Aberdeen, Montesano, Olympia and Seattle. Listening to the music of Queen while watching men work in an Aberdeen lumber mill communicates an aspect of Cobain's early years that could not have been captured by conventional means. Another device, used to support Cobain's claim of being typical of his generation, is showing anonymous people engaged in the…

By Thomas Rozwadowski
trozwado@greenbaypressgazette.com

As someone who has tried to read everything written about Nirvana, one of Kurt Cobain's most admirable qualities was his public reverence for bands that helped shape his burgeoning musical legacy.

When Nirvana became the torchbearer of the grunge generation, Cobain never failed to mention his adoration for unsung artists like Half Japanese, the Vaselines, Flipper and Beat Happening. The latter group, one of the Northwest's earliest purveyors of lo-fi indie rock, never became huge because of it, but they had an especially profound influence on Cobain.

With a new generation viewing Nirvana's music through a historic lens, the soundtrack to A.J. Schnack's "Kurt Cobain: About a Son" documentary serves as an exquisitely unconventional timeline of his life in musical terms.

At the…

Documentary filmmaker AJ Schnack's online persona has been getting all the attention.

By Mark Olsen

The juggling of multiple and often conflicting responsibilities has become an integral part of the multi-tasking life. A whole new set of issues can arise when those separate duties intersect.

For AJ Schnack, the collision has come between his work as a documentary filmmaker -- his latest, "Kurt Cobain About a Son," opens today at the Nuart -- and a blog he started called All These Wonderful Things (edendale.typepad.com).

The movie is an artful, emotionally engaging portrait of the life and times of unlikely superstar Kurt Cobain, who as a member of the landmark group Nirvana was a figurehead of alternative rock before he committed suicide in 1995. The film is narrated in a sense by Cobain, with audio culminated from some 25 hours of interview tapes conducted by the journalist Michael Azerrad while working on his 1993…

Unusual Cobain documentary ‘About a Son’ looks past rumor and fame

~ By STEVE APPLEFORD ~

Photo by Charles Peterson~ Lay your hands on me: Cobain meets fame ~

urt Cobain killed himself at the height of his fame on April 5, 1994. And ever since, the life and legacy of this tortured rocker has been the subject of wild imaginings and inane conjecture. Did he really love Courtney? Was he a mumbler?

As the leader of Nirvana, Cobain was the ’90s grunge king, a rock revolutionary whose songs of raw, emotional power could be communicated equally at either full-bore electric howl or (for one night, at least) in wounded acoustic mode. For many listeners, the music was enough. Others prefer to speculate.

Ending the speculation is one mission of Kurt Cobain About a Son, an unusual documentary from…

From Edward Douglas at ComingSoon.net:

"10 out of 10

I was intrigued by the prospect of an in-depth look at the life of Cobain told in his own words from the days before forming the band to the time before his death. I was also interested in this doc, because I really liked AJ Schnack's previous music doc Gigantic (A Tale of Two Johns), which was about a band I had worked with more directly, They Might Be Giants, which showed lots of interesting footage and interviews with their famous fans. Kurt Cobain About a Son is a completely different beast altogether for ways that I'm hesitant at mentioning, because it might spoil what makes this film so special and such an amazing film experience.

I'm just amazed by what Schnack has achieved with this doc, especially considering how different it is from Gigantic. Either way, this really is one of…

Adding to prizes from AFI Silverdocs and the Denver Film Festival, KURT COBAIN ABOUT A SON took the award for Best Documentary at the 2007 San Diego Film Festival.  Thanks to everyone at the festival for their hospitality and kindness this past weekend!  And congrats to our friend Annie Sundberg, who won Best Female Filmmaker for her documentary THE DEVIL CAME ON HORSEBACK.