Monday would have been the 50th birthday of late rock star and Pacific Northwest legend Kurt Cobain: the Nirvana musician was born Feb. 20, 1967.
His daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, shared a note on Instagram remembering her father.
“Today would have been your 50th birthday,” she hand-wrote. “You are Loved and you are missed. Thank you for giving me the GIFT of Life. Forever your Daughter, Frances Bean Cobain.”
February 20th 2017. Happy Birthday.
Frances was not yet two years old upon Cobain’s death on April 5, 1994. Her mom, Courtney Love, has been off social media for the last few days, and has yet to mark the birthday publicly.
With Nirvana, Cobain led the movement that broke the Seattle grunge scene onto the national radar, recording chart-topping albums including “Nevermind” and “In Utero” that remain rock classics decades later.
In 2016, producer Butch Vig celebrated the 25th anniversary of “Nevermind” with a look back at what made the album endure.
“Part of it is that the performances are amazing-sounding, really intense, and very focused. But the songs are super hook-y. They’re gloriously hook-y pop songs dressed up with punk attitude, so you can sing along to pretty much every song at the top of your lungs. Great choruses,” he told the Daily Beast. “It’s real simple production. I know people groused at the time that it was too slick, but it’s not slick. It’s drums in a room, a guitar, and bass. Sometimes we double-tracked the guitar and sometimes we’d add a few harmonies and Kurt would double-track his voice, but it was dead simple production.”
See our archival photos of a 1993 Nirvana show at the Salem Armory above.
— David Greenwald
dgreenwald@oregonian.com
503-294-7625; @davidegreenwald
Instagram: Oregonianmusic
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