All (my) Apologies (Nirvana in general)

Member Name: zusy

Product:	Nirvana in general
Date:	05/04/01 (241 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Everything

Disadvantages: No new releases to lust after...

It’s just hit me. I am sitting here at 2:40am and it has just hit me.

Can it really be seven years ago? Seven whole years?!

I have days when I can do nothing but listen to Nirvana. Nothing else will do.

Yesterday was like that.

I spent it flipping from album to album, single to single. They brought back happy memories of drunken dancing with friends at university. We would hear the opening chords and just fly to the middle of the dance floor, elbowing all the boys out the way and smiling inanely as we thrashed around in time to the melodic screaming.

Sometimes I can’t listen. It hurts; it’s an actual pain, a wild sweeping of nausea. I just want to scream out “WHY aren’t you here anymore?” My God I miss him. I miss them all. I miss running to get the latest magazine or newspaper with something, anything about Nirvana in it. I miss the hungriness of waiting for the latest release and all the gossip and rumour about the new tracks, the lyrics, the insider-knowledge gleaned by some lucky journalist.

The day before yesterday was like that.

I was aimlessly flicking through magazines in WH Smiths in my lunch break, and ‘All Apologies’ came on the in store radio. It was akin to being struck by lightning. I actually felt routed to the spot, as if the whole shop and everyone else in it had disappeared. The only two things in the world were that song, and me and I just had to get away.

I am fully aware how irrational this may sound, but you have to understand that I have always found that song difficult to listen to. There is also the fact that no other band has affected me so deeply as Nirvana. I really can’t imagine there ever will be. That’s not to say I don’t love all sorts of other music, or that I can’t ever appreciate the music that other bands will make in the future – I have a wide-ranging musical taste, eclectic doe
sn’t even cover the half of it. It’s just that Nirvana are MY band. You know?

I think we all have a band that we will always go back to – a band you had to keep replacing the tapes of, at first (remember tapes? ;-) because they spooled up and got chewed and worn out through continuous usage, or the records got all scratched or stolen. Then you got the whole back catalogue on CD because they were supposedly indestructible (heh, I remember reading that when CD’s first got popular. Indestructible? Yeah, right….); but then they got scratched or broken or lost.

That special band, that I hope we all have, they serve a great purpose in our lives. We can find tracks to suit our every mood. They bring back snapshots of The Good Times, or can send us snivelling under the duvets as we lament The Dour Grimness of Life, and all those hulking great philosophical conundrums we usually back away from, but find acceptable to confront through music.

Nirvana are that band for me. Should I say ‘were’? I don’t think I will ever get used to that past-tense phrasing. Anyway, it doesn’t apply, because as I’m still listening, and they still affect me, so it’s present tense all the way, baby.

So there I was, stupefied amongst the glossies, and part of me wanting to stay and savour the whole song, but the greatest part of me saying “Get out of this shop now before you do something humiliatingly stupid like burst into tears!” So I left rather hurriedly and went for a strong coffee to calm me down, in the irrational manner of a habitual coffee drinker.

It’s now 3:54 and this is taking a long time to write. Well, I suppose that’s okay, because I have been waiting to write it for ages now. Every time I sit down and start to type, I get all confused and think of several hundred Dooyoo opinions I could write that wouldn’t mess with my head in the way this one
has been trying to.

I have to keep stopping and wondering what to say next that makes any sense whatsoever to you poor, bewildered readers. Assuming anyone has bothered to read this far, of course…

Well anyway, today it hit me, as I said in the opening paragraph of this ramble, and for anyone wondering what the ‘it’ was – Kurt Cobain killed himself on 5th April 1994. Today marks the seven-year anniversary of that dreadful day.

I try not to think about that date much, and I have never exactly marked it before apart from tipping my metaphorical hat and wishing him well. I prefer not to dwell on the whole sickening turmoil of that time, focusing instead on the wonderful music, that still sounds as fresh to me today as it did when I first heard it. But it really hit me hard this morning, and I’m not sure what triggered the remembering.

At the moment I’m thinking of going to this really beautiful church near me and lighting a candle and sitting still for a little while and just thinking. The last time I went to church I was ten years old and in the choir (all rosy-cheeked and innocent), and that wasn’t my choosing I can tell you! Would I be a hypocrite? Do vicars creep up on you and try to convert you as you dally on the doorsteps of their scared spaces?

Maybe I wont even go, but it is such a beautiful church, and hey I could get all gothed-up and sweep about in that velvet cloak I got ages ago but have been too embarrassed to wear outdoors. Maybe not.

Maybe I should just switch up the stereo and bounce around off the walls of my flat whilst guzzling vodka and handfuls of chocolate, I’m sure the neighbours would appreciate that little gesture.

At least my boyfriend will be here to share whatever erratic mood swings come my way. He’s asleep right now, and I keep looking over from the messy desk where I’m typing this, to him all curled up in the be
d sheets.

I have Kurt to thank for introducing us to each other, as it happens. Not literally, of course, although that would have been nice…We met because one of the first things I did when I heard about Kurt’s death was write an article for this national magazine I sometimes contributed to – the much missed ‘Zine’ Magazine – which was kind of an early print form Dooyoo. It was written entirely by contributions from the readers, on whatever subject they felt like ranting about.

So I wrote this article mourning the loss of one of the 20th Century’s greatest talents, and really it was a cathartic exercise (as this is, in a way) because that’s what I do when something upsets me – I write about it furiously and then face it a few days later.

The magazine printed my article (which both thrilled and appalled me as I had admitted my own suicidal periods of the past for the very first time, and my mother read them and panicked and my friends walked over eggshells with me, which I hated, and…well that’s a whole other opinion…); and I had the most amazing response. Hundreds of people wrote to me, via the magazine!

One morning, the postman delivered a literal sack of mail and I sat in my bedroom in my penguin pyjamas opening all these letters telling me they empathised and had been going through the same emotions. It touched me and helped a lot, at the time.

I still write to a lot of them, now, although many of our pen-friendships kind of petered out, but one letter struck me the most.

This bloke and I kind of ‘clicked’ and had the same taste in just about everything, and sent books and tapes and t-shirts to each other. We wrote every single day, and everyone around us thought we were mad. I definitely didn’t want a relationship with him (so I convinced myself ;-) and so I refused to give him my phone number (I detest talking on t
he phone, anyway) and would no way agree to us meeting.

I loved this little fantasy world we had, and was sure if we took it further it would all come crumbling down like a sand castle destroyed by the incoming tide. Plus, we’d exchanged photos, and he was gorgeous and I thought he’d take one look at me and run for the hills. He told me he thought I was pretty, but obviously I attributed that to flattery – what else could he say?

Why am I telling you this? God, I don’t know. This isn’t what I intended to write at all.

A year later, when I moved into a flat with my two best friends from university, he drove all the way from Nottingham to Windsor and back, just to leave a trail of little plastic horses all the way up the wrought-iron steps that led to our front door. Each horse had a speech bubble taped to its mouth that said things like “We love Suzy!”, “Suzy is our favourite person in the whole world!” and “We are your new little friends, darling Suzy!” He didn’t knock at the door, as he knew I would hate to be put in the position of an enforced meeting.

He drove all that way and did that (leaving a large box of choccies, a huge bunch of white lilies and a Nirvana bootleg CD I’d been trying to track down for ages, too, I should add) and he didn’t even knock at the door. My flatmates were freaked out when they found it the next morning – they even wanted me to call the bomb squad as the choccies looked ‘suspicious’! Well, it was a bit weird, but then he is weird (in a good way), and I’m a bit odd myself – it’s one of the reasons we clicked I suppose.

So eventually I had to admit I had sort of fallen in love with him, and we met, and it turned out he’d sort of fallen in love with me, too, and that was that. We moved in together a few weeks later and haven’t been apart since. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
h! Vomit inducing, isn’t it?

If Kurt hadn’t killed himself, I would never have written that article, and my boyfriend would never have read that issue of the magazine (which he’d never read before, and only picked up because it had a picture of Kurt on the front), then we would never have met. I would have missed out on the love of my life. Isn’t that awful? But wonderful, at the same time, because it meant that at least one good thing came from his tragic death, that I know about.

I think the reason I can’t listen to All Apologies (or at least, only rarely) is because it reminds me how I felt when I first heard the news (delivered by mum, of all people!) I had been shut away in my room all day, writing an essay, and she came up and sat on my bed next to me and took my hand. It was really odd, and I thought she was going to tell me my step-dad had had another heart attack. She knew how much Nirvana and Kurt meant to me, and she tried to tell me delicately. She’d just heard it herself, on the news. I said “Oh.”

I had seen it coming, all those mysterious days of him going missing and police searches. You just had this awful seasickness feeling in the pit of your stomach and knew it was going to end in tears.

I asked her to leave the room, and ever so calmly began to flip through radio stations, trying to find a news programme, or just some other voices talking about it, so I would know it was true. I couldn’t find anything, and got so frustrated I could have hurled the radio out the window. I needed to hear it, and finally did. I’m not sure now, but it might have been Radio One. I caught it mid conversation, this woman was saying, “So it’s true then, it’s him, it’s been confirmed?” And a man’s voice answered, “Yes.” And I didn’t need to hear them say his name; I just knew what they were talking about. I listened for a l
ong time after that, all these frantic fans calling in and crying. It was all so unreal, the room was freezing cold, and I couldn’t do anything except listen.

Perhaps you are reading this and thinking I over-reacted, and I’d never met him, so what did it have to do with me? Well, again I have to say; I didn’t just ‘like’ Nirvana, and I don’t just ‘like’ their songs. They speak to me in a way that no other songs have done. They moved me, inspired me, made me laugh, made me boo my eyes out, made me jump up and down, made me scream, made me happy. They still do. I will probably be an old Granny some day; moshing in the pension queue if a Nirvana song comes on the radio and saying “They don’t write them like that anymore…ah, they were proper songs!”

If someone asks me to name my favourite album of all time, I’m a bit stuck. It’s a Nirvana one, of course, no points there I’m afraid. But which one? Some days it’s Nevermind, as that’s the one my friend lent me at college, that made me an immediate fan. Listening to that album was like coming home. It was so right! It fitted me like a glove.

Other days it has to be In Utero, as the lyrics are amazing, and the shifty brilliance of the guitars and melodies never fails to amaze me. Some other days it’s Bleach, for the raw power of the songs and the energy that seems to spark off the album as you listen to it. Ask me the next day and I might tell you it’s Incesticide or Hoarmoaning or Unplugged, or On the Muddy Banks… I suppose it all has to do with the mood I am in when I’m listening. That’s why I love Nirvana so much, and why I never get bored of listening to them.

5:54am now, and the birds twittering outside my window. Good gracious, his has been a weird opinion, if you can call it that. Thank you, those plucky few who have stayed with me to the bitter end. I
suppose those ‘All Apologies’ should be mine, now. Sorry.

I just want to say, thank you Kurt and Krist and Dave. Three geniuses. Thanks especially to Kurt, who turned out to be a matchmaker.

Miss you lots.

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