There’s a linear connection from one to the other, and you don’t need to listen to 25 years of Crazy Horse bootlegs to get there. The late Nirvana singer repeated “the godfather of grunge’s” lyrics in his suicide note:
“It’s better to burn out than to fade away.”
As previously noted, I’m not sure I believe that. I understand the point, but I’m still just not sure I agree.
The song in question, Young’s “My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue),” arrived 30 years ago this summer and didn’t need Cobain to use it as his epitaph for it to be rich in meaning.
The album on which it appears, Rust Never Sleeps, was a comeback for the Canadian songwriter whose career was flagging after tepid response to American Stars ’n Bars and Comes a Time.
It was a paean to the life of a rock ’n’ roll star, how they burn so brightly at the start before they hit some sort of cosmic expiration date and begin a slow, inevitable decline. Young mined Elvis Presley and Johnny Rotten as examples, but really, he was talking about himself.
Seeing Cobain repeat his words colored Young’s music, and it’s not the first time the untimely death of a young rocker did so. More than 20 years earlier, it was Danny Whitten, a Crazy Horse alum, who Young fired, and gave a plane ticket to Los Angeles along with $50. The money went to heroine and hours later, Whitten died from an overdose.
Feeling a deep burden of responsibility for Whitten’s death, Young grew depressed. It showed in his songwriting, inspiring the “Ditch Trilogy,” a dreary run of albums from ’73 to ’75.
When Cobain departed, Young responded with Sleeps With Angels, a thematic kin to the Ditch records. The title track was a nod to the late Nirvana frontman.
Youth is the great conceit of rock ‘n’ roll, this idea that everything is better before you’re 40. The music industry is geared to adolescents and young adults and has been for a long time — The Beatles and Presley weren’t making swarths of fans from the Silent Generation.
Even though he was only in the spotlight for two years and the lifespan of two studio albums, Cobain and Nirvana’s impact on music is profound. It’s a decade and a half later and you don’t need to hear Nickelback repeat the same tired soft-verse/loud-chorus dynamic to know we’re still lounging in the post-grunge wake.
Cobain’s legacy is his all-too-brief existence, another cautionary tale about rock ‘n’ roll excess. But it’s also turned out to be his body of work’s enduring value. Nevermind and In Utero are still interesting records that I revisit every few months.
He just should’ve listened to Young a little more closely. In the second verse of “My My, Hey Hey,” Young sings a lasting thought that resonates more strongly than the ones Cobain chose:
“Once you’re gone, you can never come back.”
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