What was kurt cobains iq

When we arrived at his hotel room, Courtney was lying on the bed, reading a magazine. Then he flopped down on the end of the bed, sidewise, and Courtney nonchalantly put up her feet on his back like he was a sofa cushion. I got the sense that something like this had happened many times before. Kurt was sleeping, or something like it, and Courtney apparently had things under control, so I left them and headed down the hall to stop by a little party the rest of the band and crew were having.

Kurt overdosed later that evening. He had gone to the bathroom for a long time. Then Courtney heard a thud. But it, too, became terrifying. Soon after I arrived, one of the guys in the band stepped out the window and onto a broad ledge on the side of the building, several stories above the street.

He started walking on the ledge toward the next window of the room—which was maybe ten feet away. I was petrified. He was hammered, not the ideal condition for tightrope walking. I thought that I was about to witness a horrific moment in rock history, but he made it. Everybody in the room cheered.

Then one of the crew tried it. And I was petrified all over again, but he made it, too. Then the guy in the band went a second time. By now, I was thoroughly freaked out. But he made it again, and, thankfully, there were no more ledge walks. I made a beeline for the drinks table. Courtney eventually forced her way into the bathroom and saw Kurt turning blue. He claimed it would be boring, but then he said everything about his life was boring.

The long, concrete-floored hallway leading to their room was lined on one side with cremation urns, which were manufactured in another area on the floor. It was late when we arrived, and the entire building was silent. The room was about six hundred square feet, with windows that looked out onto other industrial loft buildings.

A small riser for the drum set was as fancy as they got. There was a modest P. They had no soundproofing, no sound person, no special lights, no recording equipment, no well-stocked bar. A few mismatched old chairs were strewn around the room, some concert posters hung on the wall, and there was a small fridge.

They fussed with the P. They played sections of songs, starting and stopping until Kurt felt that things were right. I suppose this was what Kurt thought was the boring part, but it was illuminating to see how much he controlled things, how exacting he was with music that appeared so rough-hewn. It was difficult to hear some of the flaws Kurt wanted to correct, but when the band fixed them it was obvious that everything had snapped into place.

I was a relatively steady person, a little older, and drug-free. She figured that I would be good company for Kurt on the road, maybe help keep him on the straight and narrow—if only by example. Sometimes a cloud gathered over the touring party. But everyone in the band felt some sort of tension: even if they tried to make light of it, Kurt, the bassist Krist Novoselic, and the drummer Dave Grohl felt the enormous pressure of being a world-famous rock group and resented the invasive journalism that comes with it.

There were tensions within the band, too. The thing was, Dave was staying in the room right next door. I was sure that Dave heard the whole thing. He told his biographer, Paul Brannigan, that on a flight from Seattle to Los Angeles he had overheard Kurt bad-mouthing his drumming two rows back.

Once they landed, Dave told their trusty Scottish tour manager, Alex MacLeod, that he was quitting the band after the last scheduled show. MacLeod talked him out of it. After we reached Dallas, Kurt called my room and asked whether I wanted to walk around downtown with him, the kindly Pat Smear an early L. We rolled out with Kurt pushing Frances in her stroller, making her laugh with a ridiculous assortment of rude noises. The emptiness of downtown Dallas on a weekday afternoon was baffling to me, a provincial New Yorker, but great for Kurt, who could stroll around without being hassled by fans.

Walking down a wide boulevard, we found ourselves at the edge of a big open space. An enormous flock of grackles circled above, forming an undulating disk so vast and dense that the sunlight filtering through looked gray. It felt apocalyptic. Except for the occasional car, there was not another human being in sight. It dawned on me that this was Dealey Plaza, the site of the John F. Kennedy assassination. Eventually, Frances needed baby supplies, so Kurt rolled off with her to a drugstore.

That was the last time I saw Kurt Cobain. On or about April 5, , Kurt went up to an attic over his garage, took a lot of heroin, and then killed himself with a shotgun.

He left a note. The quality of empathy was very important to Kurt; he spoke of it often. Which might come as a surprise, given all the wanton vandalism and assorted other mischief he committed as a teen and indeed throughout his all-too-brief adult life, not to mention his avowed disdain for so many of the people around him. How much empathy did he have when he hit a man on the head with his guitar during a show in Dallas, in ?

But maybe, as Kurt claimed, opiates really did still his misanthropic impulses and help him experience empathy, or something resembling it. Maybe his outspokenness about empathy was actually a passive-aggressive plea for people to have empathy for him.

At any rate, Kurt avowedly cherished the ability to imagine what other people are feeling, right down to the last moments of his life. His name was in the smallest lettering on the whole page.

Mason describes what happens almost every time someone finds out that he used to work with the group, whose singer, Ian Curtis, hanged himself, in He was a nice guy, got into a strange situation, and the only way he could think about [it] at that time was to kill himself. Sorry, no secrets. People often ask me why Kurt killed himself. Actually, what frequently happens is, they wind up telling me why he killed himself.

They have their opinions, despite never having met him, and dismiss my firsthand observations of Kurt as incompatible with what they already believe. He also had a long family history of suicide. Somehow she survived and lived to be ninety-four. He survived but died later, after purposely reopening the wounds in a psychiatric hospital.

John apparently reached in his pocket for a cigarette and accidentally knocked his pistol out of its holster. The gun dropped to the floor and discharged, killing him. In , when Kurt was twelve, Burle killed himself with a gun. Five years later, Kenneth did. All I knew was that I had the distinct feeling that Kurt would not live a long life.

But what, if anything, could I do about it? Nevermind is the best album of the year. PS, Lars hates the band. For many years, Cobain enjoyed making Super-8 films.

One of these movies contains a scene in which Cobain commits suicide. In his free time, Cobain liked to buy big hunks of meat from the grocery store, and then go out into the woods and shoot at them with a variety of guns. He was a paradox in that way, because he also could be brutally and intensely strong, yet at the same time, he could appear fragile and delicate.

Cobain came close to joining the Navy, even meeting with a recruitment officer at one point to discuss enrolling. They involved a guitar, bass, and spoons banged against a suitcase. The band director remembered him as being a fairly run-of-the-mill student - not particularly extraordinary as far as musical talent goes, but not the worst.

At age 14 , Cobain announced to a schoolmate that he would be a superstar musician, get rich and famous, kill himself and go out in a blaze of glory like Jimi Hendrix. Suicide surrounded Kurt from early on in his life. There were several within his family, and when Cobain was about 13, he and a schoolmate came across a corpse hanging from a tree after a kid hanged himself outside of the elementary school. Cobain and his classmates stared for 30 minutes before school officials sent them on their way.

In the small town of Aberdeen, Washington, Cobain had to be crafty about getting alcohol while underage, so he and his friends arranged a deal with a morbidly obese alcoholic. They wheeled the man to the store in a grocery cart and gave him money to buy them beer. In exchange, they paid for malt liquor for him. Cobain jumped from job to job for a time after dropping out of high school, including one at a YMCA.