Joan Jett as Kurt Cobain?

I have been hoping against hope that Joan Jett could play with Nirvana at the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame show tomorrow, and it looks like it might not be just a wet dream.

Joan Jett + Nirvana: Five Reasons Why She’s a Good Pick for Rock Hall of Fame | Billboard.

“Here We Are Now”

It’s hard to believe it’s been two decades since we lost Kurt Cobain. I only met Kurt once. I was writing an article about the Melvins, and he was producing their album. He was clearly already into heroin; like Joan Jett producing the Germs, Cobain kept nodding off in the studio. Still, although no one had warned him a reporter would be there, the young man with the piercing blue eyes was gracious enough to sit with me for about half an hour and talk about why he loved the Melvins — and why he chose Steve Albini to produce the next Nirvana album.

I’ve already written in this blog about running into Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore on the day Kurt’s body was found. It was a strange, hard, crucial time for music lovers, an era of breakthroughs and breakdowns — the whole bipolar range captured in Kurt’s too short life.

I reviewed Charles Cross’s Here We Are Now: The Lasting Impact of Kurt Cobain for The Seattle Times. As his biographer, the author of Heavier than Heaven knows the artist’s importance as well as anyone.

Kim Minus Thurston Equals Sad

Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore have been on my mind, ever since I read Vanity Fair‘s latest trainwreck rerun story about Courtney Love yesterday. I’ll never forget running into Mr. and Mrs. Sonic Youth on Prince Street on the day news of Kurt Cobain’s death hit. “I’m so sorry,” I mumbled, as we stopped on a corner, because I knew they were friends.

“We’re not surprised by his death,” Kim said. We’d all been expecting Kurt to die any day, so wasted was his living. “It was just the way he died, the violence.”

I nodded. I didn’t really know what to say about such an ugly, intimate, yet public loss. It was a raw, vulnerable day for a rock critic to catch indie rock’s ultimate power couple, the coolest people on the planet. Other people would have hugged, cried. But we nodded, shared a moment of silence, then went on our ways.