Nirvana

Nineteen years ago Friday, the singer for the most important American rock band of the '90s died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in his Seattle home. Kurt Cobain was only 27, leaving behind his wife Courtney Love and daughter Frances Bean Cobain.  His legacy includes recording one of the most influential catalogs in rock music, upending the music business by proving an indie-inspired act could become a blockbuster, defining a generation's style and proving that the loudest, heaviest band in rock could also be one of its most feminist and introspective.

By Kari Howard The stories I read spark musical connections every day. It's a bit more rare when the walk to work does. But one of my favorite moments this week came when I was strolling down Broadway past Grand Park in downtown LA, a section that used to be a parking lot for the criminal courts building. A woman was walking in the other direction talking on the phone, vexation in your voice. And I overheard her say this: “They turned it into a damn park!” It made me laugh - it was a bizarro-world Joni Mitchell lyric in reverse: “They paved paradise/And put up a parking lot.” Months ago, I had watched the parking lot being unpaved so paradise could be put up, so another of the song's lyrics had resonance: “They took all the trees/Put 'em in a tree museum.” The first thing the construction workers did?

By Kari Howard The stories I read spark musical connections every day. It's a bit more rare when the walk to work does. But one of my favorite moments this week came when I was strolling down Broadway past Grand Park in downtown LA, a section that used to be a parking lot for the criminal courts building. A woman was walking in the other direction talking on the phone, vexation in your voice. And I overheard her say this: “They turned it into a damn park!” It made me laugh - it was a bizarro-world Joni Mitchell lyric in reverse: “They paved paradise/And put up a parking lot.” Months ago, I had watched the parking lot being unpaved so paradise could be put up, so another of the song's lyrics had resonance: “They took all the trees/Put 'em in a tree museum.” The first thing the construction workers did?

Nineteen years ago Friday, the singer for the most important American rock band of the '90s died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in his Seattle home. Kurt Cobain was only 27, leaving behind his wife Courtney Love and daughter Frances Bean Cobain.  His legacy includes recording one of the most influential catalogs in rock music, upending the music business by proving an indie-inspired act could become a blockbuster, defining a generation's style and proving that the loudest, heaviest band in rock could also be one of its most feminist and introspective.

Robert Hilburn's cover story "Look Into His Eyes. Do You See Nirvana?" should have been titled "Look Into His Eyes--Why Don't We See Anything There?" (Aug. 29). Hilburn claims the critics have hailed Kurt Cobain as "the voice of a new generation." With Beavis and Butt-head in agreement, it must be true. What amazes me is how a garage band of such ungifted musicians with such weak material is deserving of four full pages in The Times. Cobain shares with Hilburn his idealism of early L.A. punk bands and how "you could hear a lead singer just scream at the top of his lungs.

The reunion of the three surviving members of Nirvana with guest singer Paul McCartney for the “121212: The Concert for Sandy Relief” brought the first live performance of a new song they'd created together while jamming recently, the ex-Beatle said on introducing “Cut Me Some Slack” during their time together at Madison Square Garden. “Recently, some guys asked me to go jam with them,” McCartney told the crowd. “So I showed up, like you do, ready to jam. And in the middle of it, these guys kept going, 'We haven't played together for years.' So the penny finally dropped, I finally understood I was in the middle of a Nirvana reunion.” The new song, not surprisingly, is a driving rock workout with a heavy backbeat full of distortion-drenched electric guitar work by Pat Smear in tandem with stinging slide guitar leads by McCartney, a sonic assault not far removed from one of the Beatles' signature hard rockers, “Helter Skelter.” A bit more surprisingly, McCartney's instrumental contribution came on a humble cigar-box guitar he played with a slide.

How's this for rock history in the making? Paul McCartney is expected to front a Nirvana reunion tonight, according to a flurry of online reports. McCartney will reportedly step in for late frontman Kurt Cobain as surviving members of the pioneering grunge band reunite for Wednesday night's Sandy relief concert at New York's Madison Square Garden.  The 70-year-old Beatles icon is said to have been secretly working with Foo Fighters singer Dave Grohl and bassist Krist Novoselic following a recent studio session, according to The Sun . THE ENVELOPE: Grammy Awards 2013 Cobain and Novoselic formed Nirvana in the late 1980s, with Grohl joining as drummer in 1990.

Kudos to Perry C. Riddle for his shot of former Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl on the July 29 cover page of Calendar. It deserves an award for so realistically depicting the agony of a lost soul temporarily on leave from hell. H.L. BRYSON Los Angeles

No matter how fierce your devotion to popular culture, odds are you've never heard of Samuel Bayer, who makes his feature directing debut Friday with the reboot of "A Nightmare on Elm Street." But you're almost certainly familiar with his work. A prolific commercial and music-video director, Bayer has been responsible for some of the most memorable images of the last 20 years: Kurt Cobain thrashing around a gym in Nirvana's music video for "Smells Like Teen Spirit"; the bespectacled girl in a bumblebee tutu finding elusive companionship in Blind Melon's "No Rain" video.

"I don't want my daughter to grow up and someday be hassled by kids at school . . . I don't want people telling her that her parents were junkies." Kurt Cobain, the 25-year-old leader of the acclaimed and hugely successful rock group Nirvana, is sitting in the living room of his Hollywood Hills apartment, holding Frances, his and Courtney Love's 4-week-old baby. It's Cobain's first formal interview in almost a year, and it takes time to open up.

SANTA FE, N.M. - It's fair to call me a chocoholic, but it wasn't until a trip to Santa Fe that I realized I'd never had the good stuff. What was supposed to be a casual late-December exploration of this New Mexican cultural hub wound up becoming a full-on chocolate extravaganza in which I dragged my husband, Jay, to a new exhibit, "New World Cuisine: The Histories of Chocolate, Mate y Más," at Santa Fe's Museum of International Folk Art, and...

PARK CITY, Utah - At the world premiere of his directorial debut, the rockumentary “Sound City,” Foo Fighters frontman and ex-Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl made an admission that's sure to come as a surprise the millions of head-bangers who have thrilled to his music.  “I consider this to be the most important thing I've ever done artistically,” Grohl said, just before the lights went down in the theater. If you have enjoyed FM radio pop music at any point in the last 40 years, songs created at Van Nuys' legendary Sound City Studios almost certainly hold a cherished position in your music collection.

Amid the splintered drum sticks and empty coffee cups littering his Northridge recording studio, Dave Grohl contemplated the enormous mixing desk before him. The Foo Fighters frontman looked at the seemingly endless rows of faders and dials on the console, admiring it like a car lover might a vintage Aston Martin. "I consider that board to be responsible for the person I am today," said the former drummer of Nirvana. "Had it not been for that board, who knows what 'Nevermind' would've sounded like.

The reunion of the three surviving members of Nirvana with guest singer Paul McCartney for the “121212: The Concert for Sandy Relief” brought the first live performance of a new song they'd created together while jamming recently, the ex-Beatle said on introducing “Cut Me Some Slack” during their time together at Madison Square Garden. “Recently, some guys asked me to go jam with them,” McCartney told the crowd. “So I showed up, like you do, ready to jam. And in the middle of it, these guys kept going, 'We haven't played together for years.' So the penny finally dropped, I finally understood I was in the middle of a Nirvana reunion.” The new song, not surprisingly, is a driving rock workout with a heavy backbeat full of distortion-drenched electric guitar work by Pat Smear in tandem with stinging slide guitar leads by McCartney, a sonic assault not far removed from one of the Beatles' signature hard rockers, “Helter Skelter.” A bit more surprisingly, McCartney's instrumental contribution came on a humble cigar-box guitar he played with a slide.

How's this for rock history in the making? Paul McCartney is expected to front a Nirvana reunion tonight, according to a flurry of online reports. McCartney will reportedly step in for late frontman Kurt Cobain as surviving members of the pioneering grunge band reunite for Wednesday night's Sandy relief concert at New York's Madison Square Garden.  The 70-year-old Beatles icon is said to have been secretly working with Foo Fighters singer Dave Grohl and bassist Krist Novoselic following a recent studio session, according to The Sun . THE ENVELOPE: Grammy Awards 2013 Cobain and Novoselic formed Nirvana in the late 1980s, with Grohl joining as drummer in 1990.

Four a.m. is a terrible time of day, too late for night owls, too early for early risers. The exception is 4 a.m. at Borobudur, waiting for the sun to rise over the Kedu Plain in central Java with 504 figures of Buddha. The temple is one of three great religious sites in Southeast Asia, but it's older and more esoteric than Bagan in Myanmar and Angkor Wat in Cambodia. It was begun in the 8th century by the Sailendras, a dynasty of Buddhist kings who ruled central Java for almost 200 years until their power waned and the temple was abandoned.

"Nirvana," the giddy new installation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art by Tokyo- and New York-based artist Mariko Mori, seamlessly fuses East with West, tradition with iconoclasm, and ancient philosophy with modern ideals, all in heady and ingratiating ways.

"I don't want my daughter to grow up and someday be hassled by kids at school . . . I don't want people telling her that her parents were junkies." Kurt Cobain, the 25-year-old leader of the acclaimed and hugely successful rock group Nirvana, is sitting in the living room of his Hollywood Hills apartment, holding Frances, his and Courtney Love's 4-week-old baby. It's Cobain's first formal interview in almost a year, and it takes time to open up. A shy, sensitive man, he speaks easily about his daughter, but there's one thing he's uncomfortable talking about even though he knows he has to. Nirvana is the hottest new band to come along in years, and several of the articles on the group have speculated about Cobain's alleged drug use. He now admits that he's used drugs, including heroin, but never as much as has been rumored or reported in the rock press.

Richards' book rocks Keith Richards has gone platinum as an author. The Rolling Stone's memoir, "Life," has sold more than 1 million copies since coming out last fall. "Hail to the Keef!" Little, Brown and Co. publisher Michael Pietsch said in a statement Thursday, noting that "Life" was among the bestselling rock memoirs of all time. Richards, 67, received more than $7 million for his book, which received almost universal raves. —Associated Press New King chiller eschews print Stephen King is back in the e-book game.

Nothing says NCAA basketball mayhem like the words of Gus Johnson calling a down-to-the-wire game. "Coldblooded," Johnson howled Saturday when Washington's Isaiah Thomas, well, coldbloodedly ended the Pac-10 championship game in overtime against Arizona with a jump shot at the buzzer. UCLA fans still love to replay Johnson's call of the 2006 West Regional semifinal when the Bruins came from 17 points down to beat Gonzaga in the final seconds. "What a game!" Johnson screamed as Jordan Farmar made a steal and a pass to Luc Richard Mbah a Moute for a layup in the final seconds.