Debbie Gilbert – Memphis Flyer

It’s hard to believe that 10 years have passed since Kurt Cobain died. To me, the memory is as stark as if it happened yesterday.

I was working at the Flyer that Friday afternoon, April 8, 1994, when a co-worker said she’d heard on the radio that Kurt was dead. We thought it was a hoax at first, but the news turned out to be true.

A maintenance worker had found the 27-year-old Nirvana frontman in the garage of his Seattle home. The body had apparently been there for a couple of days, lying in a pool of blood beside a suicide note and a 20-gauge Remington shotgun.

In retrospect, I don’t know why I was shocked. Ever since his “accidental” overdose in Rome a month earlier, I knew Kurt was living on borrowed time. But I thought he would eventually succumb to the massive amounts of chemicals he was putting into his body. It never occurred to me that he would do something so deliberate as blow his brains out.

If I had been searching for clues to Kurt’s state of mind, I could have found them in Nirvana’s brilliant MTV Unplugged, taped on Nov. 18, 1993. Surrounded by candles, frail in appearance but strong in voice, Kurt seemed to be performing his own eulogy, singing about sickness and death and the afterlife.

At the end of the final song, a cover of Leadbelly’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?,” he let out a scream so filled with rage and anguish that the audience almost recoiled. It felt like voyeurism to listen to this man’s raw pain.

Kurt had a family history of major depression. At least three of his male relatives committed suicide. Like many depressives, he turned to substance abuse in an unconscious attempt to self-medicate. But what really screwed him up was the mysterious stomach ailment that he suffered the last few years of his life.

From his own descriptions of his symptoms, I’m convinced Kurt had gastroparesis, a partial paralysis of the stomach that causes chronic pain and nausea. Unfortunately, there’s no effective treatment for this condition. So Kurt turned to heroin, which couldn’t cure him but made him too numb to care. Shortly before Kurt’s death, his family and friends worried that his drug abuse was out of control and staged an intervention. They meant well, but they were asking him to give up the one thing that made life bearable. Kurt panicked. He jumped the fence of a rehab center and fled back to Seattle, where he ended up jamming that shotgun against the roof of his mouth and pulling the trigger.

In a way, I’m almost happy for him that he’s gone. He’d feel even more depressed if he had to witness what has happened to rock music since he left. For a few years after his passing, there was a brief golden age when fine bands such as Pearl Jam got plenty of airplay. But the recording industry killed alternative music by turning it into a commodity, and the scene soon degenerated into a cesspool of sound-alike posers and wannabes. “Modern rock” radio these days consists of tiresome rap-rock and emo bands with their interchangeable lead singers whining about how their girlfriends don’t treat them right.

By contrast, Kurt actually had something to say. Music was his weapon for bashing the establishment, and though he always yearned to be a rock star, he agonized over his success, fretting that it contradicted the punk ethic. This was a guy who had the guts to mock his own fans (“Here we are now, imitate us”); who titled a track “Radio-Friendly Unit Shifter” just to piss off his record company; who managed to create a hit single out of a song that contains the line, “I wish I could eat your cancer when you turn black.”

On those rare occasions when a Nirvana song comes on the radio, it sounds as fresh as the day it was written, and you realize how singular Kurt’s talent was. He had a gift for melody, a sense of irony, an artistic vision. In his lifetime, he produced only three studio albums and a B-side compilation; two live albums were released posthumously. Yet there is more quality in his meager catalog than in the combined output of most of the faceless, soulless bands out there now.

As a fan, I wish he had left more material. But maybe Kurt realized the value of quitting while you’re on top. As he wrote in one of his countless three-ring-binder notebooks: “I hope I die before I turn into Pete Townshend.” You got your wish, Kurt. You got your wish.

Debbie Gilbert is an environmental and medical reporter with The Times in Gainesville, Georgia.

I wanted so much to be at Dennis Freeland’s memorial service Wednesday, but 500 miles and job obligations kept me from attending. I wished I could be among his friends as they shared their favorite stories about him. Everyone who knew Dennis has a story. Most of us have dozens.

I met Dennis more than a decade ago, when we were both struggling freelance writers so desperate for gigs that we accepted assignments from a godawful Elvis magazine. Before long we ended up working together at the Flyer. There, Dennis instigated a revolution, persuading the company to ditch its Antiquated MS-DOS computers and typesetting equipment and replace them with Macintoshes. He insisted we could create a better-looking paper with less time and effort, and he was right.

As an editor, he was extraordinarily generous. He spent uncounted hours nurturing young reporters, helping them to polish their work (and giving some of them more chances than they probably deserved). With me, because I was already an experienced writer, he took a hands-off approach and trusted my judgment.

“I’m sure whatever you turn in will be fine,” he would say. I appreciated the respect and confidence he showed in me.

And it was Dennis, in his gentle way, who pushed me to make a career leap when I was hesitant to take the plunge. In 1999, I was offered the opportunity to move to the mountains of northeast Georgia and cover

environmental and medical issues for a daily newspaper. I felt guilty about abandoning the Flyer, especially since Dennis was recovering from a recent stroke. Yet he was the one who encouraged me to go.

“I’ll miss you, as a colleague and even more so as a friend,” he said. “But you need to do this.”

So I did. I literally would not be where I am today if it weren’t for Dennis Freeland.

But my fondest memories aren’t about Dennis the boss; they’re about Dennis the person.

I remember how happy he was when the government paperwork finally came

through and he could marry his Indian-born wife, Perveen. I remember his profound joy six years ago when his daughter Feroza was born. How he loved being a dad! I can still picture the way he lifted the days-old infant out

of her bassinet, holding her as carefully as if she were a porcelain doll, as he kissed her sweetly on the forehead.

I remember how, while I felt compelled to go jetting off to the Rockies every summer, Dennis was content to spend his vacation time at the Anytown camp in Arkansas, working with teenagers of all races and faiths. If everybody in the world embraced the concept of diversity as wholeheartedly

as Dennis did, there would be no wars.

I remember his grief when his beloved German shepherd Spencer (aka “Bubba”) died on the bathroom floor one night, right in front of him. And I remember how supportive he was of me four years ago when my own dog was critically ill. Fortunately, she recovered completely. But Dennis never failed to ask, “How’s Sunny?”

I remember how distraught he was when one of his best friends died of multiple sclerosis. He confessed to me that this was his worst nightmare — to be incapacitated by a disease like MS.

And then, the nightmare came true. At first, the doctors thought his mysterious neurological symptoms might be attributable to MS. I tried to reassure him that a diagnosis of MS would not be a death sentence. After all, my mother lived with MS for 20 years, and there are new and promising therapies on the horizon.

But then it turned out that it wasn’t MS. It was much, much worse: glioblastoma, the most malignant and fastest-growing type of brain tumor. It is not curable. Dennis knew he was going to die no matter what he did, but he opted for the most aggressive course of treatment in order to buy a little more time with his family.

He endured so much: delicate brain surgery, weeks of radiation, even the new gamma knife procedure. None of it worked. He lived about the same amount of time he would have if he had done nothing at all. He had gambled and lost. But he didn’t regret having taken the risk, and he accepted his fate

philosophically.

I last saw Dennis on December 14th, during a brief trip to Memphis. He was tired, but he summoned the strength to talk to me for almost two hours. I knew he couldn’t see me very well because the tumor had destroyed his sight. But at one point he looked at me and flashed that sly yet angelic smile, and

for a moment the old Dennis was back again.

Before I left, he had a gift for me. He had been prescribed the antinausea drug Marinol, which contains the active ingredient in marijuana. He knew that I had been diagnosed with a stomach ailment that causes chronic nausea, and he wanted me to have his pills. Reluctantly, I had to decline,

explaining that I’m very sensitive to drugs and my system just couldn’t handle something like that.

“I’ve been looking forward to giving these to you for a long time,” he said, clearly disappointed.

That was Dennis. Even when his own condition was about as bad as it could

possibly be, he was thinking about others rather than himself. His compassionate and giving nature was what inspired such loyalty and affection from his friends.

That, and his impish sense of humor, is what we’ll miss most about him. And what we’ll remember.