Nirvana manager: Nobody could have saved Kurt Cobain

30 March 2019

Nirvana's manager doesn't think anyone could have saved Kurt Cobain.

Kurt Cobain

The charismatic frontman died by suicide at the age of 27 in 1994 and friend and Nirvana co-manager Danny Goldberg - who has written a book 'Serving the Servant' about the late star - doesn't believe anyone could have helped him.

When asked by Rolling Stone: "Do you think anything could have saved him?", he answered: "I don't. I think a lot of people loved him. Nobody will ever know -- you can't go back and test out hundreds of hypotheticals. I think anybody who knows somebody who killed themselves would give the same answer. There is a mystery to why some people do it and some don't."

However, Danny admitted that doesn't stop him from wondering "what if?"

He explained:" I absolutely believe nobody knows why people kill themselves and there's no glib, easy answer why he or anyone else does so. For all the psychiatrists and priests and rabbis and yogis that exist in the world, 50,000 Americans each year kill themselves.

"But I still ... what if I had invited him to stay with us for a few days? Maybe that would have been a good idea. Maybe if I had ... spent X amount more hours trying to find other kinds of therapists that knew something about artists. Of course, if you're unfortunate enough to have been close to someone who did this to themselves, you go over things in your mind. But I do feel that ultimately people who do this do it, it's not the people around them who do it."

And Danny revealed his lasting memory of Kurt is his smile.

He said: "The thing I remember most about him is his smile. It's not like an anecdote. The thing about working with somebody famous is you end up telling stories so many times, they develop a certain plastic quality, even though they really did happen. So I cherish the memories that I wrote about; there's a number of them in the book that mean a lot to me. But when privately just thinking about him, it's more this sort of look in his eyes that he would get of such sweetness, at the same time mixed with a sardonic wit that really brings him back to me."