Thurston Moore is commemorating the life of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain in his new memoir, Sonic Life.
The Sonic Youth guitarist recalls the day he found out that Cobain had taken his own life, with the band’s booking agent calling to tell him the news on Apr. 8, 1994.
Cobain had committed suicide three days prior to Moore hearing the news, being found by a worker installing security lighting at his house in Washington.
“It hadn’t been looking good in the preceding months: the overdose in Rome, reports of Kurt missing in action around Seattle, the intervention by his friends and family,” the memoir reads in a new excerpt.
Moore’s ex-wife and bandmate, Kim Gordon, was seven months pregnant at the time when he called her to deliver the news.
“She couldn’t speak. In the silence, I could sense her weeping. Like every one of us, she had loved the boy,” he remembers.
Moore also looks back on happier memories they shared in the book. He details his experience backstage at a Nirvana show with Cobain and Courtney Love in 1993. His mother joined them at Miami’s Bayfront Park Amphitheater, calling Love a “very good mother” to their daughter, Frances Bean Cobain.
“[Frances] hung with her nannies backstage, running around, grabbing whatever she could off deli trays, beautiful and full of light, both Courtney’s and Kurt’s features visible in her expressive face. My mother sat watching as Courtney told Frances to settle down, opened a juice bottle for her, and put her on her lap for a bit of mother-daughter knee-bouncing and laughter.”
Ahead of the memoir’s release on Tuesday, the 65-year-old guitarist had to cancel his U.S. book tour due to “a long standing health condition.” He had written the book throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.