I completed my final year of high school
in 1994. I vividly remember being at home alone, studying and listening to JJJ
when the death of Kurt Cobain was announced on the radio. Like many people of
my generation, I was affected by this news and shocked. During high school I drank beer in my backyard with my friends singing the words to Nirvana ‘I’m
on plain, I can’t complain’. One of my older sisters friends brought me a
cassette copy of Nirvana Bleach, explaining it’s importance and that I had to
listen.
The following summer, I’d finished high
school, with very bad grades and my friends and I went to The Big Day Out. Courtney
Love, the lead singer of Hole - was one of the headline acts. At this time Love
was in the headlines for all the wrong reasons, causing havoc around the
country as Cobain’s mourning widow. I was in the mosh-pit during Hole’s set.
Maybe it was mix of weed, beer and sun; whatever it was, I got swept up in a
sea of movement and passed out in the crowd, falling under a stampede of
uncaring stomping feet. Some complete stranger, a lot stronger than me, picked
me up by the scruff of the neck. This guy shook me sharply, then slapped me
across the face and screamed directly at me to ‘snap out of it’.
As I came to, a different feeling washed
over me, I wasn’t as disconnected, I started to feel right at home here. I felt
like, people do actually care. Before me Love was there on stage swilling on a
bottle of bourbon, smoking cigarettes and a hurling abuse at the crowd. Love
had one leg with giant heals resting on the amplifier and a heavy guitar draped
around her. She was singing like a wounded cat, and was pissed off at the world
– I understood the tone, I connected with the grief and the anger – there was a
lot to be pissed off at. I’d been to lots gigs before, but this different, this
wasn’t just a gig; this was a moment, an event documenting something about my
generation and what we stood for.
I wasn’t just in the crowed watching a
gig; I realized that I was a member of generation X, living out the story of
this music. This was unlike the generations that came before and definitely
different to the ones that would come after us. Seeing Love on stage that Big
Day Out has had a lasting affected me. It wasn’t just because of the music, but
what it represented. It was the signpost to the future and the sum of the past.
It captured the mood of the times and gave me a reason to getup in the morning.
This moment still motivates me to find any kind of purpose to stay motivated and keep
going.
Picture: Courtney
Love, Hole, Melbourne, 1995; Tony Mott
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