Nirvana’s rise to fame certainly wasn’t overnight, but it did happen pretty quickly. Once they achieved “rock star” status, however, frontman Kurt Cobain used his newfound windfall of money to buy some very bizarre items.
In a resurfaced 1993 interview, Cobain detailed his spending habits. “Since I’ve become a big rock star and made a bunch of money, I found this place in the Mall of America in Minneapolis that sells nothing but medical stuff,” he began. “It’s a medical supply store that’s turned that they’ve offered to the public, you know. It’s really great.”
So what kind of “stuff” did Cobain buy from this medical supply store? “I bought all these fetuses and, you know, anatomy men and charts and stuff,” he revealed, “and it was like a dream come true.”
The iconic grunge frontman did not go into detail about why he was fascinated by these items. But he did explain why it was his big splurge after earning all that rock star money.
“I’ve always been really poor. If I could find something like that in a secondhand store, I’d barely have enough money to buy it. A lot of times, I couldn’t buy that stuff,” he said. “So, I just went on this rampage of buying all this stuff.”
“I think I’ve overused it, you know, for like pictures for the album,” he added. This seems to refer to the band’s third and final album, In Utero. “I don’t know,” Cobain concluded. “I just went overboard on it.”
Dave Grohl once called ‘In Utero’ Nirvana’s ‘Uncomfortable Soundtrack’ to Stardom
Years later, Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl and bassist Krist Novoselic sat down with Conan O’Brien to talk about their journey to stardom. The two men noted that everything happened in whirlwind style. It happened with the release of In Utero, which was produced by Steve Albini. The late music producer was also part of the Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend podcast episode.
“You know, at the time, when the band became popular in 1991, we were so young,” Grohl offered. “I think I was 21 or 22 [looks at Krist], and you might have been 25 or something, but we were kids.”
“When you talk about the amount of time that’s gone by, to me it’s not even so much about the years. It’s about the experiences that just kind of led one after another,” the grunge drummer continued.
“Going from three kids that were basically living or touring out of a van to then becoming a huge band,” he confessed, “Then In Utero, becoming the uncomfortable soundtrack to that transition.” Finally, he added, “By 1992, 1993, we were living in a different world than we were just 16 months before.”
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