about a son

Watch Kurt Cobain: About A Son on AUX BOX Office

by Allan Tong

September 5, 2010

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Watch About A Son September 5, 1:00 pm & 9:00 pm, and September 6, 9:00 am & 1:00 pm

Your typical rock doc is a parade of rare photographs, archival TV footage and concert clips strung together by interviews of band members which tend to be fawning, innocuous and if you’re lucky revealing.  About A Son is none of these things.  Instead, it’s a daring blend of audio interviews of Kurt Cobain laid on top of contemporary film footage of Aberdeen, Olympia, Seattle and other haunts of the American northwest where Kurt Cobain spent his 27 years on this planet.  This arty approach is risky.  About A Son could have come off as pretentious and boring, but somehow director A.J. Schnack makes it work.

Credit starts with co-producer Michael Azerrad, who wrote the first important biography of Nirvana, 1993’s Come As You Are.  His taped Cobain interviews are what we hear on this soundtrack, like a spirit talking from the afterlife.  Cobain is refreshingly candid, open and relaxed.  We feel like he is talking to us and not a journalist, and this the essential ingredient of this film.  It doesn’t hurt that Wyatt Troll’s lovely cinematography keeps our eyes glued to the scarred forests of Washington state or the glittering office towers of Seattle.  The music soundtrack is also left-field.  Instead of Smells Like Teen Spirit we hear what Cobain listened to on his mix tapes: Mudhoney, Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Vaselines, REM, early Bowie, The Melvins and many others.

As mentioned, Cobain opens his heart to us like an audio diary.  Some excerpts:

On his first musical influence:
“My Aunt Mary, I guess you can call her an aspiring musician.  She was in a lot of bar bands in Aberdeen.  She was definitely the most helpful person in my life as far as music, because she gave me an electric Hawaiian guitar and amplifier when I was eight years old, and she was the one who also gave me The Beatles records…”

On his father:
“I never felt like I had a father figure…I lived with him for a short time and then he got married.  After that, I was like one of the last things of importance on his list.”

On finding punk rock:
“I’m glad I got into punk rock the time that I did.  It gave me those few years I needed to grow up and to put my values into perspective and realize what kind of person I am.”:

On Nirvana’s first gig, a house party:

“There were 50 stoners in the kitchen hiding from us, because we were making so much noise.  We were so drunk….At the end of the evening the girls talked their boyfriends into wanting to beat us up.”

On the challenge of finding the Nirvana sound:
“We wanted to be more experimental and diverse, but there was so much pressure from Sub Pop [Records].  It just wasn’t cool to play pop music when you’re a punk rock band.  I wanted to mix the two.  I was a little too intimidated what the crowd response might be with more pop stuff.”

On his role as a musician:

“I’m pissed off about all these things in general.  All these songs are pretty much about my battle with things that piss me off….I have this conflict between good and evil.  Man and evil.  People doing evil things to other people for no reason.  I just want to beat the shit out of them.  All I can do is scream into a microphone instead.”

Watch the trailer:

Tags: Music, News, Aberdeen, Kurt Cobain, Nirvana, Smells Like Teen Spirit, Sub Pop Records, The Beatles

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