Music

REM's Michael Stipe tried to "save Kurt Cobain's life"

by Ciaran Thompson

REM lead vocalist Michael Stipe sat down with Interview Magazine recently and revealed that in 1994 he had offered late Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain a chance to collaborate with him in order to prevent the worst from happening.

“I was doing that to try to save his life. The collaboration was me calling up as an excuse to reach out to this guy. He was in a really bad place,” Stipe said.

“I knew him and his daughter,” he continued. “I reached out to him with that project as an attempt to prevent what was going to happen. I simply constructed a project to try to snap Kurt out of a frame of mind. I sent him a plane ticket and a driver, and he tacked the plane ticket to the wall in the bedroom and the driver sat outside the house for 10 hours. Kurt wouldn’t come out and wouldn’t answer the phone.”

The collaboration, which was apparently not for an album, never took place and Cobain’s body was later found on April 8 at his Lake Washington home along with a suicide note.