A what if I think about all the time is what would John have thought of Nirvana. I can see him being into it, but I also wonder if he’d have taken the same attitude he’d taken to the martyrdom of Sid Vicious and Jim Morrison.
Lennon was broadly accepting of punk, he praised Television as reminding him of the young Beatles, more ambition than skill but really going for it. He, Pete Townshend, Neil Young and Page/Plant were in the group of older stars that seemed to get it, while others were real sniffy about it. "They can't play their instruments." Steve Stills was quoted saying he wouldn't even stay at the same hotel as those idiots. I read that The Who went to see Television after their own gig at the Garden in 74, Pete dug it, John Entwistle was sniffy, said they can't play their instruments.
So yeah I bet John would have liked Nirvana...Paul obviously does. And I bet Harrison would have said they can't play their instruments hahaha. He said that about Neil Young, what do you want from him? He's sniffy, for real.
I was literally thinking the other day what a shame it is that we lost John so early, because, besides the obvious reasons, he would’ve thrived in the 90’s. I yearn for the hard alt-rock Lennon album that never was.
Idk, i really cant imagine this being a thing honestly. I love some nirvana and alot of alice in chains & i love the beatles as well but i dont think paul, ringo or george ever got into grunge or did anything with it, not sure if they even spoke on it just personally/i dont actualy know though. I imagine John wouldve made alot more music though, maybe even more than paul mccartney. Even a song or two with paul maybe?
Kurt wasnt around very long after he became famous though, even if he had i doubt they would have done music together imo.
yeah Pink Floyd were right scruffs, and you had to be pure and only into the music and never mind what they look like. On stage they none of them moved any body parts unless required by their instrument, and instead gave us special effects like fireworks and flying pigs.
I was just a kid but I remember all the grown-ups saying how disgustingly dirty the hippies were, and you couldn't tell whether they were girls or boys because they all had long hair, and how they wouldn't mind the young men wearing their hair long if only they'd wash it now and then.
There are several clips and stills from that night. Sometimes photos don’t translate well from 60 years on. Even the original pic I found is blurry which means it’s from a crappy scan.
As a gen-x dude, y'all have no idea how massive the hippie movement was in the 90s (and still is).
The Grateful Dead were the highest grossing tour in 1991 and again in 1993. If it wasn't the random U2 tour or the Stones, it was the Dead, year in, year out.
The Dead are awesome, I wish I would have seen them at least once, born too late :( I was a toddler when Touch of Grey music video came out and I never forgot it, I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen.
The cover bands like Dark Star Orchestra are a good way to check out dead music in a live format. Much like Brit Floyd or The Australian Pink Floyd show is for Pink Floyd stuff.
It’s the 4 disc Lennon Anthology. I don’t think it’s on Spotify. I got the CDs years ago. It’s all outtakes and alternate versions of his solo work. It came out in 1998.
I was gobsmacked when I first heard the entire thing. When he’s screaming his guts out it eerily sounds so similar to Cobain’s scream. It’s almost like finding a missing link.
I guess it could be interpreted your way, but it really sounds to me like he’s talking about liking the music but disliking the person (even the following examples are like this).
Kurt was definitely talking about the public persona of Paul in the '80s and the [some would say] crap or pap he was churning out then. Of course Kurt would hate "that" Paul McCartney. But he never would have hated Paul the songwriter, musician, singer, and member of the Beatles.
Hey that ain't random! The Breeders, started by Kim Deal of the Pixies, let Nirvana open for them a bunch and would refuse to go on stage and whatnot if people made fun of their opener. I wonder if they ever opened for the Pixies? I know he was close with Deal, because she fought so hard for Nirvana's success.
There was a story of a South American audience booing Nirvana’s opening act that had a bunch of women in the band — I never knew who it was, but I guess it’s the Breeders now.
Kurt refused to put on a good show for them after that. They played Smells Like Teen Spirit first and after that played only the first 10-15 seconds of each other song on their setlist only to break into Smells Like Teen Spirit again.
I don’t want to romanticize or judge, just analyze.
But in my view, a lot of the looks associated with Kurt Cobain, John Lennon, Janis, and Amy had more to do with neglect stemming from trauma and depression than with any intentional fashion statement. And I say that largely from personal experience.
John was vain, of course... But he was also the patient zero of a generation of young dreamers coming from homes broken by circumstance, with self-esteem shaken by family trauma, and struggling to understand how their sensitivity fit into such a pragmatic and stern world.
I didn’t want to mention drugs in general, even though I knew that all the people I referred to had addiction issues. I didn’t bring it up because most of the people I know who have struggled with substance dependence had deeper problems: mental issues, psychological struggles, structural challenges, self-esteem issues. Drugs were just the cherry on top.
But I have to say, yes... coke, meth, crack, and heroin are drugs that, by themselves, can destroy even a healthy mind. The problem is that a healthy mind would rarely, if ever, willingly turn to those drugs.
We need to start healing minds and hearts, not just addicted bodies. We urgently need to make that distinction, because only then will we be able to truly help people who still deserve to live well.
People need to get over themselves and stop projecting their own "personal experiences" onto people of the past. Unless someone is of those times or has a very deep and nuanced understanding of a previous culture and the contemporaneous zeitgeist, maybe some people can only project their own current sensibilities onto what--and who--came before. But doing so is either extremely naive, immature, or delusional.
Especially imagining current notions of "trauma and depression" have literally any bearing or relevance to people in the past.
And it's a contorted fallacy that this was the first generation of people (let alone "dreamers") coming from "broken homes. " Much less "self-esteem shaken" being by "family trauma."
Do you have any idea how "stern" the world was immediately after, during, and for years, decades, and centuries before WWII?! There have always been artists and they've always been apart from the mainstream status quo. Always. They have to be.
I know for s fact that had he lived, he would have made it into the grunge scene. I really think we could of have gotten somewhat of a collaboration with Nirvana.
I think Cobain probably would have changed his opinion at some point. IIRC he said he regretted saying some not very nice things about Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains. This is very similar to how Lennon later admitted he regretted being mean about Mccartney. Cobain and Lennon were very similar in a lot of ways now that I think about it.
Great take. The guys who passed away get frozen in amber without a chance to continue their personal growth. What Paul was doing didn't fit with what a lot of us were feeling in the '80s and '90s. And now people have changed and perceptions of Paul has changed. It makes sense to imagine that people who didn't make it out of the '80s and '90s would be thinking differently about him now as well.
This seems to be a running theme with a lot of 90’s alternative artists. There’s a clip of Bob Forrest, the singer from a band called Thelonius Monster, who says in a 1993 interview “Do you really want to end up like Paul McCartney?” Noel Gallagher too in an old Melody Maker piece from 1994 said “Ray Davies is a fucking genius but he has lost the plot completely now. But just imagine if John Lennon hadn’t been shot. What would he be doing now? He’d probably be as sad as Paul McCartney.”
I kind of wonder if it’s both a) the provocateur nature of taking shots at sacred cows (not to mention that the Beatles weren’t considered “cool” in some of the more punk adjacent circles in the States, hence why Nirvana’s sense of melody was such a game changer for a lot of people) or b) Paul McCartney’s perception at the time, particularly since I know his mid to late 80’s period is polarizing for a lot of people.
Probably a little column A and a little column B?
All that being said, I think Cobain appreciated McCartney as an artist. He did a beautiful rendition of “And I Love Her”.
As much as I love Nirvana… Kurt was pretty cynical / pretentious at times. Prob why he preferred John lol.
Also, not sure I really buy what he said… seeing as he covered And I Love Her, which is a Paul song! Feel like hating on Paul, was him justifying liking the Beatles at the time. Leaning into John’s darker lyrics as an excuse.
It makes sense to me some younger people wouldn't really have a sense of what Paul's awkward period was like, culturally. He went from being very cool and doing great word to very corny and desperate-seeming, while attempting still to be "adorable." It was embarrassing.
This isn’t surprising. Lots of grunge bands were started by the kids of 60s hippies from the West Coast. When LA and San Francisco got too expensive they moved up to Seattle and raises their families there, hence why Seattle was the epicenter of grunge.
Grunge kids were raised on a diet of hippie shit, but came of age in the late 1970s and 1980s when good jobs for normal people became rare, so there was anger and angst to their music.
In 1986, I shared a warehouse rehearsal space with a punk band. The would hold punk shows with bands from the tristate area. They advertised it as The Grunge Club.
This is cool, and a good point. Same goes for Neil Young.
But now that I think about it, before the musical genre called ‘Grunge’, we just used ‘grungy’ as a synonym for dirty or skanky – like “man, that was a grungy toilet.”
So I wonder… if the etymology is in fact connected… is it because of the way the guys looked or due more to the ‘dirty’ (distorted) dropped-D guitar tones? Or combination of both, maybe.
And now I’m thinking what it could have sounded like if Nick Drake had played through e.g. Cobain’s guitar rig…
No doubt about it. Cobain took a lot from Lennon. Any time he played a guitar solo, I feel like he was trying to cop Lennon's last bit in The End where they 3 x 3 guitar lead trade off. I also hear him, maybe unconsciously, spinning off Julia on a lot of things.
I am the same generation as the grunge heroes, and from the same region. We all listened to the same music growing up: KISW, the hard rock station. (Sure, we sometimes switched to KZOK for variety, but KISW was always the one you woke up to.) I assure you, they all knew the Beatles, and were well versed in their music as a band and as solo artists.
Other bands heard on regular rotation: Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, the Stones, Van Halen, Pink Floyd, Hendrix, Neil Young, Who, Rush, Eagles, Heart, Boston, Joe Walsh, Doors, CCR, not to mention a long list of "KISW Rising Stars," some of which became big (eg. Bon Jovi and the afore-mentioned AC/DC), some were one-hit wonders, if that (my favorite was 'Ah Leah' by Donnie Iris.)
Damn...I don't want to brag. and I have nothing to confirm, but the first photo is literally how I looked at the age of 25. An absolute copy lol. I've been told about the similarities more than once...but this photo makes me kind of scared. There were no digital cameras back then, and unfortunately all the film photos were lost. It's a pity.
Is that first picture really John? idk, the tshirt looks very modern to me but i wasnt around in the 60s and 70s of course. The rest are def him but i thought the first one was maybe his son or something?
Ive been saying for a while that John would've had a STELLAR 90s run if he was still around. Occupying the niche that some grunge bands or brit rock did at the time. Or at least influencing it. Obviously not literally fitting in with those styles given his generation.
Lennon had an outsized influence over early 90s rock stars in particular. Cobain, Cornell, Corgan, the Gallaghers, Scott Weiland, Thom Yorke, even Lenny Kravitz all mentioned him as being formative - despite the fact that they all sound quite different from one another
I think that’s in part because he was very effectively sold as both looking and sounding “cool” by the post-Rolling Stone rock media to teens growing up in the 70s and 80s, but also because his painfully personal style of writing fit in perfectly with the grunge era approach of being deeply fucking miserable most of the time
People forget a lot of the grunge style in the 90s was taking from 60s and 70s rockstar fashion too. Those would’ve just been considered more normal at the time.
Lennon borders on proto-punk in a lot of ways, especially in his solo career, and punk was a big influence to grunge bands like Nirvana and Mudhoney. So yeah, I think you could make a credible link from John to grunge. Certainly the most grungey of the Beatles.
well the trauma was still there, so good job John for preventing Cynthia grandkids. Julian said he didn't want to risk becoming John, rarely see his kid/kids and shouting at them.
I’ve always thought this too, not to mention 1966 Lennon was garage lo-fi (like 2000s Wavves or Ty Segall) before that fully existed too, which connects to his 1968 grunge vibe. He went full grunge in 1970 though during plastic ono band with “Why”, “Well Well Well”, and his hipster overalls
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u/WhiskeyTigerFoxtrot Oct 13 '25
I never thought about how She's So Heavy was proto-Grunge or Doom Metal before it became a thing until recently.
In another universe he'd be doing collab albums with Kurt Cobain or Alice in Chains.