DENIAL CAN KILL –
March 30, 2023 – As he watched Nirvana’s meteoric rise in the early ‘90s, Steven Tyler says he recognised the “pain” in Kurt Cobain’s eyes and later discovered that Nirvana’s frontman was using heroin. In a bid to try to help the younger musician avoid pitfalls of which he had personal experience, Aeromith’s frontman went as far as contacting Nirvana’s management in 1992 to enquire about getting Cobain’s phone number to set up a heart-to-heart chat with the vocalist/guitarist.
In Everybody Loves Our Town(opens in new tab), the definitive oral history of grunge, Gold Mountain Entertainment’s Janet Billig, recalled, “Right when It started coming out that Kurt was doing drugs, I remember Steven Tyler called and wanted to help. I told Kurt, Holy shit, Steven Tyler called my office and he wants to help you. Can I give him your number?’ And he was like, ‘Steven Tyler got to be a junkie for 18 f**kin’ years. I’ve only been doing drugs for an hour’.”
Like many drug users, Cobain was somewhat in denial about the extent of his drug use.
“It’s not my f**king fault that anyone knows that I did heroin,” he told Details magazine writer Gavin Edwards in July 1993. “I’ve never talked about it. When I’m high, it’s really obvious. That’s why I’ve never gone out in public on it. I tried as hard as I could to keep it from everyone.
“I just hope to God nobody is influenced to do drugs because of me,” Cobain continued. “I definitely have a responsibility to talk negatively about heroin. It’s a really, really evil drug—I think opiates are directly linked to Satan.”
