The critically acclaimed “Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck” by HBO is everything you want it to be. The documentary, which follows the private life and childhood of Kurt Cobain, contains many details about the rock star that die-hard fans would love to know about.
Also, as expected, the documentary had Nirvana fans coming out of the woodwork. However, the real surprise is this one part which chronicled one of the Nirvana front man’s secrets, a secret not even his closest friends and family knew about before his tragic and controversial suicide in 1994.
The story begins when Brett Morgen, director, finally got access to the late legend’s most intimate possessions in 2013. By this time he had been developing the story five years. In here, among the artist’s paintings and journals, he found a box labeled “cassettes.”
He was surprised to see the box as nobody told him that audio recordings would also be available. He began transferring them to a digital format and sifted through hours of jams and jokes. In one tape recorded in 1988, Morgen says, “I knew instantly it was different because he was performing it and was doing multiple takes on it. It was more narrative than most of Kurt’s art.”
Cobain goes on to share in the recording his first sexual encounter. It is after this traumatic experience that he began to contemplate on suicide. Morgen brought the tape to Kurt’s family and to Charles R. Cross, Kurt Cobain biographer, and it was revealed that neither party knew about the tape’s existence.
Initially, this discovery was not even meant to be part of the documentary. For instance, there is the problem of animating it. “We were going to animate his art and his journals, but there was never a discussion about animating Kurt,” says Morgen.
The documentary first showed in Sundance and has since won three Emmys. See the trailer below:
