Kurt: I don't favor them-I can afford them. [laughs] I'm left-handed, and it's not very easy to find reasonably priced, high-quality left-handed guitars. But out of all the guitars in the whole world, the Fender Mustang is my favorite. I've only owned two of them.
GW: What is it about them that works for you?
Kurt: They're cheap and totally inefficient, and they sound like crap and are very small. They also don't stay in tune, and when you want to raise the string action on the fretboard, you have to loosen all the strings and completely remove the bridge. You have to turn these little screws with your fingers and hope that you've estimated it right. If you screw up, you have to repeat the whole process over and over until you get it right. Whoever invented that guitar was a dork.
"We're just musically and rhythmically retarded," asserts Kurt Cobain Interview 1
Not at all. It's too slick. I don't listen to records like that at home. I can't listen to that record. I like a lot of the songs. I really like playing some of them live. In a commercial sense I think it's a really good record, I have to admit that, but that's in a Cheap Trick sort of way. But for my personal listening pleasure, you know, it's just too slick.
I'm not into ambition or salesmanship, we're not some new trend.
I don't understand anything technical about music at all. I don't understand any of it, why you can't put these sounds together with those sounds.
I've always been a paranoid person by nature anyhow, and now I have all these people so concerned with what I say and what I do at all times that it's really hard for me to deal with that.
Rolling Stone sucks, has always sucked, and still sucks just because they have a hip band on their cover. We're not as cool and hip as everyone thinks. Having us on the cover isn't going to make Rolling Stone any cooler. Ever since this band has been popular, I've always thought of us as just a '90s version on Cheap Trick or the Knack. They had two sides of appeal that made them kind of a cool band-a commercial side and kind of a new-wave side. We have that.
I can't think of a damn thing. I can't even waste my time on that band, because they're so obviously pathetic and untalented. I used to think that everything in the mainstrteam pop world was crap, but now that some underground bands have been signed with majors, I take Guns N' Roses as more of an offense. I have to look into it more: They're really talentless people, and they write crap music, and they're the most popular rock band on the earth right now. I can't believe it.
Jim Crotty: From a Kurt Cobain musical perspective what is grunge? Kurt Cobain: It's a fine mixture of hygiene paraphernalia - bleach, Lysol, bubblegum-flavored toothpaste, isopropyl rubbing alcohol 90%, hand and body lotion, and conditioning shampoo.
Real "performing" implies a sort of acting that I've always tried to avoid.
I'm the anti-guitar hero - I can barely play the thing myself. I'm the first to admit that I'm no virtuoso.
Chuck Crisafulli: On In Utero, and in concert, you play some of the most powerful "anti-solos" ever hacked out of a guitar. What comes to mind for you when it's time for the guitar to cut loose ?
Kurt Cobain: Less than you could ever imagine.
The Atlanta Journal and Constitution
"Yeah, you know, there were a lot of Beavises and Butt-heads back there," he says. "The only difference is they weren't as clever as the guys on TV."
