Fans of Kurt Cobain continue to mourn the Nirvana rocker. But Cobain’s 1994 suicide did have one upside: he didn’t have to listen to loathsome Axl Rose anymore.

Cobain was willing to do a few things in the interest of rock stardom, record business eminence Danny Goldberg recalls in his poignant and funny memoir, “Bumping Into Geniuses.” In fact, when MTV chief Judy McGrath was so insistent on Nirvana appearing on the MTV Awards, Cobain left rehab, according to Goldberg.

But Cobain “detested” Rose, says Goldberg, who served as president of Atlantic Records, Warner Bros. Records and Mercury Records. When the Guns N’ Roses frontman asked to meet Cobain backstage after a show, Kurt refused. “Rose had the kind of macho rock persona that Kurt detested,” Goldberg writes.

Nor was Cobain’s wife, Courtney Love, keen on getting to know Rose’s then-girlfriend, Victoria’s Secret stunner Stephanie Seymour. After another show, Seymour asked Love, “Are you a model?” Snapped Courtney: “Are you a brain surgeon?”

Promoters tried to launch a tour with Nirvana, Metallica and Guns N’ Roses. “There was a lot of money on the table,” says Goldberg. “Kurt really liked Metallica.” But there wasn’t enough money in the world to get him to share a stage with that other band. Cobain passed.

Goldberg, who became a renowned leftie politico, learned how to look after temperamental, drug-using rock stars early on as publicist for Led Zeppelin. He recalls Robert Plant grumbling enviously about “all the publicity that the Stones got on their last tour!” Yet the band hated doing press. When a young rock critic told drummer John Bonham, often blasted for his 30-minute solos, that he thought he was the “greatest drummer in rock,” Bonham grabbed the reviewer’s lapels and yelled, “Look, I’ve had about enough of you people!”

Bonham was “an angry and mean drunk,” Goldberg writes, and the atmosphere around the band in 1973 “was one of tension, exacerbated by huge quantities of cocaine. Violence was one bad mood away.”

Bonham would try to get into Goldberg’s hotel room in the middle of the night to yell at him. The band’s legendary 300-pound road manager Peter Grant suggested Goldberg do as he did: book two rooms far apart and sleep in the secret one.

Goldberg recalls that Grant once had “to settle up with a hotel manager after the band had thrown several TVs out of the windows.” Surprising, the manager admitted the hotel’s rooms were so sterile, he wouldn’t mind throwing a TV himself. “[Grant] peeled off another $500 in cash and told the guy, ‘Have one on me,’” says Goldberg.

He first met Patti Smith at Max’s Kansas City when she was a poet with a day job at Scribner’s bookstore on Fifth Ave. “What book do you want me to steal for you?” she asked sincerely.

Sticky fingers aside, “I knew even then she was a genius,” he recalls.

The Gotham Book is out next month.

(source)

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