Watching Brett Morgen’s 2015 documentary Montage of Heck, assembled from Kurt Cobain’s own journals, home-taped monologues, and family home videos, you felt a profound sense of intimacy, even violation. Eavesdropping on Cobain has been a lurid national pastime for nearly 20 years now, from 2003's Journals to the scraps collected on the With the Lights Out box, but Morgen took us closer than even the most brazen imagined we should be allowed to go: Courtney and Kurt, naked and bantering in the bathroom on home video about who gets to play the Reading Festival that year (Courtney, pregnant with Frances, complains jokingly about having to stay home and “get big and fat”). Cobain, nodding off and holding his toddler. Footage of the three band members, teenagers, thrashing around in an Aberdeen shack, watched by two profoundly bored audience members. The very idea that this footage exists, and that we might be given such unfettered access to it, lends the film an uneasy voyeuristic charge.
Montage of Heck: The Home Recordings carries the same unsavory aftertaste as the film, with none of its attendant illuminations. The scraps here were dredged by Morgen and used to wallpaper the film, and he’s rounded them out with some home recordings that didn’t make the movie. Home tapes by iconic artists are a tricky business. They can be revelatory, but they always carry a question: Did we learn enough to justify the intrusion? In the context of the film, the audio was an essential part of the film’s sometimes-unclean sense of immersion. Divorced from the images, the sounds on these tapes are little more than lint emptied out of the last pocket of a life.
"Kurt’s brain was always on,” his sister Kim says early in the film, and Home Recordings sounds exactly like that: What a brain is like when it is on, but not necessarily thinking anything. It’s not like listening to Kurt Cobain’s music; it is like submerging yourself in (what you imagine to be) his mind, with all of the bored fidgets, silly voices, jokes made to oneself, and half-hearted guitar strums this implies. In the film, his first girlfriend Tracy Marander recalls that while Cobain was living with her, he was unemployed and would watch television for hours, strumming his guitar abstractedly. You can imagine that a few of these tracks were recorded in similar states. “Burn the Rain” could have been a song he never finished, or it could just be a blurry version of a bunch of different songs he would eventually write, something he committed to tape and never thought about a second time.
This hits upon the main issue with releasing Cobain's home-tapes: As King Buzzo of the Melvins noted of this film, Cobain was "a master of jerking your chain." These tracks mostly feel like an antic mind entertaining itself, and to enshrine them in this way is mystifying. Consider: There’s a track called “Beans” here, and it’s a minute and 20 seconds of Cobain thumbing two notes and singing about eating beans in a shrieking cartoon voice. There’s another called “Rehash” that consists of him hollering silly songwriter words—“rehash,” “chorus,” “solo”—as he plays some power chords. There are brief audio clips of him playing with sped-up and slowed-down voices. The few early demos—"Sappy", or "Frances Farmer", strummed and mumbled as he worked out the song's skeleton—are so inchoate that lavishing any kind of attention on them feels perverse. They serve to remind us that ephemera provide mute testimony of a life’s existence, but say little about its meaning.
There is a precedent for this sort of release, especially with artists who died young with a slim catalog: 2007’s Family Tree gathered together all of the home recordings of Nick Drake, an artist with a similar predilection for committing all his guitar fumbling to tape and even to recording emotionally revealing monologues. Montage of Heck is like a shaggier version of Family Tree, a voyeuristic document that attempts to plop you down in the living room of a dead hero, and it leaves you with a similar hollow feeling.
Cobain fan sites have complained that the Home Recordings crosses the line into exploitation, but this line was crossed years ago, and has been obliterated and trampled many times since. The Home Recordings marks the point where that exploitation enters the absurd. It’s a sad bookend to a captivating film, and an ignoble use of a trove of material. Its purpose isn’t to give us any new music, but to give us one last grasp at his fading spirit. For most people, this is the last phase of a breakup, or of grief—when you smell the t-shirt, and register sadly that the essence is gone.
