Danny Goldberg will release Serving the Servant: Remembering Kurt Cobain next week, and in a newly released excerpt he discusses Kurt Cobain brutally rejecting an offer to meet Guns N’ Roses frontman Axl Rose at a Nirvana show in 1991.
“In Los Angeles, where Geffen was headquartered and much of the media was based, we wanted to make room for more people to see them so an underplay didn’t make sense. October 27, a month after Nevermind had been released, Nirvana headlined at the Palace Theatre, which had 2,200 seats, the biggest place Nirvana had headlined up until that moment, and the show quickly sold out. The band had been consistently playing great shows and this was no exception.
Backstage afterward, Eddie Rosenblatt told me that he had come with Axl Rose and asked if he could bring him into the dressing room to say hi to Kurt. When I conveyed this request, Kurt grimaced and said he really didn’t want to meet the Guns N’ Roses singer. I didn’t want to put Geffen’s president in an untenable situation, so I suggested to Kurt that he and I leave the dressing room and then I’d give Rosenblatt a couple of passes. That way it wouldn’t be like we were excluding them, just that Kurt couldn’t be found.
Kurt nodded and I walked outside, delivered the passes to Rosenblatt, and asked if he and Rose could wait five minutes for Nirvana to ‘change clothes.’ Then I went back in and grabbed Kurt and we ducked out a back door. Rosenblatt never gave me shit about it afterward so the charade worked on some level, but I doubt it left Rose with a great taste in his mouth.”
