Mudhoney’s Steve Turner recently made an appearance on the Appetite for Distortion podcast. He went on to reveal his thoughts on the final days of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain and Alice In Chains’ Layne Staley.
The guitarist, who ‘knew Cobain better than Staley’, said the following about the last days of the Nirvana frontman:
“We did a lot of shows with Nirvana, but Kurt was a very shy person and, obviously, very troubled. The last time I saw him, he was walking down the street from the direction where he lived, like, he had escaped was what it seemed like. Because I knew they’d had him in rehabs, and he kept leaving stuff, and he did not look well at all. You know, that was sad.”
Turner then explained how he found out about Cobain’s death and compared it with Staley’s:
“When I heard about his death, I was in Washington DC, on tour with Pearl Jam, Mudhoney was opening for Pearl Jam on a leg of their tour at the time. So that was kinda surreal, and it was numbing at the time, honestly. I don’t think I dealt with it for a long time after it, but you know, Layne thing was such a slow and sad decline that all the rumors were awful about him. And Chris [Cornell] was out of nowhere, that was the shocking one.”
Staley himself, too, was one of the people to be affected heavily by the passing away of Cobain. The Alice In Chains frontman discussed the matter just once in an April 1995 Pandemonium interview. He said:
“Kurt and I weren’t the closest of friends, but we ran into each other at shows and hung out. I knew him well enough to be devastated by his death. I just don’t understand at all. The last time I saw him, he gave me a ride from QFC on Broadway to a friend’s house, the whole way there, which was about a fifteen-minute drive, he talked about his daughter. For such a quiet person, he was so excited about having a child; he really loved that little girl. About a month later, I saw on the news that he was dead.”
Eight years after Cobain’s death, Staley passed away due to heavy use of drugs on the same date of April 5.
