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In 1991 the world was introduced to two things that would change the course of music history forever. Kurt Cobain, and Grunge. Both absolute forces to be reckoned with. Both would change the landscape of music forever, but not without their hiccups of course.

You all know how Nirvana got started, a scrappy punk-rock band from Seattle that started at the Cobain residence in 1985. Being musical peers with bands like Bikini Kill and The Melvins, they never thought that they would be signed to a major label and reach the apex of fame just three years after their debut album. Much less did Kurt realize he'd be one of the most renound music producers on the planet. 

Shortly after they reached mega-stardom with Unplugged, Nirvana seemed like they were unstoppable, that was until the cracks began to show in the recording of their fourth album. "Kurt was really depressed...and snippy," Guitarist Pat Smear would later explain. "He would be really uncooperative, and yell at us for stuff we did "wrong" in his eyes, and sometimes he wouldn't show up to practice at all. But then we'd call him and we discovered he was recording a solo album with Michael Stipe, and then afterwards we'd discover he was shooting up with Kristen...we knew the band was in the home-stretch. Everyone did." 

"I didn't want to believe it," Drummer Dave Grohl, now more known for The Foo Fighters said. "But Kurt didn't like being in a band with us anymore, he resented the very fibers of our being and what Nirvana had become. He said as much in an interview with rolling stone at the start of that very year." 

His marriage to ex-wife and lead singer of Hole Courtney Love was similarly fraught. The two were in the middle of divorce proceedings when Nirvana was recording their final album. "He was impossible," Said Love of the final months of their marriage, that was finalized in March of 1994. "He fought me every step of the way for custody of Frances," It is worth noting, that Courtney had failed to pass a mental evaluation that declared her an unfit parent, but that wasn't revealed until the divorce finalized in March of that year.

But nothing could've prepared them for his suicide attempt. By this point, him and Courtney had started living separately, and he was living with then-girlfriend Kristen Pfaff. "When I got home that day," Tearfully recalled his wife Kristen Pfaff. "I was wondering why the greenhouse was open...when I see him lying on the floor..with his kit around him, and the shotgun right next to him. He was trying to reach it, but since he was so doped up, i was able to snatch it out of his reach and took him to the hospital."

After that incident, Kurt was never really the same. "He'd come into work and would do his thing, without much fight since he was on anti-depressants by this point, he wasn't as skinny as he used to be since getting off heroin, but he clearly wasn't eating much. But, when he was especially mad, he would shout and rant about how he shouldn't have been there and how he should've...well, you know what." Kris Novoselic would recall in an interview with Kerrang in their June 1997 issue "NIRVANA IS DEAD, LONG LIVE THE FOO FIGHTERS!".

When asked about the incident by Barbara Walters a year later, Kurt would tell her to fuck off to much media backlash. "It was so invasive," He recalled in a 2012 interview with Creem Magazine. "I was in such a bad place, and she was asking if I used heroin in front of my daughter...I was a year sober by that point, who the fuck asks that! Especially on television!"  

Once recording for the final album ended in August 1994, Kurt had married former bassist of Hole and bassist of Janitor Joe, Kristen Pfaff in June of that year to much scandal. Since Courtney publically slandered them both in an interview with People that year accusing Kurt of cheating on her. Which, was not entirely unfounded. 

"We had been exchanging gifts right up until his divorce to Courtney, and some pretty flirty letters...but we never did anything physical," Later recalled Kristen Pfaff. "It wasn't until he left her in December 93' that he asked me out. And by the time we lived together, the proceedings were finalized...I don't get why she made such a big deal out of it. Jealousy? Ego? I'm not sure." 

The bands fourth and final album released in March 1995, self titled NIRVANA went off without a hitch, the lead single You Know You're Right heading to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 within days and being the most played single on MTV to date. Dave Grohl doesn't recall the single fondly though, neither do his other bandmates. "It was the last song we recorded before Kurt tried to take his life...and if he had his way...It would've been our last. It's basically a suicide note in song form damn it just read the lyrics!"

Kurt would go onto focus on other things that year, mainly, producing Janitor Joe's third album "Inhospitable" and his first critically acclaimed  acoustic-grunge solo album "Montage Of Heck" in June of that year. The lead singles being a catatonically poppy track, "Do Re Mi (Don't Rape Me)", and "Half The Man I Used To Be". 

Rolling Stone would declare MOH record of the year, reviewer Jim Derogatis giving it a 5/5 stars, and it would sell 1 million within the first week. Inhospitable would go on to sell double platinum, launching Janitor Joes career to the mainstream. Kurt was on top of the world...and he was losing touch with his band in the process.

"By this point, it became obvious that Kurt had outgrown Nirvana," their manager Danny Goldeberg would say two months after their infamous breakup. "And he wanted nothing to do with them, and he showed that in the only way he knew how."

By the time they were playing at Big Day Out, their self titled had gone triple platinum, and You Know You're Right had been the most played single in the country along with Buddy Holly by Weezer and Wonderwall by Oasis. Pat Smear had been an official member of the band for two and a half years, and they were close peers with Green Day, a band that had blown up in August of 1994 on MTV with their critically acclaimed album Dookie and their single Basket Case. 

Green Day was a supporting act for them, and until this concert Billie Joe had considered himself a good friend of Cobain. But by this point the public perception of him had begun to sour. In interviews, he would barely talk, seemingly permanently unimpressed with the interviewer. "I wasn't on mood stabilizers yet," he would later say on Jimmy Kimmel in 2014, after Nirvana was inducted into the rock hall of fame. "So I acted like an asshole, and people were like...'Man, He's an asshole.' And they were right." 

"There was this sort of, growing consensus that he was stuck up, and pretentious, and that he was getting a big head. And there was some truth to it! But in retrospect I think I'm able to say that...he just didn't know how to manage his ego yet. He was becoming much more confident in himself and his abilities- more than he ever had been- and rightfully so, he's a genius....but it was really making him, and sorry for being mean here, making him act like a stuck up son of a bitch," Billie Joe Armstrong would recall in the July 2004 issue of Kerrang. He had reunited with Kurt to produce American Idiot and was asked about the incident that lead to their falling out.

In the practice leading up to the infamous performance, Dave and Krist had noted his increasingly sour demeanor. "He was mad, like, madder than usual, and he would show up all in a huff with his green hair barely even brushed, and he would cuss us out when we got a note wrong." Dave recalled. "It really chapped his ass that Foo Fighters was doing well and cutting into my schedule, so he took it out on me, by, well, hitting me with his guitar," Foo Fighters had released their debut album in June of the year prior, and it had caused some controversy due to the song "I'll Stick Around" being speculated to be about Kurt, when in reality it was about Courtney. 

Nirvana had been playing as usual, when at the end, they were playing Teen Spirit, when halfway through the song, Kurt snapped. "This song is so fucking insipid and vapid, I hate it, I hate this concert, I hate the shitty band I have to play with, I hate Green Day, and I hate this FUCKING CROWD!" People jeered, only fueling Kurt to destroy his black stratocaster in an epic fit of rage. He hurled the remains at Pat Smear, who would get knocked over, and he'd shout into the mic. "THIS BAND IS DONE! GRUNGE IS DEAD! EVERYONE GO THE FUCK HOME!" Krist would chase after him as he ran off stage, but that would only result in him getting punched in the stomach as Kurt ran off. 

"It was completely off the rails!" A teenage audience member would later say on MTV two hours after the incident. "He was so angry, and, and he broke his guitar, and told us to fuck off and that grunge was dead and he ran off! He was totally nuts!"  

Billie Joe and Tre Cool of Green Day were backstage when it all went down, and they had heard what he had said, and Billie went to confront Kurt, when according to them both, they got into a fist fight. "Dave had to break it up, and Kurt was crazy like "You're fucking nothing! You're fucking nothing!" all mad and shit. He thought Green Day were a bunch of posers," Pat Smear recalled. "And that quiet moment, in the aftermath was when the band itself broke up. We just kind of looked at each other like 'yeah, we aren't gonna recover from this.' and we packed our stuff, and went home." 

So angered by the experience, both Billie Joe and Dave Grohl wrote songs about it, "Platypus (I Hate You)" off of Nimrod (which is what Billie Joe had called Kurt before the infamous fistfight) and the lead single off the Foo Fighters best selling album, The Colour And The Shape "Monkey Wrench" are both written about Cobain. 

Platypus is much more direct than Monkey Wrench in its lyrical contents, calling Kurt a "dickhead, fuckface, cock-smoking motherfucking asshole..." etc. with the chorus just being "Cause I hate you!" and the chorus of Monkey Wrench containing the lyrics "Don't wanna be your monkey wrench / One more indecent accident / I'd rather leave than suffer this / I'll never be your monkey wrench."

Afterwards, Kurt had faced major media scrutiny for the way he handled the breakup. "If you don't like it? Too bad! Nirvana is not coming back and you all need to move the fuck on and find a new rock savior. I'm done giving a shit about Nirvana." He said in a Rolling Stone interview days after the incident. 

Kurt would end up becoming a major record producer afterwards. He had produced "Reject All American" for Bikini Kill, and later collaborated again with Kathleen Hanna for her band "Le Tigre"s debut album. His first major production jobs being the albums Return To Saturn and Rocksteady for No Doubt, Rocksteady being produced in collaboration with The Neptune's. 

"Kurt and Pharell are amazing producers," Gwen Stefani would recall in an interview with MTV in 2007. "Kurt really knows how to bring the grit and authenticity, but Pharell balances him out by bringing, ykno, the polish and the shine, and its like a perfect harmony between them," Pharell would speak highly of Kurt, citing him as one of the best producers he had ever worked with. 

Later on he would work with the likes of Lady Gaga for "Born This Way", Rhianna on "Talk That Talk" (In collaboration with Calvin Harris), ironically enough, he put aside his differences with Dave to produce the Foo's fourth album "There Is Nothing Left To Lose" (which later on, Dave said working with Kurt inspired the name of the album.) and Oasis' final album "Dig Out Your Soul" before their own infamous breakup. Though his biggest success would be Green Day's "American Idiot".

Initially, Kurt didn't want to work with Green Day, still sore about the BDO fight. But it wasn't until longtime friend Kathleen Hanna came over to his house with a CD of demo's that she convinced him to produce the album. "I heard it, and I was like...fuck me, this is incredible! and Kathleen was all smug like Seee??? I love her, honest, wouldn't have done this without her," He would later recall in a Rolling Stone 2005 interview. 

They would but heads at first, but Kurt would eventually apologize to Billie Joe, explaining why he had so much animosity towards him in the first place. "I was jealous," Kurt explained in a Vogue interview in 2009. "I was so jealous of them, and I felt like I was pigeonholed into this genre I didn't want to be the face of anymore, and to me he looked like this free dove, and I was a chicken trapped in a coop. I took it out on him, all of them...and really I shouldn't have." 

But the woes wouldn't end for Kurt, after achieving acclaim for his work on American Idiot, he would move to LA to be able to work more directly with the stars, which landed him in some trouble considering, Courtney lived there.

While on a night out in 2005, Courtney and Kurt would get into an all out brawl outside the Whiskey-A-Go-Go. Courtney was very inebriated, and seeing him had sent her into an all out rage. "The fading rock-star had earlier that month been fighting for visitation rights for her daughter Frances, now 12. But after multiple failed drug tests and mental evaluations she was repeatedly denied." TMZ reported that afternoon. 

His troubles wouldn't stop there. Next year he was seen on a cruise party making out with Paris Hilton, and his wife Kristen Pfaff would be seen getting handsy with Christian Slater. "We were in desperate need of couples therapy. And regular therapy to be honest," She would later recall in an interview with Cosmopolitan in 2012. "I was upset that he was working too much, he was upset that Janitor Joe was touring alot and that my solo career was taking off, that coupled with our new baby...it was a complete mess," The baby she was referring to was their youngest son, Elijah, Cobain's third child. 

After the Paris incident in 2006, later that year he would be arrested for public intoxication charges and drunk driving. He was given a mental evaluation and was mandated to stay six weeks in a mental hospital to recuperate. "I was apparently taking the wrong medicine this whole time!" Kurt would say in a 2007 interview with Blender Magazine. "My psychiatrist, she took one look at me and my pills and said "No wonder you're freaking out! you are taking the wrong shit!" and I was like...ohhhhhh! That explained so much for me, its like a shroud was lifted."

Kurt was very close to leaving music all together in 2009, until a producer friend of his had introduced him to Lady Gaga. "He gave me this CD for The Fame, and at first I dismissed it as more MySpace Krunk trash, but i listened to the first track, and I was really impressed...but it was Poker Face that lit a fire under my ass." Kurt would go on to say in 2011 in an interview at the VMA's. "If it weren't for Ange [Gaga] I wouldn't be here today, her take on music was so fresh and new, it pulled me out of a rut creatively,"  Gaga had long been a fan of Nirvana, so when presented the opportunity to work with Cobain by the heads at Interscope, she enthusiastically agreed.

"It was like a guardian angel had shown up, and when we were in the studio together, it was like complete magic. Both of us just making complete unabashed magic and chaos." He and Gaga were the primary producers on Born This Way, along with several others like Red One and Paul Blair aka DJ White Shadow. They recorded it all over, from Abbey Road to Germano, to Vegas, to Paris, you named it, they probably recorded there. It would go on to become one of Gaga's most acclaimed albums, and Gaga would go on to thank him at the 2011 VMA's during one of her acceptance speeches. Kurt would preform with her on stage for You And I while she was in Drag as Jo Calderone. 

When in 2013 Nirvana was chosen to be put in the rock hall of fame, Kurt knew what he had to do. "I had to make amends, It was non negotiable." He said on Jimmy Kimmel after they were inducted. "I was reminded, of just where I had come from, and I had the realization, that...If it weren't for these guys sitting right next to me, I would be nothing!" Kurt had called all them up before rehearsals were to take place, and he gathered them at a diner there in Los Angeles. "And he just spilled his guts out to us like a total sap, he apologized for alienating us and being so mean and how things ended, and he wanted to start things on a new page," Dave would later recall for an interview in Kerrang in 2015. 

Nirvana would shortly reunite after their induction, leading a reunion tour to go along with their greatest hits album in 2016.