“I Had Been Trying To Reach Him”: Neil Young Regretted Not Helping This Troubled Rocker in Time

No one understands the plight of being a rock ‘n’ roll star quite like a fellow rocker, which is why Neil Young regretted not helping out a young musician and face of the 1990s grunge movement when he saw that the 27-year-old was struggling. Sadly, Young never got a chance to connect before the musician took his life in April 1994.

That musician, of course, was Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain. While Cobain’s death rattled the global music community, it sent heavy shockwaves through Young, who Cobain quoted in his suicide letter.

Neil Young Always Regretted Not Reaching Out Sooner

Kurt Cobain’s tragically premature death coincided with a paradox so often felt by rockstars of his caliber and celebrity. On the one hand, his band, Nirvana, was enjoying the height of their fame. But on the other hand, the media and critics were vilifying Cobain for his inability—what they must have perceived as an unwillingness—to handle the immense pressure of stardom.

“He had been taking a lot of heat for canceling some shows,” Young recalled in his 2012 memoir Waging Heavy Peace. “I, coincidentally, had been trying to reach him through our offices to tell him that I thought he was great, and he should do exactly what he thought he should do, and f*** everybody else. He was not just an entertainer; he was an artist and songwriter. There is a big difference. I know him and recognized him for who he was. I wanted to…tell him only to play when he felt like it. And that would be good enough. Be true.”

When Cobain died, he left a note that quoted Young’s lyric from, “Hey Hey, My My.”It’s better to burn out than to fade away. “When he died and left that note, it struck a deep chord inside of me,” Young wrote. “It f***ed with me.”

A Controversial But Thought-Provoking Sentiment

Despite the distinctive weight of Neil Young’s regret about not helping the Nirvana frontman, Kurt Cobain’s suicide letter wasn’t the first time a musician had directly referenced Young’s controversial lyric from “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black).” John Lennon denounced the lyric in one of his final interviews before his death in 1980. “I hate it,” Lennon said. “It’s better to fade away like an old soldier than burn out. I don’t appreciate worship of dead Sid Vicious or of dead James Dean or of dead John Wayne. It’s the same thing. Sid Vicious died for what? So that we might rock?”

“I mean, it’s garbage, you know,” Lennon continued. “If Neil Young admires that sentiment so much, why doesn’t he do it? Because he sure as hell faded away and came back many times, like all of us. No, thank you. I’ll take the living and the healthy.” Tragically, Lennon would die weeks later after Mark David Chapman shot him in front of the Dakota in New York City.

Young pushed back against Lennon’s sentiments in his 2012 memoir. “People have asked me about that line since I first sang it in 1978. I wrote it referring to the rock and roll star, meaning that if you go while you are burning hottest, then that is how you are remembered, at the peak of your powers forever. That is rock and roll. At sixty-five, it seems that I may not be at the peak of my rock and roll powers. But that is not for sure.”

“The idea that I should have died earlier is not the point,” he continued. “There really is more to life than its charged peak because other things continue to grow and develop long afterward, enriching and growing the spirit and soul.”

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