When I think of my life in NYC 20 years ago, it was a different time, a different place and I was a different person. The world in April 1994 was largely pre-Internet, a time when pagers still ruled. In NYC, the looming Disney-fication of Times Square was underway, the nightlife was still world-class, and the last of the weird and wild days on the West Side of Manhattan were being had.I was a raging lunatic – working hard and playing harder in the crossroads of the world.

Today, the time, the place and this person couldn’t be more different. But one day from back in the day is frozen in time…

*****

I was never in the office early, save for the few times that I slept in it. My dawn patrol on April 8, 1994 at the pop-culture factory otherwise known as MTV’s Times Square, where I was a production associate/writer, was completely and utterly my fault.

I had turned 27 two days before and went hard – Bukowski, Keith Richards kind of hard.I subsequently missed the first seven hours of my workday on April 7.When they finally sent someone to check to see if I was alive, and when I finally got there, I threw up, twice.

Back in the office at 7:30 AM on Friday April 8, 1994, I had to write 12 day-part segments, hopefully get a quick nap in, go to the studio for three hours, come back and write more scripts for Tuesday that I didn’t get a chance to write on Monday because I was going to Boston to see Pearl Jam at the Bahston Gah-den on Sunday.

It was a potential 16-hour shit storm, all of my own making, still sweating out the poison and somehow thinking of the next party.

I chugged coffee, smoked cigs and choked a bat or three in the stairwell that our office shared with the creative crews from The State and Beavis and Butthead. It was the height of the power of MTV, and the people I worked with smoked and drank and were somehow influencing an entire generation.

By 8:30AM, the scripts were coming out quick and a little darker than usual, but all was on point. I was completely finished by noon and god dammit, if I didn’t find six new ways to make to make fun of Ace of Base and insert a joke or two about R. Kelly’s ability to hold it a long time (this is way before the urine fetish became public).

Crashing hard from the caffeine and detox, I set the alarm clock on my desk for 20 minutes, shut and locked the office door.

Then the phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Donnelly?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s Jack (not his name) Fuck man, I’m so happy you are there.”

“What’s up?”

“Cobain’s dead.”

“Shit…Ah fuck man, you sure?”

“Yeah man. I’m sure. Suicide.”

“What? He killed him…”

“You need to get into my office, take the two bags of tapes that are next to my desk and get them to National.”

“Fuck, ok. Let me see if my keys work, hold on.”

“You gotta get in there man. It’s all the footage from last month when he overdosed and went into the coma in Italy. It’s all of the archives, everything that would make airtime are in those two bags.”

My hands are shaking. I feel like I’m going to puke. My keys don’t work in the lock.

“My keys don’t work!My fucking keys don’t work!”

“Use your Viacom ID to slide between lock and the door. You can do this dude!”

I take out my ID and with one swipe, I’m in.

“I’m in!”

There are bags of tapes all over the office, surrounding the desk. I finally locate what I am looking for, thanks to yellow Post-it stapled to the bag.

“Got it!”

“Go! They are waiting for you!”

I hang up the phone and as soon I pick up the larger of the two bags and make it more than halfway across the expansive office, it bottoms out. Tapes spill all over the floor.Some of them are labeled and in their case, some are not and made a hard landing. This is not good…

All of the offices are locked and finding a bag to fit these tapes seems impossible. I run back to Jack’s office, do the ID card trick, spy a bag roughly the same size that’s tucked in the corner, dump out its contents and run back over to the Cobain pile.I throw it all, covered and uncovered, into the new bag.

With the lead news story of the world in my two hands, I run towards the closed elevator door.I wait, then opt for the stairs.I fly through our stairwell smoking area, down four flights and hit the grand lobby of 1515 Broadway for the 44^th Street exit.

Running down the escalator, I blow through the hulking revolving door and hit the street, straight into a misting rain falling down on a moving sea of humanity. Wailing sirens competed with jail house prophets on soap boxes spewing race-baiting venom and dressed like an angry intergalactic Sun Ra Orchestra, and finally a large, long bearded whacko holding a huge sign with the flames of hell flaring on it, that simply read “Repent or Perish.”

Oh, and there’s not a fucking cab in sight.

National Video Center is on 42^ndStreet, way west (10th Ave.) – I mean, almost in Jersey, west. I start walking south on Broadway to the Forty Deuce, make a right at the huge yellow billboard that says “Everybody” and speed walk past shuttered doors of the Liberty, Harris, Empire and Selwyn Theater.

When I hit the long dethroned King of Pizza and Bill’s Famous Gyros and Souvlaki, I startedwalking backwards facing oncoming traffic scanning the eastern horizon cutting through the skyline for a cab.

Nothing yellow with a light shining on top of it.

At Eighth Ave. and the Port Authority Bus Terminal, the rain begins to harden as street urchins try to get me to make a detour into Peep Land and Show World. I finally give up on hitching a ride mid-block as I hit the Army Navy store.

My slow jog morphed into a panic-driven sprint.Past the curbside-drunks that surround the Hotel Amsterdam to Ninth Ave., I make the light, cross the packed intersection and motor past the West Bank Cafe. National Video Center is a half block away and in my standing on edge crosshairs.

My pants, shirt and head are drenched from the rain and sweat. I can hear my heartbeat in my ears. My breath could kill a cat and I’m freezing.I approach the front door of National Video, where an MTV News staffer runs straight at me. She has a crazed look in her eyes and shoots the messenger with, “What fucking took you so long?”

Looking square in her bulging eyes, I gave her the crazy Irishman death look, turn my back and begin to walk away when I am stopped in my tracks by the news authority of Generation X, Kurt Loder. His sober delivery and matter of fact-ness was never clearer when he said:

“Hi, I’m Kurt Loder with an MTV News special report. The body of Nirvana leader Kurt Cobain was found in a house in Seattle on Friday morning dead of an apparently self-inflicted shotgun blast to the head. Police found what is said to be a suicide note at the scene but not yet have divulged its contents. Cobain, who was 27, had reportedly been missing for several days.”

Loder went on to say that an electrician found Cobain’s body and before calling the police, he called a radio station to say that he found Cobain dead.

Shocked, exhausted and on the verge of tears, I stepped out the door onto the sidewalk, leaned against a pole, lit a cigarette, took a drag, closed my eyes and started to think. Elvis overdosed. Lennon was assassinated. My generation’s equal blew his head off. Whoa. Despite the methodology, fame killed Cobain, just as it did Elvis and Lennon.

I identified with Nirvana from the jump thanks to Matt Pinfield on my local alternative radio station 106.3 WHTG. In the last week of August of 1991, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was released to radio and by Halloween, my first copy of Nevermind was worn out.

Getting sneaked in the backdoor at Roseland for their November 15, 1993 blowout two nights before they filmed their seminal version of MTV Unplugged is still one of the best nights of my life.

The passion, balls and angst was as much me as it was Kurt Cobain. We were the same age, from places that lacked employment opportunities and had a mutual love for the melodies of The Beatles and the power of The Ramones. Slow-fast-fast-slow, I got what Cobain was saying from the get.

Perverse delight enveloped me when I remembered all of the times that we would walk into a commercial fishermen bar in my hometown or a tourist trap in Times Square and play “Territorial Pissings” and “Rape Me” on the jukebox. Nothing can provoke a bar to the precipice of anarchy like Nirvana, or fill a car with greater road-rage-worthy anthems.

I pushed myself off the pole I was leaning on and made my way back east of 42^nd Street, where every building was closed for the long gentrification process, spelled out on the marquees of the boarded up theaters where there were now messages of inspiration, change or thought provocation.

On a former porn palace it read: “What Urge Will Save Us Now That Sex Won’t,” on another, “Men Don’t Protect You Anymore.”

Lonely, gray and emotionally compounded by my immediate environment, the tears began to fall.

But I looked up at a 100-year-old blighted building with a decrepit marquee that made perfect sense to me in that moment, “Use What Is a Culture to Change It Quickly.”

By the time I got to 43^rd Street I had blocked out all of the noise and insanity around me. I was somewhere else when I entered 1515 Broadway and stood silently on the up escalator, looking down, not making eye contact with anyone.

When I got back to my office, my producer was waiting for me, thinking that I had just arrived for work.

“What are you just getting here?”He asked. “Why are you wet?”

“You have no idea.” I said.

None of us knew what kind of changes the entire planet was to undertake after Cobain’s death. Looking back at that day 20 years later, it’s safe to say that everything changed. At 27, he didn’t give himself or his art a chance to be the agent of change or be the man he wanted to be by age 47.

It is 20 years later. And it is still so fucking sad.

Postscript–The weekend in Boston was a mess, Pearl Jam in their first show since Cobain’s passing,was historic. One of the greatest, rawest performances I’ve ever seen. Mid-show, a Masshole of the female persuasion put gum in my (then) full head of hair. By the time of my hazy return to work on Tuesday, my head was shaved and wouldn’t you know it, it never grew completely back.

***

Tim Donnelly is a contributing editor at Relix. Over the years he has written cover stories on Pearl Jam, Trey Anastasio and Bonnaroo.