Punks at the Georgetown Roy Rogers fast-food restaurant in Washington, D.C., 1985. (Photo by Bettmann / Getty Images)
There are some people those of a certain age and a certain disposition, mostly middle class and white, often male who will always remember just where they were when they heard the news. I was working as a bike messenger in San Francisco that spring day in 1994, and I can still recall locking up outside City Hall, getting ready to make a court filing, when the boss came on the two-way radio and blurted it out. “It’s all over,” he said, delivering the grim news with an air of barely restrained, mordant self-satisfaction. “Kurt Cobain killed himself, put a shotgun in his mouth.”