R.E.M frontman Michael Stipe has said he tried to get Nirvana's Kurt Cobain to record a duet with him in order to "save his life." Speaking to Interview Magazine, Stipe said he sent a plane ticket and driver to Cobain's home in Seattle to try and get him to come and record with him, but that the s...
R.E.M frontman Michael Stipe has said he tried to get Nirvana‘s Kurt Cobain to record a duet with him in order to “save his life.”
Speaking to Interview Magazine, Stipe said he sent a plane ticket and driver to Cobain‘s home in Seattle to try and get him to come and record with him, but that the singer wouldn’t leave his house.
Asked about his failed attempt to record with Cobain, Stipe said: “I was doing that to try to save his life. The collaboration was me calling up as an excuse to reach out to this guy. He was in a really bad place.”
He continued: “I constructed a project to try to snap Kurt out of a frame of mind. I sent him a plane ticket and a driver, and he tacked the plane ticket to the wall in the bedroom and the driver sat outside the house for 10 hours. Kurt wouldn’t come out and wouldn’t answer the phone.”
Stipe denied that the collaboration was part of an album, saying that it had “become part of mythology.”
The R.E.M frontman also opened up about when he suffered from bulimia in the early 1980s, describing it as “a complete meltdown.”
He said: “I went through this difficult time when we were making our third record where I kind of lost my mind. That’s when the bulimia kicked in. And that’s when I got really freaky.”
Stipe described the illness as “a control thing” and said it lasted for “about a year.
