Nirvana "Heart Shaped Box"

It was some kind of amazing teenage Rock N Roll fantasy come true. I was on the radio.

Better yet, after only a couple of weeks on the air, I was getting my own specialty program, and it started tonight! It was April 8th, 1994.

I'd been hired to work at a small, independent radio station near the Virginia/Tennessee border, as a part-time evening DJ. They needed someone to cover their nightly 2-hour call-in request program. But in the interview, I pitched the idea of having an Alternative specialty show.

It's kind of hard to imagine this, but in 1994 much of the country still didn't have radio stations for Modern Rock. Classic rock station were playing Soundgarden and Pearl Jam, but as "Alternative" got punkier and/or weirder, there wasn't a place for it on the radio dial yet.

And in Southwest Virginia, there was nowhere on the radio to hear Beck or Smashing Pumpkins or this up-and-coming little band called Green Day. But that was about to chance.

I was positively giddy at the notion that I'd be sharing this great music with an audience that (I believed, anyway) hungered for it. So I spent the week preparing and refining the playlist for my first program, Friday, April 8th.

Unfortunately, the pickings were pretty slim at the station. WABN was a Top 40 station, so the CD selection for Alternative tracks was limited. I used a ton of my own CDs, but there were still gaping holes between what we had, and what we needed.

Still, I had crafted a playlist for an amazing tour-de-force of a debut program, and bounded into the station Friday evening, ready to set the world on fire.

Rita, one of the station owners, stopped me dead in my tracks.

"PJ, Kurt Cobain is dead. I'm sorry."

She said "I'm sorry" with a seriousness that made it feel like I had known Cobain personally. That this loss was real and profound and near.

The wind was definitely taken out of my sails.

Instead of hitting the airwaves like a gleeful pirate, spreading musical anarchy to southwest Virginia, I now had the unpleasant duty of being the guy who came on the radio and told you about a terrible human tragedy.

Worse, we only had one Nirvana song in the building: "Heart Shaped Box." It had crossed over to Top 40, so the station owned a copy of that, and nothing else.

In the ensuing years, I would do a Cobain tribute on April 8th, and play songs from throughout the band's career: "Lithium," "About A Girl," "Sliver."

And I would play that one song that I had played (and replayed) on that sad day in 1994, that represented a small and feeble gesture in the face of incomprehensible sadness.