Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain passed away 25 years ago today. The singer died by suicide on April 5, 1994, though his body was not discovered until three days later, on April 8, when an electrician who’d been hired to install a security system found him in a greenhouse above the garage of his Seattle home.

Cobain was 27 years old when he died

Cobain was just 27 years old when he died, making him one of several prominent rock stars who have passed away at that age, including Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and Janis Joplin.

The rock star had struggled with heroin addiction for years before his death, and had recently escaped from a Los Angeles rehab family that he’d checked into after friends and family staged an intervention. He had been diagnosed with clinical depression as a teenager and may also have had bipolar disorder.

He would be 52 years old today

Cobain was born February 20, 1967, in Aberdeen, Washington. If he were alive today, he would be 52 years old. Courtney Love, who was married to Cobain when he died, is 54 years old now, and their only daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, is 26 years old.

Nirvana’s former manager reflects on working with the band

A few days before the anniversary of Cobain’s death, Nirvana’s former manager Danny Goldberg released a new book, Serving the Servant, where he talks about the time he spent working with the band that turned grunge into a global phenomenon.

Goldberg had both a professional and personal relationship with Cobain and was one of the people involved in the last intervention before the singer’s suicide. He says he still wonders if there is something he could have done or said that would have changed what happened a few days later. But he says he isn’t angry at Cobain for killing himself and instead sees him as someone who suffered from a disease.

“I felt enormous grief, as I still do, but I just see it as a disease that no one can cure,” Goldberg said in an interview with Yahoo! Entertainment. “If somebody died of cancer at 27, you wouldn’t be angry with them; you would just mourn them. And I think this was a mental illness that nobody knew how to cure.”  

Nirvana is one of the most popular bands of all time  

Nirvana only released three studio albums over the course of their career, but a relatively small creative output hasn’t kept them from becoming one of the most popular and enduring bands in music history. Nevermind, their breakthrough second album, is the 12th biggest selling rock album in history, according to Billboard, with nearly 10 million copies sold in the U.S. and 30 million worldwide. The band’s followup, In Utero, sold 15 million copies worldwide.

Though it’s been 25 years since Cobain’s death and the end of Nirvana as a band, they still make millions of dollars a year. In 2013, Nirvana sold 350,000 albums and had combined album and singles sales of $4.4 million, and the group’s music was streamed 72 million times. At the time, Cobain’s estate was valued at $450 million.

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