Just a little over 25 years ago, Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain took his own life, on April 5, 1994. Exactly one week later, on April 12, Cobain’s widow, Courtney Love, issued her sophomore album with her alt-rock band Hole. Cobain’s last words to Love before his death were, reportedly, “Whatever happens, you made a great album.” Says Nirvana’s manager, Danny Goldberg, “That was Live Through This. And it is a great album.”

Goldberg, who just released the new memoir Serving the Servant: Remembering Kurt Cobain, looks back and marvels to Yahoo Entertainment, “It’s so baroque and crazy. So many of the things that happened over those years were so dramatic that if a screenwriter wrote them, you would say they were not believable. And that’s one of them. But that’s what happened.”

Live Through This was a critical smash upon its release amid the chaos and tragedy of Love’s personal life. It was named the No. 1 album of ’94 by Spin, the Village Voice, and Rolling Stone, with the latter declaring, “Love delivers punk not only as insinuating as Nirvana’s but as corrosive as the Sex Pistols’. More significantly, Live Through This may be the most potent blast of female insurgency ever committed to tape.” Musician even wrote, “Cobain’s much-discussed, little heard other half finally gets the chance to escape gossip-column purgatory and succeeds with flying colors. … Courtney Love’s foul, funny eloquence cuts through all the bulls*** with a mighty flourish.”

But despite all the accolades for Live Through This (and its follow-up, 1998’s Celebrity Skin, which earned four Grammy nominations), Love has been vilified for years by Nirvana fanatics and conspiracy theorists, who have accused her of everything from getting Cobain hooked on heroin, to being an opportunist riding on his coattails, to having him ghost-write Live Through This, to even conspiring to murder him. But in Serving the Servant, Goldberg, who also managed Hole for a while, paints Love in a surprisingly positive light. In his Yahoo interview, he calls her a “major creative force in her own right” and first and foremost emphasizes that she and Cobain truly adored each other.

“It was very, very clear to me, very early on, because Kurt just told me how much in love with her he was, and he was really upset when they were first together that there were some people around the band that didn’t honor that, and thought that it was some fly-by-night, rock ‘n’ roll fling,” Goldberg says. “I knew these were people that were in love, and that they were not conventional people, they were artists, and they came from damaged backgrounds, and they both developed drug problems, but they were in love. So that was the core thing about it, is that he loved her. No one made him love her. She didn’t control him. He was incredibly willful. You couldn’t get Kurt to do anything he didn’t want to do. He had no problem saying no to her, but he also learned certain things from her.”

Goldberg was there the night when Cobain and Love first hooked up, backstage after a Nirvana gig at the Metro club in Chicago; Love was actually in the Windy City to visit another ‘90s rock star, her then-boyfriend Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins, but fate intervened and the rest was alt-rock history.

“When she got there, [Corgan] was with some other woman. She knew Nirvana was in town, and as she said, she and Kurt had been kind of flirting with each other from a distance over the last year or two, and I remember being in the dressing room after she said hi to me. And then, like five minutes later, she was in the back of the dressing room, sitting on Kurt’s lap. And Courtney is a few inches taller than Kurt, so it was a little bit of an unusual visual, but they both had this look on their face like the proverbial cat that swallowed the canary. They were each quite pleased with themselves for being in that position. And they were together from that night onward for the rest of Kurt’s life.”

As for that urban legend that Cobain wrote or co-wrote Live Through This, Goldberg is quick to insist that is “absolutely not true,” and even argues that Love was an influence on Cobain: “She was extraordinary lyricist in her own right; I think with a [Nirvana] song like ‘Pennyroyal Tea,’ you can feel some of Courtney’s influence in explaining certain things to him about what she had been through.”

Elaborating on that specific conspiracy theory, Goldberg says, “Obviously, musically, [Kurt] was a great inspiration to everybody that was around him, including Courtney and [Hole guitarist] Eric [Erlandson] and the other members of Hole. … He would sometimes rehearse with them, play bass. He recommended Scott Litt to mix Live Through This because he was so happy with what Scott had done on remixing the singles on In Utero. And they were married, and played their music for each other. …But it was a marriage of two artists, and people who didn’t get it I thought were foolish.”

Goldberg tells an amusing anecdote to prove his point. “Kurt was very covetous of good songs, and he was competitive in that way. There was a little club date that Courtney at some point did, an acoustic show at [Los Angeles's] Café Largo … and she did ‘Pennyroyal Tea,’ before [Nirvana’s] In Utero came out, and it’s an incredible song. … She could sing the s*** out of it. The next day, Kurt called me and said, ‘Listen, Courtney is thinking of recording “Pennyroyal Tea,” and don’t encourage that! That’s a Nirvana song. I’m not giving her that song!’ He wanted to keep all the best songs that he wrote for Nirvana. So, Courtney wrote [the Live Through This track] ‘Doll Parts.’ If Kurt had written ‘Doll Parts,’ he wouldn’t have let Courtney record it. Believe me.”

And as for the speculation that Love could in any way be blamed for Cobain’s death, Goldberg believes that his love for his wife and their daughter, Frances Bean, actually extended his life — and he said so when he delivered a eulogy at the private Cobain memorial organized by Love. “A Rolling Stone writer was there, and that’s the one quote that made it into the press of what I said,” he recalls. “I wanted to just say how much [Kurt] loved [Courtney], and so, according to Rolling Stone, I said that if it weren’t for how much he loved her, he might’ve left us earlier.”

Looking back, Goldberg understands why Love was and continues to be so polarizing, but in the end, he knows she left her mark with Live Through This, which still holds up a quarter-century later. In 2008, the BBC said of the record, “In 1994 and the years that followed, tragedy and controversy seemed to overshadow everything Courtney Love touched. Thankfully, with every year that passes, it becomes easier to put the record’s emotional baggage to one side and appraise it on the strength of its songs.” And just last month, Live Through This placed No. 4 on Rolling Stone’s 50 Greatest Grunge Albums list — just three spots behind Nirvana’s Nevermind.

“They could do stupid things when they were stoned, and Courtney could do stupid things more loudly, because she’s more loud; Kurt was more quiet. I’m not claiming that she was perfect or a saint or anything like that,” Goldberg says. “But I like her. I think she’s a great artist. I think her legacy speaks for itself. I think there’s many, many hundreds of women who were aspiring to become artists because they saw that Courtney could rock in a way that very few women could. You can count of the fingers of your hands the women that have been able to compete at that level in rock ‘n’ roll.”

Watch Danny Goldberg’s full Yahoo Entertainment interview about Cobain’s life and career below.

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This article originally ran on Yahoo Entertainment.

April 5 marks the 25th anniversary of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain’s tragic suicide, so it is a somber time for Nirvana’s onetime manager, music industry veteran Danny Goldberg, who was known as the “Kurt Whisperer” from 1990 to 1994. During that brief whirlwind period, Cobain became the world’s biggest and most unlikely rock star as Nirvana made the leap from indie Sub Pop to major label Geffen, recorded and released Nevermind, followed up with the landmark album In Utero, and recorded their legendary MTV Unplugged session. During that time, Cobain’s personal life went through just as much upheaval, as he married and had a baby with Hole’s Courtney Love — and, along with Love. battled heroin addiction — before shooting himself at age 27.

Sitting with Yahoo Entertainment for a candid and lengthy chat about his time with Cobain, Goldberg — whose memoir, Serving the Servant: Remembering Kurt Cobain, just came out — sadly recalls the last time he saw Cobain in person, at an intervention staged about a week before the singer’s death.

“I was in New York, and Courtney called and asked if I would come and be part of an intervention. She was really worried about Kurt, said it was the worst she’d ever seen him and so forth,” Goldberg says. Janet Billig Rich, another manager at Gold Mountain Entertainment who worked closely with both Nirvana and Hole, “found some dude who had been part of interventions before, a 12-step person — the theory being that someone who had just been around that would a little gravitas to it. It’s so hard to know it’s going to work, and you just get advice from people, and it’s a lot of guesswork involved.”

When Goldberg, Billig, and “maybe half a dozen people” flew in from both New York and Los Angeles and descended upon Cobain and Love’s Seattle home, Cobain was upset about what he perceived as an ambush. “Kurt was really stoned, and we went to the house, and it was weird, and he was not happy, and feeling invaded by people lecturing him on how he should behave — and who would?”

As Goldberg reveals in his book, Cobain was especially upset that Billig flushed some of his drug stash down the toilet. But the people in Cobain’s home that day had the best intentions. “My message was just, ‘Whatever is bothering you, you can’t make a good decision the way you’re strung-out. Get clean, and then whatever you want to do, I’ll help you do whatever you want to do. But you can’t make any good decisions this way. It is no good future.’ Just the typical anti-drug, get-clean plea,” says Goldberg.

Danny Goldberg and Kurt Cobain at the 1992 VMAs. (Photo: Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic, Inc)

In Serving the Servant, Goldberg expresses some regret about how the situation was handled. “I was in a hurry to get home, and I let an impatience and brittleness get into my tone. That sounds like a subtle thing, but it’s the whole ball game when you’re communicating with somebody. It’s not always the words; it’s how you say them,” Goldberg explains. “I didn’t want to miss the plane to L.A.; I’d been away from my family in New York, and this was sort of an extra stop. Otherwise maybe, maybe if I’d stayed another hour, I would’ve thought of some intelligent thing to say, or got him to take a walk. You know, you just go over in your head: ‘Is there something I could’ve done?’”

Feeling bad about that had transpired during the ill-fated intervention, Goldberg phoned Cobain when he got home to try and make things right. “I just said, ‘Look, I’m so sorry if I came across as judgmental. You know I love you and I just want you to be happy, and I’m just trying to be helpful.’” Knowing that Cobain was immensely fond of Goldberg’s toddler daughter Katie (“Kurt loved her, and they used to play a lot; before Frances was born, it was almost like a practice kid for him”), he put Katie on the phone with Cobain, thinking her sweet precocious would cheer him up. “She told him that she was upset that Frances had pinched her the last time they were together, and could Kurt please talk to her about that? And he got back on — and he still sounded really just depressed and wiped-out. I just told him I loved him, and that was it.” It was the final time that Goldberg and Cobain spoke.

A quarter-century later, Cobain’s death still sparks a surprising amount of anger among both his fans and friends. Some people — including Everett True, a music journalist who covered Nirvana over the course of their career — were even angry over the eulogy Goldberg gave at Cobain’s private memorial, thinking it was too cheerful and positive. And while Goldberg insists that he was never mad at Cobain, he understands where that fury is coming from.

“I think when someone commits suicide, a lot of people take it as an act of great hostility to the survivors, especially the family members. That is a very common response, and there were certainly people that I spoke to, very, very close to Kurt — like [Nirvana bassist] Krist [Novoselic] and [Hole guitarist] Eric [Erlandson], for example — who just openly said, ‘How could he do that? What’s wrong with him? How could he do that to his daughter?’ And I respect those emotions. It doesn’t happen to be my emotions.

“I felt enormous grief, as I still do, but I just see it as a disease that no one can cure. 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. Nobody that any of us knew, and no one that he could find. It wasn’t like there weren’t efforts — the dozens of doctors, therapists, and so on, and maybe there was someone out there that could’ve helped him — but no one that we were ever able to find, or he was ever able to find.”

Suicide is an ongoing sad reality of the rock world, as evidenced at the recent deaths of the Prodigy’s Keith Flint, Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington, and Cobain’s ‘90s Seattle-scene peer, Chris Cornell of Soundgarden. Goldberg still doesn’t have any answers or closure. “I think it’s dangerous to try to pretend to understand things that really human beings don’t understand,” he says.

“Any time somebody kills themselves, I think people around them always wonder if there’s something they could’ve done. I don’t really believe there is, because certainly, I’ve read some, if you read what psychiatrists or philosophers, or priests, or rabbis, or yogis… people who’ve studied this stuff, nobody seems to have come up with any particular solution to it,” Goldberg muses. “I think there’s 50,000 Americans a year kill themselves. Three-quarters of them are male. Half of them are with guns. Hundreds of thousands of people a year. And then, people say, ‘Well, if somebody had a bad childhood, or if they were on drugs, or they’re prone to depression, they’re isolated,’ or one of the predictors… having relatives who killed themselves could be a predictor, and Kurt did have two uncles who killed themselves. But you could have 19 people with those same painful circumstances who don’t kill themselves, and one does, and why the one does and the other 19 don’t. … And what do you do about it with an adult who’s got all the legal rights of an adult, except beg them not to engage in self-destructive behavior, and to try to expose them to options for help?

“I’ll never get over it. Nobody who cared about him will. And no one who cared about less famous people who killed themselves will ever get over it. But it’s what happened, it’s part of the mystery of the human condition, and I love him anyway, I’m glad he was alive for those 27 years, I wish he hadn’t done it, but I’m glad I got to know him, and that the world got to know his music.”

Watch Danny Goldberg’s full Yahoo Entertainment interview about Cobain’s career, life, and death below.

Follow Lyndsey on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Amazon, Spotify.

This article originally ran on Yahoo Entertainment.