I’ve been a diehard Seattle Mariners fan since the late 1980s-early 1990s. Ken Griffey Jr. was one of my teenage idols. Kurt was the other one.

Mariners’ fans wear a shirt with #24 on it (Griffey) that says on the back, “Your favorite player’s favorite player.” You could make a similar shirt for Kurt that says, “Your favorite musician’s favorite musician.”

It’s certainly possible that Kurt’s legacy was accelerated by his suicide. But while alive, he was unquestionably the thought leader of an entire generation. I still remember the first time I heard Nevermind and Smells Like Teen Spirit. My next door neighbor brought the CD over and put in on the boom box while we were playing dunk ball. We listened to it over and over for hours. We couldn’t believe that somebody could sing exactly what we were all thinking at the time. He changed music for me forever. When he died, I was so sad. I think so often even now of what he would be doing, what he would have written, how many times I would have seen him live. Addiction is a horrible thing.

But to my earlier point, look at what Eddie Vedder, Dave Grohl, Michael Stipe, David Bowie, Neil Young, Lana Del Rey, Billy Corgan, Chris Cornell, and so many others have all said about Kurt and his genius, charisma, and lyrics. He was so much to so many of us for the short time he lived in the public eye. His death was devastating.

He was not the guitar savant like Jimi (another Seattle son). He wasn’t the angsty teen grown into a cool adult like Eddie and Dave. He was a unicorn from a broken home in Aberdeen who changed the entire landscape of music almost overnight with an anthem and album who couldn’t handle the pressure of becoming deity to millions of kids knowing how flawed he was as a person.

R.I.P. Kurt