

It was January 12, 1992, a clear but chilly Sunday morning. For the generation smitten with him, it was an impassioned, powerful, and binding devotion-the kind of love that even as it begins you know is preordained to break your heart and to end like a Greek tragedy.

It was, remarkably, his first death, and only the earliest of many little deaths that would follow.

The first time he saw heaven came exactly six hours and fifty-seven minutes after the very moment an entire generation fell in love with him. It summed up both Nirvana’s “heavy” sound and the heft of 300-pound Tad Doyle. A slogan used by British concert promoters to describe Nirvana’s 1989 tour with the band Tad.
