‘I was still in my twenties and given to doing spontaneous things that I couldn’t explain’

Thank God that wouldn’t last long.

Rick McGinnis photographed/remembers Lollapalooza 1992:

They looked so young. I was only 28, but I could already feel my perception of myself as a fellow youth slipping away. A year earlier, when Nevermind was released and punk “broke,” it felt like a vindication of sorts, a sign that the culture me and my friends had championed for most of the ’80s had been acknowledged and accepted.

Two years later, when Kurt Cobain killed himself, I was thirty and under no illusion that the young people looking so dejected on the news were my peers. Which means that these photos of youth, lunging and convulsing in the brief certainty that injury was a minor consequence, were taken in the moment when I would realize I was no longer one of them.