by Max Wallace
From an early age, Kurt had an imaginary friend named Boddah, whom he introduced to his family and for whom he made them set an extra place at the table. When five-year-old Kurt was fingered by Aberdeen police as the prime suspect in the torture of a neighbor’s cat, Boddah was blamed. But, other than a brief period on Ritalin to control his hyperactivity—a condition that was to diminish naturally when his parents restricted his sugar intake—by most accounts, Kurt was a typical little boy.
The story goes that the clue to explain what brought this happy childhood to an abrupt crash can be found on a wall inside this house on East First Street—where our newfound friends have taken us on the first stop of our Cobain tour of Aberdeen. Here a young Kurt had allegedly scrawled on his bedroom wall, “I hate Mom, I hate Dad, it really makes me feel so sad,” after his parents’ relationship started to deteriorate and he heard them fighting almost constantly. The story, like many told by his mother in later years, may be apocryphal, but it has been constantly repeated by chroniclers attempting to explain his self-destructive path, each of whom traces his downward spiral to his parents’ 1975 divorce when Kurt was eight. It is the first of a long string of clichés that get trotted out, almost like a mantra, by those seeking pat answers for his eventual fate.
“Of course his parents’ divorce had an effect on Kurt,” says his grandfather. “What kid isn’t affected when their parents split up? But I think the real impact, which I guess you can blame on the divorce, didn’t come until a little later.”
Like almost everybody we talked to in Aberdeen, Leland paints a troubling picture of Kurt’s relationship with his mother. “She didn’t really have much use for him until he became famous. She didn’t want anything to do with him. Maybe she couldn’t handle him or something, although he wasn’t really that much trouble.”
When Don finally moved out of the house shortly after Kurt’s ninth birthday, Wendy invited her new boyfriend to move in, a man Kurt would later describe as a “mean, huge wife beater.” Taking on what he perceived to be the father role, the boyfriend would frequently smack Kurt for the smallest transgression. His mother’s failure to protect him caused the boy to withdraw into his own little world. Wendy later admitted that the man was “nuts—a paranoid schizophrenic.” At her new boyfriend’s suggestion, she soon let Kurt go live with his father, who had taken a small house across the lot from Leland and Iris in Montesano.
If Leland has harsh words for his daughter-in-law’s treatment of Kurt, he doesn’t spare his own son some of the blame. At first, he recalls, Kurt was extremely happy living with Don. “They used to go fishing and they were together all the time. They did all kinds of father-and-son things. Kurt was thriving. I don’t think I’m the only one who noticed that he was ecstatic to get away from his mother. And I think Kurt was about the happiest he’d ever been.”
That soon changed when Don met and married a woman who had two children of her own. Kurt’s new stepmother did everything she could to win his affection. But she wasn’t the problem.
“One thing I noticed early on after Donny married this woman was the way he treated Kurt different than her kids,” says Leland. “They could get away with just about anything, but if Kurt did something wrong, his father would give him a hard time. Donny never did want the divorce from Wendy, and I think he was afraid that the new one was going to leave him, so he bent over backwards to please her. She had a boy and a girl, and there could have been an apple sitting on a table and one of her kids could pick up the apple and take a bite out of it and put it back on the table, but if Kurt did that, Donny would hit him in the head or something. I told Donny, ‘You’re going to lose that kid.’ I said, ‘Goddamit, you’ve got to treat him the same as you do hers,’ but he denied it, and he said, ‘Bull, I don’t treat him any different.’ I know Kurt resented that, and I think that’s when a lot of his problems really began.”
When Kurt was young, the kids in Aberdeen and Montesano usually fell into three categories—the jocks, the rockers and the misfits. Kurt fell somewhere between the latter two. Today, explain our young companions, there are still three distinct groups, only the qualifications are now different: you’re either a “screecher” (pothead), a “tweaker” (crystal meth addict) or a junkie (heroin or crack addict).
We realize Donnie Collier is definitely a screecher when the first thing he asks us is whether we have any of that “good Canadian weed.” Our new friends have brought us to meet Collier at his little house in North Aberdeen because he was supposedly “real tight with Kurt.” It soon becomes apparent that it wasn’t so much Collier who was friends with Kurt but rather his uncle Dale Crover, a member of a local band called the Melvins, and later a Nirvana drummer.
Kurt had developed a love for pop music at an early age through listening to his favorite bands, the Beatles, the Mamas and the Papas, and the Monkees, on his aunt Mary’s old hi-fi. Despite, or because of, his constant drum banging, none of his relatives had ever thought young Kurt had much musical affinity. Everybody just assumed he was going to be an artist after one of his drawings made it into the school paper when he was six. But as he became increasingly alienated from his father’s new family, music—not art—became his refuge. Don was into rock and roll in a big way, and he had joined the Columbia House Music Club (“Get twelve records for only a cent”). When the records began to arrive, Kurt discovered a heavier sound than the bubblegum pop he had always loved. It soon brought him into contact with a new circle of friends—a group of much older heavy metal potheads who would come over to listen to and exchange records by the likes of Kiss, Aerosmith and Black Sabbath. “After they turned me on to that music,” Kurt later recalled, “I started turning into this little stoner kid.”
By the time he got his first guitar from his uncle Chuck on his fourteenth birthday, Kurt had already decided he was going to be a rock star. When he began taking guitar lessons, he wanted to play only Led Zeppelin, recalls Warren Mason, the guitarist in Wendy’s brother Chuck’s band, who remembers “the little blond kid watching when we jammed.” Mason still runs ads all over Aberdeen inviting locals to study with “the man who taught Kurt Cobain to play guitar.”
Chuck paid Mason $125 for an old Gibson Explorer and gave it to Kurt as a present. “The first lesson, I asked Kurt if he could play anything and he said yes,” recalls Mason. “He played ‘Louie, Louie’ on one string. Kurt later admitted that a lot of his songs were based on ‘Louie, Louie,’ which has a one-four-five chord progression. When I asked him his goal, he said he wanted to master ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ His favorite band at the time was ELO.” Years later, Kurt was furious when he read an interview with Mason inRolling Stone revealing Kurt’s early love for Led Zeppelin and other mainstream bands. “He was also pissed off that I said he was a nice kid,” recalls Mason. Although bands like the Sex Pistols and the Ramones had already pioneered a musical revolution that would one day change his life, punk rock still had not permeated the Aberdeen scene.
By the age of fifteen, unable to get along with Don’s wife and his stepsiblings, Kurt was shuttling back and forth between his parents’ houses. But his mother’s patience with his increasingly rebellious behavior grew thin, especially after Kurt was arrested for spray-painting “Homosexual Sex Rules” on the side of a local bank—an act more reflective of his penchant for pissing off the locals than of his sexual orientation. Wendy sent him to stay with a long series of relatives, including his grandparents, who brought him to church with them every Sunday. He didn’t have much use for the sermons, recalls Leland, but he loved the music, and for a time Kurt even joined the choir, where he may have honed his soon-to-be distinct vocal abilities.
And then, at the age of sixteen, Kurt Cobain discovered punk, courtesy of a friend named Matt Lukin, whom Kurt had met in the most unlikely of places. They were on the same Little League baseball team that Kurt had joined to please his father (or so he later claimed, lest anybody accuse him of being a jock). Matt was the bassist for a local band mockin
gly named after a mentally handicapped Thriftway employee called Melvin who liked to climb on roofs. The year before, Kurt had been in the same high school art class as the Melvins’ leader Buzz Osborne, when the band had still been a Jimi Hendrix/The Who cover band. But in the interval, the band had been turned on to the angry, rebellious sounds of punk, just the right music to say “Fuck off!” to all those they had grown to detest—the local rednecks, the jocks, the stoners and, most of all, their parents. Lukin and Osborne began to lend Kurt their precious cache of punk and new-wave tapes, along with their most prized possession, a Sex Pistols photo book. Before long, he joined the other “cling-ons”—the nickname for the assortment of local misfits who congregated around the Melvins—at the Aberdeen rehearsal space where the band pounded out the music that would transform Kurt’s world.
“This is what I was looking for,” Kurt wrote in his journal after he saw the band play for the first time behind the local Thriftway. “I came to the promised land of a grocery store parking lot and I found my special purpose.”
Twenty years later, Donnie Collier, nephew of Dale Crover, the Melvins’ drummer, takes a long hit off his pipe and proceeds to share his memories of Kurt, whom he met at the Melvins’ sessions. “There was a bunch of us who’d go over after school while the band rehearsed and just hang out. Sometimes he’d jam with the band, but he still wasn’t very good. They didn’t pay very much attention to him, I don’t think. But they were the coolest guys in town and anybody who hung around with them was automatically considered cool. At least we thought so. I think it’s about the only place where Kurt really fit in. You always read that Kurt was really quiet, but I never really noticed that. There was this nerdy guy, Scottie Karate, who would come over and hang out all the time. Kurt would sort of pick on him, just rag on him constantly; he could be a bit of a bully. He was pretty nice to me though, maybe because my uncle was in the band. He used to sell me pot. Kurt wasn’t a big-time dealer or anything, but he’d always have a little extra that he’d sell to make some money.”
Collier has run out of the homegrown he has been using to fill the pipe that has been going around the room for the past twenty minutes. He offers to take the lot of us to “Kurt Cobain Bridge,” so nicknamed because Kurt immortalized it in the heartbreaking song “Something in the Way,” and would later claim to have slept under it when his mother threw him out of the house. Recent accounts, fueled by the denials of Kurt’s sister, Kim, have suggested the stories are a myth, that Kurt never really slept under the bridge at all, but that he had embellished the stories to make his youth seem more unhappy.
“Nah, the only myth is that it was the Wishkah Bridge he slept under,” explains Collier, referring to the massive bridge you have to cross to enter Aberdeen. “You can’t sleep under that bridge. The tide would wash you away.”
Instead, Collier takes us to a much smaller structure known as the North Aberdeen Bridge, and we climb down a path to the fetid Wishkah River through thorny brambles and bushes, to emerge on a spacious rocky slope sheltered by the span. “Here’s where he slept,” says Collier, his words occasionally drowned out by the rumbling of the cars overhead. “Just about every kid around Aberdeen ends up sleeping here at one time or another. Anybody who says Kurt didn’t sleep here doesn’t know what they’re talking about. It’s dry, it’s pretty warm and you can pitch a tent. Kurt would sometimes spend a couple of nights at a time under here whenever his mother threw him out. Then, if it got too damp or miserable, he’d end up sleeping on somebody’s floor. But it’s a good place to play guitar. The acoustics are perfect.” One of the girls, Angela, who’s been with us all afternoon, tells us she slept under this bridge for five days in 1995 after her own parents banished her from the house. “It was dry, but it wasn’t very warm,” she remembers. “I froze my ass off.” The remnants of a small cooking fire and an abandoned sleeping bag suggest that somebody has indeed been sleeping here in the not-too-distant past. But it isn’t the only sign of human activity. Judging by the graffiti adorning every available inch of the concrete columns, walls and ceiling, we aren’t the first to make the pilgrimage under this bridge in search of Kurt’s ghost by the banks of the Wishkah.
“Everything I ever knew, I learned from Nirvana. Thank you Kurt!” scribbled one fan. “Kurt Lives!” another had spray-painted. Among the hundreds of sentiments paying homage to their musical hero, we immediately notice the same three-word graffito—“Who Killed Kurt?”—sprayed, painted and scrawled like a nagging whisper from at least ten different locations. Donnie Collier, however, doesn’t give much credence to the murder theories. “When I knew him, he certainly didn’t seem like the kind of guy who would end up killing himself, but who knows what happened after he left here?” He shrugs. “Nothing would surprise me about that world, but I doubt if he was murdered. I guess he just couldn’t take it anymore.”
Autumn, the young mother, weighs in: “Who wouldn’t want to kill themselves growing up here? It rains all the time and there’s nothing to do. He was a junkie, and junkies die here practically every day. It’s so common, the paper doesn’t even bother reporting it anymore.” She is holding the baby in her arms so that he doesn’t accidentally step on a dirty syringe, she says, but we don’t see any needles, just a lot of cigarette butts and a few beer bottles.
Why do you stay here? we ask. Do you ever dream of escaping? She looks incredulous before responding meekly, “Where would I go?”
As we emerge from under the bridge, the kids ask us if we want to meet Kurt’s daughter. This is an odd question, since Kurt’s daughter, Frances Bean, is eleven years old and is known to live in Los Angeles. “No, he has an illegitimate daughter by a local girl that he slept with when he still lived here,” Angela claims. “She looks just like him, and she used to say all the time that Kurt was her dad. Most people think it’s true.” Skeptical, we decline the invitation. After we drop them off downtown and shell out some cash so the kids can each “get a forty” (a 40-ounce can of beer, the drink of choice in these parts), we head to a local bar where we had been told we could hook up with the one person left in Aberdeen who might be able to shed light on how Kurt himself eventually escaped from this sad, seemingly dead-end existence.
Six nights a week, each evening in a different location, Dave Reed organizes what appears to be the chief source of entertainment in these parts—karaoke. We arrive at Trio’s Bar, where the night’s program is already well under way. As lowbrow as the surroundings appear, one thing strikes us immediately: the people here are having fun, the first indication since we arrived that not everybody in this town considers it a redneck backwater devoid of culture. As an overweight, middle-aged woman finishes screeching an out-of-tune version of “Brown Eyed Girl,” the room erupts with cheers and encouragement.
A fifty-something man sporting a purple tie-dyed T-shirt and a long beaded braid almost to his waist adjusts the mike. This is Dave Reed, the man who was said to have been like a father to Kurt Cobain during his latter teenage years. By 1984, when he was seventeen, Kurt had already experienced frequent and extended bouts of homelessness, living for months at a time in alleys, under bridges and in friends’ garages. His mother had taken up with a new boyfriend—a heavy-drinking, womanizing, hot-tempered longshoreman named Pat O’Connor, whom Kurt despised—and she didn’t want anything to do with her son. He tried living with his father for a few months, but things were no better than before.
Kurt had recently made friends with a boy named Jesse Reed, the teenage son of evangelical Christians, and began a period of his life that he would not be anxious to discuss in later years. One would be hard-pressed to find any evidence in his soul-baring lyrics or soon-to-be frequent interviews about his Aberdeen youth that Kurt Cobain had found Jesus, become a born-again Christian and had even been baptized at the age of seventeen. Among the chroniclers dissecting the evolution of his drug use, few noted that he spent a portion of his teenage years lecturing friends about the evils of drugs as an abomination again
st Christ. It was during this period that Dave Reed and his wife, Ethel, invited Kurt to live with their family at the Reeds’ large home a few miles outside Aberdeen.
“His family life was a mess,” recalls Reed, who was a Christian youth counselor at the time. “He had big problems with his mother, and he was going through a really bad time. He and my son were always together, so I asked him if he wanted to stay with us. He jumped at the chance. I think Kurt saw me as a Ned Flanders–type guy, although I don’t thinkThe Simpsons were even airing yet. I was with the South Aberdeen Baptist Church. Kurt became a born-again Christian through my son, Jesse, and our family environment. He went to church almost every time the door was open. I was a youth group leader, and Kurt would always come to church with Jesse. For a while, he took Christian life very seriously. But mostly he was into art, horses and music.”
By this time, Kurt had dropped out of high school and entered what he would later call his “aimless years.” For hours on end, he would sit in the local library reading voraciously or writing the poems that would eventually form the lyrics to many familiar Nirvana songs. Hilary Richrod, the reference librarian at Aberdeen’s Timberland Library, recalls Kurt coming every day and reading for hours at a time: “It was hard to miss him. He usually had multicolored hair, and that kind of stuck out in a town like Aberdeen.”
The most significant by-product of his churchgoing period was Kurt’s burgeoning friendship with a gawky teenage giant named Krist Novoselic, who attended the same church as the Reeds. Kurt and Krist had met in high school, but it was while attending the Baptist church—which Krist joined because he was dating a Christian girl at the time—that they actually bonded, says Reed.
