‘And deep down I knew it too.’
Negative creep
Kurt was a human being. And maybe it’s selective memory, but I don’t want to think of him as some brooding, suicidal genius. He was a fucking nice guy. But I understand. That’s how legends are made …
Dave Grohl
There’s a famous photograph of Kurt Cobain which Nirvana fans will instantly recognise. Shot by NME photographer Martyn Goodacre in London in October 1990 during Dave Grohl’s first tour with the band, the image has featured on magazine covers worldwide and been reprinted on countless unofficial T-shirts, posters and live bootleg recordings. In the photo, Cobain stares down the camera from behind a tousled, mussed-up fringe, his eyes ringed with black ‘guy-liner’, his jaw set hard. It’s a powerful piece of iconography, conveying vulnerability, defiance and soulful intensity: the singer’s sullen expression evokes memories of classic movie anti-heroes, from Marlon Brando’s outlaw biker Johnny Strabler in The Wild One to Matt Dillon’s high school rebel Richie White in Over the Edge. It’s an image that posits the idea of Cobain as a moody, brooding misfit, rock’s last rebel without a cause.
On 4 March 1994, as news broke internationally that Nirvana’s frontman was in a coma in Rome’s Policlinico Umberto Primo hospital following a drug overdose in the city’s Hotel Excelsior, one UK music magazine selected Goodacre’s photo as a potential cover image to accompany its coverage of the story. The following day, after Cobain emerged from the coma and it became clear that he would survive the overdose, the image was placed back in the files. The time was not yet right for Cobain’s beatification. Five weeks later, as reports reached London that a lifeless body had been found in a room above the garage of Cobain’s home on Seattle’s Washington Boulevard, the photo was pulled from the files once more. For even as Kurt Cobain’s death was being reported, his immortality was being packaged and sold.
Former NME Editor Steve Sutherland, the man who originally commissioned Goodacre’s session with Nirvana, once claimed that this image ‘tells the story of grunge’, that it ‘tells Kurt Cobain’s story’. But with all due respect to the photographer, it doesn’t, it doesn’t at all. It’s too clean, too pretty, too stylised, too perfect. It’s an image that would be better suited to advertising a Disney biopic of Cobain’s life than the true dirt-under-the-fingernails story. It does, however, perfectly illustrate the myth of Cobain – the notion of Nirvana’s frontman as a troubled poetic genius, an artist too sensitive and fragile for the cut-throat corporate entertainment industry into which he was propelled against his will by the phenomenal success of his band’s 1991 album Nevermind. That romanticised narrative is neat, conventional and easily grasped, a powerful myth with enduring appeal.
Yet no one was more responsible for constructing myths around Kurt Cobain than the man himself. From the earliest entries in his journals through to his suicide note, Cobain obsessively and compulsively documented, distorted, revised and rewrote his own history, to the point where facts and fictions in his life story have blurred and coalesced into one. The singer used to tell a great story about how he pawned his stepfather’s guns to buy his first guitar: it’s a memorable anecdote, but not true. Then there was the moving tale of Cobain living under a bridge in Aberdeen as a homeless teenager: poignant, but again untrue. As another illustration of his unhappy, deprived childhood, Cobain would tell of receiving just a solitary lump of coal as a present from his parents one Christmas: this piece of heartrending Dickensian storytelling was pure fiction too. For the singer, truth was rarely allowed to stand in the way of a good story.
But if Cobain was, on occasion, an unreliable narrator, then he was following in an accepted tradition. The music business is a hall of smoke and mirrors, and rock ’n’ roll had always provided opportunities for reinvention and rebranding: for all their undeniable integrity, the personas of ‘Joe Strummer’ and ‘Iggy Pop’ were calculated constructs for John Mellor and James Osterberg Jr just as surely as Ziggy Stardust and Alice Cooper were the inventions of David Jones and Vincent Furnier. And just as Robert Zimmerman’s early yarns about being a hobo and a circus performer were pure fantasy, there’s no doubt that padding out his own life experiences with exaggerations, obfuscations and lies damned lies appealed to the mischief-maker in Cobain. As a child, Cobain read about punk rock before he ever heard punk rock – courtesy of a Creem magazine report on the Sex Pistols’ much-hyped 1978 US tour – and in reading of Malcolm McClaren’s machinations and manipulations he instantly grasped how myths could serve to inspire and incite above and beyond base realities. Rewriting his own story, then, was Cobain’s very own great rock ’n’ roll swindle.
Writing about Nirvana’s frontman in Ireland’s Hot Press magazine in 1993, music critic Bill Graham noted, ‘Small-town outsiders frequently believe more intensely in rock myths. Swallowing dreams whole, they can lack the worldliness, agnosticism and chameleon habits of big city scenemakers. Kurt Cobain’s version of punk could be nothing but fundamentalist.’ The intensity of this conviction would prove damning for the singer. On the afternoon of 5 April 1994, before placing the business end of a shotgun against his head, Cobain put pen to paper for the final time. ‘All the warnings from the Punk Rock 101 courses over the years since my first introduction to the, shall we say, ethics involved with independence and the embracement of your community has proven to be very true,’ he wrote. ‘I haven’t felt the excitement of listening to as well as creating music along with reading and writing for too many years now. I feel guilty beyond words about these things … The fact is, I can’t fool you, any one of you. It simply isn’t fair to you or me. The worst crime I can think of would be to rip people off by faking it and pretending as if I’m having 100% fun.’
‘It’s better to burn out than to fade away,’ he concluded.
With these words, for better or worse, Cobain’s status as a rock ’n’ roll martyr was enshrined. But this reductive version of Nirvana’s story sits uneasily with those, like Dave Grohl, who knew Kurt Cobain best.
‘You have to understand, for me, Nirvana is more than it is for you,’ Grohl told one inquisitive journalist in 2011. ‘It was a really personal experience. I was a kid. Our lives were lifted and then turned upside down. And then our hearts were broken when Kurt died. The whole thing is much more personal than the logo or the T-shirt or the iconic image.’
‘What do you think of when you think of Kurt?’ Grohl asked me rhetorically in 2009. ‘You think of a rock star that killed himself, because of this guilt of being a rock star, [because] he was unhappy with his success. But he was a complicated person, and it’s hard for anyone still to this day to completely understand. He may have seemed like this punk rock iconoclastic misfit, but he still fucking loved Abba, we danced to Abba a hundred times. So, when I think of Kurt, I think of the way he giggled, or Abba, or him saying to me, “God man, I wish I could wear sweatpants,” shit like that. He was a human being. And maybe it’s selective memory, but I don’t want to think of him as some brooding, suicidal genius. He was a fucking nice guy. But I understand. That’s how legends are made.
‘Reading John Lennon interviews you can see how he was so conflicted, how he was such a massive tangled ball of contradiction, how he was searching and confused and passionate and a genius. And in reading a lot of those interviews, personally, I see a lot of similarities [with Kurt]. Please don’t quote me saying he was a songwriter like Lennon, but there are some similarities in those two personalities that made for some great contradictions and it’s really complicated to figure them out. Did Kurt want to be considered the greatest songwriter in the world? I think he did. But was he cool about everything else that came along with that? No. Did it keep him from writing songs? No. At the end of the day, if you don’t want to fucking do something, don’t do it.
Kurt Donald Cobain was born on 20 February 1967 at Grays Harbor Community Hospital, on a hill overlooking Aberdeen, Washington. His mother, Wendy, was a homemaker, his father Donald a mechanic at
a Chevron station in nearby Hoquiam, where the young newly-weds lived at 2830½ Aberdeen Avenue. Like Dave Grohl, Cobain had Northern European ancestry – his father’s family had Irish roots, while Wendy Cobain’s bloodline, the Fradenburgs, were of German descent. Like Grohl too, Cobain had music in his blood: his uncle Chuck Fradenburg played drums in Aberdeen garage rockers The Beachcombers (whose raucous take on garage standard ‘Farmer John’ can be heard alongside The Kingsmen’s ‘Louie Louie’ and The Sonics’ ‘High Time’ on the excellent compilation album The History of Northwest Rock,Volume 2 – The Garage Years) while Wendy’s younger sister Mari played guitar and performed as a country ’n’ western singer/ songwriter in area nightclubs. By the age of two, Kurt was contributing enthusiastic takes on The Beatles’ ‘Hey Jude’ and The Monkees’ ‘(Theme From) The Monkees’ to family singalongs: one of Mari Fradenburg’s home audio recordings from 1969 finds her stubbornly independent nephew shouting ‘I’ll do it by myself!’ when an adult offers to help out with lyrics.
‘You could just say, “Hey Kurt, sing this!” and he would sing it,’ Mari Fradenburg (then the married Mari Earl) told Goldmine magazine in 1997. ‘He had a lot of charisma from a very young age.’
On 24 April 1970 the Cobain family was expanded with the arrival of Kurt’s sister Kimberly. By then the family had moved to Aberdeen, Washington. Derived from the Pictish-Gaelic words aber devan, meaning ‘at the meeting of two rivers’, Aberdeen is located on the banks of the Wishkah and Chehalis Rivers, on the southern edge of the picturesque Olympic Peninsula. Developed around its logging and fishing industries, in the post-World War II years it was a thriving seaport and a gateway to the Pacific, with a reputation as a town in which hard, honest graft was handsomely rewarded. Those rewards were not always wholesome: local entrepreneurs recognised that the town’s young, overwhelmingly male itinerant workforce had significant disposable income, and a slew of saloons, gambling dens and brothels grew up around Hume Street to part them from their earnings. The area had a reputation for lawlessness: at a point, violence and villainy was so endemic that sailors kicking their heels in Aberdeen between voyages to Asia bestowed the unwanted nickname ‘The Hellhole of the Pacific’ upon the town. By the time the Cobain family set up home at 1210 East First Street, though, Aberdeen’s streets had been cleaned up and its bordellos had long been shut down. So too, however, had most of its sawmills and fishing canneries. Unemployment, alcoholism and suicide rates were on the rise, homes and shops were being boarded up and abandoned, and Washington State politicians had chosen to avert their eyes from the town’s problems. As the 1970s progressed, Aberdeen’s prospects looked increasingly bleak: to many of its residents, this was a forgotten town drawing its last breaths.
Though he would come to despise his hometown, in the early years of his childhood at least Cobain was oblivious to its rapid deterioration. He was a hyperactive, bright, happy child, popular with his peers and teachers alike, with a flair for art and a gift for mimicry which made him the centre of attention at family parties. But in 1975 the youngster’s self-confidence and self-esteem were dealt a crushing blow when his parents decided to divorce. This was also the year in which Virginia and James Grohl separated, but whereas the six-year-old Dave Grohl, too young to fully grasp the gravity of the situation, took his parents’ divorce in his stride, Cobain, two years older than his future bandmate and shielded less from parental arguments, internalised the split and dwelt upon it constantly. In the summer of 1975 he wrote on his bedroom wall ‘I hate Mom, I hate Dad. Dad hates Mom, Mom hates Dad. It simply makes you want to be so sad.’
‘It just destroyed his life,’ Wendy Cobain admitted to Michael Azerrad. ‘He changed completely. I think he was ashamed. And he became very inward – he just held everything. He became real shy. He became real sullen, kind of mad and always frowning and ridiculing.’
Where Virginia and James Grohl’s divorce was conducted with civility and mutual respect, and the split actually tightened the bonds between Dave and his mother and sister, the same was not true for Kurt Cobain. Wendy and Don Cobain’s separation was acrimonious, and both Kurt’s parents later admitted that their children were used as pawns in the bitter battle between them. Though Wendy Cobain was awarded custody of the couple’s two children, soon after the divorce Kurt asked to live with his father in the nearby town of Montesano, as he despised his mother’s new boyfriend. He found life with his father problematic too, however. Though Donald Cobain tried his best to develop a relationship with his boy, he was locked down emotionally, and not given to overt displays of affection. His attempts to bond with his artistic, sensitive son over baseball and wrestling were painfully ill-judged: a loathing of the ‘jock’ mentality stayed with Kurt throughout his life.
In truth, both Cobain males were lonely, unhappy and unfulfilled. While Don sought solace in a new relationship with a local divorcee, Kurt retreated to his bedroom, seeking escape in his father’s record collection, through which he discovered bands such as Kiss, Led Zeppelin, Iron Maiden and Aerosmith. He took to drawing Iron Maiden’s cadaverous mascot Eddie in notebooks and on his bedroom walls, bestowing the monster with violent, vengeful urges and a powerful presence he himself lacked.
Despite reassurances to his son that he would not remarry, in February 1978 Don Cobain did just that. His new wife and her two young children moved into his trailer park home soon afterwards. Feeling pushed out by the new arrivals, and increasingly starved of both attention and affection, Kurt’s sense of rejection intensified: he decided it was time for him to move on once more. For the rest of his childhood the restless youngster bounced unhappily between both his parents, three different sets of aunts and uncles and his grandparents; in the coming years he would stay with no less than ten different families. But wherever he lay his head he felt like a burden, unwanted and unloved. Shunted between high schools in Aberdeen and Montesano, he found it hard to establish firm friendships and became increasingly withdrawn and isolated.
‘I was a rodent-like, underdeveloped, hyperactive spaz … and I was frustrated,’ he recalled in his journals in later years. ‘I needed to let off some steam.’
In time-honoured fashion, Cobain soon fell in with a group of fellow misfits, older stoner kids who shared his love of classic rock and metal. But he felt ill-at-ease in the group, and was still unsure of his own identity. In the summer of 1983, however, the teenager finally found what he’d unconsciously began searching for, a world which gave him a sense of definition and belonging. This world was punk rock. Years after the event, he sketched out his personal punk rock epiphany in vivid detail in his journals.
He wrote: ‘I remember hanging out at a Montesano, Washington Thriftway when this short-haired employee box boy who kinda looked like the guy in Air Supply handed me a flyer that read: “The Them Festival. Tomorrow night in the parking lot behind Thriftway. Free live rock music.” Montesano, Washington was a place unaccustomed to having live rock acts in their little village, a population of a few thousand loggers and their subservient wives. I showed up with stoner friends in a van … There stood the Air Supply box boy holding a Les Paul with a picture from a magazine of Kool cigarettes laminated on it, a mechanic red-headed biker boy and that tall Lukin guy … They played faster than I had ever imagined music could be played and with more energy than my Iron Maiden records could provide. This was what I was looking for. Ah, punk rock. The other stoners were bored and kept shouting, “Play some Def Leppard.” God, I hated those fucks more than ever. I came to the promised land of a grocery store and I found my special purpose.’
The ‘Air Supply box boy’ was Buzz Osbourne, his band Melvins. And this was the night that changed Kurt Cobain’s life forever.
Or so one version of the story goes. Again, Cobain may have been taking some liberties with the truth here. In Come As You Are, Cobain told the author that he’d first seen Melvins play at a rehearsal session in the attic of a local house, before they’d gone punk, and were still playing Hendrix and Wh
o covers.
Whatever the truth of Kurt’s initial exposure to the band, there’s no doubt that Melvins, and in particular Osbourne, their wild-haired frontman, had a massive impact upon his life. The teenager began hanging out at Melvins’ practice sessions at drummer Dale Crover’s house at 609 West Second Street in Aberdeen with a group of other nerdy metalhead stoners Osbourne dubbed ‘The Cling-Ons’, so-called because they clung on to every word of wisdom the older teenager dispensed. Among his peers at Montesano High School Osbourne was considered a freak: here on home turf, among the beaten-down, the ill-at-ease and the written-off, he was revered as a philosopher, a rock star, a mentor. And here, sheltering under Osbourne’s wing with his fellow adolescent misfits, Cobain finally found the sense of community and familial security that he so craved in his domestic life.
It was Osbourne who introduced Cobain to punk rock, via a series of home-made compilation tapes featuring bands such as Flipper, Fang, MDC and Black Flag, the same bands Dave Grohl was obsessing over in his Springfield bedroom. According to legend, the first song on the first tape Osbourne handed to Cobain was Black Flag’s ‘Damaged II’, one of the snarling, slamming highlights of the California band’s 1981 début album. The track opens with vocalist Henry Rollins screaming ‘Damaged by you / Damaged by me / I’m confused / Confused / Don’t wanna be confused.’ This rage, this aggression, was music to young Cobain’s ears.
On 25 September 1984 Cobain travelled to Seattle with Osbourne and Matt Lukin to see Greg Ginn’s band play alongside Green River at the Mountaineers club on their My War tour. For Black Flag the show was unremarkable – Henry Rollins’s diary entry for the night read simply, ‘Show went good. Throat feeling better’ – but for Cobain the night was a revelation. Though the Californian band were increasingly moving away from the relentless, clenched-fist hardcore of Nervous Breakdown towards a grinding, sludgy, Black Sabbath-influenced punkmetal crossover sound, their live shows remained every bit as confrontational and punishing as ever, and Cobain felt at home amid the chaos and violence. This was not Cobain’s first concert – he had watched ex-Montrose (and future Van Halen) frontman Sammy Hagar rock the Seattle Center Coliseum in March 1983 and had checked out Judas Priest at the Tacoma Dome on their Defenders of the Faith tour in May 1984, almost a year on from his ‘conversion’ to punk rock – but the white heat of Black Flag’s performance proved to be a transformative experience. On the drive back to Aberdeen Cobain spoke excitedly of his dream to start his own punk rock band.
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