Come As You Are

by Michael Azerrad

  Up until third grade, Kurt wanted to be a rock star—he’d play Beatles records and mime along with his little plastic guitar. Then, for a long time, he wanted to be a Stuntman. “I liked to play outside, catch snakes, jump my bicycle off the roof,” he recalls. “Evel Knievel was my only idol.” Once, he took all the bedding and pillows out of the house, put it on the deck, and jumped onto it from the roof; another time, he took a piece of metal, duct-taped it to his chest, and put a bunch of firecrackers on it and lit them.

  Sometimes Kurt would visit Uncle Chuck, Wendy’s brother, who played in a band. Chuck had built speakers for his basement studio that were so big he couldn’t get them out of the room. He’d put Kurt downstairs, give him a microphone, and roll some tape. Wendy still has a tape he made when he was four or so. Kurt sings and then, when he thinks no one’s listening, he starts saying dirty words. “Poo-doo,” he says. “Poo-doo!”

  Don and Wendy got Kurt a little Mickey Mouse drum set. “I kind of pushed drums on him because I wanted to be a drummer,” Wendy admits. “But my mother thought that was so unfeminine, so she never let me play.” Kurt didn’t need to be pushed—as soon as he could sit up and hold things, he had been banging on pots and pans. He thrashed his Mickey Mouse drum set every day after school until it was broken.

  Although it wasn’t in the best section of Aberdeen—in fact, the neighborhood is quite run down—the Cobain home was always the nicest on the block. Don kept it in tip-top shape, installing the wall-to-wall carpeting, the fake-brick fireplace, the imitation-wood paneling. “It was white trash posing as middle class,” Kurt says of his upbringing.

  Wendy came from a family that was hardly well-to-do, but her mother always made sure that her children looked like they had a lot more than they did. Wendy was the same way. Every morning, she would diligently feather Kurt’s hair for that Shaun Cassidy look, make sure he brushed his teeth, and dress him in the nicest clothes they could afford, and he would trudge off to school in his wafflestomper hiking boots. She even made Kurt wear a sweater that he was allergic to, because it looked good on him. “Both my kids were probably the best-dressed kids in Aberdeen,” says Wendy. “I made sure of that.”

  Wendy tried to keep her kids away from what she calls “certain friends from certain kinds of backgrounds that lived in certain situations.” Kurt says she basically told him to stay away from poor kids. “My mom thought that I was better than those kids, so I picked on them every once in a while—the scummy kids, the dirty kids,” says Kurt. “I just remember there were a couple of kids that stunk like pee all the time and I would bully them around and get in fights with them. By fourth grade I realized that these kids are probably cooler than the higher class children, more down to earth, down to the dirt.” Later on, Kurt’s unwashed hair, ever-present stubble, and tattered wardrobe would become world-famous trademarks.

  Kurt started taking drum lessons in third grade. “Ever since I can remember, since I was a little kid,” says Kurt, “I wanted to be Ringo Starr. But I wanted to be John Lennon playing drums.” Kurt played in the school band in grade school, though he never learned how to read music—he’d just wait for the kid in the first chair to learn the song and then copy what he was doing.

  By the Christmas of 1974, when he was seven, Kurt got the idea that his mom thought he was a problem child. “The only thing I really wanted that year was a five-dollar Starsky and Hutch gun,” Kurt says. “I got a lump of coal instead.”

  Kurt says he was ambidextrous, but his father tried to force him to use his right hand, fearing Kurt would have problems later in life as a lefty. He became a lefty anyway.

  For most of his life, Kurt has been plagued by one health problem or another. Besides his hyperactivity, he’s always suffered from chronic bronchitis. In eighth grade, Kurt was diagnosed with a minor case of scoliosis, or curvature of the spine. As time went by, the weight of his guitar actually made the curvature worse. If he had been right-handed, he says, it would have corrected the problem.

  In 1975, when Kurt was eight, his parents divorced. Wendy says she divorced Don because he simply wasn’t around very much—he was always off playing basketball or baseball, coaching teams or refereeing. In retrospect, she wonders if she ever really loved him. Don bitterly opposed the divorce. Both Wendy and Don admit the kids were later used in a war between their parents.

  Kurt took the divorce and its aftermath very hard. “It just destroyed his life,” says Wendy. “He changed completely. I think he was ashamed. And he became very inward—he just held everything. He became real shy.

  “I think he’s still suffering,” she adds.

  Instead of the sunny, outgoing kid Kurt once was, “He became real sullen,” Wendy says, “kind of mad and always frowning and ridiculing.” On the wall in his bedroom, Kurt wrote, “I hate Mom, I hate Dad, Dad hates Mom, Mom hates Dad, it simply makes you want to be sad.” A few feet over he drew caricatures of Wendy and Don along with the words “Dad sucks” and “Mom sucks.” Below he drew a brain with a big question mark over it. The drawings are still there to this day, along with some nifty Led Zeppelin and Iron Maiden logos that he drew (he denies he made them, but sisters don’t lie).

  Kurt was like a lot of kids of his generation—in fact, everyone who has ever been in Nirvana (but one) has come from a broken home. The divorce rate skyrocketed in the mid-seventies, more than doubling in ten years. The children of these broken marriages didn’t have a world war or a Depression to contend with. They just didn’t have a family. Consequently, their battles were private.

  Kurt says it was a like a light went out in him, a light he’s been trying to recapture ever since. “I just remember all of a sudden not being the same person, feeling like I wasn’t worthy anymore,” he says. “I didn’t feel like I deserved to be hanging out with other kids, because they had parents and I didn’t anymore, I guess.”

  “I was just pissed off at my parents for not being able to deal with their problems,” he continues. “Throughout most of my childhood, after the divorce, I was kind of ashamed of my parents.”

  But Kurt had begun to feel like an outsider even before the divorce. “I didn’t have anything in common with my dad especially,” says Kurt. “He wanted me to be in sports and I didn’t like sports and I was artistic and he just didn’t appreciate that type of thing, so I just always felt ashamed. I just couldn’t understand how I was a product of my parents because they weren’t artistic and I was. I liked music and they didn’t. Subconsciously, maybe I thought I was adopted—ever since that episode of the ‘Partridge Family’ when Danny thought he was adopted. I really related to that.”

  Kurt’s creativity and intelligence—and the early realization that he was an artist—compounded the problem. “Until I was about ten or eleven, I didn’t realize that I was different from the other kids at school,” he says. “I started to realize that I was more interested in drawing and listening to music, more so than the other kids. It just slowly grew on me and I started to realize that. So by the time I was twelve I was fully withdrawn.” Convinced he’d never find anyone like himself, he simply stopped trying to make friends.

  “This town—if he would have been anywhere else he would have been fine,” says Wendy. “But this town is just exactly like Peyton Place. Everybody is watching everyone and judging and they have their little slots they like everyone to stay in and he didn’t.”

  Kurt lived with his mother for a year after the divorce. But he didn’t like her new boyfriend, whom he calls a “a mean huge wife-beater.” At first, Wendy attributed Kurt’s dislike of her boyfriend to mere jealousy. Five years later, she realized her boyfriend was “a little nuts”—a paranoid schizophrenic, in fact. Kurt was extremely unhappy and would take out his anger on everyone from Wendy to his baby-sitters, whom he would usually lock out of the house. Wendy couldn’t control him anymore, so she sent him to live with Don at his trailer home in Montesano, an even smaller logging community about twenty miles east of Aberdeen.

 
; Don’s place wasn’t a mobile home, but a prefabricated house that is towed in sections behind a truck to a trailer park and assembled. “It wasn’t one of the more luxurious ones—the double-wide ones that the rich white trash got to live in,” Kurt says.

  At first it was great. Don bought Kurt a minibike and they did things together like go to the beach for the weekend or go camping. “He had everything,” says Don. “He had it made. He had the run of the whole house, he had a motorcycle, he got to do whatever he wanted to do, we were always doing stuff. But then when two other kids and a new mother comes in …”

  Don once offhandedly told Kurt that he’d never get married again. He soon remarried in February of 1978. His new wife brought along her two kids, and they all moved into a proper house in Montesano. Kurt didn’t get along with his new family at all, especially his new stepmom. “Still, to this day, I can’t think of a faker person,” he says. “She’s one of the most nicest people,” Don protests. “Treated him perfect, tried stuff, she got him jobs and tried to cope with everything but it was just screwing up the whole family, just the way he was acting and things that he was doing—and not doing.”

  Kurt skipped school and refused to do household chores. Don says he didn’t even show up for the table-bussing job he arranged for him. He began picking on his younger stepbrother and didn’t like his stepsister much, either—even though she was four years younger than Kurt, she was assigned to baby-sit for him when their parents went out.

  Then he noticed that his dad started to buy lots of toys for his stepsister and brother. While he skulked around in his basement room, they would go out to the mall and come back with a Starhorse or a Tonka truck.

  “I tried to do everything to make him feel wanted, to be part of the family and everything,” says Don, who maintains he got legal custody of Kurt just to make him feel more a part of the family. “But he just didn’t want to be there and wanted to be with his mom and she didn’t want him. And then here she is the goody-goody and I’m the big bad guy.”

  But there may be more to it than that. “I’m emotional at times, but other times I’m not and I just don’t know how to express myself,” Don admits. “Sometimes my smart-ass stuff hurts people’s feelings. I’m not trying to hurt somebody’s feelings but I don’t know I’m doing it, I guess.” Maybe something like that happened with Kurt. “Maybe,” says Don. “Definitely.”

  Oddly, Don seems to have genuine amnesia about his years with Kurt. Although he comes across as a sweet and simple man these days, the strain of the divorce may have brought out a darker side. “Did I rule with a strong arm?” he says. “Okay, my wife says I do. I do probably blow up before I think. And I hurt people’s feelings. And I get over it, I forget about it and nobody else does. Yeah, my dad, he beat me with a belt and stuff, give me a black eye and stuff, but I don’t know, I spanked him with a belt, yes.”

  “Everything that Kurt did was a reflection on Don,” says Wendy. “If he was bad at a baseball game, he would be just infuriated after that game to the point where he’d just humiliate Kurt. He would never allow Kurt to be a little kid. He wanted him to be a little adult and be perfectly behaved, never do anything wrong. He would knuckle-rap Kurt and call him a dummy. He’d just get irritated really quickly and—whack, over the head. My mom says she remembers a time when he actually threw Kurt clear across the room when he was like six.” Don says he doesn’t remember any of this.

  “It’s called ‘denial,’ ” Wendy replies.

  After the divorce, Don had begun working at Mayer Brothers, a logging company, as a tallyman. “Basically,” says Kurt, “he just walked around all day and counted logs.

  “His idea of a father-and-son day out would be to take me out to work on Saturdays and Sundays,” Kurt continues. “I would sit in his office while he went and counted logs. It’s really a quite exciting weekend.” In his dad’s office, Kurt would draw pictures and make prank phone calls. Sometimes he’d go out into the warehouse and play on top of the stacks of two-by-fours. After all that excitement, he would get into his dad’s van and listen to Queen’s News of the World over and over again on the eight-track. Sometimes he’d listen so long that he’d drain the battery and they’d have to find someone to jump-start the engine.

  Don used to run around with the jock crowd in high school, but he never excelled in sports, perhaps because he was small for his age. Don’s father expected a lot from him, but he just couldn’t compete. Some believe that’s why Don pushed Kurt into sports.

  Don got Kurt to join the junior high wrestling team. Kurt hated the grueling practices and worse yet, having to hang out with jocks. “I hated it—every second of it,” says Kurt. “I just fucking hated it.” He’d come home in the evening from practice, “and there’d be this disgusting, shriveled-up, dry meal that my stepmom had cooked with a lot of love and preparation and it had been sitting there since dinnertime and the oven on low heat and everything was totally dried up and awful. She was the worst cook.”

  Nevertheless, Kurt says he did pretty well at wrestling, basically because he could vent his anger on the mat. But on the day of a big championship match, Kurt decided to get back at his dad. He and his opponent walked onto the mat and got in position while Don sat in the bleachers, rooting for his son. “I was down on my hands and knees and I looked up at my dad and smiled and I waited for the whistle to blow,” says Kurt, “just staring straight into his face and then I just instantly clammed up—I put my arms together and let the guy pin me. You should have seen the look on his face. He actually walked out halfway through the match because I did it like four times in a row.” Don doesn’t remember that episode either, but Kurt says the incident resulted in one of the times he had to move out of the house and live with an aunt and uncle.

  Don also took Kurt hunting once, but once they got to the woods, Kurt refused to go with the hunting party. He spent the whole day, from dawn to dusk, in the truck. “Now that I look back on it,” Kurt says, “I know I had the sense that killing animals is wrong, especially for sport. I didn’t understand that at the time. I just knew that I didn’t want to be there.”

  Meanwhile, Kurt began to discover other kinds of rock music besides just the Beatles and the Monkees. Don had begun to develop a pretty serious record collection after someone talked him into joining the Columbia House record and tape club. Every month, records by bands like Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Kiss would come in the mail. Don never got around to opening them, but after a few months, Kurt did.

  Kurt had begun hanging out with a bunch of guys who sported pukka shells and feathered hair and Kiss T-shirts. “They were way older than me—they must have been in junior high,” says Kurt. “They were smoking pot and I just thought they were cooler than my geeky fourth-grade friends who watched ‘Happy Days.’ I just let them come over to my house and eat my food, just to have friends.” These stoner guys soon noticed Don’s awesome record collection and urged Kurt to play the records. “After they turned me on to that music,” says Kurt, “I started turning into a little stoner kid.”

  “He never came out and said anything, even in his early years, about what was really bothering him or what he wanted,” says Don. “He’s like me—don’t say anything and maybe it’ll disappear or something. And don’t explain. You just bottle it all up and it all comes out at one time.”

  “He got married and after that I was one of the last things of importance on his list,” Kurt says. “He just gave up because he was convinced that my mom had brainwashed me. That’s a real pathetic weak thing to base your son’s existence on.”

  “I don’t really think of my dad as a macho jerk,” Kurt says. “He isn’t half as extreme as a lot of fathers I’ve seen.” So exactly what is Kurt’s beef with his father? “I don’t even know,” he confesses. “I wish I could remember more. I never felt like I really had a father. I’ve never had a father figure who I could share things with.”

  Ultimately, Don couldn’t deal with his son either, s
o Kurt was shuffled through the family, eventually living with three different sets of aunts and uncles, as well as his grandparents on his father’s side. He moved at least two times a year between Montesano and Aberdeen, switching high schools as well.

  Wendy knew she should take Kurt back, but she had been going through her own traumas—she had finally gotten rid of the paranoid schizophrenic, who had mentally and physically abused her, even putting her in the emergency room at one point. She had since lost her job and asked her brother Chuck, the musician, to take care of Kurt.

  For Kurt’s fourteenth birthday, Chuck told Kurt he could either have a bicycle or a guitar. Kurt took the guitar, a secondhand electric that barely played, and a beat-up little ten-watt amp. “I don’t think it was even a Harmony,” Kurt says of the guitar. “I think it was a Sears.” He dropped the drums and took guitar lessons for a week or so, just long enough to learn how to play AC/DC’s “Back in Black.” “That’s pretty much the ‘Louie, Louie’ chords,” says Kurt, “and that’s all you need to know.” After that, he started writing his own songs. His guitar teacher, Warren Mason (who played in a band with Chuck), remembers Kurt as “a quiet, little nice kid.” Kurt vehemently denies it, but Mason says he really wanted to learn how to play “Stairway to Heaven.”

  Kurt found Aberdeen intimidating. Compared to Montesano, Aberdeen was like the big city. “I just thought these kids were a higher class of people and I wasn’t quite worthy of being in their group,” he says.

  In class, he’d read S. E. Hinton books like Rumblefish and The Outsiders and avoided speaking to anybody. He says he didn’t make a single friend that year. Instead, he’d come home every day and play guitar until it was time for bed. He already knew how to play “Back in Black” and he figured out a few more covers—the Cars’ “My Best Friend’s Girl,” “Louie, Louie,” and Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust.”