Nirvana

by Everett True

  SHUT UP! SHUT UP! This is a book about Nirvana. You don’t want anecdotes, hearsay. Personal journals should remain personal. Have you ever stopped to think that there might be a human being at the heart of all this? That not everything should be public property? Think about what you’re saying, with all your talk of conspiracies, of drugs, of arguments and exploitation. Nirvana were a band. A fucking great live band that also benefited from some judicious radio-friendly production and the fact their lead singer had baby-blue eyes. All the other stuff is extraneous. Listen to the music. Listen to the music. Why do you feel the need to know more?

  Do you remember Kurt saying anything about Courtney that night?

  “He was sort of mumbling stuff about her. There was some talk about her trying to get him to go with her but he didn’t want to. My friend Alex kept a journal back then, and she recently emailed me a quote from Kurt from that night that might’ve been about Courtney: ‘I want to meet a woman twice as intelligent and half as jaded as I am.’ So we went back to the apartments and it was quiet for a little while and then chaos ensued. There was a drunken English guy there and he was walking through the bushes. I don’t remember why we were outside, I just remember this very drunk English guy yelling, ‘I love Courtney Love. I love Courtney Love.’ Then he’d fall into the bush and we’d have to pick him up. ‘I love Courtney Love. I want to marry Courtney Love.’ ” Courtney Love. I want to marry Courtney Love.’

  Were you awake for most of that night?

  “Well, Krist started throwing furniture out the window. He threw an ashtray and it hit Alex in the head on its way out. She started crying and he was so apologetic. I remember the apartment being trashed. Krist was the biggest and so he could pick up the biggest things: the coffee tables and the couches. The next day Alex and I went into Hollywood. I bought a guitar. I got an old tattoo covered that I’d wanted to get covered forever. There was a big party with Jennifer from L7, but Kurt didn’t want to go, so he and I stayed home and watched TV. He wanted to finish lyrics and we watched a really cool cartoon that blew our minds – Night Flight. And then he wrote something down.”

  SHUT UP! SHUT UP! This is a book about Nirvana.

  “Dress was not a big concern in Seattle. It still isn’t. There’s a picture of an early audience in ’83, that I call the ‘stray dogs from every village’. There is no uniform sense of style at all. There’s a little bit of hippie, some glam, there’s the trench coat, the flannel coat. One boy’s got the leather jacket with the Sid Vicious pin on it, a little bit of punk. We just liked thrift store clothes. It was an amalgamation of stuff. It started to split up into camps. The Mudhoney camp was more into peg trousers and old school penguin shirts. A little more garage rock.”

  SHUT UP! SHUT UP! This is a book about Nirvana.

  “While we were doing the demos, the cops came by. It was the only noise complaint we’d had at that studio in five years. It’s an old building, with triple walls. It’s soundproofed. And yet Dave was so loud there was a noise complaint from a house three doors away. I was out in front talking to the police. The cops said, ‘You guys need to turn it down.’ I was telling them, ‘You guys know who Nirvana is?’ I’m trying to explain to the cops that I’ve got Nirvana in here, and I’m trying to explain to Nirvana that I’ve got the cops outside. I’m going, ‘What a time for the cops to show up – I’m doing demos for Nirvana. Jesus Christ, I’m going crazy!’ What am I going to tell the band? We have to stop? It’s a studio! The studio’s been there since the Seventies.”

  None of this ever happened, and Kurt is still somewhere out there, nestling underneath a bridge in blue-collar America laughing at us all.

  “All right, let’s start with this: page 185. He says that I said, ‘Kurt said to me, “Look! You can see their little arms and pieces floating in the tank.” ’ Talking about the tadpoles that we had brought back from the quarry and he had in his aquarium in the apartment. And he says, ‘A young man who used to save birds with broken wings was now delighting in watching tadpoles being devoured by turtles.’ Kurt didn’t throw the tadpoles in his tank thinking they were going to be killed by the turtles. He wanted them to grow up to be frogs. It was a mistake of reasoning on his part because he could have probably figured out that they would get devoured by the turtles and, yeah, he did point out the pieces of them to me, but I wouldn’t say he was delighting in it, I would say he was horrified by it. And then he dumped that stuff out in the backyard and, yes, he was irresponsible, but I wouldn’t say . . . I mean this makes him out to be some kind of a sadist. Which is just totally wrong.”

  Enough already.

  This is a book about Nirvana. Some guy took drugs and killed himself. Some guy began looking outside the rock arena for fulfilment and moved into politics. Some guy fell in love with rock’n’roll and there he remains. Some guy never left home and is still on an island with his wife and kid, building studios in the air.

  Welcome to the world of Nirvana.

  PART I

  UP

  CHAPTER 1

  Welcome To Aberdeen

  Hi, Everett

  Most of my experience with Aberdeen is driving through it on the way to, or back from, a nice weekend on the coast. I have eaten at a couple of diners and fast food joints there, but that hardly makes me an expert on the place. One noticeable thing is that as soon as you leave Aberdeen and hit Hoquiam, the houses and streets are nicer. It’s nothing fancy, it’s just that the same kinds of houses are no longer rundown, and the yards, for the most part, are better kept. The towns merge into each other and if it weren’t for the ‘Welcome To Hoquiam’ (or Aberdeen) signs, you wouldn’t know that you were in one town or the other.

  Aberdeen is a small (and small-minded) white trash town with high unemployment and, as such, isn’t remarkably different than thousands of other small white trash towns with low employment across the US. If the environment of Aberdeen created Kurt Cobain, then there should be tens of thousands of Kurt Cobains. But there aren’t. I don’t think there’s anything special, or especially bad, about Aberdeen. There are worse places with worse vibes – like Butte, Montana for instance. Butte hasn’t produced a tortured soul – at least one that got out of there, unless that’s what drove Evel Knievel to jump across the Snake River Canyon.

  Love, Mark Arm1

  THE story of Nirvana begins in Aberdeen, in the US state of Washington.

  Let me level with you.

  I know little about the pasts of individual members of Nirvana. You’ll discover some stuff about that in this book, but plenty more in others. I’m not good on history or bullshit. I’m not good on straightening out facts so rigidly they cease to bear any semblance to meaning. I’ve always preferred first-hand experience, first-hand recollections, even if this necessarily leads to contradiction and confusion because no two people view the same event in the same way, not collating together a jumble of assorted views and giving prominence to the most famous among them.

  The salient facts about Nirvana’s most famous member are well known by now: Kurt Donald Cobain was born on February 20, 1967 in Grays Harbour Community Hospital. His 21-year-old father Don worked as a mechanic at the Hoquiam Chevron garage; his teenage mother Wendy got pregnant just after graduating from high school. The family moved to central Aberdeen from Hoquiam six months after Kurt was born. Kurt had an imaginary childhood friend, Boddah, whom he created at the age of two, and would later believe to be real, listening back to the echo of his own voice on his Aunt Mari’s tape recorder.2 He was the centre of attention in an adoring family; there were seven aunts and uncles on his mother’s side alone. A sister, Kimberley (Kim), was born when he was three. His relatives nurtured his musical leanings and his burgeoning artistic talent, presenting him with a ready stream of paintbrushes and a Mickey Mouse drum kit. Uncle Chuck played in a band and had some large speakers in his basement studio.

  As an infant, Kurt would draw cartoon characters ( Aquaman, Creature From The Black Lagoon) and sing Arlo Guthrie�
��s ‘Motorcycle Song’. The family would go on toboggan rides together. Kurt was later diagnosed as hyperactive and claimed to have thrown 7-Up cans full of pebbles at passing police cars, even from the age of six.

  The singer died at the age of 27, victim of a self-inflicted shotgun blast.

  Some like to question this last fact because some like to read conspiracy into everything around them: figure out that it’s unfair that life rewards the avaricious and pushy, that those on top most often end up on top because they have so few scruples and are willing to trample on whomever it takes. Or maybe they just like a good story, no matter how hollow its basis. Some would be wrong. But hey, we’ll try and remain open-minded to everything . . . perhaps Kurt wasn’t born in Grays Harbour hospital, Aberdeen after all? No wait. That’s verifiable. Other people were present.

  Unlike suicide.

  Leg,

  Hi. Have only been to Aberdeen once. Remote, desolate . . . working class. Lumber town? What’s fascinating to me is: how unlikely the odds are of an act coming from, truly, The Middle Of Nowhere . . . to becoming the world’s biggest band in . . . four years?

  Bruce3

  Aberdeen is an isolated community situated in the south of America’s most north-western state4, an hour west of the state capital Olympia and just south of the Olympic Peninsula, home of the most formidable mountain range on the Pacific Coast. It’s in an area that travel writers like to describe with the clichéd phrase ‘outstanding natural beauty’. In Washington State’s case the epithet is justified: mountains (the Olympics, the Cascades) and rivers and ocean inlets and vast fields of trees all wind round one another, locking and interlocking and taking the breath away on a sunny day – which it rarely is. You wouldn’t know about beauty if you were born in Aberdeen, though: the town is dominated by its lumber mills and sawmills, and especially the towering Rayonier Mill, pumping white smoke from 150 feet in the sky.

  Aberdeen is a Scottish name, meaning ‘confluence of two rivers’: the town is located on the banks of the Chehalis and Wishkah rivers. For a hundred years, Aberdeen was a timber mill town on a bay, Grays Harbour, at the foot of the mountains. By the late Seventies, the region ran out of trees to cut down, and all businesses of any size were shuttered. The grand department stores downtown were emptied of merchandise and reborn as flea markets selling old books, magazines and second-hand clothes for a nickel a pound. In its heyday in the early twentieth century, Aberdeen was home to a population of more than 50,000. It now boasts less than a third of that. It’s a dying town. Aberdeen in 2006 is pretty much unchanged from back when a teenage Kurt Cobain used to spray incomprehensible graffiti in alleyways.

  Unemployment’s high in Aberdeen: unemployment and alcoholism and the suicide rate.5 There’s little for youth to do except run around drunk and light small fires in disused junkyards, or pick the psychedelic mushrooms that grow in the fields around the edges of town. Initially, Aberdeen prospered because its logging industry was serviced by a railroad terminus and seaport that engaged men who squandered their wages in its saloons and bordellos. But successive American governments in the Sixties and Seventies systematically ran down the railroads; the logging industry became decentralised and sailors started looking elsewhere for their pleasures after a crackdown on prostitution in the Fifties. Sounds grim, but Aberdeen is no different to anywhere else in small-town America – if it’s not logging, it’s strip-mining or oil-drilling, though nowadays it’s more likely to be corporate chains like Wal-Mart moving in, leeching the heart out of a small community and moving out again once they’ve sucked it dry.

  “Aberdeen was apocalyptic in the way old industrial towns are when the economy dies and there is no money or jobs,” explains Olympia musician Tobi Vail.

  When people talk about 25 per cent of the US population being near or below the poverty line6, they’re talking about Aberdeen. The difference between Aberdeen and the similarly depressed Olympia is that Olympia is rich enough to have a homeless community. Vagrants simply don’t bother coming to Aberdeen – they know there’s nothing for them there. It’s simple US economics: the side of America politicians never like to talk about. You don’t have many rights, just the right to exist. No one wants to know you because you’re not rich or powerful enough to be part of any political agenda. You don’t vote so you don’t count. It’s not like there isn’t beauty around Aberdeen, though. You can find a veritable treasure trove trawling through its thrift stores and church halls – but you need to focus, like the camera blowing on an empty carrier bag at the end of American Beauty.

  That’s one point of view.

  Others feel there’s plenty to appreciate about the town.

  “I don’t think it’s fair to say Aberdeen’s inhabitants don’t appreciate its beauty,” comments former K recording artist Rich Jensen. “Aberdeen’s raw wildness – its lack of structure – is one of the main things that keeps them there; the freedom to take a leak off your porch in the moonlight; the pleasures of rolling a junked car into a ravine and shooting at it periodically over a summer or two. I think the residents and working people of rural towns enjoy the quiet: the eagles that rest in the tops of the pines, the smell of sea air at dawn, etc – and they extract a satisfaction in believing that they deserve the charms of their rugged landscape because they work there, they belong there, they know what the place is, where the bones were broken, not like the aesthetes from the cities who see only a shallow, sunny afternoon’s image of the land.”

  Imagine a grey, rainy afternoon in the Pacific Northwest.

  As we set out from Olympia to Aberdeen on a highway that weaves through densely forested and hilly terrain, we’re playing the obligatory Nirvana soundtrack followed by the theme music from Twin Peaks.7 There are few stops along the way and the only signs of life are a handful of scattered farms, dilapidated barns and the occasional abandoned, sometimes half-built, breeze-block building whose purpose is ambiguous. Before you reach Aberdeen, there’s a small town called Montesano. This is where Kurt lived with his dad for a time. The man working at the Chevron station immediately identifies us as ‘big towners’. He knows we are n’t from the area because he knows everyone in the town. He explains that most people pass through here on their way to the big casinos in Ocean Shores. If it wasn’t for the constant drizzle and gusty winds, we could probably comfortably traverse the city limits in an hour by foot.

  Kurt’s dad’s old home is on Fleet Street, not too far off the freeway (there again, nothing is). The house is of modest size and well-kept, just a few houses away from the end of the street – a dead end – which leads to a repair shop that services cement trucks and construction equipment. The nearby railroad tracks appear to be derelict. A bike ride away is the combined junior high/high school where Kurt went for his freshman year. There is a small baseball field across the street, and a parking lot that could probably accommodate 20 cars or SUVs.

  Driving into Aberdeen, it’s hard to tell whether the sky is covered in fog, clouds or smoke from the smokestacks. Dense forest appears to surround the freeway and the river, but on closer examination the area is barren behind the first layer of trees. There is a logging factory immediately to the left, across the water. Timber is stacked up and stretches out in piles for several acres. What little traffic there is can be attributed to trucks toting lumber, RVs and station wagons. As we cross the city limits, we get to see the new, improved Aberdeen sign. As of April 2005, the Kurt Cobain Memorial Committee erected a new board with the words ‘Come As You Are’8 added to the bottom of ‘Welcome To Aberdeen’. There’s nowhere convenient to pull off the main stretch of road to take pictures, so we do what a few others have already clearly done (tyre marks as evidence), stopping on the narrow hard shoulder.

  Near the bridge there’s a Scenic Overlook point that perversely overlooks lumber-yards and smokestacks. There is a Wal-Mart with American flags adorning its façade, a McDonald’s with its familiar yellow arch, Taco Bell, Ross and Pizza Hut – the corporate images fro
m a thousand American malls giving the temporary illusion of a successful, commercial area. Once we drive on a mile or so further, however, across another bridge, the picture is entirely different. Many of the homes are boarded up and businesses closed down. A pretty even mix of mom and pop stores litter the town’s main shopping area, and the neighbourhoods are mostly small houses situated close together, decked out in the faded pastel colours popular in the Seventies. The rain, the constant cloud, the fumes and the distant rumble of Highway 12 create a tepid pall across the town. The city seems worn out.

  If it was sunny, you could imagine kids gathering in the park to play among the sea lion statues that shoot water from their mouths.

  Our first stop is underneath North Aberdeen Bridge, a short road span that straddles the Wishkah River where legend has it that a runaway Kurt Cobain slept during the winter of 1985. We park on the dead-end street where Kurt’s family lived (First Street), walk one block down to the crest of the bridge, climb through some overgrown brush and weeds and skittle down an embankment to its underbelly. There’s no official monument: instead there’s a few empty beer cans, some faded graffiti . . . I Kurt, cobaincase. com, Kurt Rests in Heaven, 20 hour drive to see your bridge – we love you Kurt, Kurdt 9: am I stupid for writing on this walright now, or is it still OK to? Your music is a gift to us all . . . piles of cigarette butts and some random bits of trash. It seems almost cosy down here, with a surprising amount of shelter and refuge from the rain. Like the names of so many American rivers, Wishkah sounds exotic, a throwback to the Native Americans who would have bathed in, washed in and drank from its waters – but this is a brown and murky Wishkah, littered with broken wood and pilings jutting out from the surface. The woods reach all the way to the banks of the river.