Nirvana

by Everett True

  The First Street residence is covered in chipped paint and surrounded by unkempt rose bushes. It’s not deserted, but the house and its neighbours are eerily quiet. Where is everyone? An overweight kid wearing a Grateful Dead T appears from the house across the street. He eyes us suspiciously from his front porch. We decide to move on as his painfully overweight mother emerges from their home, an equally suspicious look on her heavy face.

  Down the street, there’s a clerk inside a spacious Thriftway shop explaining to a customer that 60-year-olds and over get their discount on Tuesdays only. The store sells everything from used wire hangers to fabrics, old trophies, folders and binders, clothing, baskets, tins and cheap Halloween decorations. There is a shelf with old romance novels, self-help manuals and a wide variety of religious works. The clerk sees us taking notes and asks us, dryly, what we’re doing. We explain that we’re just going around learning about Nirvana. She says: “Oh right, Nir-van-a. Is that the guy that died?”

  We walk around the corner to ‘the shack’ where Kurt and Matt Lukin lived: it’s now completely unliveable (perhaps it always was), the windows boarded up and the roof caved in. The paint is stripped away and there are nails protruding from several surfaces. Graffiti on the side says, ‘ Cripts Rule’. They could at least spell it right. Other vacant, decaying houses surround the shack, as if one diseased house has infected the rest. There is one well-kept home decorated with ‘Support Our Troops’ and ‘United We Stand’ stickers10, but mostly this particular street is uninhabited . . . left to fall by the wayside.

  Kurt and Krist’s high school, Aberdeen High – home of the Aberdeen Bobcats – is housed in an unexpectedly small building; two, maybe three, storeys high. A fire occurred recently in the historic wing, apparently caused by students attempting to burn school records. The absent wing has been replaced with a gravel parking lot, with spaces for cars marked on the rocks with spray paint. This building looks like a large cinderblock, prison-like . . . anyone seeing it for the first time might well be tempted to drop out, just like Kurt. A large yellow and blue painted rock rests on a platform. It’s hard to figure out its significance – maybe Aberdeen’s take on abstract art?

  We visit Judy’s, an antique book and record shop next door to Krist’s mom’s old hair salon, which is across the street from what used to be the YMCA where Kurt worked. The place seems closed because the doors and windows are entirely blocked with books, but Judy sees us and lets us in. She’s not usually open on Wednesdays, she says. Judy remembers the Nirvana guys coming in quite often, mostly buying records. She says Shelli ( Krist’s ex-wife) sometimes bought games, and Krist’s mom would do her hair.

  Aberdeen feels lethargic. The products in the antique shops sum the place up: overused, dirty and neglected. There are billboards and marquees spouting bible verses and religious propaganda: it’s that sort of a town. There’s even a pastor on the sidewalk, waving to oncoming traffic as if beckoning them into his church, like those guys who wear sandwich boards or chicken costumes to advertise the daily specials.

  This is the reality that Kurt Cobain – and childhood friend Krist Novoselic (of Croatian heritage and also the product of a broken home) – was born into. A place that maybe once existed, once had a heart and bustling soul but is now just another white trash trailer stop off the freeway, a place you’d never visit in a million years unless you had a reason to.

  “Aberdeen was real scary: redneck, hell town, backwoods, like a village or a big city for lumberjacks,” Krist told me in Nirvana’s first mainstream interview in February 1989. “You see Jack Nicholson in Easy Rider talking about rednecks? About how if they see something different they don’t go running scared, they get dangerous. Aberdeen’s like that. But they were so bone-headed, why shouldn’t we be different from them?”

  “Aberdeen was really out there,” comments former Nirvana drummer Chad Channing from the relative security of his present-day house on Bainbridge Island, a ferry-ride away from Seattle. “It was a total logger town or something, you know? It’s this place I could never picture living in. These people just seemed to work all day and drink all night. It seemed kind of rundown. It’s a place on the verge of not being a town any more. Why did you go there and why is this place – how is it existing? What keeps it running?”

  A lot of towns are like that in America.

  “Well, it makes you wonder,” he replies. “In every small town there are usually people who have lived there their whole lives. Aberdeen’s one of those towns where I couldn’t imagine doing that. How could you do that? Down the road you could be in your seventies or eighties. ‘I’ve been here all my life.’ ‘ Geez, I’m sorry – you’re not dead yet?’ ”

  Kurt Cobain was eight when his parents divorced, the reasons predictably similar to those of thousands of other couples caught in the same predicament. They married too young, and the harsh economic pressures of trying to keep their small household together drove them apart. Don Cobain changed jobs in ’74, and took an entry-level job into the timber industry – office work at Mayr Brothers – but at $4.10 an hour, less than he’d been earning as a mechanic. The Cobains would frequently borrow money from Don’s parents, Leland and Iris. Kurt became increasingly wayward, and his father tried to keep him in line, inflicting almost daily psychological punishments – thumping him on the chest with two fingers – and, of course, there was the famed ‘lump of coal’ Christmas present, wherein Don and Wendy threatened Kurt he’d only receive a lump of coal in his Christmas stocking if he continued fighting with his sister. It didn’t happen – it was meant as a joke – but it left enough of an imprint on a young Kurt for him to claim later that it did, that on Christmas morning one year he found a lump of coal by his bed instead of a five-dollar Starsky and Hutch gun.11

  “My story is exactly the same as 90 per cent of everyone my age,” he told Guitar World. “Everyone’s parents got divorced. Their kids smoked pot all through high school, they grew up during the era when there was a massive Communist threat and everyone thought they were going to die from a nuclear war. And everyone’s personalities are practically the same.”

  The year before the divorce was, by all accounts, pleasurable for the Cobains – there was a trip to Disneyland south of Los Angeles, and a visit to the hospital where Kurt’s broken arm was reset after some boisterous rough-and-tumble with Don’s brother Gary had gone too far; even the unlikely image of Kurt stepping out as a baseball player in his local Little League team. It was suggested that his hyperactivity might be due to attention deficit disorder. Food colourings were removed from his diet, followed by sugar. When that didn’t work and he was still marching round the house banging a drum and screaming at the top of his voice12, he was placed on Ritalin for three months.

  It was the divorce that really changed Kurt’s perspective on life. Almost overnight he became withdrawn. His mother Wendy told Nirvana biographer Michael Azerrad that Kurt became “real sullen, kind of mad and always frowning and ridiculing”. On the wall of his bedroom in June 1976, a few months after the divorce, Kurt scrawled, “I hate Mom, I hate Dad, Dad hates Mom, Mom hates Dad, it simply makes you want to be sad,” with caricatures of his parents to one side. The divorce was acrimonious: Wendy wanted to split from Don because she felt he wasn’t around very much; Don contested the split and remained in a state of denial for a considerable period afterwards. Both parents admitted they used the kids in the war between them. Wendy got the house and the kids; Don was granted the 1965 Ford pick-up truck; Wendy got the 1968 Camaro; Don was instructed to pay $150 a month child support.

  Don moved into his parents’ Montesano trailer. Kurt hated his mom’s new boyfriend, who was prone to violent fits and whom he called “a mean wife-beater” (he once broke Wendy’s arm). Soon after the divorce he asked to live with his dad. Don was granted custody in June 1979. For the remainder of his formative years the troubled child was bounced back and forth between parents and relatives. Kurt began to develop stomach problems, caused by mal
nutrition. Initially, Kurt felt buoyed by the close relationship developed through necessity between father and son, even though Don’s idea of a bonding experience was to take him to work. Later, he felt betrayed after Don remarried – to Jenny Westby, who had two kids of her own, of whom Kurt felt intensely jealous.

  From being a happy, outgoing kid, Kurt became incredibly insecure.

  NOTES

  1 Mark Arm: singer with Mudhoney, the archetypal late Eighties Seattle band for whom the term ‘grunge’ was coined. Arm was a major influence on Kurt Cobain.

  2 Mari – sister to Wendy – claims to be the first person to have placed a guitar in Kurt’s hands, when he was two. She was 15 years old, and played guitar herself. “He turned it around the other way because he was left-handed,” she told Seattle journalist Gillian G. Gaar.

  3 Bruce Pavitt, founder of Sub Pop records. Leg is a reference to my stage name, The Legend!, which is how I was first introduced to many in this story.

  4 Strictly speaking Washington is the most north-western state in the contiguous 48 states. Let’s not forget Alaska.

  5 Aberdeen’s suicide rate was twice the national average in 1991, at 27 people per 100,000. In July ’79, one of Kurt’s great-uncles, Burle Cobain, committed suicide (gunshot to the abdomen). Five years later, Burle’s brother Kenneth shot himself in the head. By choosing to die the way he did, Kurt – either knowingly or unknowingly – chose the perfect Aberdeen death.

  6 Financial Times magazine, May 18, 2005.

  7 Kurt described his home town as being like “Twin Peaks . . . without the excitement.” In actuality, Twin Peaks was filmed 162 miles up the road at the rather picturesque blue-collar holiday resort Snoqualmie Falls.

  8 ‘Come As You Are’ was the second single lifted from Nevermind .

  9 Kurdt was the spelling Kurt first gave to his name in Nirvana. He also briefly spelt his surname Kobain.

  10 Olympia’s nearest neighbour is an army base, Fort Lewis.

  11 The ‘Bean’ in his daughter’s name, Frances Bean Cobain, is a reference to the lump of coal – Kurt’s own spin on his imaginary childhood present.

  12 Cartoon images spring to mind. First, there’s Charlie Brown in Peanuts, cast adrift on his pitcher’s mound, the eternal optimist despite all the evidence to the contrary – and then Calvin, the insatiable hyperactive kid with his imaginary friend, the toy tiger Hobbes, in Bill Watterson’s brilliant Nineties Peanuts equivalent, Calvin And Hobbes. In one four-panel strip, Calvin can be seen hammering nails into the dining-room table. His mother screams at him: “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” Calvin stops for a minute, considers and then looks up at her, all innocence, and says, “Is this a trick question or what?”

  CHAPTER 2

  Don’t Want To Be Confused

  The Melvins are not heavy metal.

  They are conceptual artists working in a pop vein.

  Think Boredoms, Sonic Youth, Captain Beefheart. 1

  There is no better band. Equally good, yes, but better, no.

  They are completely misunderstood by fans and critics.

  They are hilarious.

  They are sadists.

  They are highly intelligent.

  They are punk, not hardcore. Think Sex Pistols, Dead Kennedys, not Fugazi or Bikini Kill.2

  They were influenced by The Wipers.3 This is what they have in common with Beat Happening.4 The Wipers and the Melvins were influenced by Hendrix.5 This is what they don’t have in common with Beat Happening.

  If Northwest music was split into a chart of influences, most bands could be traced back to The Wipers, the Melvins, Jimi Hendrix or Beat Happening. Nirvana was influenced by all four. The other two ingredients were desperation and The Beatles.

  ( Taken from www.bumpidee.com)

  LIFE wasn’t much fun for Kurt Cobain, post-divorce.

  Kurt refused to eat with his new family; joined the school’s wrestling team on the insistence of Don but refused to fight back on the day of the big tournament, sitting on the mat with his arms folded; didn’t want to go hunting; wore a pageboy haircut and bell-bottom jeans; and doodled constantly in class. He watched Close Encounters Of The Third Kind and recounted its dialogue word-for-word to his stepbrother James; made his own Super-8 snuff movie at the age of 11; talked about becoming a big rock star and going out in a blaze of glory like Jimi Hendrix . . . no big deal, many kids are overtly concerned with death and attention. He was left-handed, artistic in a town that viewed art as the closest thing to gay (his mother later forbade him from hanging around with a gay friend); he smoked the marijuana that grew around Montesano.

  Musically speaking, Kurt’s taste wasn’t improving: some might view his progression from liking the odd Beatles record to championing Journey’s heinous early Eighties album Evolution as a step backwards. Ironically, he would later compare rivals Pearl Jam to the self-same stadium rock band when seeking to dismiss their music as holding no credibility whatsoever. Maybe teenage boys should be banned from listening to rock music: it’d sure put paid to the careers of such ageing wannabe juvenile delinquents as Velvet Revolver and anyone still impressed by Mick Jagger’s pout. In 1981, Kurt began life as a freshman at Montesano High School. In a clearly doomed attempt to please his dad and not stand out from his peers, he joined the football and track teams.6

  In February, Uncle Chuck decided it was time to buy Kurt a proper teenage birthday present. It was to prove a decisive turning point. “I was offered the choice once between a guitar and a bicycle for my birthday,” he told me eight years later – before adding mendaciously, “so I took the bicycle.7 Why did I start playing music? Boredom, I guess. I wanted to be able to play the drums,” he added, referring to his old childhood toy. “I still do.”

  The guitar was cheap, second-hand and Japanese – a Lindell – but it was more than enough for Kurt. He called up his Aunt Mari to ask if the strings should be strung alphabetically. He carried it with him everywhere as a badge of pride, even though he could barely play it through the tiny 10-watt amp Chuck also gave him. In March 1982 – after having been moved down to the basement – Kurt decided to leave his dad’s house: first, he went to his paternal grandparents’ trailer, then on to his Uncle Jim’s house in South Aberdeen. He found Aberdeen intimidating compared to Montesano.

  “There are actually about a hundred really small towns in south-west Washington,” Tobi Vail explains. “I lived in Naselle, WA, which is one hour south, and to us Aberdeen seemed really big – they had city buses, a library, a post office, a handful of restaurants and stores; stuff that rural places don’t have.”

  Uncle Jim smoked pot and had a hipper record collection than his brother Don: The Grateful Dead8, Led Zeppelin and The Beatles; stoner musical influences that Kurt absorbed, encouraged by older school buddies sporting tie-dyed T-shirts and feathered hair who’d drop by to mooch off Jim’s food supply. “I just thought they were cooler than my geeky fourth-grade friends who watched Happy Days,” Kurt told biographer Azerrad.

  From Jim’s, Kurt was passed around from relative to relative – including Uncle Chuck’s where the young Cobain began taking guitar lessons from one of Chuck’s bandmates, Warren Mason. Mason found Kurt a proper guitar – an Ibanez costing $125 – and tuition began in earnest: such classic rock standards as ‘Stairway To Heaven’9, ‘Louie Louie’10 and AC/DC’s ‘Back In Black’ being among the first songs learned.

  In ’82, Kurt moved back into his mother’s house at 1210 East First Street and was transferred to his parents’ old school, Aberdeen’s Weather-wax High. Once again he felt like an outcast, a situation probably aggravated by his choice of class – commercial and basic art, where he’d draw crude cartoons of Michael Jackson, sperms and Ronald Reagan, and make rudimentary Claymation movies.

  “I was a scapegoat,” the singer told music journalist Jon Savage, “but not in the sense that people picked on me all the time. They didn’t beat me up because I was already so withdrawn. I was so antisocial that I was almost insane. I wou
ldn’t have been surprised if they had voted me ‘Most Likely To Kill Everyone At A High School Dance’.”

  Wendy had started dating younger men, and delighted in sunbathing in her bikini: Kurt was embarrassed by the attention his mom would get and hit any friend who’d joke about it – which many of them did, especially as his mom bought them beer and let them stay over. In February ’83, Kurt turned 16 and passed his driver’s test. Several weeks later, he saw his first rock show: Sammy Hagar11 at Seattle Center Coliseum.12 Impressed by the show’s theatrics he turned up at school the next day wearing a Hagar T-shirt. He was later to feel embarrassed at his teenage proclivity, but he certainly didn’t deny his past as has since been claimed. This is how he described the event to me:

  “Everyone was passing round pot and I got really high and lit myself on fire. I had a Bic lighter in my sweatshirt pocket and I was watching Sammy, swinging upside-down from the rafters, mocking everyone else who was holding their lighters above their heads. I looked down and petrol had spilt out everywhere and my shirt was on fire. It went well with the piss-stained pants. I got those before the show when we drank a case of beer and got stuck in a traffic jam. There was nowhere to go so I peed my pants in the back of the car.

  “In the bathroom there was a passed-out, drunken seventh grader lying in the piss trough. People relieved themselves on him throughout the concert, not even caring. There were these two girls cutting lines of coke on a small mirror when, all of a sudden, a drunken man fell behind their chairs and vomited all over their laps. The girls had their boyfriends beat up the drunken coke killer.”