A huge jukebox dominates the living room, which is decorated with funky old thrift shop furniture, but mostly everyone—including the cats Einstein and Doris—hangs out in the kitchen. The refrigerator is stocked with organic this and preservative-free that. Recycled paper is used wherever possible. A vintage late fifties dry bar and three pinball machines—Kiss, the Addams Family, and Evel Knievel—are down in the basement, where Chris threw a party the night before the band left to record In Utero. Old friends like Matt Lukin from Mudhoney, Tad Doyle from TAD, and Dee Plakas from L7, new friends like Eddie Vedder, folks from Nirvana’s extended family like Ernie Bailey and Geffen/DGC A&R (Artists and Repertoire) man Gary Gersh all partied into the wee hours. Shelli whipped up some vegetarian hors d’oeuvres.
Chris lives low to the ground, spends his money wisely. This is hardly a high-living rock star—the door falls off his aged tape deck.
***
After a quick preliminary interview just before Christmas of 1992, the first round of more than twenty-five hours of interviews with Kurt took place in early February. They began very late at night, after Kurt would return from rehearsals for In Utero, lasting until four or five in the morning. In the midst of moving into a temporary home in Seattle, Kurt padded around his and Courtney’s hotel suite in mismatched pajamas, chain smoking as he peppered his story with a supremely dry and sarcastic wit. Once, he strapped on a virtual reality machine—something between a Walkman and a private psychedelic light show—that he was experimenting with to control his chronic stomach pain. Various settings supposedly stimulate memory, creativity, energy, and relaxation.
For internationally famous celebrities, Kurt and Courtney live a pretty no-frills lifestyle. There are no minders, no beefy bodyguards around them. Kurt takes a taxi around town, stops in the McDonald’s for a burger, wearing a ridiculous Elmer Fudd hat pulled down on his head for a disguise. A visitor to their hotel room one night walked into the hotel, took the elevator to their floor, and walked right through their open door to find Kurt and Courtney in their pajamas and nestling together on the bed, watching a trashy Leif Garrett TV movie in the dark. “Oh hi,” Courtney said, not even startled.
Kurt appears frail, rail-thin. He speaks in a sort of deadpan sing-song, abraded by too many cigarettes into a low growl. It makes him seem sad and spent, as if he’s just finished a crying jag, but that’s just the way he is. “Everyone thinks of me as this emotional wreck, this total negative black star—all the time,” Kurt says. “They’re always asking ‘What’s the matter?’ And there’s nothing wrong with me at all. I’m not feeling blue at all. It got to the point where I had to look at myself and figure out what people are seeing. I thought maybe I should shave my eyebrows. That might help.”
Although Kurt’s charisma is almost palpable, he is profoundly low-key. It helps to mentally amplify his every reaction: a distracted “hmph” translates into “Wow!”; a quick chuckle is a guffaw; a dirty look is murder.
As in photographs, his face takes on many different aspects. Sometimes he looks like an angelic boy, sometimes like a dissipated wastrel, sometimes like the guy who fixes your transmission. And sometimes, in certain lights, he even looks eerily like Axl Rose. His pale complexion is lightly veiled by scruffy stubble. An angry red patch on his scalp shows through the trademark unwashed hair, which is strawberry blond for the time being. He usually wears pajamas and is perpetually unkempt. Although the time of day has very little to do with his schedule, he always wears a watch bearing the likeness of Tom Peterson, the owner of a chain of appliance stores in Oregon.
Kurt’s eyes are so extremely blue that they give his face a perpetually startled expression. In his pajamas, he gives the impression of a shell-shocked young private padding around a veteran’s home. But he doesn’t miss a trick.
By early March, after the recording of the band’s new album, In Utero, Kurt, Courtney and their baby Frances moved into a largish rented house overlooking Lake Washington. At the kitchen table, Kurt would play at disemboweling a plastic anatomical model, chain-smoking the whole time. “I like the idea that you can take them all apart and just see the guts,” he said. “Organs fascinate me. They work. And a lot of times they fuck up, but it’s hard to believe that a person can put something as poisonous as alcohol or drugs in their system and the mechanics can take it—for a while. It’s amazing they take them at all.”
The place is sparsely furnished—there’s beige wall-to-wall carpeting and nothing on the walls—but this is just temporary. They’ll be moving to a remodeled house in a small town a few dozen miles out of Seattle later this year, and they’re looking for a pied à terre on Seattle’s hip Capitol Hill. Upstairs is the bedroom, the baby’s room, and Kurt’s painting room, where an easel holds a portrait of a withered, forlorn creature with skeletal arms and lifeless black eyes. In the downstairs bathroom sits an MTV Award for Best New Artist, the little silver astronaut keeping a close watch over the toilet. Frances’s nanny, Jackie, has a room down in the basement. In the dining room off the kitchen, a model-car track is set up.
One room of the house is designated “the mess room.” The floor is covered with old letters, notes, work tapes, records, photographs, and posters dating back to the earliest days of Kurt’s musical life. Against one wall is Courtney’s Buddhist chanting shrine, which she doesn’t use much anymore, probably because she can’t get to it through the clutter. A brown paper bag has tipped over, disgorging a score or so of plastic Colonel Sanders and Pillsbury Doughboy dolls.
Guitars are everywhere, even in the bathroom. A sonorous old Martin sits in the living room alongside a more modest instrument painted red and covered with appliques of flowers.
Seven-month-old Frances Bean Cobain is a beautiful baby with her father’s piercing blue eyes and her mother’s jaw line. Although her parents seem to dote on her for the benefit of the visitor, they are clearly loving. Kurt seems a little more graceful with children than Courtney, but both do a fine job of making the usual goo-goo noises for the obvious amusement of the baby.
By all accounts, Frances did wonders for Kurt. “He looks at Frances all the time and he says, ‘That’s the way I used to be! That’s the way I used to be!’ ” Courtney says. “You can’t change a person, but my goal in life is to make him that happy again. But it’s hard because he’s always dissatisfied with stuff.”
One night, Courtney quietly strums an acoustic guitar into a boom box in the living room upstairs while down in the garage next to their used Volvo, Kurt bangs on a dilapidated drum set left over from some long-forgotten tour. The garage is filled with boxes and boxes of papers, artwork, guitar guts, and years of thrift shop purchases. Two boxes are crammed with transparent plastic men, women, and even horses. Close by are an amplifier, a bass guitar, and the one thing in the house that could conceivably be called an indulgence—a Space Invaders-type video game that Kurt picked up for a couple of hundred bucks. He records high scores on it with initials like “COK” and “POO” and “FUK.”
Our conversations were extremely frank. Kurt has a simple explanation for his candor. “I’m caught,” he says, referring to his widely-publicized problems with heroin, “so I may as well fess up to it and try to put it in a little bit more perspective. Everyone thinks I’ve been a junkie for years. I was a junkie for a really small amount of time.”
Furthermore, he’s not worried about exploding the band’s—or his own—formidable myth. Quite the opposite. “I never intended to have some kind of a mystery about us,” he said to me once. “It’s just that I didn’t have anything to say in the beginning. Now that it’s gone on long enough, there’s a story, in a way. Still, every night after you leave, I think, ‘God, my life is so fucking boring compared to so many people that I know.’ ”
Kurt is eager to set the record straight. There have been so many rumors about him, his wife, and even his infant daughter that he figures the best way he can cut his losses is just to tell exactly what happened. His tales are sometimes self-se
rving, full of rationalization and self-contradiction, but even his distortions are revealing about his life, his art, and the connections between the two.
CHAPTER 1
A GREASY-HAIRED LITTLE REBELLIOUS KID
Aberdeen, Washington (pop. 16,660), is one hundred and eight long miles southwest of Seattle, way out on the remote Washington coast. Seattle has a lot of rain, but Aberdeen has more—up to seven feet a year—casting a constant, dreary pall over the town. Far from the nearest freeway, nothing comes in and rarely does anything come out.
Art and culture are best left to the snooty types over in Seattle—among the “fascinating activities” listed in a brochure from the Grays Harbor County Chamber of Commerce are bowling, chain-saw competitions, and video arcades.
Route 12 into Aberdeen is bordered by an endless succession of trailer parks; beyond them are hundreds of thousands of acres of timberland, often marred by vast stubbly scars where the loggers have been clear-cutting. Coming in from the east, the first thing a visitor sees of Aberdeen is the sprawling, ugly Weyerhauser lumberyard fronting the Wishkah River, where the limbless carcasses of once-proud trees lie stacked like massacre victims. Surveying the scene from the other side of the river is a long strip of plastic fast food joints.
Logging dominates the town; or rather, it once did. Business has been falling off for years and layoffs are turning Aberdeen into a ghost town. These days, the streets downtown are slowly filling with empty or boarded-up storefronts. The only places that are doing good business are taverns like the Silver Dollar and the aptly named Pourhouse, as well as the local pawnshop, which overflows with guns, chain saws, and electric guitars. The suicide rate of Grays Harbor County is one of the highest in the nation; alcoholism is rampant and crack came to town years ago.
People hate the spotted owl—recipes for cooking the endangered creature pop up on local bumper stickers—even though decentralization of the timber industry, rising labor costs, and automation are really what’s putting people out of work. One of the biggest mills in town used to employ scores of workers and now it has five: four men and a laser-guided computerized cutting machine.
One of the biggest growth industries in the county is the cultivation of marijuana and psychedelic mushrooms, which people grow in order to supplement their meager or nonexistent incomes.
Things didn’t used to be so rough. Aberdeen was once a bustling seaport where sailors stopped off for rest, food, and some rented female companionship. Fact is, the town was once one big whorehouse, centered on the notorious Hume Street (which the town fathers renamed State Street in the fifties to try to bury the memories). Later, the town became a railroad terminus and the home of dozens of sawmills and logging operations. Aberdeen teemed with single young men making plenty of money in the wood industry and prostitution thrived, with as many as fifty bordellos (“women’s boardinghouses,” they were called) in the downtown area at one point. Prostitution lasted as long as the late fifties, when a police crackdown finally put an end to it. Some say Aberdeen’s unsavory past gives its residents an inferiority complex.
This is where Kurt Donald Cobain was born on February 20, 1967, to Wendy Cobain, a homemaker, and her husband Donald, a mechanic at the Chevron station in town. The young family started out in a rental house in nearby Hoquiam, then moved to Aberdeen when Kurt was six months old.
Kurt grew up not knowing where his family name came from. His maternal grandfather is German, but that’s all he knew. Only recently did he discover that his father’s side of the family is full-blooded Irish, and that Cobain is a corruption of the name Coburn.
Although the Cobains were of humble means, life started out very well for their golden-haired son. “My mom was always physically affectionate with me,” says Kurt. “We always kissed good-bye and hugged. It was really cool. I’m surprised to find out that so many families aren’t that way. Those were pretty blissful times.”
Kurt’s sister Kim was born three years after he was, but Kurt and his mother had already established a tight bond. “There’s nothing like your firstborn—nothing,” says Wendy, now remarried and still living in the same house in Aberdeen with her husband and eight-year-old daughter. “No child even comes close to that. I was totaled out on him. My every waking hour was for him.”
Kurt just before his second birthday.
Kurt was obviously a bright child. “I remember calling my mother,” Wendy recalls, “and telling her it kind of scared me because he had perceptions like I’ve never seen a small child have.”
Kurt had started showing an interest in music when he was two, which was not surprising since his mother’s side of the family was very musical—Wendy’s brother Chuck played in a rock and roll band, her sister Mary played guitar, and everyone in the family had some sort of musical talent. At Christmas, they would all sing or act out skits.
Wendy’s uncle changed his name from Delbert Fradenburg to Dale Arden, moved to California to become an operatic balladeer, and cut a few records in the late forties and early fifties. He became friends with actor Brian Keith (who later starred in the sixties sitcom “Family Affair”) and Jay Silverheels, who played Tonto in the “Lone Ranger” TV series. So, as Wendy jokes, “this celebrity thing is nothing new to the family.”
Aunt Mary gave Kurt Beatles and Monkees records when he was seven or so. She would invite Kurt over to her house to watch her band practice. A country musician who had actually recorded a single, Mary had played in bar bands around Aberdeen for years, sometimes appeared solo at the Riviera steak house, and once placed second on a local TV talent contest called “You Can Be a Star.”
Mary tried to teach Kurt how to play guitar, but he didn’t have the patience—in fact, it was hard to get him to sit still for anything. He had been diagnosed as hyperactive.
Like many kids of his generation, Kurt had been given the drug Ritalin, a form of speed, which counteracts hyperactivity. It kept him up until four in the morning. Sedatives made him fall asleep in school. Finally, they tried subtracting sugar and the infamous Red Dye #2 from his diet, and it worked. It was hard for a hyperactive kid to stay away from sugar because, as Wendy puts it, “They are, like, addicted to it.”
But not being able to have a candy bar hardly dampened Kurt’s spirits. “He got up every day with such joy that there was another day to be had,” says Wendy. “He was so enthusiastic. He would come running out of his bedroom so excited that there was another day ahead of him and he couldn’t wait to find out what it was going to bring him.”
“I was an extremely happy child,” says Kurt. “I was constantly screaming and singing. I didn’t know when to quit. I’d eventually get beaten up by kids because I’d get so excited about wanting to play. I took play very seriously. I was just really happy.”
The first kid of his generation, Kurt had seven aunts and uncles on his mother’s side alone who would argue over who got to baby-sit for him. Used to being the center of attention, he entertained anybody who wanted to watch. “He was so dramatic,” says Wendy. “He’d throw himself down on the floor at the store for this old man because this old man would just love to have Kurt sing for him.” One of Kurt’s favorite records was Alice’s Restaurant by Arlo Guthrie. Often, he’d sing Guthrie’s “Motorcycle Song.” “I don’t want a pickle/I just want to ride on my motorcycle/ And I don’t want to die!”
His aunt Mary gave him a bass drum when he was seven. Kurt would strap it on and walk around the neighborhood wearing a hunting hat and his dad’s tennis shoes, beating the drum and singing Beatles songs like “Hey Jude” and “Revolution.”
Kurt didn’t like it when men looked at Wendy, a very attractive woman with blond hair and pretty blue eyes. Don never seemed to care, but Kurt always got angry and jealous—“Mommy, that man’s looking at you!” he’d say. Once, he even told off a policeman.
Even at age three, Kurt didn’t much like policemen. When he’d spot one, he’d sing a little song. “Corn on the cops, corn on the cops! The cops are com
ing! They’re going to kill you!” “Every time I saw a cop I’d start singing that at them and pointing at them and telling them that they were evil,” says Kurt, grinning. “I had this massive thing about cops. I didn’t like them at all.” When he was a couple of years older, Kurt would fill 7-Up cans full of pebbles and heave them at police cars, although he never actually hit one.
That was also about the time that Kurt somehow learned how to extend his middle finger in the time-honored manner. While his mother drove around town doing errands, he’d sit in the backseat of the car and flip the bird to everyone they passed by.
By the time Kurt was in second grade, everybody had noticed how well he could draw. “After a while,” says Wendy, “it kind of got crammed down his throat. Every present was a paintbrush or an easel. We kind of almost killed it for him.”
Everybody thought Kurt’s drawings and paintings were great. Except for him. “He would never be happy about his art,” says Wendy. “He would never be satisfied with it, like typical artists are.” One day around Halloween Kurt came home with a copy of the school paper. It had a drawing Kurt had done on the cover, an honor usually reserved for kids who were at least fifth-graders. Kurt was really mad about it when he came home, because he didn’t think his picture was that great. “His attitude toward adults changed because of that,” says Wendy. “Everybody was telling him how much they loved his art and he was never satisfied with it.”
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