Come As You Are

by Michael Azerrad

  Early in 1980, when Kurt was twelve, he and his friend Brendan had seen the B-52’s on “Saturday Night Live.” They got bitten by the new wave bug and Brendan got his parents to buy him some checkered Vans. Kurt’s dad couldn’t afford that, so Kurt just drew a checkerboard pattern on his regular sneakers.

  Somewhere around the summer before tenth grade, Kurt began following the exploits of the Sex Pistols in Creem magazine. The idea of punk rock fascinated him. Unfortunately, the record store in Aberdeen didn’t stock any punk rock records, so he didn’t know what it sounded like. Alone in his room, he played what he thought it sounded like—“three chords and a lot of screaming,” says Kurt. Not so far off the mark, as it turned out.

  A few years later, he finally tracked down a “punk” record, the Clash’s sprawling, eclectic three-album set, Sandinista, and was disappointed when it didn’t sound like what he thought punk should sound like.

  Kurt describes his early music as “really raunchy riff-rock.” “It was like Led Zeppelin but it was raunchy and I was trying to make it as aggressive and mean as I could,” he says. “I was thinking, ‘What would punk rock really be like? What is it? How nasty is it?’ And I would try to play as nasty as I could. Turn my little ten-watt amplifier up as loud as it could go. I just didn’t have any idea what I was doing.

  “It was definitely a good release,” says Kurt. “I thought of it as a job. It was my mission. I knew I had to practice. As soon as I got my guitar, I just became so obsessed with it.

  “I had this feeling all the time—I always knew I was doing something that was special,” says Kurt. “I knew it was better, even though I couldn’t prove it at the time. I knew I had something to offer and I knew eventually I would have the opportunity to show people that I could write good songs—that I could contribute something musically to rock and roll.”

  Kurt was desperate to take the next logical step and form a band. “I wanted to see what it was like to write a song and see what it sounded like with all the instruments at once,” Kurt says. “I just wanted that. At least to practice. That’s all I wanted.” It would be four years before he would find a band, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.

  In school, he met two kids named Scott and Andy who played bass and guitar and jammed out in an abandoned meat locker way out in the woods. Kurt went out there and played one day and the three decided to form a band. Kurt agreed to leave his guitar out there because after all, he was going to come back the very next day and rehearse again. But Scott and Andy kept putting off practice and days turned into weeks, weeks into months. Kurt couldn’t get his instrument back because he didn’t have a car, and his mom wouldn’t drive him. He made do with a right-handed guitar owned by a kid whose mother had died and was staying at the Cobains’ house. “He was just this stoner guy who was really stump dumb,” says Kurt. “I liked him because he was a real depressed person.” Eventually, Kurt got a friend to drive him out to the woods where his guitar was and they found it in pieces—just a neck and some electronic guts. Kurt painstakingly made a new body in wood shop, only to find that he didn’t know the correct proportions to make it stay in tune.

  “When I was a lot younger, around seven years old, I thought for sure I could be a rock star,” says Kurt. “There was no problem because I was so hyperactive and the world was in my hands—I could do anything. I knew I could be the president if I wanted to, but that was a stupid idea—I’d rather be a rock star. I didn’t have any doubt. I was really into the Beatles and I didn’t understand my environment, what was lying ahead, what kind of alienation I would feel as a teenager.

  “I thought of Aberdeen as any other city in America,” Kurt continues. “I thought they were all the same—everyone just got along and there wasn’t nearly as much violence as there actually was and it would be really easy. I thought the United States was about as big as my backyard, so it would be no problem to drive all over the place and play in a rock band and be on the cover of magazines and stuff.

  “But then when I started becoming this manic depressive at nine years old, I didn’t look at it that way. It seemed so unrealistic.”

  By tenth grade, Kurt had abandoned all fantasies of fame. “I was so self-conscious at that time,” he says. “I had such a small amount of esteem that I couldn’t even think of actually becoming a rock star, never mind dealing with what they would expect a rock star to be. I couldn’t imagine being on television or doing interviews or anything like that. Stuff like that didn’t even seep into my mind at the time.”

  Kurt’s father had made him join the Babe Ruth league baseball team. Basically, Kurt just warmed the bench, and whenever he was called to bat, he’d strike out on purpose, just so he wouldn’t have to get into the game. On the bench, he hung out with a guy named Matt Lukin and they talked about Kiss and Cheap Trick. The two had met before in electronics class at Montesano High. Lukin remembers Kurt as “this greasy-haired little rebellious kid.”

  Lukin played bass in a local band called the Melvins, whom Kurt had actually seen rehearse one night the summer before ninth grade. Kurt’s friend Brendan knew someone who knew the drummer for the Melvins and they wangled an invitation to the Melvins’ practice, which was then an attic in someone’s house. The Melvins had not gone punk yet, and were playing Hendrix and Who covers.

  It was the first time Kurt had seen a real rock band up close and he was terrifically excited. “I’d been drinking wine all night and I was really drunk and obnoxious and I remember complimenting them about a million times,” says Kurt. “I was so excited to see people my age in a band. It was so great. I was thinking, ‘Wow, those guys are so lucky.’ ” Disgusted with this fawning little squirt, they kicked Kurt out. Still drunk, he fell down the attic ladder as he left.

  In art class at Montesano High that year, Kurt again met Melvins leader Buzz Osborne, a stocky, wild-looking kid a couple of years his senior. At the time, Osborne was a big Who fan, but soon moved into punk rock. He had a photo book on the Sex Pistols, which he let Kurt borrow. Kurt was riveted. It was the first time he had gotten to see punk rock other than those precious few spreads in Creem. “This was the Sex Pistols in all their wildness,” says Kurt, “and I got to read about them and everything. It was really cool.” Soon he was drawing the Sex Pistols logo on his desk in every class and all over his Pee-Chee folder. Then he began telling anyone who would listen that he was going to start a punk rock band and that it was going to be really popular, still not having any idea what punk rock sounded like.

  “He struck me as a freak,” says Kurt of Osborne. “Someone who I definitely wanted to get to know.” Kurt envied Osborne because he had a punk rock band that actually played sometimes in Seattle and Olympia. “And that’s all I ever really wanted to do at that point,” says Kurt. “I didn’t have any high expectations for my music at all. I just wanted to have the chance to play in front of some people in Seattle. The thought of being in a band that was successful enough to actually go on tour was too much to ask for at that time.”

  The Melvins also included original drummer Mike Dillard, who was later replaced by Dale Crover. In their first punk phase, they played faster-than-light hardcore. Then, when everyone began doing the same, they played as slow as they possibly could, just to piss everybody off. And to really piss them off, they injected heavy metal into the mix. With 1987’s seminal Gluey Porch Treatments album, the Melvins would become one of the founding fathers of what eventually became known as “grunge”—a new, mutant form of punk rock that absorbed heavy metal as well as proletarian seventies hard rock bands such as Kiss and Aerosmith. Their sound revolutionized the Seattle music scene, which had previously been dominated by art-rock bands.

  The Melvins had already played in Seattle when Kurt first saw them, and by 1985, had appeared on the protean Deep Six collection along with the U-Men, Soundgarden, Green River, Malfunkshun, and Skin Yard. Except for the art-rock U-Men, all mixed varying amounts of punk, seventies-style hard rock, and proletarian heavy metal int
o a crude but effective musical mongrel.

  Kurt would sometimes help the Melvins haul their equipment to Seattle for gigs. Aberdeen didn’t have much of a musical history—although half of platinum-selling speed-metalers Metal Church hailed from the town—and a band that played in Seattle was big news.

  Kurt was very unhappy about getting shuttled from relative to relative. In May of 1984, Wendy had married Pat O’Connor, a longshoreman. Pat was drinking heavily then and Wendy had her hands full with that—she didn’t feel she could also deal with Kurt, but Kurt eventually convinced her to have him back. “It took months of being on the phone crying every night, trying to talk her into letting me live with her,” says Kurt.

  Pat went out one night and didn’t come back until seven in the morning, drunk and, as Wendy puts it, “reeking of a girl.” She was furious, but she still went to work at the department store. Then a couple of townies walked through the store just to taunt her. “Hey, where was Pat last night?” they cackled. Wendy got so mad that she went out and got drunk with a friend, then came home and exploded at Pat. In front of both the kids, she grabbed one of his many guns out of the closet and threatened to shoot him—but she couldn’t figure out how to load the gun. Then she took all his guns—shotguns, pistols, rifles, antique guns—and dragged them down the alley, with Kim hauling a big bag of bullets, to the Wishkah River and dumped them in.

  Kurt was watching from his bedroom window. Later that day, he paid a couple of kids to fish as many guns as they could find out of the river and then sold them. Kurt bought his first amplifier with the proceeds. Then he drove the guy who sold the amp to him to his pot dealer’s place and the guy spent all the money on pot.

  Kurt played his guitar very loud. The neighbors complained. Wendy marked up the ceiling with her broom handle. Kurt loved it when the family left to go shopping or something, because that meant he could crank. “We’d come home hoping we had windows left,” says Wendy. Kurt tried to get his friends to play with him, but no one had any musical talent. He’d be very bossy and direct in his criticism. He knew exactly what he wanted.

  Nobody knew he was also singing up there in his room. “One day,” says Wendy, “Pat and I heard him. He was singing real low. He did not want us to hear it. We put our ears to the door and we both looked at each other, wrinkled up our noses, and said, ‘Better stick to the guitar.’ ”

  Nirvana at the Crocodile. (© Charles Peterson)

  CHAPTER TWO

  WE WERE JUST CONCERNED WITH FUCKING AROUND

  Around this time, Kurt first noticed Chris Novoselic at Aberdeen High. “I remember thinking he was definitely somebody I wanted to meet,” says Kurt. “But we never connected.” The two didn’t have any classes together—Kurt occasionally saw Chris at pep assemblies, where he would sometimes participate in little skits, only to sabotage them by doing things like spontaneously singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

  “He was a hilarious person who obviously had a different sense of humor,” says Kurt. “Everyone was just laughing at him but I was laughing with him, because he was basically making fools out of everybody else. He was just a really clever, funny, loud-mouth person. He was taller than anybody in school. He was huge. It was too bad I never got to hang out with him, because I really needed a friend during high school.”

  Kurt felt like an outcast, but even outcasts can find other outcasts to hang out with. Except, apparently, in Aberdeen. “I wanted to fit in somewhere, but not with the average kid, not with the popular kids at school,” says Kurt. “I wanted to fit in with the geeks, but the geeks were sub-geeks in Aberdeen. They weren’t the average geek. They weren’t the type of kid who would listen to Devo. They were just usually deformed.”

  Kurt says there were only two other guys in school that he even thought about being friends with. Both were at least cool enough to be into Oingo Boingo, the manic new wave band from Los Angeles. “But they were just such geeks—total idiots,” Kurt says. “They were the kind of guys who would paint their faces at football games.”

  High school was a teenage wasteland for Kurt, composed of three castes: the social types, the math nerds, and the stoners. The girls at Aberdeen High had noticed Kurt’s dimples and blue eyes, and decided that he was cute. “They kind of liked me,” says Kurt, “but I just didn’t like any of those girls because they were just stupid.” And because girls liked Kurt, their jock boyfriends tried to buddy up to him, but Kurt blew them off, too.

  Kurt considered hanging out with the nerdy kids who were into computers and chess, but they didn’t like music.

  That left the stoners. “Although I hated them,” he says, “they were at least into rock and roll.” So Kurt donned the typical stoner jacket—the jean jacket with the fleece lining which still finds favor among today’s wasted youth—and began hanging out at the traditional stoner hangout, the smoker’s shed. Kurt hardly said a word to anybody; he was so quiet that occasionally, someone would ask him if he was a narc.

  Kurt had fallen out of touch with the Melvins after his move back to Aberdeen. But then he met a fellow music fan named Dale Crover at the smoker’s shed. Chris also knew Crover because Crover used to jam with Chris’s younger brother Robert. When the Melvins needed a drummer, Chris suggested Crover, who got the gig. And since Kurt knew Crover, he began hanging out with the Melvins again.

  The Melvins began practicing in an extra room at Crover’s parents’ house. Anywhere the Melvins rehearsed quickly turned into a seemingly permanent haven for a group of Aberdeen stoners dubbed “the cling-ons,” and Crover’s place was no different. Clad in bell-bottom jeans and quilted pullover jackets with zippered pockets so they could keep their pot safe, “these guys were just the most classic cartoon types of stoner metalhead kids that you could imagine,” Kurt recalls. “They were so hilarious—zits, no teeth, reeking of pot.”

  For the cling-ons, hanging out at the Melvins’ practice space was just about the only source of excitement there was. “All there was to do in Aberdeen was drink beer, smoke pot, and worship Satan,” quips Crover. “There’s nothing there. We watched a lot of TV.”

  The practice space itself was festooned with posters of Kiss, Motley Crue, and Ted Nugent, pages torn out of Circus magazine, and pictures of naked women with different faces pasted on them (a similar image would one day resurface on a Nirvana T-shirt). Visitors would go up the stairs of the back porch of the house, through a tiny room, and then into the rehearsal room. Buzz didn’t like many people around at practice, so the cling-ons contented themselves with hanging out on the back porch while the Melvins rehearsed. The band’s daily practice usually lasted three or more hours, but only because they had to stop playing every twenty minutes or so while one of the members transacted some business with the cling-ons.

  Kurt auditioned to become a Melvin, but it didn’t work out. “I totally botched it,” Kurt says. “I was so nervous that I forgot all the songs. I literally couldn’t play a note. I just stood there with my guitar and played feedback with a blushed face.”

  It was just as well, because Kurt was already writing and recording his own material. Matt Lukin recalls a tape Kurt made of his own songs, just guitar and vocals. “They were just some really cool songs,” recalls Lukin, “especially for somebody in Aberdeen who played guitar at that point that was our age—most guys just wanted to play Judas Priest. We found it kind of odd that some kid was writing his own songs and would rather play that than Motley Crue.”

  And then Buzz Osborne introduced Kurt Cobain to punk rock. Osborne made a few compilation tapes, mostly Southern California bands such as Black Flag, Flipper, and MDC. The first song on the first tape was Black Flag’s “Damaged II,” an all-out attack of abrasive guitars and shambling but assaultive drums, brimming with buzzsaw rancor. “Damaged by you, damaged by me/ I’m confused, I’m confused/ Don’t want to be confused” screamed singer Henry Rollins.

  Kurt was floored. “It was like listening to something from a different planet,” he says. “It took
me a few days to accept it.” By the end of the week, though, he was a certified, self-proclaimed punk rocker. “I sensed,” says Kurt, “that it was speaking more clearly and more realistically than the average rock and roll lyric.”

  Soon after that, in August of 1984, Kurt, Lukin, Osborne, and others drove up to Seattle to see Black Flag play the Mountaineer Club during the Slip It In tour. In order to raise enough money for a ticket, Kurt sold his record collection—which at that time consisted of albums by bands such as Journey, Foreigner, and Pat Benatar—for twelve dollars. “It was really great,” says Kurt of the show. “I was instantly converted.”

  “Becoming a punk rocker fed into my low self-esteem because it helped me realize that I don’t need to become a rock star—I don’t want to become a rock star,” Kurt says. “So I was fighting this thin line—I was always on the left or right side of not caring and not wanting to and not being able to, yet kind of wanting to at the same time. Still wanting to prove myself to people. It’s kind of confusing. I’m so glad that I got into punk rock at the time I did because it gave me these few years that I needed to grow up and put my values in perspective and realize what kind of person I am.

  “I’m just really glad I was able to find punk rock,” Kurt says. “It was really a godsend.”

  Osborne also showed him a way to deal with his environment. “He just had a really awesome attitude toward the average redneck,” says Kurt. “I was really inspired by his attitude. It was ‘Fuck with them as much as you can get away with.’ We would go to jock parties and follow the big muscle men around and spit on their backs. And write dirty sayings on the walls of their houses and take the eggs out of the refrigerator and put them in the host’s bed. Just try to get away with as much damage as we could.”