Here We Are Now Page 8

  In the past decade, that perception of Kurt has begun to shift in Aberdeen, and surrounding Grays Harbor County. “Even the naysayers have warmed up to the idea that Nirvana was a transformative band, and a real source of pride,” John Hughes observed. Some of that shift came as motel and restaurant owners noticed a steady stream of visiting Nirvana fans. Some of the change, I suspect, reflects a wider national trend: as the sensationalistic aspects of Kurt’s life and death fade further into the past, his work becomes the larger part of his current history. Kurt’s musical legacy, easier to embrace for politicians than his personal demons, also brings much needed tourist dollars to the struggling city.

  In 2004, three Aberdeen High School students wrote a story in the daily newspaper asking why their city had never done anything to officially honor Kurt Cobain. That same year, one of the newspaper’s writers and a city council member formed the nonprofit Kurt Cobain Memorial Committee. Their first goal was to place a sign at the city limits saying that Aberdeen was the birthplace of Kurt, but that was deemed too controversial. Eventually the committee raised private money to construct a small addition to the existing “Welcome to Aberdeen” sign that would read: “Come As You Are.” The organizers gambled that by mentioning Kurt’s iconic song, and not his name, they might have a greater chance of getting official approval. “We were looking to honor a guy who had said some rather mean things about his hometown and the people who lived there,” Jeff Burlingame, an Aberdeen author and co-organizer of the effort, told me. “Many were not fond of that, nor were they fond of his lifestyle or his means of death.” But the city council approved the effort, and it was installed at the city limits. It has since become an iconic part of Aberdeen’s identity.

  Over the years there have been other attempts to construct a more overt memorial in Aberdeen, or to possibly name a street or a park after Kurt. A proposal to rename the Young Street Bridge the Kurt Cobain Bridge was voted down ten to one by the city council. “Is this the legacy we want to leave to our children?” local pastor Don Eden said at the time.

  In 2008, a senior citizen who lived next to the Young Street Bridge became frustrated at attitudes like Eden’s and took matters into his own hands. Tori Kovach cleared out a half acre of blackberry bushes from city property near the path to the underside of the bridge and began the process of creating a “park” there with his bare hands. Other locals started to help, and businesses donated materials. This do-it-yourself attitude, which Kurt had as well, is one of the things I admire about the citizens of Aberdeen. A sign was constructed in etched metal that featured the lyrics of “Something in the Way” on it. Kovach told The Daily World he was more of a fan of Elvis Presley than Kurt Cobain, but Aberdeen was overdue to recognize Kurt. “Aspects of his life resonate with me because I was from a broken home,” Kovach said. The citizen-created park stirred some to complain, but eventually the city voted to take it over. The spot is now officially the Kurt Cobain Riverfront Park.

  In 2013 a proposal was put forth to the Aberdeen city council to demolish the “Come As You Are” sign. After some consideration, the council voted unanimously to keep it as is. And when the Kurt Cobain Memorial Committee has organized benefit concerts, they’ve been well attended and supported by donations from some of the nearby governments, including even Hoquiam’s. “Today, anyone from Aberdeen who speaks of Kurt in a negative light on social media will find himself shouted down tenfold,” Jeff Burlingame says. “Time, as it does with most things, has softened the spite. The line graph of Kurt’s popularity in Aberdeen, if there were such a thing, would still be heading north.” John Hughes agrees: “With every passing year, Aberdeen has come to grips with his genius.”

  A sign at Aberdeen’s Kurt Cobain Riverfront Park also notes that it is one of the many spots Kurt’s ashes were scattered after his cremation. It reads, in part: KURT IMMORTALIZED THIS RIVER. IN TURN, THE RIVER NOW IMMORTALIZES HIM.

  Seattle’s relationship with Kurt was, and remains, markedly different from Aberdeen’s. “Seattle band Nirvana” was the description in nearly every story or news report on the band after they became famous. That Nirvana were from Aberdeen had been detailed in local publications like my magazine The Rocket, but as Nirvana became an international sensation, their hometown was often left out of the history. Sometimes when Aberdeen was mentioned in that 1991 wave of press, it was incorrectly described as “just outside” Seattle, when the cities were worlds away culturally and two hours by distance. I’ve even seen it written, likely by journalists who never visited the Northwest, that Aberdeen was a “suburb” of Seattle, something that would cause a howl of laughter to any resident from either of those cities. But to most of the world outside the Northwest, “Seattle” and “Nirvana” were synonymous.

  At the start of 1991, though, only one member of Nirvana lived in Seattle, and that was Dave Grohl. Grohl had moved there a month before the release of Nevermind after growing tired of sleeping on the sofa in Kurt’s tiny Olympia apartment. Krist Novoselic lived in Tacoma that year and didn’t buy a Seattle home until Nevermind’s royalties started arriving in 1992. “We couldn’t afford to live in Seattle,” Novoselic told me. Kurt certainly couldn’t afford Seattle rents: he had a hard time scraping up $200 to pay for his apartment in Olympia. When he returned home after recording Nevermind in California, he’d been evicted for back-due rent. He’d just recorded an album that would go on to sell thirty-five million copies, but on the day he arrived home, all his possessions were in boxes on the curb. He slept in his car for the next week until he started rooming with friends, and eventually in hotel rooms paid for by his record label as Nirvana began to tour.

  For much of 1991 and 1992, Kurt continued to stay in hotels and crash with friends as Nirvana toured more regularly. His next semipermanent address was in Los Angeles, where he and Courtney Love rented an apartment awaiting the birth of Frances Bean Cobain in August 1992. They had intended to stay in Los Angeles only temporarily, but when California Child Protective Services became involved in their lives due to rumors of their drug use that had appeared in Vanity Fair, they couldn’t move out of the state. They stayed in a few different temporary apartments, but the one they resided in the longest was in the Fairfax neighborhood. Their apartment had a large picture window, but the drapes were never opened. In one of the sunniest places in the United States, Kurt brought Aberdeen with him.

  Kurt and Courtney, with baby in tow, didn’t move to Seattle until late 1992, living initially in fancy hotels. They repeatedly ran into trouble with hotel management—smoking violations, damages, drug activity, unpaid bills—and were essentially kicked out of every four-star hotel in Seattle. They rented a house in northeast Seattle for the next year, which was to be their most permanent Seattle domicile. It wasn’t until January 1994 that they bought their mansion in the Denny-Blaine neighborhood of Seattle. It was the first home Kurt ever owned, and it would be the last: he would die in the greenhouse-type room above the garage just three months after purchasing the house.

  Seattle was in many ways ideally suited to Kurt’s personality and his moment of fame. The Seattle music scene was created organically—no one imagined it would become as big as it did, and thus egos were left at the door. After Nirvana struck, I’d often find myself escorting visiting New York–based journalists who wanted to see the sights of where this red-hot music “scene” had developed. But there was little to see, as the scene had come together in mostly basements and garages. Almost every other vital music scene in the nation—from Austin to Los Angeles’s Sunset Strip—had developed because of a strong local club circuit. Seattle bands broke through for the opposite reason: there wasn’t a decent club scene. Since bands couldn’t make money playing live, they retreated to basements to rehearse and imagined that recording a single or an album would be their ticket to stardom. It was the very fact that there was no chance of success and riches from playing live that forced these groups to aim higher, to go straight to making a record. And it worked.

>   When bands could scrape up enough luck to land a gig at one of the handful of Seattle clubs that booked original bands, audiences would inevitably number in the dozens, and everyone in the crowd knew each other. A tribe mentality existed that was insular but also nurturing. Most audience members at venues like the Vogue or the Central Tavern were members of other bands. “We played at the time not thinking we’d be successful or famous,” Soundgarden’s guitarist Kim Thayil once told me, “but simply because we wanted to impress our friends. It was a scene built on friendships, and that’s one reason bands were so supportive of each other and not competitive.” Consequently, there was no place in town for big egos and judgment, and status within the Seattle music scene, at least through the mid-nineties, was afforded only for talent, not for fame or money.

  This was perfectly suited to Kurt Cobain’s attitude. Although he desperately wanted to succeed, he didn’t want to be too obvious about it. That was the source of Kurt’s beef with Pearl Jam: he felt that band had sinned by overtly wanting success. In the press, Kurt delivered what would be the sternest rebuke for a Seattle band: he called Pearl Jam “careerists.” (He described them in Rolling Stone as a “corporate, alternative and cock-rock fusion” band.) It was hypocrisy, of course, as Kurt could have easily stuck with independent record labels, but in truth he wanted to sell albums as much as anyone. Kurt, and Nirvana, left Sub Pop and signed with the “corporate” major label Geffen because they wanted the money that deal brought. But in Seattle, “desire” was a dirty word, and Kurt downplayed his.

  In turn, even when Nirvana were incredibly famous, Seattleites treated Kurt as if he were a member of any other band, superstar or not. I was in Seattle clubs a dozen times when Kurt, or one of the other members of Nirvana, was present. Yes, muffled whispers would pass through the crowd that royalty was in the house, but no one would dare do something as lame as ask Kurt for an autograph, or a photograph, or harass him in any way. Even when Kurt was a huge superstar, he was given a kind of anonymity in Seattle that he could not have found anywhere else. And Kurt made himself easy to spot: though many in Seattle music dressed in essentially the same uniform—jeans, T-shirts, sneakers—in the last year of his life, Kurt frequently wore an Elmer Fudd–style hunting cap with flaps. The hat stood out on the streets of Seattle, and so did the most famous rock star in the world who was wearing it. But still, nobody bothered him.

  If there is one story that most illustrates the essence of Seattle, it came when Courtney decided the couple needed a new car. She didn’t drive, but Kurt had two vintage cars, an old Valiant and a Volvo. So they went out together and bought a brand-new black Lexus. They were worth millions then and could have afforded a fleet of luxury cars. But Kurt drove the Lexus for less than a day before he became uncomfortable with the showiness of it.

  He returned the Lexus to the dealership, claiming he didn’t like the color, and got his money back. Kurt then took a cab back to his million-dollar mansion. His beater cars were still parked in the driveway.

  If Seattle was the ideal city for Kurt Cobain to be a star, it was also true that Kurt Cobain was the ideal rock star for Seattle. Nirvana’s rise, and the attention that Grunge music received internationally, was perfectly timed for Seattle’s big star turn. The explosion of Seattle music came at exactly the moment Microsoft, Starbucks, and Amazon were all bringing attention to the city. In prior decades, Seattle had primarily been known in business circles as the home of Boeing, and in music culture as the hometown of Jimi Hendrix. The only local band that had found platinum record success before 1991 was Heart. And even though Seattle served as headquarters for several Fortune 500 companies, prior to the nineties its unofficial symbol was the Space Needle, a UFO-shaped icon constructed for the 1962 World’s Fair.

  Nirvana was only one band, and one aspect, of Seattle’s coming-out party in 1991, but Nevermind may have earned the town more national press than anything other than Microsoft that year. Record companies began to scour the Seattle music scene looking for talent, and in many cases they found it. “No one can get a seat on a plane to Seattle or Portland now,” said Ed Rosenblatt of Geffen Records at the time. “Every flight is booked by A&R people out to find the next Nirvana.” In the year following Nevermind, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chains all earned platinum records of their own. And the good news for Seattle was that every one of those bands actually resided in the city, and unlike Nirvana those bands deserved the connection.

  The particular artistic sensibility of Kurt Cobain also struck a chord with Seattle residents and tastemakers. The city has always appreciated the underdog, the left-of-center artist, the outlier. “There’s something deeper here, less about money, more about art,” Knute Berger, a columnist for Seattle magazine, told me. Berger cites influential Northwest painters Mark Tobey and Morris Graves, poets Theodore Roethke and William Stafford, and other artistic types who were connected to the Northwest’s working-class roots but who were also doing world-class work. Grunge’s ascent gave Seattle a sense that it had a chance to be famous for something other than rain, software, or coffee. “Muddy, mucky, dark indigenous art could still happen here, burst forth, and capture the world’s attention,” Berger said. “Culture and validation: the perfect Seattle moment.”

  If there was a moment in time when that validation was most obvious, at least when it came to commercial success, it was the summer of 1994, the year Kurt died. In that year alone, four different Seattle bands—Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden—topped the Billboard sales charts. There has not been a year since when a quartet of bands from one region of the world all scored No. 1 albums. “At that moment,” Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil told me, “it felt like the Seattle Mariners had just won the World Series in baseball. It started to seem like something was happening, not just to me, but to Seattle.”

  It was an indelible time, one that has stayed with Seattle ever since. Music became a part of Seattle’s identity—apparently a permanent part, if the last two decades were a sign of things to come. Musicians from around the country, by the vanload, moved to Seattle. Some of them became famous, some didn’t, but an infrastructure of record labels, music attorneys, recording studios, managers, booking agents, and live music venues developed, none of which had been in place in the eighties. The club scene—once so lame that Sub Pop bands were driven to rehearse in basements rather than play live—burst forth and became world-class. Seattle’s superstar bands would only play in those clubs for “surprise,” announced-at-the-last-minute shows, but the clubs were packed every night of the week with all the B-level bands who were hoping for greatness, along with their fans.

  At The Rocket we published a directory of working Northwest bands once a year. In the late eighties there were three hundred bands on that list, identifying themselves as “working” bands and not just pickup groups; by the early nineties that number had mushroomed to a thousand. Within those listings were a dozen bands whose members would be next in the long line of famous Northwest groups: Built to Spill, the Presidents of the United States, Seven Year Bitch, Elliott Smith, Supersuckers, Harvey Danger, Candlebox, Sleater-Kinney, Modest Mouse, Neko Case, MxPx, the Shins, Band of Horses, Walking Papers. From that early-nineties scene even came some of the musicians who would later play in the band with the biggest breakthrough of 2013, Macklemore, whose megahit “Thrift Shop” could be the first musical ode to Grunge fashion. Macklemore himself was too young to have been listed in The Rocket’s nineties-era directory of bands, but the man who sings the chorus of “Thrift Shop,” Michael “Wanz” Wansley, was there.

  It wasn’t Kurt Cobain who made these bands that followed Nirvana successful—it was their talent—but the ground he broke, and the attention Nirvana brought to Seattle, helped get some of this music heard. Nirvana was a big enough tanker in the water of the music industry that many other bands saw their boats rise with them.

  For me, the crystalizing moment that proved that my city was now shorthand for a certain music
occurred during a vacation to St. Louis in 1992. A band poster on a telephone poll I saw listed three bands I’d never heard of. That shouldn’t be surprising, given that this was miles from my hometown, but it was the word “Seattle” that drew my eye in the first place. Atop the poster was a banner headline, ten times bigger than the band names, that read FROM SEATTLE.

  It seemed absurd to me that three unknown bands could tour the Midwest as long as they made their home address bigger on a poster than their names. In early 1992, even Kurt Cobain couldn’t legitimately put “From Seattle” on a Nirvana poster, but in the public’s mind that little detail hardly mattered. He was “Seattle’s Kurt Cobain” already, and would remain so.

  FIVE

  HAPPENS EVERY DAY

  Addiction & Suicide

  Kurt Cobain was not just one of the most influential musicians of his generation; he was also one of the era’s most famous drug addicts. Kurt experienced great fame, of course, but drug addiction is an undeniable part of that fame, and of his legacy. His death, however horrible, has had an undeniable effect on how musicians are now treated for addiction, and on how managers and record labels respond to clients who struggle with drugs. In the fields of thanatology, the science of death, and suicidology, the science of suicide, Kurt’s life and death have been widely analyzed, investigated, and written about.

  For all the identification Kurt would have as a heroin addict in the eyes of the public, that phase of his life came fairly late. For his first twenty-four years, Kurt Cobain was not a drug addict, and was often the most sober of his group of friends. When his heroin addiction began, it came as a great shock to some friends: Kurt was so afraid of needles that he once ran out of a doctor’s office when a physician tried to give him a shot. Once, in his early adulthood, Kurt attended a Halloween party dressed in a junkie costume, complete with fake track marks drawn on his arms. Kurt’s thin frame was already what many imagined a drug addict to look like, and rumors of his drug use began to plague him around 1990 in Olympia, in part because of that Halloween costume. Two years later, it was true.