On 2830 ½ Aberdeen Avenue, Hoquiam, was a tiny bungalow where Don, Wendy and Kurt lived. 21 year old Donald Cobain worked at the Chevron station as a mechanic and worked long hours while Wendy took care of the baby. When Kurt was two years old the stress in the marriage began to magnify. Fights between Don and Wendy weren’t unusual and Kurt didnìt get any attention at all.
Kurt showed many musical talents as a child and when he was five years old his grandfather, Leland Cobain, gave him a mini-drumset. He began to get pretty good on the drums, but when he was seven years old, his parents divorced and he didn’t feel like drumming anymore.
After the divorce he went to live with his father. The first years he lived with his father they lived in a trailer and got along very well and finally he got the attention he needed. Then Don began dating again and Kurt didn’t really like that. Kurt disliked the first woman, so Don dropped her. Then Don met Jenny. She was divorced, with two kids. At first Kurt liked Jenny and her kids but soon he began to think that if he showed Jenny so much love he would be betraying his love for his mother and his “real” family. Then Don and Jenny married. After his fathers remarriage Kurt began complaining to Don: “You told me you weren’t going to get married again.” Usually Donìs answer to that question was: “Things change”
Things temporarily improved when the family moved into a new home in Montesano. Kurt had his own room with a round window that made it look like a ship. Not long after the move, Jenny gave birth to another son, Chad Cobain. Now two other children, a step-mom and a baby were all competing for the attention that had once been Kurtìs alone.
When he was 12 years old his grandfathers brother shot himself both in the stomach and the head, and when Kurt was in the eight grade one of his classmates hung himself in the schoolyard and Kurt and his friends were the first to notice the corpse hanging from a tree when they were walking to school. These tragedies affected him very much and he began to tell his friends that he was going to be a superstar musician, kill himself, and go out in a flame of glory just like Jimi Hendrix. (At this point he didnìt know that Jimi Hendrix didnìt commit suicide).
For his fourteenth birthday uncle Chuck bought him an electric guitar and that guitar became the one thing that was worth living for. Kurt began to practise every day and even carried the guitar with him to school. But then he began smoking marijuana and using LSD at parties and with his friends and by ninth grade smoking daily by himself in his room because it helped him to forget his home life. When he started smoking marijuana he also started skipping classes. He saw less of his friends and appeared alienated from everything except his own anger. Soon his conflicts with Don and Jenny reaced a breaking point and in March 1982 he left his father and stepmother's care. For the next four years he had to live in ten different houses with ten different families and not one of them would feel like home.
His first stop was his grandparents house just outside Montesano. He didn't stay there for a long time and went to live with his uncle. Soon Kurt was just handed down from relative to relative. Kurt spent a few months at his uncle Chuck, where he began to take guitar lessons. Kurt got a new guitar, an Ibanez, for $125(the old was more for showing off at school then playing). Kurt was a serious student and spent hours trying to apply himself.
After a few months of living with his uncle he moved back to Aberdeen to his mother. It started allright but when Wendy started to date a 22 year old, Kurt started to tell his friends he hated her and was thinking about running away. He would vacate the house if she was there, since she'd yell at him a lot. Eventually Wendy broke up with the 22 year old.
As the 1983 school year ended, Kurt discovered punk rock. That summer he saw the Melvins. It would be an event that would change his life forever. The singer of the Melvins was Buzz Osbourne, who went in the same school as Kurt. They didn’t really know each other but soon became good friends. Buzz told Kurt all about punk rock, he passed along punk rock records and a book about The Sex Pistols.
Around the time Kurt turned seventeen, Wendy started to date Pat O’Connor, neither of Wendy’s children liked O’Connor and Kurt grew up to hating him. Arguments between Wendy and Pat made the battles between Don and Wendy look mild in comparison. After a big fight Wendy went out looking for Pat and found him cheating on her. She stormed home in a fit of rage and in panic gathered Pat’s guns. When Pat came home Wendy said she was going to kill him. She tried to but didn’t figure how to load the gun. Upon Pat’s exit she gathered the guns in a bag and threw them into the Wishkah River. The next day Kurt and two of his friends went to the location of the guns and fished the rifles out. Then he traded the guns for a Fender deluxe amp.
During the spring of 1984 his conflicts with the adults in the house grew to a boiling point. Eventually they threw him out on the streets where he lived in a cardboard refrigerator box, under a bridge and in abandoned buildings. After about four months of living on the street he finally went back to live with his father. Kurt tried to find a job but there wasnìt much to do in Montesano. Desperate to find something to do, he quit drugs and drinking and found religion. He and his best friend, Jesse Reed, began going to church together.
Jesse’s parents were born age christians so they suggested Kurt would move in. Ethal Reed, Jesse’s father had been playing rock’n’roll for twenty years so the house was stocked with guitars, amps and albums. At the Reed’s Kurt first jammed with Krist Novoselic and started to write songs. Kurt and Krist knew each other from school. Jesse, Krist and Kurt would play all day long and sometimes travel to see concerts.
At the end of March 1985 Kurt cut his finger at work and quit in a fit of panic. He told Jesse: “that if he lost his finger and couldn’t play anymore he would kill himself.” With nothing to do he convinced Jesse to skip school and the two of them began drinking and doing drugs again. The last straw for the Reed’s was when Kurt forgot his keys and kicked in a window to get in, and they told him that he would have to find another place to live. Kurt was back on the streets, sleeping in hallways or garages. But on the first of July he and Jesse moved into an tiny apartment. It was a tiny 100$-a-month studio with pink walls. It was named “The pink apartment”. During “The pink apartment” period, Kurt found a job at YMCA and jammed even more with Jesse and Krist then at the Reed’s.
Jesse had plans to join the navy and Kurt felt threatened by this so he decided to kick Jesse out of the apartment. Soon Jesse was living with his grandmother. Kurt continued to write songs while living in the pink apartment and he and Krist started a band. They started off with Kurt singing and playing guitar and Krist playing bass but no drummer. They were practising every day and Kurt was writing songs in the night.
Two months after Jesse’s departure Kurt was evicted. He didn’t have any money so he couldn’t pay the rent. His landlord came to his apartment when he wasn’t at home, boxed his belongings and left them on the street. For the third time he was back on the streets.
On September 1, 1986, Wendy loaned Kurt $200 and he moved into his first “house”. It was in Aberdeen just two blocks away from Wendy’s house. For a roommate Kurt chose Mat Lukin from the Melvins. Buzz Osborne and Dale Crover visited frequently and the living room was filled with band gear. Kurt and Krist were still practising every day and still looking for as drummer. But their search came to an end when they found Aaron Buckhard. Buckhard was the first drummer of Nirvana.
In early spring of 1986 Kurt and Lukin had grown on each others nerves. Kurt didn’t like many of Lukin’s friends so Lukin moved out. Kurt lived alone for a while practising with the band every day. In the spring of 1987 he found a new roommate, Dylan Carlson, who was an old friend. They got along very well and in the summer Kurt got a girlfriend. Her name was Tracy Marender an she was an ideal girlfriend for Kurt.
Kurt greeted his twentieth birthday with a new best friend, a girlfriend, a band, a new pet, a house, loads of drugs and loads of great songs. Kurt loved Tracy very much but there was one thing he loved more, his pet, Kitty the rat.
On a rainy day there was a terrible accident. Kurt saw a spider in the house and told Kitty to kill the spider. But she failed to attack the spider, he went to get a spray can but when he returned he heard a heartbreaking sound. He wrote in his journal:
“My left foot . . .on top of my rat’s head. He jumped around squealing and
bleeding. I screamed, “I’m sorry” about 30 times. Picked him up in a pair
of dirty underwear. Put him in a sack, found a piece of two by four wood,
took him outside and clubbed, and laid it on its side, and stepped all over
the sack. I felt his bones and guts crush. It took about two minutes to put
him out of his misery and then I went into misery for the rest of the night.
I obviously didn’t love him enough, as I do now. I went back into the
bedroom and observed the blood stains and the spider. I screamed, “Fuck
you,” to him and thought about killing him, but left him there to eventually
crawl across my face as I lie awake all night.”
One rainy night in March Nirvana played their first gig. It was going alright at first but then Krist got so drunk he began jumping in and out of a window while playing. The gig was a shambles and there would be several months before they would play again.
Two months after Nirvana’s first show, Kurt left Aberdeen forever. He and Tracy moved into a studio apartment in Olympia. Krist and his girlfriend Shelly moved to Tacoma. Buckhard still lived in Aberdeen so he couldn’t come to practice. Nirvana needed a drummer. Just a few days with Buckhard gone they found a new drummer, Dale Crover former drummer of the Melvins and recorded their first demo with Sub Pop. But Crover didn’t stay for long and instead they got Chad Channing and they started jamming a lot. In 1988 they recorded their first single, “Love buzz”, which sold out and went all the way to second place on the “Sub Pop single list” just behind a single by Soundgarden. By the end of 1988 Nirvana had only done two dozen shows, during their entire two year history, under various names. But in 1989 they would play 100 gigs. In 1989 they recorded their first album, Bleach, with the Sub Pop label and Nirvana started touring.
In 1990 Nirvana had been touring a lot and Kurt had grown dissatisfied with Chad’s drumming. On a concert in Boston Kurt threw a full pitcher of water at Chad and missed the drummer’s ear by inches. In late May, it almost didnìt have to be said that Chad was out of the band. On the same week Kurt fired Chad, he also broke up with Tracy.
In late September Nirvana got a new drummer, Dave Grohl. Grohl had played with the bands Scream and Dain Bramage. The instant Kurt and Krist practised with Grohl, they knew they had their final drummer. Just twenty days later Dave played his first concerts with Nirvana, it went great.
In 1991 they recorded Nevermind with the Geffen labels. Nevermind reached the top of the Billboard and went multiplatinum, On the Nevermind tour Kurt met Courtney Love. They fell in love and married on the tour the 24th of February on the beach at Waikiki.
On January 12 1992 Kurt recklessly or intentionally overdosed on heroin. It was the week that Nevermind became the best selling album of the nation, the night Nirvana played on Saturday Night Live. Courtney frantically began a resuscitation effort that would eventually become commonplace for her. It was his first near-death overdose. It came on the very day he became a star.
Frances Bean Cobain was born on the 18th of August 1992. When Frances was born Kurt was in detox and the public argued about weather or not Kurt and Courtney should keep the baby. Eventually they were allowed to keep the baby but Kurt quit detox and started to take more drugs.
In March 1993 Kurt and Courtney moved into a $2000-a-month house in Seattle. It was a modern three-storey home and bigger than all of Kurt’s previous homes combined. In April In Utero was released. It was well received by critics and fans and sold millions of copies all around the world.
On the first Sunday of May, at 9 p.m. the 911 emergency services centre received a report of a drug overdose from the Cobain house. Kurt had been at a friend’s house and injected himself with $30 to $40 worth of heroin. When he got home he was vomiting and in shock. Shortly before the police arrived Kurt had turned blue and appeared to be dying. Kurt had not wanted 911 to be called because he’d rather die than see it in the paper that he overdosed or got arrested. He was taken to hospital where he recovered after three hours.
That summer Kurt increasingly isolated himself, he was using drugs almost every day and virtually every interview he did had some reference to suicide. In November Nirvana played on MTV’s Unplugged series. Before the show Kurt was asked how he wanted the stage to look. He wanted white lilies and loads of candles, like at a funeral. The concert was incredible and those present said they could see the pain and suffering on Kurt’s face. It was like a final farewell.
On the third of March 1994 Kurt was meeting Courtney and Frances for the first time in 26 days. They met in the evening and everything looked fine, but when Courtney had gone to sleep Kurt started to write a letter, a suicide letter. When Courtney woke up in the morning she found Kurt on the floor, pale as a ghost, with blood coming out of one nostril. Kurt was rushed to a hospital and his stomach was pumped, he had taken 60 Rohypnol pills.
Kurt checked into detox for a 28-day program but only lasted two days. He went into hiding and didn’t answer any calls. On the 6th of April he walked from his bedroom into his garage, put a towel on his head , a shotgun to his mouth and then it was all over. The last words of his suicide note were: “I can’t stand the thought of Frances becoming the miserable, self-destructive death-rocker that I’ve become. I don’t have the passion anymore and so remember, it’s better to burnout than to fade away. Peace, love, empathy. Kurt Cobain. Frances and Courtney, I’ll be at your alter. Please keep going Courtney. For Frances. For her life which will be so much happier without me. I love you. I love you!”
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