27: Kurt Cobain (2 page)

Don Cobain did have a considerable record collection, however. Kurt began to hang out with a group of slightly older boys who were into music and smoking pot. When they came over to the Cobain home, they discovered Don's records, which included Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Aerosmith and Kiss. Listening to these albums, Kurt's head was opened up to further musical possibilities, possibly assisted by the marijuana he began smoking with his new friends. ‘I started turning into a little stoner kid,' he said.
[5]

It hardly seems surprising that, in the manner of some lonely children, Kurt Cobain created an imaginary friend, significantly named ‘Boddah', as though Kurt was searching for a guide to provide him with peace of mind.

When he was in junior high school, Kurt, encouraged by his father, reluctantly joined the wrestling team. In wrestling matches he would release some of his growing anger. ‘I was a scapegoat, but not in the sense that people would pick on me all the time. People wouldn't pick on me or beat me up, because I was so withdrawn by that time, and I was so antisocial that I was almost insane. I felt so different and so crazy that people left me alone. I always felt they would vote me most likely to kill everyone at a high school dance,' Kurt said. ‘I've got to that point where I've fantasized about it. But I would have opted for killing myself.'
[6]

When he was turning twelve, already inspired by watching the B-52s on
Saturday Night Live
, Kurt read an article in
Creem
magazine about the Sex Pistols tour of the United States, something of an epiphany for him – it was the idea of the group that appealed to him, some time before he actually got to hear them. Searching in his local library for punk records, he discovered the Clash's
Sandinista!
, which didn't live up to what he was expecting. Although he came to like that group's
Combat Rock
album, when he finally heard
Never Mind the Bollocks
, he fell in love with it. On assorted Nirvana tunes, such as ‘Territorial Pissings', you can hear that this is a vocalist who has assiduously studied the work of John ‘Johnny Rotten' Lydon. The instrumental introduction to ‘In Bloom' could be from a Pistols' out-take.

‘The Pistols' album has the best production of any rock record I've ever heard,' was Kurt's assessment. ‘It's totally in-your-face and compressed. All the hype the Sex Pistols had was totally deserved – they deserved everything they got. Johnny Rotten was the one I identified with, he was the sensitive one. The only reason I might agree with people calling our band “The Sex Pistols of the 90s” is that, for both bands, the music is a very natural thing, very sincere.'

For a fourteenth birthday gift, not long after Kurt had been diagnosed as suffering from a minor case of scoliosis (curvature of the spine), Kurt's uncle Chuck gave him the choice of a bicycle or an electric guitar. Kurt had still been playing around with a drum kit, but now he swapped instruments. He opted for the guitar, a cheap secondhand model, and was given some tuition from one of Chuck's bandmates, learning to play AC/DC's ‘Back in Black'. Other songs he learned included the Cars' ‘My Best Friend's Girl', Queen's ‘Another One Bites the Dust', and that staple of the region, ‘Louie, Louie'. From that point on, he began to write his own songs, ‘really raunchy riff-rock,' as he described them. ‘I would try to play as nasty as I could … It was definitely a good release. I thought of it as a job. It was my mission. I knew I had to practice. I had this feeling all the time – I always knew I was doing something that was special.'
[7]
(Unbeknownst to Kurt, the weight of playing the guitar would exacerbate the curvature of his spine. ‘I had minor scoliosis in Junior High, and I've been playing guitar ever since, and the weight of the guitar has made my back grow in this curvature. So when I stand, everything is sideways.')

At his father's insistence, Kurt had played in a local baseball league – as unwilling as he had been about wrestling. Another member of the team was a boy called Matt Lukin. It turned out that Lukin, like Kurt a student at Montesano High, was also a prospective musician, playing bass in a local group called the Melvins.

Kurt went to a Melvins rehearsal, and got drunk. But he also experienced an epiphany:
these guys had actually managed to put a band together
 …

Having started out as Who copyists, the Melvins by now were playing furiously paced hardcore punk, sometimes performing shows as far afield as Seattle. When other groups began to play in a similar style, the Melvins altered utterly, playing everything at an impossibly slow, doomy pace, into which – sacrilege! – they began to inject elements of heavy metal. The Melvins thereby became the forerunners of what transmogrified into grunge, exemplified on their
Gluey Porch Treatments album
, released in 1987, often cited as the first grunge album.

As fate would have it, it transpired that Buzz Osbourne, the leader of the Melvins, was in the same art class as Kurt at Montesano High School – although he was a couple of years older. Osbourne owned a book about the Sex Pistols, which Kurt avidly devoured, inking the group's distinctive logo onto desks and exercise books. Kurt Cobain had decided that somehow he would start a punk group.

Finding it difficult to get on with his father's new family, Kurt moved back to Aberdeen to live with his uncle Chuck: his mother had broken up with the boyfriend and had also lost her job, so she asked Chuck to care for her son. Kurt shuffled between relatives, including his father's parents and three different sets of aunts and uncles, moving back and forth between Aberdeen and Montesano, regularly swapping high schools. How, you cannot help wondering, would this have exacerbated Kurt's mounting sense of insecurity and anger?

In 1983 Kurt moved back to his mother's place. Yet returning to his maternal home was not an easy experience. There were always guns around. In 1984, his mother suspected that Pat O'Connor, her new longshoreman husband, had cheated on her. Wendy came home drunk and grabbed one of Pat's several guns, intending to shoot him
[8]
. Fortuitously, she found herself unable to load the weapon. In the end, Wendy collected all Pat's rifles and pistols, took them down to Aberdeen's Wishkah River, and threw them in. Kurt watched as his mother did this. The next day he fished out of the water as many of the weapons as he could, and – in what could be seen as a symbolic twist – purchased his first professional amplifier with the proceeds from selling the guns.
[9]

At Aberdeen High School, Kurt met a boy called Krist Novoselic. Blessed with a satirical mind-set, Krist was extremely funny. Sometimes Kurt felt he was the only person who appreciated his uncompromising sense of humour. In Aberdeen, Krist was known as Chris, but in 1992 he legally changed it back to his Croatian name. Krist had been born to Croatian immigrant parents on 16 May 1965, in Compton, the sometimes notorious south-central district of Los Angeles, where from an early age being streetwise was a necessity for survival. In 1979, Krist's father, who had been driving a delivery truck in Southern California, learned that there was cheap property to be had in Aberdeen, Washington, where there was a significant Croatian community, as well as regular work in the local lumber mills. When they moved to Aberdeen, Krist Novoselic, by now a relatively sophisticated Los Angeleno, could not find any local kids with whom to empathize. Among other things, he was physically huge, eventually growing to 6' 7”. The local teenagers were into Top 40 radio, while Krist dug Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Devo.

By late spring 1980, his parents had made a radical decision to send their eldest son for a stay in their homeland, which was still a region of communist Yugoslavia. Becoming fluent in Croatian while there, Krist benefited from the excellent standard of education enjoyed in the communist bloc. He also discovered the Sex Pistols and the Ramones. Their music was released in Yugoslavia, which also had a strong national music scene, as Krist discovered.

But when he returned to Aberdeen, he found his parents had divorced. He also learned that the city's isolation meant he was almost alone in his understanding of punk. ‘It was hard for punk to make its way to Aberdeen because of its geographic isolation,' he told Everett True. To earn money Krist took a job at Taco Bell, saving for a vehicle and musical instruments and equipment.

Kurt Cobain, who by now would always wear a grey trench coat, first became friends with Krist's younger brother Robert. The first time he visited their home, Krist was upstairs, playing punk music. Although he was a couple of years older than Kurt, the younger boy quickly registered his presence and immediately ‘got' him. Krist was, Kurt said, a ‘really clever, funny, loudmouth person everyone laughed at, even though he was smarter than them.'
[10]

Yet they did not immediately become close friends. In fact, as always seemed to be the case, there was hardly anyone at Aberdeen High with whom Kurt felt he could empathize. Eventually, he began to hang out with the school's stoners, who were at least into rock'n'roll. Among them was a kid called Dale Crover. Crover had just become the new drummer with the Melvins, who began to rehearse at Crover's parents' Aberdeen house. Kurt Cobain again found himself in the inner orbit of the Melvins, for whom he even auditioned at one point. ‘I totally botched it. 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.'
[11]
Yet the Melvins' discipline and belief in rigorous hard work hit a nerve in Kurt, who vowed to himself to emulate them.

Kurt and Krist Novoselic would run into each other at Melvins' rehearsals. Kurt discovered that Krist played guitar, and they would hang out and play music together.

On a punk rock compilation tape that Buzz Osbourne had put together for him, Kurt discovered Black Flag, and its iconic singer Henry Rollins. Suitably inspired, in August 1984 he sold his record collection to pay for a trip to Seattle to see Black Flag. ‘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 … 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.'
[12]

In 1993, Kurt Cobain expanded on this theme: ‘[Buzz] made me a couple of compilation tapes, Black Flag and Flipper, everything, all the most popular punk rock bands, and I was completely blown away. I finally found my calling. That very same day, I cut my hair, and I would lip-synch to those tapes. I'd play them every day. I'd already been playing guitar by then for a couple of years, and I was trying to play my own style of punk rock, what I thought it would be. I knew it was fast, and had a lot of distortion. It expressed the way I felt politically and socially. It was the anger that I felt, the alienation.'
[13]

Although he had got into more conventional rock acts, like Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith, sensitive Kurt could detect that something was awry in their entire stance. ‘I really did enjoy and do enjoy some of the melodies they'd written, but they were definitely lacking something, and it took me so many years to realize that a lot of it had to do with sexism, the way that they just wrote about their dicks, having sex. That stuff bored me,' he told Jon Savage.

Surprised at such a perception, Savage asked Kurt for the origins of such thinking – did it evolve from punk rock? No, he replied, his innate sense of injustice had been sparked earlier. ‘It was before that. Because I couldn't ever find any good male friends, I ended up hanging out with the girls a lot, and I just felt that they weren't treated equally, weren't treated with respect, the way Aberdeen treated women in general. They were just totally oppressed, the words “bitch” and “cunt” would be totally common. But it took me many years after the fact to realize those were the things that were bothering me. I was just starting to understand what was pissing me off so much, and within that year, the last couple of years of high school, and punk rock, it all came together. I finally admitted to myself, I am not retarded.'

From around the time he turned fourteen, Kurt was smoking marijuana every day. By the time he was in his senior year, he started to ease off and ultimately quit altogether for a time, aware that the drug exacerbated the paranoia to which he was already prone. He also became a pot-smoking buddy of a kid called Myer Loftin, drawn to him because he was into similar music. What Kurt did not know at first was that Loftin was gay, which led to other students at Aberdeen High assuming that Kurt was also. Although this was not the case, he would be bullied – taking a couple of beatings – for this. ‘I even thought that I was gay. I thought that might be the solution to my problem. One time during my school years, although I never experimented with it, I had a gay friend, and that was the only time that I ever experienced real confrontation from people, because for so many years … they were basically afraid of me, and when I started hanging out with this person who was known to be gay, I started getting a lot of shit. People trying to beat me up and stuff. Then my mother wouldn't allow me to be friends with him anymore. 'Cos she's homophobic. It was real devastating, because finally I'd found a male friend who I actually hugged and was affectionate to, and we talked about a lot of things. Around that same time, I was putting all the pieces of the puzzle together. He played a big role in that.'
[14]

Ultimately, this led to Kurt having an especially sophisticated view of sexuality. In his Nirvana lyrics, Kurt would often say the unsayable: ‘Everyone is gay!' he declared, on ‘All Apologies' – a song that also contains the lines, ‘Everything is my fault / I'll take all the blame.'