27: Kurt Cobain (3 page)

Once again, Don Cobain decided to intervene in his son's life, and try to put it back on course. Kurt was persuaded to move back to Montesano, where his father cajoled him into sitting an entrance exam to serve in the US navy. Kurt passed the test with flying colours, but refused to sign up to be a sailor.

Returning to Aberdeen, Kurt moved in with Jesse Reed and his family. Jesse was a friend whose born-again Christian parents endeavoured to set him on what they considered to be the correct path in life. Jesse's father, Dave, had an unconventional past as sax player in the Beachcombers, a 1960s garage group. Although he would be obliged to attend church with Jesse's parents, they provided a stable home life for Kurt. At the age of seventeen, under the Reeds' influence, Kurt was baptized. For a few weeks he declared he was a Christian. Kurt was looking for something. Something he never really found. But at least he felt a little more self-confident. In August 1984, Kurt had sex for the first time.
[15]

On his eighteenth birthday, on 20 February 1985, the Reeds threw a party for him at their house. As a present, his aunt Mari gave him Stephen Davis's
Hammer of the Gods
, a revelatory, warts-and-all Led Zeppelin biography. Kurt was touched. ‘… it was nice to know people care about ya,' he wrote to her in his thank you letter.

By now Kurt's life mainly consisted of smoking large amounts of marijuana. Three months later, realizing that he was way behind on graduation credits, Kurt dropped out of high school, only weeks before he was due to have graduated. Somehow, he had decided, he would make his future in music. A high school dropout? You can't get lower than that in America. Considering his low self-esteem, such loser status may well have appealed to Kurt.

Despite the Reeds' generosity towards him, something of the feral seemed to have developed in Kurt. On one occasion when he forgot his key, he smashed a window to get back into their house. And was summarily told to leave.

Kurt briefly moved back to his mother's. After Wendy had told him that if he didn't get a job, he would have to move out, Kurt moved into an apartment with Jesse Reed. Ironically, in order to pay for this, he did get a job, working at a restaurant on the coast, then returning to Aberdeen High – as a janitor. Going back to his high school in such a lowly role sapped him psychologically, and after two months he quit.

He then turned on Jesse. After defacing Jesse's high school yearbook – a rebuke to Jesse for having graduated? – Kurt kicked him out of the apartment, which they had shared for three months. Kurt hung on to the place. Eventually, he ran out of money and, in autumn 1985, was obliged to up sticks. Broke and homeless, Kurt slept wherever he could: in the local library; on his mother's porch. Although there is an element of self-mythologizing here, it's true that he very occasionally slept under the North Aberdeen Bridge, near his mother's place. The bridge crossed the Wishkah river, and Kurt prided himself on his ability to catch fish from its waters, which he would then eat. (Later he was told that the Wishkah was so polluted that any fish caught in it were certainly poisonous.)

That winter of 1985, Kurt put together his first group, to which he gave the cartoon-like hardcore name of Fecal Matter. Playing his own material, Fecal Matter also consisted of his friend Dale Grover on bass and another boy, Greg Hokanson, on drums. On one occasion they managed to secure a support slot with the Melvins, playing a Washington state coastal town. But Kurt and Dale Grover could not get on with the drummer, and decided to concentrate on recording together. Driving up to Seattle, they paid a visit to Kurt's aunt Mari, who owned a four-track TEAC tape recorder. Mari was amazed at how angry Kurt's vocals were, on tunes with such titles as ‘Bambi Slaughter', ‘Laminated Effect', ‘Sound of Dentage' and ‘Downer', a different version of which would appear on
Bleach
, the first Nirvana album. The sound of these tunes was like a cross between the Melvins and Metallica, reliant on heavy riffing and largely devoid of melody.

Later, with Buzz Osbourne on bass and Mike Dillard, once of the Melvins, on drums, Kurt practiced the Fecal Matter material, but eventually this project evaporated.

For around eight months, Kurt moved into the home of his friend Steve Shillinger. Shillinger's father taught English at Aberdeen High, and taking in waifs and strays was commonplace for the family. However none had ever stayed as long as Kurt did, who kept his sleeping bag behind the couch on which he slept. During this time, Kurt Cobain embarked on a side career as a graffiti artist. Largely this consisted of absurdist gestures, such as spray-painting ‘QUEER' on trucks bristling with rifle-racks. Once he was picked up by the police and fined for such behaviour. (In his pocket when he was busted was a copy of a cassette by hardcore outfit Millions of Dead Cops.)

In 1986 Kurt managed to play his first live show, in a performance space in the state capital Olympia, fifty miles east of Aberdeen. Buzz Osbourne was on bass, and Dale Crover played parts of a drum kit, as Kurt recited some of his poetry over their instrumental backing – he had had to get drunk to do so. But local groovers Dylan Carlson and Slim Moon were impressed, telling Kurt afterwards how great the show had been. Kurt also started to hang out with a local drug dealer, and in the middle of the summer, this character shot Kurt up with heroin. This was the first time he had ever experienced the drug. ‘It was such a scarce thing to find heroin in Aberdeen that I just thought I would try it,' he said.
[16]

As her son was still essentially homeless, his mother put down the initial $200 deposit on a rundown wooden house at 1000 East Second Street in Aberdeen, near to where she lived. Melvins' bassist Matt Lukin moved in with him – useful, as Lukin was a carpenter, and plenty of work needed to be done on the two-bedroom property. Not that Lukin's efforts were always noticed. By the time that Kurt had been living there for only the briefest time, the place looked like a parody of a teenage apartment – the floor was littered with empty beer cans and it stank. In the bath Kurt installed a family of turtles, raising the question as to where he actually washed.

Despite having taken a job as a janitor at a resort hotel – he spent most of his time sleeping in the rooms – Kurt was still always broke. By now a seasoned drug user, he needed to find a cheap high, and soon discovered the opiate properties of assorted cough syrups.

That winter, however, Kurt badly burned his left hand. He had been cooking French fries and managed to cover his hand in boiling fat. At first he was told he would never be able to play the guitar again. While he recuperated he was unable to work, which meant he had even less money than previously. Rice was almost all he could afford to eat. Yet he was able to play guitar, and spent most of the several months of his recovery improving his skills on the instrument.

During this time, for about a month, Kurt also began to rehearse with Krist Novoselic, playing with a local drummer called Bob McFadden. Together they would travel to Olympia, which lay on the Puget Sound waterfront and was respected as a regional centre for the arts. There, Kurt had discovered another musical scene altogether, one of a relative sophistication that was largely drug-free. Its focus was K Records, an indie label. K was also a local distribution network for British indie acts such as the Vaselines, Young Marble Giants and Kleenex. K was run by Candace Peterson and Calvin Johnson. Johnson's band Beat Happening were the kings of this self-consciously naïf scene, which prided itself on its geeky, nerdy nature, in which everyone – unlike Kurt with his long blond tresses – had short hair. Free-thinking and bohemian, everyone around this scene played in each other's groups. Kurt was very taken with the notion of K Records, and had its logo tattooed on his left arm. ‘K Records and that whole scene in Olympia turned me on to so much amazing music. The Pastels and the Vaselines and all that stuff. Every couple of years I feel that I've gone as far as I can with being introduced to something new, and then something like that hits me and it gives me life for a few years … I was turned on to the whole 4AD thing, the Raincoats and the Young Marble Giants. It was like the first time that I heard punk rock, 'cos there were all these bands from the last fifteen years, and I'd try to find all these records, and it was a whole scene, these bands that had been going on for like ten years, and it had the same impact on me. It was a completely different world.'
[17]

The K scene was extremely purist, and Calvin Johnson's first name led to Kurt dubbing its devotees as ‘Calvinists'. The overriding attitude was not dissimilar to that at, say, the UK's
Sniffin' Glue
fanzine which, in 1977, had railed against the Clash for signing to a major label. While on one hand Kurt was extremely taken with such a stance, it was also incompatible with his secret ambitions, a source of extreme inner conflict in the coming years.

Meanwhile Krist Novoselic had bought a VW van with his Taco Bell earnings and become the driver for the Melvins. He also became involved with a Melvins side project, the Meltors, who would play Melvins covers. Krist became the Meltors' bass player. Some outsiders, like Slim Moon, the founder of the Kill Rock Stars label, thought him to be the coolest member of the Melvins scene. But others noted how much he drank, and his confrontational tendencies. Unlike most of his young male contemporaries in Aberdeen, however, Krist had a girlfriend, Shelli.

In his autobiography, Krist Novoselic wrote about his initial impressions of Kurt: ‘Kurt was a completely creative persona – a true artist. When I first met him, he had just got a job and found his own place. What a den of art/insanity that was. He tried to make his own lava lamp out of wax and vegetable oil (it didn't work). He sketched very obscene Scooby Doo cartoons all over his apartment building hallways. He made wild sound montages from obscure records. He sculpted clay into scary spirit people writhing in agony. He played guitar, and wrote great tunes that were kind of off-kilter. Kurt held a sceptical perspective towards the world. He'd create video montages that were scathing testimonies about popular culture, compiled from hours and hours of watching TV.'
[18]
A longstanding problem for Kurt, however, was the fact that Krist's mother never cared for him.

For his part, meeting Krist made a considerable difference to Kurt's life: ‘I hated everybody. I always managed to have at least one close friend at a time, through most of my life. There have been years where I would just put up with my best friend, and not really like the person. But since I've been in the band and since I've known Krist … I have a handful of friends that are great …'
[19]

In 1987, a year after Kurt had given Krist the Fecal Matter cassette, they formed a group, with Krist on bass and Dale Crover on drums, which they called Skid Row. ‘Their songs were basically riffs,' Slim Moon said. ‘They'd play a riff for a long time and Kurt would scream into the microphone, then he'd drop the guitar and play with the digital delay and make crazy noises instead of a guitar solo, and then he'd pick the guitar back up and play the riff some more. Right away, he was a showman.'
[20]

Soon, after Kurt had watched a television show about Buddhism, Skid Row's name was changed to Nirvana. ‘It means attainment of perfection,' explained Kurt.
[21]

Part of the Olympia K Records scene was a girl called Tracy Marander, arty-looking and unusual with her vivid red hair. When she and Kurt first met, she was living in Tacoma, outside Seattle. Even though she was slightly larger than him, Kurt went for this stylish, exotic girl, and she became his first girlfriend. In the autumn of 1987, Tracy relocated from Tacoma to Olympia, renting an apartment at 114 ½ North Pear Street. Kurt, now in his twentieth year, moved up to live with her, along with a rabbit he kept in a cage on top of the fridge. After he had painted the bathroom bright red, Kurt spray-painted the words ‘RED RUM' – an allusion to the horror film
The Shining
– on a wall. Living-room walls were covered with pictures and articles taken from the pages of
Melody Maker
and
NME
, which he would buy on import. Despite his evident eccentricities, people in Olympia's first impressions of Kurt were that he was a sweet guy.

Historically, the Pacific Northwest has leant towards the political left. As state capital, stylish Olympia was endowed with myriad cultural facilities for its citizens. This included KAOS radio, which was reputed to have the most comprehensive library of independent music of any station in the USA. Any record on an independent label was guaranteed to be played on KAOS, part of some unwritten charter of the station. (Even in the very early days of Nirvana, the group were regularly playing or being interviewed on KAOS: April 1987 was the month of their first broadcast, when they played eleven songs during an early-hours show.) Unusually, there was also an ethos in the city of paying serious respect to women musicians, a stance echoed by K Records. Amongst those so honoured were such British female acts as the Slits, the Raincoats and the Marine Girls. After having hung out with Myer Loftin and gained an understanding of a gay frame of mind, Kurt Cobain's sensibility was again widened, as he came to appreciate not only a feminine but also a feminist point of view. The extent to which Olympia was both hardcore and ‘Calvinist', simultaneously liberating and trammelling, and how precisely this came to define a part of Kurt Cobain, should not be underestimated.

Krist Novoselic and his girlfriend Shelli also moved up to Olympia, Krist taking a job as an industrial painter at the Boeing aircraft factory. Later they would shift residences to Tacoma. Briefly Kurt and Krist formed a group covering Creedence Clearwater Revival tunes called the Sellouts, but after a few attempts to play taverns, they abandoned the project. Later, there were those who were reminded of Creedence's John Fogerty when they heard or saw Kurt sing.
[22]