Love & Death (3 page)

Six nights a week, each evening in a different location, Dave Reed organizes what appears to be the chief source of entertainment in these parts—karaoke. We arrive at Trio’s Bar, where the night’s program is already well under way. As lowbrow as the surroundings appear, one thing strikes us immediately: the people here are having fun, the first indication since we arrived that not everybody in this town considers it a redneck backwater devoid of culture. As an overweight, middle-aged woman finishes screeching an out-of-tune version of “Brown Eyed Girl,” the room erupts with cheers and encouragement.

A fifty-something man sporting a purple tie-dyed T-shirt and a long beaded braid almost to his waist adjusts the mike. This is Dave Reed, the man who was said to have been like a father to Kurt Cobain during his latter teenage years. By 1984, when he was seventeen, Kurt had already experienced frequent and extended bouts of homelessness, living for months at a time in alleys, under bridges and in friends’ garages. His mother had taken up with a new boyfriend—a heavy-drinking, womanizing, hot-tempered longshoreman named Pat O’Connor, whom Kurt despised—and she didn’t want anything to do with her son. He tried living with his father for a few months, but things were no better than before.

Kurt had recently made friends with a boy named Jesse Reed, the teenage son of evangelical Christians, and began a period of his life that he would not be anxious to discuss in later years. One would be hard-pressed to find any evidence in his soul-baring lyrics or soon-to-be frequent interviews about his Aberdeen youth that Kurt Cobain had found Jesus, become a born-again Christian and had even been baptized at the age of seventeen. Among the chroniclers dissecting the evolution of his drug use, few noted that he spent a portion of his teenage years lecturing friends about the evils of drugs as an abomination against Christ. It was during this period that Dave Reed and his wife, Ethel, invited Kurt to live with their family at the Reeds’ large home a few miles outside Aberdeen.

“His family life was a mess,” recalls Reed, who was a Christian youth counselor at the time. “He had big problems with his mother, and he was going through a really bad time. He and my son were always together, so I asked him if he wanted to stay with us. He jumped at the chance. I think Kurt saw me as a Ned Flanders–type guy, although I don’t think
The Simpsons
were even airing yet. I was with the South Aberdeen Baptist Church. Kurt became a born-again Christian through my son, Jesse, and our family environment. He went to church almost every time the door was open. I was a youth group leader, and Kurt would always come to church with Jesse. For a while, he took Christian life very seriously. But mostly he was into art, horses and music.”

By this time, Kurt had dropped out of high school and entered what he would later call his “aimless years.” For hours on end, he would sit in the local library reading voraciously or writing the poems that would eventually form the lyrics to many familiar Nirvana songs. Hilary Richrod, the reference librarian at Aberdeen’s Timberland Library, recalls Kurt coming every day and reading for hours at a time: “It was hard to miss him. He usually had multicolored hair, and that kind of stuck out in a town like Aberdeen.”

The most significant by-product of his churchgoing period was Kurt’s burgeoning friendship with a gawky teenage giant named Krist Novoselic, who attended the same church as the Reeds. Kurt and Krist had met in high school, but it was while attending the Baptist church—which Krist joined because he was dating a Christian girl at the time—that they actually bonded, says Reed.

Jesse Reed, who was also a musician, invited Krist over one day to jam with him and Kurt. “You could say that the roots of Nirvana began in our house,” says the elder Reed, himself a former musician who had played in a group called the Beachcombers with Kurt’s uncle Chuck. “Kurt was really into his music; he practiced all the time and he was writing a lot of songs. He wanted to be a star. He said it all the time.” A former member of the Beachcombers had gone on to become a promo man for Capitol Records in Seattle, and after Kurt learned of Reed’s connection, he became obsessed with meeting the executive and launching a music career.

Before long, Kurt’s flirtation with Christianity waned, he resumed smoking pot and an indignant Dave Reed eventually threw him out when Kurt broke a window one night after he had lost his key. But a small miracle had happened while he was there. Kurt began to believe that he could get out of Aberdeen and that his escape route might be rock and roll. Before long, he and Krist had formed a band with a drummer friend named Aaron Burckhard, rehearsing constantly in a room above the downtown beauty salon operated by Krist’s mother.

By the end of our weekend in Kurt’s hometown, we had come no closer to determining whether the rejection and alienation of his dysfunctional youth had led inexorably to his self-demise. To each person we interviewed who had known him when he was young, we posed the question. Each in turn said they saw no real signs of self-destruction but blamed whatever happened after he left, perhaps unwilling or unable to indict the community to which they still clung. With the exception of Kurt’s first guitar teacher, Warren Mason, who said he “just couldn’t see himself doing that at that point in his life,” none doubted that he had killed himself. Dave Reed tells us to look elsewhere if we ever hope to make sense of Kurt’s death, saying, “It was his fame that killed him.”

Kurt Cobain had always wanted to be famous. That was the one thing virtually everybody we talked to in his hometown agreed on. When he finally got his wish in 1991, it was and wasn’t what he’d expected.

He finally escaped Aberdeen for good in 1987, shortly after his twentieth birthday. He had moved to the state capital, Olympia, thirty miles up the road, to live with his first serious girlfriend, Tracy Marander, and discovered what would later be described as his “spiritual mecca”—the ultrahip college town where the bohemians actually outnumbered the rednecks. By the time Kurt moved to Olympia, the band he and Krist had formed in Aberdeen had already played a few gigs under a number of incarnations, including “Skid Row,” “Ted Ed Fred” and “Fecal Matter.” They were beginning to attract a small following.

When he wasn’t practicing his music, Kurt continued to dabble in art, creating surreal landscapes covered with fetuses and mangled animals or, memorably, a collage of photos of diseased vaginas that he’d found in medical textbooks.

With money Kurt saved from a part-time janitorial job, the band was able to record a demo at the studio of a former navy engineer named Jack Endino, who was impressed by Kurt’s distinctive vocals and the band’s hard-edged sound. Endino passed the demo to a friend named Jonathan Poneman, the head of a new Seattle indie label called Sub Pop. Around this time, the band finally settled on a permanent name. The story goes that Kurt had discovered Buddhism after watching a TV show about Eastern religions and was enchanted by the idea of transcending the cycle of human suffering. He especially liked the name the Buddhists gave to the concept of ultimate enlightenment: Nirvana.

By this time, he had also discovered a new drug. Since he was a teenager, Kurt had experienced intermittent stomach pains that would send him into paroxysms of agony without any warning. He saw an endless series of medical specialists, but doctors were at a loss to explain what was causing the problem, which he later described to
Details
magazine: “Imagine the worst stomach flu you’ve ever had, every single day. And it was worse when I ate, because once the meal would touch that red area, I would hyperventilate, my arms would turn numb, and I would vomit.” He had been offered heroin on a number of occasions, but he had always refused, in part because he was afraid of needles. For the most part, he still confined his drug use to pot, Percodan and magic mushrooms.

By the time he moved to Olympia, the stomach pain was unbearable. A local heroin dealer called Grunt told him that opiates were the ultimate painkiller. Krist Novoselic, who was himself battling alcoholism at the time, later recalled telling Kurt he was “playing with dynamite” after Kurt called to tell him he had just done heroin for the first time.

“Yeah, he did it a few times back then, because he said it was the only thing that could get rid of the pain,” confirms Kurt’s best friend, Dylan Carlson, whom he first met in Olympia and who was himself a junkie. “But it wasn’t a habit or anything, at least not back then.”

Things were looking up. When Kurt heard that Sub Pop had agreed to record the band’s first single, “Love Buzz,” he ran into the streets yelling, “I’m going to be a rock star! Nirvana rules!” An album followed, titled
Bleach,
after the substance junkies employ to clean their needles so they can be reused.
Bleach
was recorded for a grand total of $606.17 at Endino’s studio. By this time, the struggling Sub Pop cofounders, Jonathan Poneman and Bruce Pavitt, already deep in debt, had decided that if the Seattle Sound, or “grunge” as it would soon be known, was going to find a wider audience, it would be necessary first to create a buzz in the UK. That’s how Seattle’s most famous rock-and-roll descendant, Jimi Hendrix, had first made a name for himself two decades earlier.

In the United States, alternative music was still a fringe movement, confined to college radio stations and seedy clubs. The Sub Pop founders were determined to change that, borrowing money to fly in Everett True of the influential London music magazine
Melody Maker
to showcase their label’s talent. They couldn’t possibly have imagined how much this gambit would pay off. True would later become known as the “godfather of grunge” for his series of articles profiling Sub Pop and the burgeoning Seattle music scene. It may even have been True’s seal of approval that started the train rolling for Nirvana, which he described in an article as “the real thing. No rock star contrivance, no intellectual perspective, no master plan for world domination…. Kurdt [
sic
] Cobain is a great tunesmith, although still a relatively young songwriter. He wields a riff with
passion.”
The music press descended on the city to see what all the fuss was about, and grunge, as the local music paper
The Rocket
described it, had soon “surpassed the status of a happening regional scene to become a worldwide fashion craze.”

The mainstream music industry began to pay attention. A & R reps swept through town, cash and contracts in hand, looking to capitalize on what everyone was sure was the next wave in music. Although a number of critics were decidedly unimpressed with
Bleach—Rolling Stone
described it as “undistinguished…relying on warmed over 70’s riffs”—others declared Cobain a genius. Kurt was loving every second of it, recalls his best friend, Dylan, himself a struggling musician: “He kept saying they were going to be bigger than the Beatles. Everybody knew they were getting signed, and believe me, they were getting off on it. When you dream of being a rock star and it finally happens, I guess nothing really beats it.”

When
Nevermind,
Nirvana’s second album, vaulted past Michael Jackson’s
Dangerous
in December 1991 to occupy number one on the
Billboard
charts, music journalists scrambled for an explanation. How could a supposedly alternative band sell three million albums in four months? A year earlier, the band had signed an unprecedented deal with Geffen Records that gave Nirvana complete creative control. It wasn’t the million-dollar advance that other labels were offering, but Kurt and his bandmates were ecstatic. They had been spared the noose of corporate rock they all feared when the majors came courting following the explosion of the Seattle music scene during the late 1980s. They would be able to make the kind of album they wanted to make, not the overproduced commercial “crap” they had so often scorned—at least in the company of their indie rock friends. They could hand in a sixty-minute tape of the band defecating and Geffen would have to release it, Kurt joked. What they actually did instead was go into the studio and record an inspired punk ode to the band’s pop roots, an album that would soon be recognized as a masterpiece. It still sounded like noise to most people over thirty, the feedback and hard-driving guitar drowning out the catchy musical bridges unless you listened closely enough.