Here We Are Now (10 page)

Aberdeen was itself a city Kurt thought was disconnected from the rest of the world by culture and economics, but sometimes it was literally isolated. The main road into Aberdeen abuts a cliff, and occasionally, after heavy rains, a rock or mud slide blocks the road. On those days, Aberdeen isn't just metaphorically isolated from the rest of the world—it is physically cut off, too.

Johnny Marr, the guitar player of the Smiths and later Modest Mouse, told me he had a theory that the influential music cities of Northern England and Washington State had commonalities. “They share working-class economics,” he told me, “and the kind of people who live in a rainy city.” To Marr, both Manchester and Seattle create or attract a certain breed of musician, one with an edge. “It's more than just the gray sky and the rain,” he observed. “It's more about the attitude. It's an indoor culture in both those places.” Both Seattle and Manchester are known for guitar-based rock with dense layers of vocals, distortion effects, and drum beats that often shift tempo rather than lay down a consistent rhythm.

And if Marr's observation on indoor culture is true for Seattle and Manchester, it is even truer for Aberdeen, which gets eighty-four inches of rain a year, twice that of Seattle or Manchester. Aberdeen's extreme weather has always gone hand in hand with a preference for harder music—garage rock and heavy metal. “By the early sixties, Grays Harbor was a hotbed of garage rock,” John Hughes, the former publisher of the Aberdeen
Daily World
newspaper, told me. Hughes also observed links between the region and Northern England: “Grays Harbor has a gritty, Liverpool-like appetite for loud, live music.”

The first Aberdeen band to be signed to a major label wasn't Nirvana but the thrash-metal band Metal Church. Their self-titled debut in 1984 sold seventy thousand copies and was picked up by Elektra Records. Kurt Cobain grew up a fan of that band—he liked thrash, and death metal, too. He also most likely took his frequent alternative spelling of his own name, Kurdt, from Metal Church's lead singer, Kurdt Vanderhoof.

A bigger local influence on Kurt, though, were the Melvins, who sold very few records in the eighties but provided him the template for punk rock itself. When Kurt first saw the Melvins perform in a grocery-store parking lot in Montesano, Washington (the band took its name from the manager of that grocery store), just a few miles east of Aberdeen, he wrote in his journal, “This was what I was looking for.” He wrote it twice, and underlined it.

The Melvins played around Aberdeen for a few years but made very little money. (Kurt would help get them a major-label record deal with Atlantic in 1993, and even coproduced their
Houdini
album; one of his first publicly displayed artworks was a portrait of the members of the band Kiss painted on the side of the Melvins' band van, the Mel-Van.) In 1988 the Melvins left Aberdeen, as Kurt had done just months before: he moved sixty miles west to Olympia in 1987, and it was there where he wrote most of the songs that would end up on
Nevermind
. Though he'd return to his hometown for the occasional gig or to visit friends and family, Kurt wouldn't live in Aberdeen again.

When Nirvana rose to international attention in 1991, so did Aberdeen. The city was often featured when the media first began to profile the band. Many Aberdeen residents were not comfortable with the association, particularly in light of the fact that Kurt repeatedly talked about Aberdeen as if it was filled with hicks. In one band biography release he wrote for Nirvana in 1988, Kurt described Aberdeen as full of “highly-bigoted redneck snoose-chewing deer-shooting faggot-killing logger-types who ain't too partial to ‘weirdo new wavers.'” Needless to say, Kurt did not win fans at the Aberdeen Chamber of Commerce with this depiction of his hometown.

Things soured further in 1992 when Kurt's drug addiction became news. Though drinking and taverns were central to Aberdeen life, newspaper stories about heroin embarrassed the town's leaders because their association with Kurt was still so strong. Of course, Kurt's suicide in 1994 brought the kind of infamy few towns would seek. “Some joked that it was a revolting development for Aberdeen to be famous for Nirvana,” says John Hughes. Aberdeen had already had run-ins with media stereotypes in previous decades. The town's downtown core was once so populated with brothels that in 1952
Look
magazine cited it as “one of the hotspots in America's battle against sin.” Residents seemed quicker to embrace that ribald past (a local tavern even sold T-shirts that read
ABERDEEN WHOREHOUSE RESTORATION SOCIETY
) than their connection with Kurt. There were several attempts immediately after Kurt's death to have something officially named after Kurt in Aberdeen, but all failed outright. One local sculptor created a statute of Kurt, but the city wouldn't allow it on a public street. Eventually, the statue was put on display inside a muffler-repair shop.

Aberdeen doesn't have a bookstore that holds literary events, so when I did a reading for
Heavier Than Heaven
there in 2001, it was held at the library. That was appropriate in a way, as Kurt passed many days of his youth reading books in that building. There was one element, however, that I wasn't expecting: protestors. One held a sign that said,
DON'T GLORIFY DRUGGIES.
But this being Aberdeen, with a small-town friendliness even in matters of heated debate, that particular protestor ended up coming to the reading and buying my book anyway. My impression of Aberdeen residents over the years has been a little different from Kurt's experience. I've run into “snoose-chewing” rednecks, but I've also met many educated, well-read intellectuals. Many are even proud of their famous musicians.

But not all. In 2004, for the ten-year anniversary of Kurt's death, the mayor of nearby Hoquiam put forward a proclamation honoring Kurt. The proclamation was essentially a piece of paper stating that Kurt lived in the town as a baby, and issuing it officially would have cost the city nothing. It failed to pass when some suggested it would signal a public endorsement of drug use. “What kind of message is this sending to my kids?” Hoquiam city council member Tom Plumb asked.

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.