Here We Are Now (11 page)

When bands could scrape up enough luck to land a gig at one of the handful of Seattle clubs that booked original bands, audiences would inevitably number in the dozens, and everyone in the crowd knew each other. A tribe mentality existed that was insular but also nurturing. Most audience members at venues like the Vogue or the Central Tavern were members of other bands. “We played at the time not thinking we'd be successful or famous,” Soundgarden's guitarist Kim Thayil once told me, “but simply because we wanted to impress our friends. It was a scene built on friendships, and that's one reason bands were so supportive of each other and not competitive.” Consequently, there was no place in town for big egos and judgment, and status within the Seattle music scene, at least through the mid-nineties, was afforded only for talent, not for fame or money.

This was perfectly suited to Kurt Cobain's attitude. Although he desperately wanted to succeed, he didn't want to be too obvious about it. That was the source of Kurt's beef with Pearl Jam: he felt that band had sinned by overtly wanting success. In the press, Kurt delivered what would be the sternest rebuke for a Seattle band: he called Pearl Jam “careerists.” (He described them in
Rolling Stone
as a “corporate, alternative and cock-rock fusion” band.) It was hypocrisy, of course, as Kurt could have easily stuck with independent record labels, but in truth he wanted to sell albums as much as anyone. Kurt, and Nirvana, left Sub Pop and signed with the “corporate” major label Geffen because they wanted the money that deal brought. But in Seattle, “desire” was a dirty word, and Kurt downplayed his.

In turn, even when Nirvana were incredibly famous, Seattleites treated Kurt as if he were a member of any other band, superstar or not. I was in Seattle clubs a dozen times when Kurt, or one of the other members of Nirvana, was present. Yes, muffled whispers would pass through the crowd that royalty was in the house, but no one would dare do something as lame as ask Kurt for an autograph, or a photograph, or harass him in any way. Even when Kurt was a huge superstar, he was given a kind of anonymity in Seattle that he could not have found anywhere else. And Kurt made himself easy to spot: though many in Seattle music dressed in essentially the same uniform—jeans, T-shirts, sneakers—in the last year of his life, Kurt frequently wore an Elmer Fudd–style hunting cap with flaps. The hat stood out on the streets of Seattle, and so did the most famous rock star in the world who was wearing it. But still, nobody bothered him.

If there is one story that most illustrates the essence of Seattle, it came when Courtney decided the couple needed a new car. She didn't drive, but Kurt had two vintage cars, an old Valiant and a Volvo. So they went out together and bought a brand-new black Lexus. They were worth millions then and could have afforded a fleet of luxury cars. But Kurt drove the Lexus for less than a day before he became uncomfortable with the showiness of it.

He returned the Lexus to the dealership, claiming he didn't like the color, and got his money back. Kurt then took a cab back to his million-dollar mansion. His beater cars were still parked in the driveway.

If Seattle was the ideal city for Kurt Cobain to be a star, it was also true that Kurt Cobain was the ideal rock star for Seattle. Nirvana's rise, and the attention that Grunge music received internationally, was perfectly timed for Seattle's big star turn. The explosion of Seattle music came at exactly the moment Microsoft, Starbucks, and Amazon were all bringing attention to the city. In prior decades, Seattle had primarily been known in business circles as the home of Boeing, and in music culture as the hometown of Jimi Hendrix. The only local band that had found platinum record success before 1991 was Heart. And even though Seattle served as headquarters for several Fortune 500 companies, prior to the nineties its unofficial symbol was the Space Needle, a UFO-shaped icon constructed for the 1962 World's Fair.

Nirvana was only one band, and one aspect, of Seattle's coming-out party in 1991, but
Nevermind
may have earned the town more national press than anything other than Microsoft that year. Record companies began to scour the Seattle music scene looking for talent, and in many cases they found it. “No one can get a seat on a plane to Seattle or Portland now,” said Ed Rosenblatt of Geffen Records at the time. “Every flight is booked by A&R people out to find the next Nirvana.” In the year following
Nevermind,
Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chains all earned platinum records of their own. And the good news for Seattle was that every one of those bands actually resided in the city, and unlike Nirvana those bands deserved the connection.

The particular artistic sensibility of Kurt Cobain also struck a chord with Seattle residents and tastemakers. The city has always appreciated the underdog, the left-of-center artist, the outlier. “There's something deeper here, less about money, more about art,” Knute Berger, a columnist for
Seattle
magazine, told me. Berger cites influential Northwest painters Mark Tobey and Morris Graves, poets Theodore Roethke and William Stafford, and other artistic types who were connected to the Northwest's working-class roots but who were also doing world-class work. Grunge's ascent gave Seattle a sense that it had a chance to be famous for something other than rain, software, or coffee. “Muddy, mucky, dark indigenous art could still happen here, burst forth, and capture the world's attention,” Berger said. “Culture and validation: the perfect Seattle moment.”

If there was a moment in time when that validation was most obvious, at least when it came to commercial success, it was the summer of 1994, the year Kurt died. In that year alone, four different Seattle bands—Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden—topped the
Billboard
sales charts. There has not been a year since when a quartet of bands from one region of the world all scored No. 1 albums. “At that moment,” Soundgarden's Kim Thayil told me, “it felt like the Seattle Mariners had just won the World Series in baseball. It started to seem like something was happening, not just to me, but to Seattle.”

It was an indelible time, one that has stayed with Seattle ever since. Music became a part of Seattle's identity—apparently a permanent part, if the last two decades were a sign of things to come. Musicians from around the country, by the vanload, moved to Seattle. Some of them became famous, some didn't, but an infrastructure of record labels, music attorneys, recording studios, managers, booking agents, and live music venues developed, none of which had been in place in the eighties. The club scene—once so lame that Sub Pop bands were driven to rehearse in basements rather than play live—burst forth and became world-class. Seattle's superstar bands would only play in those clubs for “surprise,” announced-at-the-last-minute shows, but the clubs were packed every night of the week with all the B-level bands who were hoping for greatness, along with their fans.

At
The Rocket
we published a directory of working Northwest bands once a year. In the late eighties there were three hundred bands on that list, identifying themselves as “working” bands and not just pickup groups; by the early nineties that number had mushroomed to a thousand. Within those listings were a dozen bands whose members would be next in the long line of famous Northwest groups: Built to Spill, the Presidents of the United States, Seven Year Bitch, Elliott Smith, Supersuckers, Harvey Danger, Candlebox, Sleater-Kinney, Modest Mouse, Neko Case, MxPx, the Shins, Band of Horses, Walking Papers. From that early-nineties scene even came some of the musicians who would later play in the band with the biggest breakthrough of 2013, Macklemore, whose megahit “Thrift Shop” could be the first musical ode to Grunge fashion. Macklemore himself was too young to have been listed in
The Rocket
's nineties-era directory of bands, but the man who sings the chorus of “Thrift Shop,” Michael “Wanz” Wansley, was there.

It wasn't Kurt Cobain who made these bands that followed Nirvana successful—it was their talent—but the ground he broke, and the attention Nirvana brought to Seattle, helped get some of this music heard. Nirvana was a big enough tanker in the water of the music industry that many other bands saw their boats rise with them.

For me, the crystalizing moment that proved that my city was now shorthand for a certain music occurred during a vacation to St. Louis in 1992. A band poster on a telephone poll I saw listed three bands I'd never heard of. That shouldn't be surprising, given that this was miles from my hometown, but it was the word “Seattle” that drew my eye in the first place. Atop the poster was a banner headline, ten times bigger than the band names, that read
FROM SEATTLE.

It seemed absurd to me that three unknown bands could tour the Midwest as long as they made their home address bigger on a poster than their names. In early 1992, even Kurt Cobain couldn't legitimately put “From Seattle” on a Nirvana poster, but in the public's mind that little detail hardly mattered. He was “Seattle's Kurt Cobain” already, and would remain so.

Kurt Cobain was not just one of the most influential musicians of his generation; he was also one of the era's most famous drug addicts. Kurt experienced great fame, of course, but drug addiction is an undeniable part of that fame, and of his legacy. His death, however horrible, has had an undeniable effect on how musicians are now treated for addiction, and on how managers and record labels respond to clients who struggle with drugs. In the fields of thanatology, the science of death, and suicidology, the science of suicide, Kurt's life and death have been widely analyzed, investigated, and written about.

For all the identification Kurt would have as a heroin addict in the eyes of the public, that phase of his life came fairly late. For his first twenty-four years, Kurt Cobain was not a drug addict, and was often the most sober of his group of friends. When his heroin addiction began, it came as a great shock to some friends: Kurt was so afraid of needles that he once ran out of a doctor's office when a physician tried to give him a shot. Once, in his early adulthood, Kurt attended a Halloween party dressed in a junkie costume, complete with fake track marks drawn on his arms. Kurt's thin frame was already what many imagined a drug addict to look like, and rumors of his drug use began to plague him around 1990 in Olympia, in part because of that Halloween costume. Two years later, it was true.

Up until 1991, Kurt also rarely drank to excess, as he always worried about his constant stomach problems. He did occasionally take pills, and he smoked marijuana, but he was too poor to afford to do any drug regularly. He was prone to trying new diets, both to bulk up and to try to help fix his stomach issues, and for several different stints, sometimes as long as six months, he would go on regimens in which he would not drink or smoke at all. On one of Nirvana's first tours, Kurt was the most health-conscious member of the band and complained about the other guys partying too much, which he felt took away from the serious task of music making. He would not stay the most health-conscious band member, however.

His use of heroin began in 1991, and that occasional use became an addiction by the end of the year. He wrote in his journal that he “made a decision” to become a heroin addict, something he romanticized at first, going so far as to describe the drug as “heroine” when he wrote about it, and he was well aware of the sarcasm of that. Most of Kurt's initial motivation to use came from his discovery that heroin relieved his stomach pain. Kurt did not initially seek heroin out—as with many, a friend introduced him to the drug—but soon he was the one among his group of friends who would suggest getting high. He used more and more, though his pitiful financial state initially worked as a governor, to limit his addiction. But fame brought money, and money brought heroin. What began as a way to seek relief from his stomach pain turned into an addiction that caused withdrawal pain anytime he tried to quit or go a single day without the drug. Pain relief begot pain.

Soon, though, Kurt's romanticism about heroin addiction disappeared and his journal became the most strident anti-drug message you could ever read. As he lost his freedom to his addiction, and as it had increasingly negative consequences for him, he often begged God to free him from the addiction—but those prayers were not answered. He did attempt to use willpower to break his habit, but without much success. He attended twelve-step meetings during a couple of phases, but pronounced them not right for him. Judge his initial choice to pursue drugs if you will, but Kurt did spend at least five separate stints in rehabilitation centers or private doctor clinics, attempting to kick heroin. None of those stints went on long enough to be truly successful, but that he attempted to get clean so many times shows how desperate he was to stop.

His drug use did not remain a secret to the general public for long. In an interview with a journalist in 1992, he nodded off, a telltale sign of drug use, and this was reported in the press. From that point on, Kurt lived under a shadow both in the media and with the public. That shame or watchfulness didn't stop him from doing drugs, but in his later interviews he consistently claimed that addiction was in his past. He used language about how he had “been” an addict, and he consistently downplayed his usage. “I did heroin for three weeks [at the start of 1992],” he said in an interview with the
Los Angeles Times
in the fall of that year. When he put his drug use so far in his past, he made it sound as if he was a changed man who had come to his senses. This was his own projection; this was Kurt imagining the man he wanted to be. But then in the next interview, the timeline of his “past” drug use would change. There never was enough time being sober to even create a “past” history and “current” sobriety. Kurt was always in current addiction.