Night Beat (72 page)

THOUGH COBAIN IS now Aberdeen’s most famous native son, and though many people recall him from his time here, there’s something about his presence here that proves shadowy and inscrutable to the locals. Lamont Shillinger, who heads Aberdeen High School’s English department, saw as much of Cobain as most people outside his family. For nearly a year, during the time he played music with the teacher’s sons, Eric and Steve, Kurt slept on Shillinger’s front-room sofa, and in those moments when Cobain’s stomach erupted in the burning pain that tormented him off and on for years, Shillinger would head out to the local Safeway and retrieve some Pepto-Bismol or antacids to try to relieve the pain. But for all the time he spent with the family, Kurt remains a mystery to them. “I would not claim,” says Lamont Shillinger, “that I knew him well either. I don’t think my sons knew him well. In fact, even to this day, I suspect there are very few people that really knew Kurt well—even the people around him or the people he was near to. I think the closest he ever came to expressing what was inside was in his artwork, in his poetry, and in his music. But as far as personal back and forth, I seriously doubt that he was ever that close to anybody.”

Another Aberdeen High teacher, Bob Hunter, affirms Shillinger’s view. Hunter, who is part of the school’s Art department, began teaching Cobain during his freshman year, and worked with him for three years, until 1985, when Cobain quit school. Though the two of them had a good relationship, Hunter can recall few revealing remarks from his student. “I really believe in the idea of aura,” says Hunter, “and around Kurt there was an aura of: ’Back off—get out of my face,’ that type of thing. But at the same time I was intrigued by what I saw Kurt doing. I wanted to know where he was getting the ideas he was coming up with for his drawings. You could detect the anger—it was evident even then.”

Hunter lost track of Cobain for a while after Kurt dropped out of school, until he had Cobain’s younger sister, Kim, in one of his classes. From time to time, Kim would bring tapes of her brother’s work to the teacher and keep him informed of his former student’s progress. Says Hunter: “Even if Kim had never come back and said that Kurt was really making it as a musician, I would have kept wondering about him. I’ve taught thousands of students now, but he would have been up there in my thoughts as one of the preeminent people that I hold in high esteem as artists. Later, after I heard the contents of his suicide note, I was surprised at the part where he said he didn’t have the passion anymore. From what I had seen, I would have thought the ideas would always be there for him. I mean, he could have just gone back to being a visual artist and he would have remained brilliant.”

IN TIME, Cobain got out of Aberdeen alive—at least for a while. In 1987, he formed the first version of the band that would eventually become Nirvana, with fellow Aberdonians Krist Novoselic on bass and Aaron Burckhard on drums. A few months later, Cobain and Novoselic moved to Olympia, and eventually Burckhard was left behind. Nirvana played around Olympia, Tacoma, and Seattle, and recorded the band’s first album,
Bleach,
for Sub Pop in 1988. The group plowed through a couple more drummers before settling on Dave Grohl and recording its groundbreaking major label debut,
Nevermind,
for Geffen in 1991. With
Nevermind,
Cobain forced the pop world to accommodate the long-resisted punk aesthetic at both its harshest and smartest, and did so at a time when many pundits had declared that rock & roll was effectively finished as either a mainstream cultural or commercial force. It was a remarkable achievement for a band from the hinterlands of Aberdeen, and the whole migration—from disrepute on Washington’s coast to worldwide fame and pop apotheosis—had been pulled off in an amazingly short period of time. Back at home, many of the kids and fans who had shared Cobain’s perspective were heartened by his band’s accomplishment.

But when Cobain turned up the victim of his own hand in Seattle on April 8, 1994, those same kids’ pride and hope took a hard blow. “After the suicide,” says Brandon Baker, a fifteen-year-old freshman at Aberdeen High, “all these jocks were coming up to us and saying stuff like: ’Your buddy’s dead. What are you going to do
now?’
Or: ’Hey, I’ve got Nirvana tickets for sale; they’re half off.’ ”

Baker is standing with a few of his friends in an alcove across the street from the high school, where some of the misfit students occasionally gather to seek refuge from their more conventional colleagues. The group is discussing what it’s like to be seen as grunge kids in the reality of post-Nirvana Aberdeen. Baker continues: “I realize that Kurt Cobain had a few more problems than we might, but him doing this, it kind of cheated us in a way. We figured if someone like him could make it out of a place like this . . . it was like he might have paved the way for the rest of us. But now, we don’t want people to think that we’re using his path as our guideline. It’s like you’re almost scared to do
any
thing now. People around here view us as freaks. They see us walking together in a mall and they think we’re a bunch of hoodlums, just looking for trouble. They’ll throw us off the premises just for being together. I don’t know—it’s sad how adults will classify you sometimes.”

The talk turns to the subject of the summer’s upcoming Lollapalooza tour. In the last few days, Aberdeen’s
Daily World
’s headlines have been given to coverage of a major local wrangle: the Lollapalooza tour organizers have proposed using nearby Hoquiam as the site for their Washington show, in part as a tribute to all that Cobain and Nirvana did for alternative music and for the region. Many residents in the area, though, are incensed over the idea. They are worried about the undesirable elements and possible drug traffic that might be attracted by such an event, and even though the stopover would bring a big boon to the badly ailing local economy, there is considerable resistance to letting such a show happen in this area.

“You would think,” says Jesse Eby, a seventeen-year-old junior, “that they would let us have this one thing—that the city council would realize we might appreciate or respect them more if they let something like this show come here. It would be such a good thing for the kids around here.”

“Yeah,” says Rebecca Sartwell, a freshman with lovely streaks of magenta throughout her blond hair. “I mean, can’t we just have
one
cool thing to do, just one day out of the year? I mean, besides go to Denny’s and drink coffee?”

Everybody falls silent for a few moments, until Sartwell speaks up again. “I don’t know how to explain this,” she says, “but all I want is
out.
Maybe I’ll move to Olympia or Portland or someplace, but when I get there I don’t intend to say, ’Hey, I’m from
Aberdeen,’
because then everybody’s going to assume I’m an alcoholic, manic-depressive hick. It’s bad enough having to live here. I don’t want to take the reputation of the place with me when I leave.”

Everybody nods in agreement with Rebecca’s words.

NOT FAR FROM the place where Kurt Cobain’s mother lives is a short span known as the North Aberdeen Bridge. It reaches across the narrow Wishkah River, leading into the part of town called North Aberdeen. In the winter of 1985, during a time when he had no place to live, Kurt Cobain used to spend his afternoons at the local library and his nights sleeping on a friend’s sofa, or on the porch deck of his mother’s house. Sometimes, though, he slept under the North Aberdeen Bridge, in a space up the sloping bank of the bridge’s south side, just feet below the overhead pavement. I climbed under that bridge during my last rainy afternoon in Aberdeen, to take a look around. There’s a hollow cleared into the brownish-red soil, close to the concrete buttresses, and it is here that Cobain slept. Indeed, there are more signs of him in this one place than in any other spot in Aberdeen, outside of his mother’s home. The columns and cylinders are covered by his spray-painted graffiti, bearing the names of bands like Black Flag and the Meat Puppets, and slogans like FUCK and STOP VANDALISM.

I sit down in the hollow of the dirt for a few minutes and stare out at the Wishkah River. From here, its water doesn’t appear to flow. Rather, it just seems to stand there, stagnant and green. I hear a clatter behind me and I turn around. A rat? The wind? I sit there and I think what it would be like to hear that sound in the dead of a cold night, with only a small fire at best to illuminate the dark. I try to imagine what it was like to be a boy in this town and turn to this bridge as your haven. Who knows: Maybe the nights Cobain spent here were fun, drunken nights, or at least times of safety, when he was out of the reach of the town that had already harmed him many times. But in the end I have to lapse into my own prejudices: It seems horrible that this was the kindest sanctuary a boy could find on a winter night in his own hometown.

I get up to leave and my eye catches something scrawled on a rail overhead. It is hard to make out, but the writing looks much like the examples of Cobain’s penmanship that I have seen recently in books and news articles. The scrawl reads: WELL, I MUST BE OFF. IT’S TIME FOR THE FOOL TO GET OUT.

Maybe it is indeed Cobain’s writing, or maybe it’s the script of another local kid who came to realize the same thing Cobain realized: To save yourself from a dark fate, you have to remove yourself from dark places. Sometimes, though, you might not remove yourself soon enough, and when that happens, the darkness leaves with you. It visits you not just in your worst moments, but also in your best ones, dimming the light that those occasions have to offer. It visits you and it tells you that
this
is where you are from—that no matter how far you run or how hard you reach for release, the darkness, sooner or later, will claim you.

You can learn a lot of bad things when you are made to sleep under a bridge in your homeland, and some of those things can stay with you until the day you die.

PART 7
a last late-night call

frank sinatra

W
hen the news came, on the late evening of May 14, 1998, that Frank Sinatra had died at age eighty-two of a massive heart attack, it did not come as a shock—though it immediately hit as an immense loss. Sinatra had been known to be in seriously failing health for over two years. What’s more, he was a man who had lived a long life and had lived it hard: He drank too much, smoked too long, and raged and wept far too many times—as if he could afford all these hazards without risking his grasp on his talent. Apparently, he could. He became a huge pop star in the early 1940s—he was, in fact, American music’s first titanic sex sensation—and despite setbacks and his own precarious temperament, he kept both his passion and his prodigy intact for several decades. As the years went along, he became an intense, deeply affecting actor, playing complex, tortured characters. He became a friend to presidents as well as a companion to gangsters. He became an idol to the rich and common man alike. And at times he behaved like a vile-tempered thug—though one with a reputation for matchless generosity.

As a result, for nearly sixty years Frank Sinatra proved to be one of pop music’s most abiding paragons—and also one of its most unsettling icons. At the peak of his craft, Sinatra raised the art of romantic singing to a new height, treating each song as if it were the inevitable expression of a personal experience—as if there were no separating the singer from the emotion or meaning of the songs he sang, and therefore, no separating the listener from the experience of a singular and compelling pop voice. But for all the grace of his talent, there was also a substantial darkness about Sinatra: a desperate hunger for the validation that comes from love and power and a ruinous anger for anything that challenges or thwarts that validation. In many ways, that fierce need for love or vindication proved the guiding force behind the best moments of Sinatra’s career. In the end, his singing amounts to the life testament of a man who learned to cling to one truth above all others: namely, that one could never win love so surely that one could stop imagining the pain of its loss.

Looking at his story, now that it has finished, it makes a certain rueful sense that it was Sinatra’s blazing, difficult heart that would finally take his life.

HE WAS BORN Francis Albert Sinatra in Hoboken, New Jersey, on December 12, 1915, to Marty and Dolly Sinatra, a young Italian immigrant couple. Sinatra’s birth was difficult—nearly fatal for him and his mother. The delivering doctor had to use forceps to wrest the infant from Dolly’s body. Sinatra carried lifelong scars around his face, and Dolly could bear no other children.

Sinatra’s father had been a boxer, a boilermaker, and a consort to liquor bootleggers, and later, he would run a bar with his wife. But Marty Sinatra was also a quiet man, said to be shy and lonely, and he is almost invisible in Sinatra’s legend. Rather, it was Frank’s enterprising mother, Dolly, who dominated the family’s temperament and who indelibly shaped much of her son’s own character and needs. Dolly was a smart and strong woman—sly if it served her purposes; ruthless if she saw fit. In Sinatra’s youth, she worked as a sometime abortionist and Hoboken Democratic ward boss and helped her husband in their saloon: Marty O’Brien’s. She adapted herself well to the company that she moved in: She could be eloquent at political gatherings and rough-mouthed and profane in the company of family, friends, and enemies—and these same traits also distinguished Sinatra throughout his life. In addition, Dolly doted on Frank—she provided him with nice clothes, a car, and cash to entertain his friends. But as John Lahr points out in his superb analytical biography
Sinatra: The Artist and the Man,
Dolly also withheld her love and punished her son when he did not match her expectations. This mix of generous reward and stern penalty formed the way that Sinatra learned how to find love, and how to give it as well, and it became a pattern that he repeated many times in private and public ways.

Frank’s parents wanted him to pursue a higher education. In particular, Dolly wanted her son to gain work as a journalist. (When Sinatra’s godfather, Frank Garrick, wouldn’t support Frank’s attempt to land a sportswriter job at a local newspaper, Dolly never forgave Garrick and refused to speak to him again. She later boasted that she was the person who taught Frank never to forget a slight.) Sinatra, though, had ambitions of his own. He longed to leave the delimiting prospects of Hoboken and to cross over the Hudson River to the dream life that might be found in New York. And he thought he had discovered the means to that goal in his parents’ bar, during the moments in his late childhood when he sang along with the pop songs that played on the music roll of the player piano. Sinatra wanted to be a singer—like his youthful idol, Bing Crosby—and he developed a fervent belief in his voice. At first Dolly resisted, and even disparaged, Frank’s hope. But when her son’s determination outmatched her own, she used her considerable skills to help him. When Sinatra was almost twenty, Dolly persuaded a local trio to take him on as an extra member, and the reformed ensemble called itself the Hoboken Four. In September 1935, the group appeared on Major Bowes’ famed “Amateur Hour” radio show, with Sinatra on lead vocal, and they were an instant success—though it was Sinatra who, in the months that followed, received most of the attention from audiences. It proved an intoxicating experience for the young singer, as well as a powerful catalyst. As John Lahr and other observers (including Sinatra’s close friend Shirley MacLaine) have noted, Sinatra immediately found in an audience what he wanted from his mother: a love that he could coax surely and that he felt he could trust. In some ways, Sinatra’s audience became his most significant love, though like nearly all the other loves that mattered to him, it was a relationship that would bring its share of failure, rancor, and deep hurt.

SINATRA BEGAN HIS professional life at a crucial time in the history of the entertainment arts. Advances in technology—including improvements in recording science, the influence of radio, and the spread of jukeboxes and home phonographs—were changing how music might be heard and preserved. The most important of these changes was a fairly recent one: the prevailing use of microphones by popular singers. It was a development that proved key to Sinatra’s success and art. In earlier years, singers had relied largely on their own force of projection or on a megaphone as a way to be heard over the band’s accompaniment. Those sorts of methods forced vocalists into high volumes, upper ranges, and sometimes unnatural tones. Belters like Sophie Tucker and Al Jolson used those limitations to a spectacular but showy effect. But as crooners like Rudy Vallee and Bing Crosby discovered, a microphone allowed a singer to draw closer to an audience’s ear and emotions. Indeed, a singer could now vocalize in the same intimate tone and manner that one might use while confiding to a friend, or to a lover in bed—and the effect of that new intimacy was electrifying to listeners. This made the mircrophone an instrument inseparable from the singer’s voice, and Sinatra was among the first artists who recognized the clear erotic (and later the artistic potential) of this valuable tool. In 1939, after he had left the Hoboken Four and was touring briefly with Harry James and His Orchestra, Sinatra was already beginning to improve his microphone technique. He moved the instrument close to his mouth in moments of romantic avowal, then pulled back from it when the music’s intensity increased. All the while he held on to the mike stand in a tender but unmistakably sexual manner.

But it was during his tenure with trombonist Tommy Dorsey’s big band that Sinatra made the most important strides in his early style. Dorsey could be a sublime soloist, playing musical passages that stretched for many bars in a smooth and continuous line, seemingly without pause for breath. Dorsey made it look effortless, and Sinatra studied the bandleader closely as he played, trying to figure out how he timed his breathing. Sinatra decided to model his own phrasing and breathing after Dorsey’s. He began taking long swims, holding and modulating his breath underwater as he played song lyrics in his head. After a few months, he redefined his phrasing. He was now able, like Dorsey, to execute long passages without a pause. “That gave the melody a flowing, unbroken quality,” he later said, “and that’s what made me sound different.”

By 1941, Sinatra had become Dorsey’s chief draw, and in that same year he won
Billboard
’s Best Male Vocalist award. He was singing in a manner that had not been heard before, and he was now eager to step outside of his role as a big band vocalist and establish himself as a solo artist. In 1942, Sinatra left Dorsey (“I hope you fall on your ass,” Dorsey told Sinatra). That same year, Benny Goodman and his orchestra were scheduled to play several December dates at New York’s Paramount, and the theater’s manager asked Goodman whether Sinatra could make a local appearance with the band. At first Goodman had no idea who Sinatra was. He ended up agreeing to the request, but he gave Sinatra last billing.

By the time of the opening show on December 30, 1942, a crowd of five thousand was crammed into the Paramount (Goodman and Sinatra performed several shows throughout the day). The audience was made up of mainly teenage girls, known as “bobbysoxers” for the white socks they favored. When Sinatra walked onstage, the theater exploded with the shrieks of young women. “What the hell was that?” Goodman asked, looking at Sinatra. The sound was so deafening that even Sinatra was momentarily stunned. Then he laughed, giddy at the thrill of it, stepped up to the microphone, wrapped his hands around the stand, leaned toward the crowd, and moved into “For Me and My Gal.” The pandemonium became so furious that, according to comedian Jack Benny, present that day, there were fears that the building might collapse. Come the end of the day, according to some reports, there wasn’t a dry seat in the house. It was the first sizable moment of adolescent pop culture fervor that America would see, and it became immediate sensational news around the country. When Sinatra returned to the theater two years later, the event set off a riot and provoked fights among Frank’s fans and detractors.

More than a decade later, Elvis Presley would duplicate—even extend—Sinatra’s feat with his early hits and his highly charged appearances on Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey’s “Stage Show” and the “Ed Sullivan Show,” and in 1964 the Beatles pulled off their own generation-defining breakthrough with their first performances on “Ed Sullivan.” But Sinatra’s astonishing emergence at the Paramount in 1942 was the event that opened up pop culture to new possibilities. At first, Sinatra’s burst of fame (like that of Presley and the Beatles) was greeted as a mass sensation—beguiling to some, alarming to others. It would be some time before the true drama and worth of his art, and its ability to stand for people’s hurts as well as their desires, would become known. Even so, many observers could see that Sinatra’s sudden and immense popularity would change American music. The big band era was effectively finished and a new era of pop vocal heroes was fast on its way. That shift would have a tremendous impact that lingers to this day—and nobody made that transition more possible, or would imbue it with as much artistic potential, as Frank Sinatra.