Name:Kurt Donald Cobain (February 20, 1967 – ca. April 5, 1994)
Band:Nirvana
Band Members :Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl
Family Members:Wife Courtney Love and daughter Frances Bean Cobain Kurt Donald Cobain was the lead singer and guitarist of the American rock band, Nirvana. He served not only as the band's frontman, but as its "leader and spiritual center" [1]. With the band's success, Cobain became a major national and international celebrity, an uncomfortable position for someone who claimed to be "ill at ease with fame and ill-equipped to handle the responsibility that accompanies success" [2]. Cobain and Nirvana were highly influential, popularizing what came to be known as "grunge music." The arrival of Cobain's best known song, "Smells Like Teen Spirit", marked the beginning of a dramatic shift of popular music away from the perceived superficiality of 1980s glam-metal and dance-pop that placed visual style over musical substance. The music media eventually awarded "Smells Like Teen Spirit" "anthem-of-a-generation" status [3], and, with it, Cobain ascended as the reluctant "spokesman" for Generation X. Among other well known Cobain songs are "Lithium", "About a Girl", "Polly", "In Bloom", "Come As You Are", "Heart-Shaped Box", "All Apologies", and the controversial "Rape Me". Kurt was born to Don and Wendy Cobain in the Grays Harbor Community Hospital in Aberdeen, Washington, and spent his first six months living in Hoquiam, Washington before the family moved to Aberdeen. By most accounts, his early life was happy, and he lived as a part of the typical American family. His interest in music came early on, possibly a result of his family's general interest in music. Around the age of seven, he began to idolize stuntman Evel Knievel. Hoping to someday become a stuntman himself, a young Cobain could often be seen diving from the rooftop of his house onto a bed of pillows and blankets below. During this time, he was prescribed Ritalin for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD); years later, his wife Courtney Love incorrectly blamed Ritalin for his addiction to heroin. Cobain's life was turned upside down at the age of eight with the divorce of his parents, which he later cited as having a profound impact on his life. His mother noted that his personality changed dramatically, with Cobain becoming more withdrawn. Cobain scribbled a note on his bedroom wall in crayon that read, "Mom hates dad, dad hates mom, its enough to make anyone sad." After a year spent living with his mother following the divorce, Cobain moved to Montesano, Washington to live with his father, but after a few years his rebellious tendencies became too overwhelming, and Cobain found himself being shuffled between friends and family. Kurt Cobain, age 15.In a February 1992 interview with The Advocate, Cobain admitted that he thought he was gay while in high school and stated, "I could be bisexual. If I wouldn't have found Courtney, I probably would have carried on with a bisexual lifestyle." In his journals, he wrote that he was heterosexual, but wished he was gay just "to piss off homophobes" [5]. When Nirvana appeared on Saturday Night Live in January of 1992, Cobain and Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic jokingly "made out" during the cast and crew farewells as the credits rolled. (Cobain and Novoselic bobbed their heads back and forth wildly as if in rapture; Novoselic and Dave Grohl subsequently repeated the gesture.) The segment was cut from the show on further airings, replaced by the closing credits from the rehearsal taping, and never aired again. As a teenager with a chaotic home life growing up in small town Washington, Cobain eventually found escape through the thriving Pacific Northwest punk scene, going to punk rock shows in Seattle. Cobain formed a lifelong friendship with fellow Montesano musicians The Melvins, whose music later heavily influenced Nirvana's sound. Cobain had a small "K" inside a shield tattooed on his forearm, the insignia of Olympia, Washington, label K Records, largely chosen for the coincidental ellipsis of his name. In his youth, Cobain spent much time reading in the local library, discovering such literary figures as S.E. Hinton and William S. Burroughs, whose cut-up technique Cobain occasionally utilised to write lyrics for some of Nirvana's songs. Cobain eventually had the opportunity to record with Burroughs a spoken word with guitar improvisation piece called The Priest They Called Him, whose words were originally one of Burroughs' short stories from The Exterminator. Other literary works which impacted Cobain's philosophy included the SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas, The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac, and Perfume by Patrick Süskind, as well as works by Samuel Beckett, Charles Bukowski, Jon Savage and Camille Paglia.
Two weeks before his graduation, Cobain dropped out of high school after realizing that he did not have enough credits to graduate. His mother gave him an ultimatum: either get a job or leave. After a week or so, Cobain found his clothes and other belongings packed away in boxes. Forced out of his mother's home, Cobain often stayed at friends' houses and snuck into his mother's basement every now and then. Cobain later claimed that when he could not find anywhere else to stay, he lived under a bridge over the Wishkah River (at Young Street), an experience that inspired the Nevermind track "Something In The Way". (In the June 2005 issue of Guitar World Magazine, Novoselic claimed that Cobain never really lived there, saying, "He hung out there, but you couldn't live on those muddy banks, with the tides coming up and down. That was his own revisionism.") NIRVANA
Cobain received his first guitar from his uncle at age 14, choosing it over a bicycle. From there, he tried to form bands with friends, generally noodling on songs by AC/DC and Led Zeppelin. When he moved back in with his mother in high school, he found himself without anyone to jam with, as none of his friends had any musical talent. Later in high school, Cobain met Novoselic, a fellow devotee of punk rock. A few years later, Cobain tried to convince Novoselic to form a band with him by lending him a copy of a home demo recorded by Cobain's earlier band, Fecal Matter. After months of prodding, Novoselic finally agreed to join Cobain, forming the beginnings of Nirvana. MARRIAGE Cobain first encountered Courtney Love at a concert in 1989. More than a year later, after learning from Dave Grohl that she and Cobain shared mutual crushes, Love began pursuing him. After a few weeks of on-again, off-again courtship, the two found themselves together on a regular basis, often bonding through drug use. Around the time of Nirvana's 1992 performance on Saturday Night Live, Love discovered that she was pregnant with Cobain's child. A few days after the conclusion of Nirvana's Australian tour, on Monday, February 24, 1992, Cobain married Love on Waikiki Beach, Hawaii. On August 18, the couple's daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, was born. The unusual middle name was given to her because Cobain thought she looked like a bean on the first sonogram he saw of her. Her namesake is Frances McKee of The Vaselines, of whom Cobain was a big fan. Love was somewhat unpopular with Nirvana fans. Her harshest critics cited Cobain's total devotion to her, combined with what they saw as her domineering personality and inferior musical talent, as evidence that she was merely using him as a vehicle to make herself famous; critics who compared Cobain to John Lennon were also fond of comparing Love to Yoko Ono. Rumors persist to this day that Cobain wrote most of the songs on Hole's breakthrough album Live Through This.
In a 1992 article in Vanity Fair, Love admitted to using heroin while (unknowingly) pregnant, an admission that seriously damaged her public standing. While Cobain and Love's romance had been something of a media attraction before the article was published, they found themselves constantly hounded by tabloid reporters, many wanting to know if Frances was addicted to drugs at birth. The notoriety of the article even resulted in Child Welfare Services launching an investigation into the couple's fitness as parents. The investigation was eventually dismissed, but not without a significant amount of legal wrangling. Love, along with Cobain, claimed that Vanity Fair took her words out of context.
Addiction and death
Throughout most of his life, Cobain battled depression, chronic bronchitis, and intense physical pain due to a chronic stomach condition. The latter wreaked an especially debilitating toll on his emotional welfare, and he spent years trying to find its source. However, none of the doctors he consulted were able to pinpoint the specific cause, guessing that it was either a result of Cobain's childhood scoliosis or related to the stresses of performing. Feeling that he had been let down by medical science, Cobain opted to self-medicate with heroin. Cobain had his first taste of the drug sometime late in 1990. For months, Cobain used the drug casually, but it did not take long for his use to become a full-fledged addiction. Toward the end of 1991, his use began affecting the band's support of Nevermind, with Cobain passing out during photo shoots. On the band's 1992 performance on Saturday Night Live, Cobain's eyes appeared to be sunken into his head, a possible sign that he had shot up earlier in the evening. Cobain's heroin addiction increased further as the years progressed. Cobain made his first attempt at rehab in early 1992, not long after he and Love discovered they were going to become parents. Immediately after leaving rehab, Nirvana embarked on their Australian tour, with Cobain appearing pale and gaunt while suffering through withdrawals. Not long after returning home, Cobain's addiction resurfaced. Prior to a performance at the New Music Seminar in New York City in July of 1993, Cobain suffered a heroin overdose. Rather than calling for an ambulance, Love injected Cobain with an illegal drug to bring him out of his unconscious state. Cobain proceeded to perform with Nirvana on what later was recognized as one of their more memorable performances. The public was given no hint that anything out of the ordinary had taken place. On March 6, 1994, in Rome, Cobain overdosed on a combination of champagne and Rohypnol, which Love later insisted publicly was Cobain's first suicide attempt. Cobain returned home, and soon faced his friends and family at an intervention over his continuing heroin addiction. Given everything that had happened, Cobain agreed to check into rehab. A few days after arriving at rehab in California, Cobain told the nurses that he was going out for a smoke. After finishing it, he jumped over the facility's six-foot wall (although the patients in the rehab could leave freely at any time), caught the next flight back to Seattle, and dropped off the radar. In the ensuing days, he hung out occasionally with longtime friend Dylan Carlson, and once bumped into friend and famed Seattle photographer Charles Peterson. However, most of his friends and family were unaware of his whereabouts, eventually pushing his wife to fill a missing persons report, under the name of Wendy Cobain, without the permission of his mother. She added in the file that Cobain was suicidal and was in possession of a shotgun. The next day, she hired a private investigator, Tom Grant, to find him. The alleged suicide note.On April 8, 1994, Cobain's body was discovered in the spare room above the garage (referred to as "the greenhouse") at his Lake Washington home by Veca Electric employee Gary Smith. Smith arrived at the house that morning to install security lighting and saw the body lying inside. Apart from a minor amount of blood coming out of Cobain's ear, Smith reported seeing no visible signs of trauma, and initially believed that Cobain was asleep. Smith found what he thought might be a suicide note with a pen stuck through it beneath an overturned flowerpot. A shotgun, purchased for Cobain by Dylan Carlson, was found at Cobain's side. An autopsy report later concluded Cobain's death as a result of a "self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head." The report estimates Cobain to have died on April 5, 1994. In the alleged suicide note, ostensibly written to Cobain's imaginary childhood friend "Boddah", Cobain quoted a lyric from Neil Young's song "My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)": "It's better to burn out than to fade away." Cobain's use of the lyric had a profound impact on Young, who recorded portions of his 1994 album Sleeps With Angels in Cobain's memory. Cobain was cremated, with one third of his ashes scattered in a Buddhist temple in Ithaca, New York, another third in the Wishkah River, and the rest left in Love's possession.
Kurt's suicide note. Suicide Dispute Cobain is legally recognized to have committed suicide. However, unanswered questions within the Seattle Police Department's report have led to a perception that Cobain may have been murdered. The first to publicly object to the report of suicide was Seattle public access host Richard Lee. The day that Cobain's body was discovered, Lee climbed a tree outside Cobain's garage with a camcorder and filmed the area around Cobain's body. A week later, Lee aired the first episode of an ongoing documentary covering Cobain's death, insisting that Cobain was murdered. The series continued for several years. In addition, Tom Grant, the private investigator employed by Love after Cobain's disappearance from rehab, adamantly believes that Cobain's death was a homicide. Grant was still under Love's employ when Cobain's body was found. Grant cites the official toxicology report, which claims that Cobain's heroin level was extraordinarily high at the time of his death ("a minimum injection of 225 mgs" [6]), as the key piece of evidence for murder. Grant argues that Cobain could not have injected himself, rolled down his sleeves, put his needle and spoon away, and still have been able to pull the trigger with such a dose. (Grant does not believe that Cobain was killed by the heroin dose, however. He suggests that it was used to incapacitate Cobain before the final shotgun blast was rendered by the perpetrator.) Journalists attempted to investigate the conspiracy for themselves. Their initial work, the 1999 book Who Killed Kurt Cobain? drew a similar conclusion to Broomfield's film: while there wasn't enough evidence to prove a conspiracy, there was more than enough to demand that the case be reopened. A notable element of the book included their discussions with Grant, who had taped nearly every conversation that he had undertaken while he was in Love's employ. On their insistence, Grant played some the tapes for the journalists to prove his claims. Over the next couple of years, Halperin and Wallace collaborated with Grant to write a second book, 2004's Love and Death: The Murder of Kurt Cobain, in which they claim to prove conclusively that Cobain was murdered. Further questions are raised by Cobain's initial "suicide attempt" in Rome which involved an overdose of Rohypnol and champagne. On March 5th, 1994, the day before his overdose, Love discussed her recreational use of Rohypnol in an interview with Select Magazine 's Andrew Harrison: "I know [Rohypnol] is a controlled substance. I got it from my doctor. It’s like Valium. You know, f**k that Prozac stuff. I’m not a depressive, I tried it for like five or six days, and by the sixth day I started seeing tracers," a statement prompted by Andrew Harrison's observation of a box of Rohypnol on Love's nightstand. In a two page article on Kurt's overdose in Melody Maker's March 12th, 1994 edition, music journalist Everett True reported that in an interview with Love she had given just prior to her flying to Rome to meet Cobain, she had said: "...I take those dihydrocodeines I get over here in London, with Rohypnol and champagne." While circumstantial, some advocating the murder theory have concluded from Rohypnol's easy concealability (it's tasteless when dissolved in an alcoholic beverage, making it a common date rape drug) and Love's past abuse of the drug that Cobain's overdose was the result of a deliberate drugging by Love rather than a failed suicide attempt. Advocates of the official verdict of death by self-inflicted gunshot wound cite Cobain's persistent drug addiction, clinical depression, and handwritten suicide note as conclusive proof. It is also notable that Grohl and Novoselic have remained silent in the matter. More recently, while being interviewed for her role on Gus Van Sant's Last Days (a film inspired by Cobain's final days alive), Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon was interviewed by UNCUT magazine regarding the circumstances surrounding Cobain's death. Asked for a possible motive for Cobain's suicide, Gordon answered, "I don't even know that he killed himself. There are people close to him who don't think that he did..." Asked if she thought someone else had killed him, Gordon answered, "I do, yes." This makes Gordon one of few among Cobain's friends to declare, on the record, that they believe that Cobain was murdered (Uncut, August 2005[7]).
AFTER COBAIN'S DEATH Writer Charles R. Cross published a biography of Cobain titled Heavier Than Heaven in 2001. In it, Cross attempted to contact as many of Cobain's friends and family as possible, and received a significant amount of input from Love. The book is probably the most detailed account of Cobain's life on record, and is arguably the "definitive" Cobain biography. The sign put up as a tribute to Kurt Cobain located in Aberdeen, WA.In 2005, a sign was put up in Aberdeen, Washington that read "Welcome to Aberdeen - Come As You Are" as a tribute to Cobain. The sign was paid for and created by the Kurt Cobain Memorial Committee, a non-profit organization created in May 2004 to honor Cobain. The Committee also planned to create a Kurt Cobain Memorial Park and a youth center in Aberdeen.
The mythic nature of Cobain's life even captured the eyes of Hollywood. Gus Van Sant based his 2005 movie Last Days on what might have happened in the final hours of Cobain's life. Years after his passing, Cobain continues to intrigue and inspire fans. A full eight years after his death, Nirvana's final studio recording, "You Know You're Right", topped playlists worldwide, bringing a new generation of Nirvana fans. Nevermind remains a watershed in alternative music, and consistently tops "best album" lists throughout the world. Many feel that Cobain's contributions to music history have permanently changed the landscape of popular music, marking him as one of the most influential songwriters in music history — even if that was never his intention.
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