My Vinyl Collection 104
Nirvana: A two-part look at the epic rock trio led by a blue-eyed, malnourished, self-proclaimed negative creep. Kurt Cobain (1967-1994). Music history from the shelves.
Part One: Aberdeen to Olympia
Let’s forget for a moment the suicide, the drugs, the money, the fame. Let’s ask about the music and in regard to this music let’s first ask the simple question: Where did it come from? This new arrangement of notes and style responsible for such a frenzy of buying. This grungy rock and roll. Music that shot literal holes in fashion. That opened doors to a new wave of musicians, many of whom are still around nearly 30 years later.
In 1965, Aberdeen, Wash. Don Cobain, 21, a gas station jockey with a high school education, met Wendy Fradenburg, 19, nicknamed “Breeze,” a waitress at the downtown’s busiest diner. Don was a jock who dreamed of glory. Wendy a sharp pin on the job, outspoken, funny. They got married. She got pregnant. The baby came along in ’67, a blue-eyed boy they named Kurt because the newlyweds thought it sounded right with Cobain, like a movie star’s name.
He was seven-and-a-half pounds at birth. Healthy and kicking. Feb. 20, 1967, 25 miles from the ocean on a hill above the confluence of three rivers. (Blues and rock and country?)
Aberdeen. A town of 19,000, once the sixth biggest port on the Pacific Coast. Built by work — falling trees, sawing board, shipping product. At the end of the 1900s Aberdeen was wide open, "The Hellhole of the Pacific” "The Port of Missing Men.” Questionable sanitation and a high murder rate. Dominated by saloons, brothels, gambling dens. Controlled by timber barons.
More than a dozen sawmills died in the Depression. After the war, the barons clear cut Olympic Peninsula forests. Sold the product to Japan, where the high quality lumber was crafted and sold back to the USA. For houses and modern furniture. Made in Japan.
Kurt Cobain’s approach was that of the cynic. Gallows humor fit for a nation with a noose around its neck. Cobain shrieked. A beast in agony. For 30 years, working people lost their ability to hold back runaway industry, suffering death by small cuts in small towns like Cobain’s Aberdeen, increasingly hollowed out, drained dry by Big Profit.
Kurt went from a child bucolic to a teenager disillusioned — deeply disillusioned. DEEPLY!!!!
His experiences created his habit — waiting for the trap door to open. Load up on guns, bring your friends/ It’s fun to lose and to pretend/ She's over-bored and self-assured/ Oh no, I know a dirty word. Yikes! Stay away from that guy.
Cobain absorbed one portion of his generation — he was a sponge for abject alienation. They’re so big and we’re so small. Kurt felt things. Slights or criticisms, spite or malice. He reacted at warp speed. And reacted. REACTED!!!!!! Screaming reaction. Filthy reaction.
Way out of bounds. Leaving-the-stadium out of bounds. Cutting out pictures of naked bodies and rubbing them with ditch slime. Twisting words. LISTEN TO ME!!! The adolescent artist on the very edge of a pinwheel, madly spinning. Cobain to holds on to life by his fingernails.
In ’67, Kurt Cobain’s first house sat in the backyard behind another house. Small. Too small. Then Don got a new job. Off the pump, “lead man” at the Chevron, making $6,000 a year. The newlyweds rented a bigger house. Soon, Kurt has a baby sister.
The Aberdeen economy is sliding, the mills keep closing. The loggers leave town. Traffic heading to the ocean resorts slows.
Don gets an office job in a lumber yard making less than he did at the gas station. The couple gets a monthly loan from Wendy’s parents. Money, money, money. Never enough.
To the little kid, however, Mom is loving and Dad is strong. Kurt rides his sled in the snow in winter, runs on the beach in summer. Makes his drawings. Starts school. “A precious, inquisitive pupil with a Snoopy lunchbox.”
Don is into sports, amateur baseball. Wendy squeezing in waitress shifts. Dad coaches Kurt and his team to the Timber Little League championship when Kurt is nine, just months after a much more momentous event. The Divorce.
A divorce sparked by arguments about money, promises of money, the shortage of money. About Don’s “lack of ambition” and Wendy’s “flirtations.” Plans abandoned in bitterness. The diamond dangles out of reach at the far end of the stick. Change from the pockets falls to the floor.
Wendy and Don broke up a week after Kurt turned nine. By then Don was already absent — a referee, a coach, playing on his teams. Extra money on weekends doing inventory at the mill, riding around on his bicycle counting wood.
Wendy played the family charade for Kurt and Kim, his 6-year-old sister. A web of family members scattered around Grays Harbor was only slightly helpful. Nobody had extra.
Kurt heard all the tragic stories as he grew up. He was 11 when grandfather Leland’s brother killed himself with a pistol. Another of Leland’s brothers died during a drinking binge after a doctor’s diagnosis that drinking would be fatal.
Kurt tells the tales in a more and more lurid fashion to his classmates, "suicide genes” complete with air quotes and drawings. “I want to be rich and famous and kill myself like Jimi Hendrix.” He hid in his room, the lights out. Less dangerous.
But, odd as it was, no matter how isolated and oblivious he became, Cobain was not really alone, was he?. Millions of teens were listening to their parents bickering over the paycheck. Watching as their towns grew smaller and shabbier. As the main roads of America blotched with potholes. Litter blowing against the chain link fences.
Kurt was 17 in ’85 when his mother threw him out of his house after catching him having sex with a girl in his room.
He stops going to school. He sleeps in a cardboard box on a friend’s porch, in the heated hallways of apartment buildings, in the hospital waiting room. He’s homeless for four months before moving into his father’s basement. Sometimes working, janitor, carpet cutter, always broke. Always writing. Notebooks fill with lyrics.
That year, Cobain and two members of the Olympia-based Melvins formed Brown Towel. Spelled Brown Cow on the flyer for the show — Cobain’s first live appearance — at the GESCCO Building behind the Safeway in downtown Olympia. May 3, 1986. Kurt jumped around the stage reading, singing, screaming. Black Sabbath abrasive punk.
Next: March 3, 1987. Inside a van with no back windows. Three male musicians, two women friends. Rolls of uncut carpets, floor padding, guitar cases, a drum kit, bottles, assorted shoes. Junk.