LIFE Remembering Kurt Cobain: 20 Years Later

INTRODUCTION

A MAN APART

MICHEL LINSSEN/REDFERNS/GETTY

An interviewer once asked Cobain (in 1991) if he felt he could live forever. Sure, he responded. I believe if you die you’re completely happy and your soul somewhere lives on and there’s this positive energy. I’m not in any way afraid of death.

Kurt Cobain might well have hated this book. We hope not. But in seeking to understand and accurately portray him, we acknowledge that he wouldn’t be happy with the attention. We make that point in these pages—that Cobain was a most reluctant rock star. He didn’t just shy from the star-maker machinery behind the popular song; he ran from it, head down, sunglasses on. He almost willfully—well, actually, willfully—sought to thwart his record label by saying no, no, no to publications such as Time and Newsweek and Rolling Stone but then showed up for an exclusive interview in The Advocate, a much smaller magazine targeted at the gay community. The interview was terrific and revealing and spoke to Cobain’s embrace of kids of all stripes—another point we will get to in the pages that follow.

How badly did Cobain (who, with his insecurities and drug addiction, was ill-equipped to deal with fame anyway) hate celebrity? Very badly, it seems. At the apex of Nirvana’s success, he said he wished he could quit that gig and be a sideman in his wife’s band, Hole. When you think about it, that’s a unique admission. Diana Ross always wanted to step forward, not back. It’s unlikely that John and Paul ever longed to be sidemen for Yoko and Linda. When Nirvana’s perfect drummer, Dave Grohl, moved on from the band after Cobain’s death, he moved forward from the drums and became the front man. Kurt Cobain was an altogether different bird.

He detested the macho metal culture and, in trying to find something else, created something entirely new. He didn’t invent grunge any more than Bill Haley invented rock ’n’ roll, but he was grunge. And by the time grunge was in the glory days of its media moment, he was already damaged—and already reluctant.

It makes for a strange, intriguing, passionate story—the kind LIFE has been telling for years. It’s the kind of story we care about, a human story. It’s quite possible Kurt would have hated it. But many celebrities who have hated other media outlets have trusted LIFE to get it right. Perhaps he would have appreciated it. We can only speculate and—again—hope.

Never mind. Here’s our telling of Kurt’s story, with the considerable help of writer Kevin O’Donnell and, as always, the photographs that reveal so much. We think we got it right. We wish Kurt were here to judge.

WHO WAS KURT COBAIN?

How did Kurt Donald Cobain, born February 20, 1967, at Grays Harbor Community Hospital in Aberdeen, Washington, the Gateway to the Olympic Peninsula (which is to say, a town in nowheresville), become a rock god? That’s a question often asked and not yet definitively answered. But it’s a question at the very center of our book.

His father, Donald, was an auto mechanic and his mother, Wendy, a homemaker. As a child, Kurt was a beaming, joyful son, his angelic blue eyes dancing beneath a mop of blond hair, as they ever would be. Kurt Cobain’s boyish optimism was in stark contrast to his environs: Aberdeen was a low-key, blue-collar town whose biggest industries had long been logging and fishing; it had been hit hard economically when the timber industry faltered during the 1970s.

At age three, Kurt was joined by a sister, Kimberly. Theirs was an arty, musical ­family—uncles and aunts had played in various bands, and his paternal grandmother, Iris, who duplicated Norman Rockwell paintings in needlepoint, encouraged