biography of kurt cobain

Kurt Cobain

(1967-1994)

Who Was Kurt Cobain?

Kurt Cobain started the grunge band Nirvana in 1988 and made the leap to a major label in 1991, signing with Geffen Records. Cobain also began using heroin around this time. After releasing the highly successful album Nevermind , Nirvana's highly acclaimed album In Utero was released in 1993 and catapulted to the top of the music charts. On April 5, 1994, in the guest house behind his Seattle home, Cobain committed suicide.

Kurt Donald Cobain was born on February 20, 1967, in the small logging town of Aberdeen, Washington. As a child, Cobain was artistic and had an ear for music. Although he had a younger sister Kim (b. 1971), the two were separated when their parents got divorced. At age nine, Cobain went to live with his father who eventually remarried, which put more strain on their relationship.

In the early 1980s, Cobain went to live with his mother and her boyfriend who were back in Aberdeen. It was during his high school days back home that Cobain was able to demonstrate his artistic talents through his love for drawing.

Troubled Youth

When Cobain was introduced to punk rock music, a seed was planted that would forever change his life. He discovered the Melvins, a local punk rock group, and became friends with one of its members, Buzz Osbourne. It was Osbourne who exposed Cobain to more punk bands, but his newfound interest didn't take Cobain away from self-destructive habits. Throughout high school, Cobain would get deeper into the drinking and drug scene. He also was fighting with his troubled mother and didn't get along with his stepfather.

Cobain spent much of 1984 and 1985 living a nomadic life, staying with friends or sleeping in public buildings to avoid his family problems. In July 1985, Cobain was arrested for vandalizing some buildings and was later fined and given a suspended sentence. Months later, Cobain got his first band together, Fecal Matter. Despite recording some tracks, the band never went anywhere.

Eventually, Cobain began collaborating with bassist Krist Novoselic and a local drummer named Aaron Burckhard joined them. The fledgling band's first public performance was in 1987 at a house party.

Around this time, Cobain began his first serious relationship with a young woman named Tracy Marander. Despite financial restraints, the couple lived a relatively happy life in Olympia.

Starting in 1988, Cobain's musical ambitions began moving forward. His band agreed on the name Nirvana and released their first track "Love Buzz" on a small label. Around the same time, Burckhard was replaced by Chad Channing on drums and the band was making headway in Seattle's music scene. In 1989, Nirvana released their first album, Bleach , which failed to make a big impression. What was evident, however, was Cobain's songwriting skills and what would become their hallmark blend of heavy metal and punk.

'Nevermind'

In 1991, Nirvana signed with a major label, Geffen Records, and released their second studio album, Nevermind , which henceforth, gave them their "grunge" label.

Rapid Rise: "Smells Like Teen Spirit"

Nirvana's single "Smells Like Teen Spirit" became their biggest hit, pushing their album to no. 1 on the music charts and establishing Cobain as an exception songwriting talent of his era.

With Nirvana's popularity skyrocketing into the mainstream, Cobain was conflicted on the direction his music was going. As someone who built his artistry on anti-establishment sentiments, Cobain began feeling he was losing control of his future. He began using heroin to ease his stress and some health issues.

Before the release of Nevermind , Cobain had reconnected with Courtney Love, who was fronting the band Hole. The two dove into a whirlwind romance, and in February 1992 Cobain and Love got married and had a daughter, Frances Bean, that August.

But the relationship was built on unsteady ground, as both were heavy drug users. At one point, social services threatened to take their daughter away after Love's Vanity Fair interview came out, in which she admitted to shooting up heroin while carrying Frances. After a difficult and expensive court battle, the couple managed to keep their family intact.

But Cobain and Love also had their fair share of problems with each other. In 1993, the Seattle police had to break up a violent dispute at the couple's house. The two were fighting over Cobain's guns at the residence, which resulted in the police confiscating them, as well as arresting him for assaulting Love.

Struggles with Drugs, 'In Utero' Release

While Cobain dealt with personal struggles, professionally he was at the top of his game. In 1993, Nirvana released In Utero , which soared to no. 1 on the music charts. His deeply personal lyrics reflected his anger towards the recording industry with tracks like "Radio Friendly Unit Shifter" as well as his softer side with "Heart-Shaped Box," which is said to have been about Love.

In the fall of 1993, Cobain and the band performed for MTV's Unplugged in New York City and also toured Europe. While in Europe, Cobain took time out to spend with Love and daughter Frances, but while at his hotel in Rome, Italy, he purposely overdosed on drugs and fell into a coma. Love found him, and he was immediately taken to the hospital.

When he returned to the States, Cobain's psychological state worsened. On March 18, 1994, Love called authorities because Cobain had taken medication and locked himself in a closet with guns. When the police arrived, they determined he was not suicidal, but as a safety precaution, confiscated the medication and firearms.

Shortly after, Love pleaded with Cobain to get clean, which she was trying to do herself. He checked into a rehab clinic in L.A. but left days later.

Suicide and Legacy

On April 5, 1994, in the guest house behind his Seattle home, a 27-year-old Cobain committed suicide. He placed a shotgun into his mouth and fired, killing himself instantly. He left a lengthy suicide note in which he addressed his many fans as well as his wife and young daughter. While his death was officially ruled as a suicide, conspiracy theories have circulated that Love may have had something to do with his death.

Soon after Cobain's death, Nirvana released their Unplugged session, which topped album charts, and two years later, From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah , a collection of songs that also was a commercial win for the band.

However, legal battles concerning Cobain's unreleased music began brewing between Grohl and Novoselic and Love. In 2002 the three finally found some resolution, resulting in the release of Nirvana , and later, With the Lights Out (2004) and Sliver: The Best of the Box (2005).

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Quick facts.

• Birth Year: 1967
• Birth date: February 20, 1967
• Birth State: Washington
• Birth City: Aberdeen
• Birth Country: United States
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: A talented yet troubled grunge performer, Kurt Cobain was the frontman for Nirvana and became a rock legend in the 1990s with albums 'Nevermind' and 'In Utero.'
• Astrological Sign: Pisces
• Death Year: 1994
• Death date: April 5, 1994
• Death State: Washington
• Death City: Seattle
• Death Country: United States

We strive for accuracy and fairness.If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us !

CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Kurt Cobain Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/musicians/kurt-cobain
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: February 18, 2020
• Original Published Date: April 3, 2014
• We're just musically and rhythmically retarded. We play so hard that we can't tune our guitars fast enough. People can relate to that.
• I'm a much happier guy than a lot of people think I am.
• I just hope I don't become so blissful I become boring. I think I'll always be neurotic enough to do something weird.
• You create attention to attract attention.
• I've never been more confused in my life, but at the same time I've never been more satisfied with what we've done.
• Grunge is as potent a term as New Wave. You can't get out of it. It's going to be passé.
• Zits are beauty marks.
• I don't blame the average 17-year-old punk-rock kid for calling me a sellout.
• All drugs are a waste of time. They destroy your memory and your self-respect and everything that goes along with your self-esteem.
• It's like Evian water and battery acid."[On the chemistry between himself and Courtney Love]
• Dreaming of the person you want to be is wasting the person you already are.
• I'd rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not.
• If there was a Rock Star 101 course, I would have liked to take it. It might have helped me.
• I'm not afraid of dying. Total peace after death, becoming someone else is the best hope I've got.
• I still can't get over the frustration, the guilt and empathy I have for everyone.

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Kurt Cobain

• Born February 20 , 1967 · Aberdeen, Washington, USA
• Died April 5 , 1994 · Seattle, Washington, USA (suicide by gunshot)
• Birth name Kurt Donald Cobain
• Height 5′ 9″ (1.75 m)
• Kurt Cobain was born on February 20 1967, in Aberdeen, Washington. Kurt and his family lived in Hoquiam for the first few months of his life then later moved back to Aberdeen, where he had a happy childhood until his parents divorced. The divorce left Kurt's outlook on the world forever scarred. He became withdrawn and anti-social. He was constantly placed with one relative to the next, living with friends, and at times even homeless. Kurt was not the most popular person in high school as he was in public school. In 1985 Kurt left Aberdeen for Olympia where he formed the band Nirvana in 1986. In 1989 Nirvana recorded their debut album Bleach under the independent label Sub-Pop records. Nirvana became very popular in Britain and by 1991 they signed a contract with Geffen. Their next album Nevermind became a 90s masterpiece and made Kurt's Nirvana one of the most successful bands in the world. Kurt became trampled upon with success and found the new lifestyle hard to bear. In February 1992 Kurt married Courtney Love , the woman who was already pregnant with his child, Frances Bean Cobain . Nirvana released their next album Incesticide later that year. The album appealed to many fans due to the liner notes, which expressed Kurt's open-mindedness. In September 1993 Nirvana released their next album, 'In Utero', which topped the charts. On March 4, 1994, Kurt was taken to hospital in a coma. It was officially stated as an accident but many believe it to have been an unsuccessful suicide attempt. Family and friends convinced Kurt to seek rehab. Kurt was said to have fled rehab after only a few days from a missing person's report filed by Courtney Love . On April 8th Kurt's body was found in his Seattle home. In his arms was a shotgun, which had been fired into his head. Near him laid a suicide note written in red ink. It was addressed to his wife Courtney Love and his daughter Frances Bean Cobain . Two days after Kurt's body was discovered people gathered in Seattle, they began setting fires, chanting profanities, and fighting with police officers. They also listened to a tape of Courtney reading sections of the suicide note left by Kurt. The last few words were "I love you, I love you". - IMDb Mini Biography By: Tony Russomanno <[email protected]>
• Spouse Courtney Love (February 24, 1992 - April 5, 1994) (his death, 1 child)
• Children Frances Bean Cobain
• His unclean hair and unshaven appearance
• Raw agonizing voice
• Smashing instruments and stage equipment after shows
• Garbled,Incomprehensible Singing
• Shoulder-length blonde hair
• Said he eventually wanted to experiment with filmmaking. He even wrote a script for a horror movie.
• The last movie he watched before his death was The Piano (1993) .
• During a Nirvana concert, he witnessed a girl being groped in the audience. Without missing a beat, he threw his guitar to the ground (a Martin D-18E electric guitar, one of the rarest electric guitars ever made and worth a significant amount of money), dived into the audience and angrily confronted the man who groped the woman. Upon returning to the stage, Cobain and the other band members openly mocked the man as he was being forcibly led out by security.
• Died at 27 years old, making him a member of the "27 Club"; The 27 Club is a group of prominent musicians who died at the age of 27. Other members include Rolling Stones co-founder Brian Jones , guitarist Jimi Hendrix , singer Janis Joplin , guitarist Alan Wilson , The Doors frontman Jim Morrison and Amy Winehouse .
• John Lennon 's song "In my Life" was played at his funeral.
• Wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person you are.
• I'm not well-read, but when I read, I read well.
• I'm not a death rocker, and I don't wear black.
• I'd rather be hated for who I am than loved for who I am not.
• I think people who glamorize drugs are f**king *ssholes and if there's hell they'll go there.

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Kurt Cobain: What to Read and Watch, 25 Years After the Nirvana Leader’s Death

By Gavin Edwards

• April 5, 2019

Twenty-five years ago, on April 5, 1994, Kurt Cobain died at the age of 27 , a victim of suicide. He left behind the epochal rock music he made as the singer and guitarist for Nirvana, piles of journals and artwork, and a final note that didn’t clear up the contradictions of his short life. Which was probably how he wanted it: The previous year, he had painted on the wall of his rented Seattle home, in large red block letters , “None of You Will Ever Know My Intentions.”

Many Nirvana biographies rehash the basics of Cobain’s story or peddle conspiracy theories that he was murdered, but there are also plenty of ways to go deeper. Here’s what to read, listen to, watch and explore:

‘Journals’ ( Riverhead )

With nearly 300 pages of photo replicas of Cobain’s personal journals and letters (and doodles, sketches and song lists), this 2002 book is funny, painful and shockingly intimate: a guided tour of the singer’s own churning psyche. “Its hard to decipher the difference between a sincere entertainer and an honest swindler,” Cobain wrote. Here’s what The New York Times’s Neil Strauss wrote when the book came out.

‘Come as You Are’ ( Three Rivers )

This deeply reported 1993 biography by Michael Azerrad, first published while Cobain was alive, was the original bible for Nirvana fans. Its strongest passages evoke the life of young Cobain in Aberdeen, Wash., a child of divorce who would sometimes spend the weekend killing time at a local logging company where his father worked: “He would get into his dad’s van and listen to Queen’s ‘News of the World’ over and over again on the eight-track. Sometimes he’d listen so long that he’d drain the battery and they’d have to find someone to jump-start the engine.”

‘Heavier Than Heaven’ ( Hachette )

Charles R. Cross, formerly the editor of the Seattle music paper The Rocket, covered the Nirvana story from early on — and conducted over 400 interviews for this thorough, definitive 2001 biography. Cobain’s widow, the musician Courtney Love, granted Cross extensive interviews and access to Cobain’s archives, including arcana such as a visual assignment he completed during his final stay in rehab: “For ‘surrender,’ he drew a man with a bright light emanating from him. For ‘depressed,’ he showed an umbrella surrounded by ties.” Read The New York Times review .

‘Takeoff: The Oral History of Nirvana’s Crossover Moment’ ( Cuepoint )

When Nirvana’s “Nevermind” hit No. 1 soon after its 1991 release, it shocked the band members and their grunge cohort, who had assumed that at best, the group would be underground heroes. Its multiplatinum success also opened the doors for many Nirvana-bes. This oral history by Nick Soulsby tells that story from the viewpoint of Nirvana’s college-rock peers, such as Gary Floyd of opening act Sister Double Happiness remembering Nirvana’s “road manager telling everyone backstage one night the CD had hit 1 million sales that day. They seemed almost embarrassed.”

‘The Dark Side of Kurt Cobain’ ( The Advocate )

Cobain loudly and frequently declared himself as an ally of gay people (and women, and people of color), so it was fitting that he gave one of his best interviews in this 1993 cover story with The Advocate, telling Kevin Allman, “I’ve always been a really sickly, feminine person anyhow, so I thought I was gay for a while because I didn’t find any of the girls in my high school attractive at all.”

‘Kurt Cobain, The Rolling Stone Interview: Success Doesn’t Suck’ ( Rolling Stone )

In Cobain’s last major interview, he informed David Fricke that he had wanted to call Nirvana’s “In Utero” album “I Hate Myself and I Want to Die,” “but I knew the majority of the people wouldn’t understand.” He insisted that the suicidal sentiment was only a joke: “I’m a much happier guy than a lot of people think I am.”

‘Never More’ ( The Village Voice )

After Cobain’s death, Ann Powers filed a raw dispatch from Seattle, reporting how the tragedy affected his friends and the neighbors who had never met him. “The kids I found who did mourn Cobain, hovering behind police lines at the house where he’d died or building shrines from candles and Raisin Bran boxes at the Sunday night vigil organized by three local radio stations, seemed to think of him more as a lost friend than as a candidate for that dreaded assignment, role model.”

Live Videos

‘Nirvana — The Moon, New Haven 1991’

On Sept. 26, 1991, just two days after the release of “Nevermind,” Nirvana played a great, sweaty show at a tiny club in New Haven — and miraculously, it was captured on this remarkably high-quality amateur video. The set featured just a few songs from the unfamiliar “Nevermind,” leaning heavily on the band’s 1989 debut, “Bleach.” Cobain, the bassist Krist Novoselic, and the drummer Dave Grohl all performed with joy and abandon, looking more at home in a filthy black room with a low ceiling than they ever did in arenas.

‘Live at Reading’

In the summer of 1992, when Nirvana played this storied U.K. festival, the band was divided by arguments over royalties and reports of Cobain’s heroin habit. Responding to the mood, Cobain came onstage in a wheelchair, wearing a hospital gown and a blond wig, and began the set with an out-of-tune cover of Bette Midler’s “The Rose.” At the end of the show, the group systematically destroyed its equipment. In between, almost as an afterthought, it delivered an hour and a half of full-blast rock.

‘Drain You’

When Jimmy McDonough, the author of the 2002 book “Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography,” wanted to show Young a live Nirvana performance after Cobain died, this 1993 clip from an MTV “Live and Loud” concert was the one he chose. “When you see the way he was,” an impressed Young said, “there’s no way he could ever get through the other end of it. Because there was no control to the burn. That’s why it was so intense. He was not holding back at all.”

‘Nirvana — Munich, Germany’

Nirvana’s last concert, on March 1, 1994, at a cavernous airport terminal that had been converted into a club, was an ordeal for a burned-out Cobain: He wanted to end the band, he wanted to divorce Love, he wanted to score drugs at the Munich train station. But the show (rendered here with just the first 10 minutes of video but a full 80 minutes of audio) was one final scream of pain, ending with “Heart-Shaped Box.” “Hey, wait, I got a new complaint,” Cobain sang, never meaning it more.

‘Kurt Cobain — Different Vocals’

This video collects live moments when Cobain dramatically altered his usual performances of familiar songs for various punk-rock reasons such as needing to shout over out-of-tune instruments (on “Come as You Are”) or just wanting to mess with a TV countdown show that was forcing him to mime playing his guitar (on “Smells Like Teen Spirit”).

‘MTV Unplugged in New York’

Playing acoustically for 44 minutes, Nirvana paid tribute to influences ranging from David Bowie to the Meat Puppets, and showed the delicate beauty behind its distorted guitars. And with the final song, a cover of Leadbelly’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night,” Cobain gave one of his greatest vocal performances; it felt powerful enough to bring the curtain down on all of human existence.

Documentary Footage

‘Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck’ ( Amazon )

Cobain’s daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, served as executive producer on this authorized documentary feature directed by Brett Morgen. Mike Hale wrote in his Times review in 2015, “Mr. Morgen was given access to Cobain’s archives — ‘art, music, journals, Super 8 films and audio montages’ — and his exhilarating, exhausting, two-hour-plus film, both an artful mosaic and a hammering barrage, reflects years of rummaging through that trove.”

‘One of Kurt Cobain’s Final Interviews’

In this 26-minute WatchMojo interview from 1993, filmed with the Seattle waterfront as a backdrop, Cobain was bearded and scabby, smoking one cigarette after another. He was also relaxed and thoughtful, laughing at questions about his rock-star status that on a different day would have made him bristle. He explained, “Either I’ve accepted it or I’ve gone beyond insane.”

‘8 Fragments for Kurt Cobain’

The poet Jim Carroll, famous for the autobiographical book “The Basketball Diaries” and the autobiographical song “People Who Died,” wrote and performed this poem after Cobain’s death, trying to make sense of the senseless. It begins, “Genius is not a generous thing/In return it charges more interest than any amount of royalties can cover/And it resents fame/With bitter vengeance.”

‘About a Boy’ ( Penguin )

The death of Cobain haunts Nick Hornby’s second novel, shattering some of its characters and binding some of them together. The 12-year-old Marcus tries to make sense of the news he sees plastered all over the front pages of the evening papers: “He wondered if his mum was O.K., even though he knew there was no connection between his mum and Kurt Cobain because his mum was a real person and Kurt Cobain wasn’t; and then he felt confused, because the newspaper headline had turned Kurt Cobain into a real person somehow.”

‘Skip to the End’ ( Insight )

This evocative 2018 science-fiction graphic novel by the writer Jeremy Holt and the artist Alex Diotto tells the story of a grunge band called Samsara (clearly inspired by Nirvana) and a guitar that functions as a time-travel device. The metaphor works not only because of the urge Nirvana fans have to create an alternate timeline where Cobain survived, but because recorded music is itself a time-travel device, teleporting people both to the moment when it was made and the moment when it first touched a listener’s soul.

‘Last Days’ (Streaming Services)

The filmmaker Gus Van Sant was a kindred spirit to Cobain: an independent artist from the Pacific Northwest who somehow wandered into the cultural mainstream. So it seemed natural in 2005 when he made a movie about (a thinly fictionalized version of) Cobain, played by Michael Pitt. In her Times review , Manohla Dargis called the movie a “mesmerizing dream” and said “Mr. Van Sant’s refusal to root around in Cobain’s consciousness, to try to explain why and how he created, suffered and died, is a radical gesture, both in aesthetic and in moral terms.”

How The New York Times Covered Nirvana

In 1991, Karen Schoemer was supposed to interview Cobain; he didn’t show up, so she wrote about “Nevermind” instead . Novoselic provided a few quotes: “We just want to play,” he said, “and put out what we consider good records.” A few months later, Simon Reynolds dissected some of the album’s songs: “‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ could be this generation’s version of the Sex Pistols’ 1976 single, ‘Anarchy in the U.K.,’ if it weren’t for the bitter irony that pervades its title.”

In 1992, Schoemer mused on Nirvana’s set on “Saturday Night Live,” a performance that she said “showed an astounding lack of musicianship” while later acknowledging that the band had released “quite simply, one of the best alternative rock albums produced by an American band in recent years.”

Also in 1992, The Times was fooled by a former Sub Pop receptionist when a reporter called to talk about grunge culture. The resulting glossary of terms she provided — “harsh realm,” “lamestain” and “swingin’ on the flippity-flop” — did enter the pop-culture lexicon, but not the way The Times had planned . The receptionist, Megan Jasper, is now the label’s chief executive.

A year later, Jon Pareles interviewed Nirvana on the cusp of releasing “In Utero,” as Cobain complained about “Nevermind” sounding too “clean.” “Ugh,” he said. “I’ll never do that again. It already paid off, so why try to duplicate that? And just trying to sell that many records again, there’s no point in it.” Pareles also reviewed Nirvana at the Roseland Ballroom , the band’s first New York show in two years.

When Cobain died, Timothy Egan wrote our obituary and Pareles wrote an appraisal that discussed how “Nirvana was the band that brought punk-rock kicking and screaming into the mass market.”

Neil Strauss later wrote about the songs written about Cobain : “Perhaps the most touching song about Cobain was written by a 10-year-old friend of his, Simon Fair Timony. Titled ‘I Love You Anyway,’ it is performed with the former Nirvana members Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic joining Timony’s band, the Stinky Puffs.”

In 2004, Thurston Moore wrote a first-person piece about his relationship with Cobain and Nirvana’s rise.

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Kurt Cobain

American rock musician (1967–1994) / from wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, dear wikiwand ai, let's keep it short by simply answering these key questions:.

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Kurt Donald Cobain (February 20, 1967 – c. April 5, 1994) was an American musician who was the lead vocalist, guitarist, primary songwriter, and a founding member of the grunge rock band Nirvana . Through his angsty songwriting and anti-establishment persona, his compositions widened the thematic conventions of mainstream rock music. He was heralded as a spokesman of Generation X and is widely recognized as one of the most influential alternative rock musicians.

Cobain formed Nirvana with Krist Novoselic and Aaron Burckhard in 1987, establishing themselves as part of the Seattle music scene that later became known as grunge . Burckhard was replaced by Chad Channing before the band released their debut album Bleach (1989) on Sub Pop , after which Channing was in turn replaced by Dave Grohl . With this finalized line-up, the band signed with DGC and found commercial success with the single " Smells Like Teen Spirit " from their critically acclaimed second album Nevermind (1991). Cobain wrote many other hit Nirvana songs such as " Come as You Are ", " Lithium ", " In Bloom ", " Heart-Shaped Box ", " All Apologies ", " About a Girl ", " Aneurysm ", " You Know You're Right " and " Something in the Way ". [1] [2] Although he was hailed as the voice of his generation following Nirvana's sudden success, he was uncomfortable with this role. [3]

During his final years, Cobain struggled with a heroin addiction and chronic depression . [4] He also struggled with the personal and professional pressures of fame, and was often in the spotlight for his tumultuous marriage to fellow musician Courtney Love , with whom he had a daughter named Frances . [5] In March 1994, he overdosed on a combination of champagne and Rohypnol , subsequently undergoing an intervention and detox program. On April 8, 1994, he was found dead in the greenhouse of his Seattle home at the age of 27 , [6] with police concluding that he had died around three days earlier from a self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head.

Cobain was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame , alongside Nirvana bandmates Novoselic and Grohl, in their first year of eligibility in 2014. Rolling Stone included him on its lists of the 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time , 100 Greatest Guitarists, and 100 Greatest Singers of All Time. [7] He was ranked 7th by MTV in the "22 Greatest Voices in Music", and was placed 20th by Hit Parader on their 2006 list of the "100 Greatest Metal Singers of All Time".

Kurt Donald Cobain Biography

Kurt Donald Cobain (February 20, 1967 – c. April 5, 1994), was an American musician, best known for his roles as lead singer, guitarist, and songwriter for the Seattle-based rock band Nirvana.

Cobain formed Nirvana in 1987 with Krist Novoselic. Within two years, the band became a fixture of the burgeoning Seattle grunge scene. In 1991, the arrival of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” marked the beginning of a dramatic shift of popular rock music away from the dominant genres of the 1980s (glam metal, arena rock, and dance-pop) and toward grunge and alternative rock. The music media eventually awarded the song “anthem-of-a-generation” status,[1] and, with it, Cobain was labeled a “spokesman” for Generation X.

During the last years of his life, Cobain struggled with drug addiction and the media pressures surrounding him and his wife, Courtney Love. On April 8, 1994, Cobain was found dead in his home in Seattle, the victim of what was officially ruled a self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head. In ensuing years, the circumstances of his death became a topic of fascination and debate. Life and career

Early life Kurt Cobain was born to Donald and Wendy Cobain on February 20, 1967 in Aberdeen, Washington and spent his first six months living in the village of Hoquiam, Washington before the family moved to Aberdeen.[2] He began developing an interest in music early in his life. According to his Aunt Mari, “He was singing from the time he was two. He would sing Beatles songs like ‘Hey Jude’. He had a lot of charisma from a very young age.”[3]

Cobain’s life changed at the age of seven when his parents divorced in 1975, an event 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.[4] In a 1993 interview, Cobain said, “I remember feeling ashamed, for some reason. I was ashamed of my parents. I couldn’t face some of my friends at school anymore, because I desperately wanted to have the classic, you know, typical family. Mother, father. I wanted that security, so I resented my parents for quite a few years because of that.”[5] 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 youthful rebellion became too overwhelming and he found himself being shuffled between friends and family.[6]

At school, Cobain took little interest in sports. At his father’s insistence, Cobain joined the junior high wrestling team. While he was good at it, he despised it. Later, his father signed him up for a local baseball league, where Cobain would intentionally strike out to avoid having to play.[7] Instead, Cobain focused on his art courses. He often drew during classes, including objects associated with human anatomy. Cobain was friends with a gay student at his school, sometimes suffering bullying at the hands of homophobic students. That friendship led some to believe that he himself was gay. In one of his personal journals, Cobain wrote, “I am not gay, although I wish I were, just to piss off homophobes.”[8] In a 1993 interview with The Advocate, Cobain claimed that he used to spray paint “God is Gay” on pickup trucks around Aberdeen. Cobain also claimed he was arrested in 1985 for spray-painting “HOMO SEX RULES” on a bank.[9] However, Aberdeen police records show that the phrase for which he was arrested was actually “Ain’t got no how watchamacallit”.[10] As a teenager growing up in small-town Washington, Cobain eventually found escape through the thriving Pacific Northwest punk scene, going to punk rock shows in Seattle. Eventually, Cobain began frequenting the practice space of fellow Montesano musicians the Melvins.

In the middle of tenth grade, Cobain moved back to live with his mother in Aberdeen. 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 a choice: either get a job or leave. After a week or so, Cobain found his clothes and other belongings packed away in boxes.[11] Forced out of his mother’s home, Cobain often stayed at friends’ houses and sneaked into his mother’s basement occasionally.[12] Cobain later claimed that when he could not find anywhere else to stay, he lived under a bridge over the Wishkah River,[12] an experience that inspired the Nevermind track “Something in the Way”. However, Krist 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.”[13]

In late 1986, Cobain moved into the first house he lived in alone and paid his rent by working at a coastal resort twenty miles from Aberdeen.[14] At the same time, Cobain was traveling more frequently to Olympia, Washington to check out rock shows.[15] During his visits to Olympia, Cobain started a relationship with Tracy Marander.

Nirvana For his 14th birthday, Cobain’s uncle gave him the option of a guitar or a bicycle as a gift; Cobain chose the guitar. He started learning a few covers, including AC/DC’s “Back in Black” and The Cars’ “My Best Friend’s Girl”, and soon began working on his own songs.[16]

In high school, Cobain rarely found anyone to jam with. While hanging out at the Melvins practice space, he met Krist Novoselic, a fellow devotee of punk rock. Novoselic’s mother owned a hair salon and Cobain and Novoselic would occasionally practice in the upstairs room. 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 asking, Novoselic finally agreed to join Cobain, forming the beginnings of Nirvana.[17]

During their first few years playing together, Novoselic and Cobain were hosts to a rotating list of drummers. Eventually, the band settled on Chad Channing, with whom Nirvana recorded the album Bleach, released on Sub Pop Records in 1989. Cobain, however, became dissatisfied with Channing’s style, leading the band to seek out a replacement, eventually settling on Dave Grohl. With Grohl, the band found their greatest success via their 1991 major-label debut, Nevermind.

Cobain struggled to reconcile the massive success of Nirvana with his underground roots. He also felt persecuted by the media, comparing himself to Frances Farmer, and harbored resentment for people who claimed to be fans of the band but who completely missed the point of the band’s message. One incident particularly distressing to Cobain involved two men who raped a woman while singing the Nirvana song “Polly”. Cobain condemned the episode in the liner notes of the US release of the album Incesticide: “Last year, a girl was raped by two wastes of sperm and eggs while they sang the lyrics to our song ‘Polly’. I have a hard time carrying on knowing there are plankton like that in our audience. Sorry to be so anally P.C. but that’s the way I feel.”

Marriage Courtney Love first saw Cobain perform in 1989 at a show in Portland, Oregon; the pair talked briefly after the show and Love developed a crush on him.[18] According to journalist Everett True, the pair were formally introduced at an L7/Butthole Surfers concert in Los Angeles in May 1991.[19] In the weeks that followed, after learning from Grohl that she and Cobain shared mutual crushes, Love began pursuing Cobain. After a few weeks of on-again, off-again courtship in the fall of 1991, the two found themselves together on a regular basis, often bonding through drug use.[20]

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 Pacific Rim tour, on Monday, February 24, 1992, Cobain married Love on Waikiki Beach, Hawaii. “In the last couple months I’ve gotten engaged and my attitude has changed drastically,” Cobain said in an interview with Sassy magazine. “I can’t believe how much happier I am. At times I even forget that I’m in a band, I’m so blinded by love. I know that sounds embarrassing, but it’s true. I could give up the band right now. It doesn’t matter, but I’m under contract.”[21] 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 kidney bean on the first sonogram he saw of her. Her namesake is Frances McKee of British band The Vaselines and not Frances Farmer as is sometimes reported.[22]

Love was somewhat unpopular with Nirvana fans; her harshest critics said she was merely using him as a vehicle to make herself famous.[20] Critics who compared Cobain to John Lennon were also fond of comparing Love to Yoko Ono. Rumors persist that Cobain wrote most of the songs on the breakthrough album Live Through This of Love’s band Hole, partially fueled by the 1996 appearance of a rough mix of “Asking for It” with Cobain singing backing vocals. However, there is no specific evidence to support the assertion.

At the same time, one song by Hole was discovered to be a song originally written by Nirvana. The song “Old Age” appeared as a B-side on the 1993 single for Beautiful Son, credited to Hole. Initially, there was no reason to believe it was anything other than a Hole-penned song. However, in 1998, a boombox recording of the song performed by Nirvana (with significantly different lyrics) was surfaced by Seattle newspaper The Stranger. In the article that accompanied the clip, Novoselic confirmed that the recording was made in 1991 and that “Old Age” was a Nirvana song, leading to more speculation about Cobain’s involvement in Hole’s catalog. Nirvana had even attempted to record “Old Age” during the sessions for Nevermind, but it was left incomplete as Cobain had yet to finish the lyrics and the band had run out of studio time. (The incomplete recording appeared on the 2004 compilation With the Lights Out, credited to Cobain.) As for Hole’s version, guitarist Eric Erlandson noted that he believed Cobain wrote the music for the song, but that Love had written the lyrics for their version.[23]

In a 1992 article in Vanity Fair, Love admitted to using heroin while (unknowingly) pregnant. Love claimed that Vanity Fair had misquoted her,[24] but her admission created controversy for the couple. While Cobain and Love’s romance had always been something of a media attraction, the couple found themselves hounded by tabloid reporters after the article was published, many wanting to know if Frances was addicted to drugs at birth. The Los Angeles County Department of Children’s Services took the Cobains to court, claiming that the couple’s drug usage made them unfit parents.[22] Two-week-old Frances Bean Cobain was ordered by the judge to be taken from their custody and placed with Courtney’s sister Jamie for several weeks, after which the couple obtained custody, but had to submit to urine tests and a regular visit from a social worker. After months of legal wrangling, the couple were eventually granted full custody of their daughter.

Drug addiction Throughout most of his life, Cobain battled chronic bronchitis and intense physical pain due to an undiagnosed chronic stomach condition.[25] This last condition was especially debilitating to 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.

His first drug experience was with marijuana in 1980 at age 14. Cobain’s first experience with heroin occurred sometime in 1986, administered to him by a local drug dealer in Tacoma, Washington, who had previously been supplying him with Percodan.[26] Cobain used heroin sporadically for several years, but, by the end of 1990, his use had developed into a full-fledged addiction. Cobain claimed that he was “determined to get a habit” as a way to self-medicate his stomach condition. Related Cobain, “It started with three days in a row of doing heroin and I don’t have a stomach pain. That was such a relief.”[27]

His heroin use eventually began affecting the band’s support of Nevermind, with Cobain passing out during photo shoots. One memorable example came the day of the band’s 1992 performance on Saturday Night Live, where Nirvana had a shoot with photographer Michael Levine. Having shot up beforehand, Cobain nodded off several times during the shoot. Regarding the shoot, Cobain related to biographer Michael Azerrad, “I mean, what are they supposed to do? They’re not going to be able to tell me to stop. So I really didn’t care. Obviously to them it was like practicing witchcraft or something. They didn’t know anything about it so they thought that any second, I was going to die.”[28] Cobain also overdosed on the same night, after performing on Saturday Night Live.

Cobain’s heroin addiction worsened 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 heroin use resurfaced. Prior to a performance at the New Music Seminar in New York City in July 1993, Cobain suffered a heroin overdose. Rather than calling for an ambulance, Love injected Cobain with illegally acquired Narcan to bring him out of his unconscious state. Cobain proceeded to perform with Nirvana, giving the public no indication that anything out of the ordinary had taken place.[29]

Cobain’s final weeks and death Following a tour stop at Terminal Eins in Munich, Germany, on March 1, 1994, Cobain was diagnosed with bronchitis and severe laryngitis. He flew to Rome the next day for medical treatment, and was joined there by his wife on March 3. The next morning, Love awoke to find that Cobain had overdosed on a combination of champagne and Rohypnol (Love had a prescription for Rohypnol filled after arriving in Rome). Cobain was immediately rushed to the hospital, and spent the rest of the day unconscious. After five days in the hospital, Cobain was released and returned to Seattle.[30] Love later stated that the incident was Cobain’s first suicide attempt.[31]

On March 18, Love phoned police to inform them that Cobain was suicidal and had locked himself in a room with a gun. Police arrived and confiscated several guns and a bottle of pills from Cobain, who insisted that he was not suicidal and had locked himself in the room to hide from Love. When questioned by police, Love admitted that Cobain had never mentioned that he was suicidal and that she had not seen him with a gun.[32]

Love arranged an intervention concerning Cobain’s drug use that took place on March 25. The ten people involved included musician friends, record company executives, and one of Cobain’s closest friends, Dylan Carlson. Former Nirvana manager Danny Goldberg described Cobain as being “extremely reluctant” and that he “denied that he was doing anything self-destructive.” However, by the end of the day, Cobain had agreed to undergo a detox program.[33] Cobain arrived at the Exodus Recovery Center in Los Angeles, California, on March 30. The following night, Cobain walked outside to have a cigarette, then climbed over a six-foot-high fence to leave the facility. He took a taxi to Los Angeles Airport and flew back to Seattle. Over the course of April 2 and April 3, Cobain was spotted in various locations around Seattle, but most of his friends and family were unaware of his whereabouts. On April 3, Love contacted a private investigator, Tom Grant, and hired him to find Cobain. The next day, a person claiming to be Cobain’s mother filed a missing person report. The report stated that Cobain “may be suicidal” and had purchased a shotgun.[34]

On April 8, 1994, Cobain was discovered in the spare room above the garage at his Lake Washington home by Veca Electric employee Gary Smith. Smith arrived at the house that morning to install security lighting and saw him 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. Cobain’s death certificate concluded Cobain’s death was a result of a “self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head.” The report estimates Cobain to have died on April 5, 1994.

On April 10, a public vigil was held for Cobain at a park at Seattle Center which drew approximately seven thousand mourners.[35] Prerecorded messages by Krist Novoselic and Courtney Love were played at the memorial. Love read portions of Cobain’s suicide note to the crowd and broke down, crying and chastizing Cobain. Near the end of the vigil Love arrived at the park and distributed some of Cobain’s clothing to those who still remained.[36] Cobain’s body was cremated.

Musical influences Cobain was a devoted champion of early alternative rock acts. His interest in the underground started when Buzz Osborne of the Melvins let him borrow a tape with songs by punk bands such as Black Flag, Flipper, and Millions of Dead Cops. He would often make reference to his favorite bands in interviews, often placing a greater importance on the bands that influenced him than on his own music. Interviews with Cobain were often littered with references to obscure performers like The Vaselines, The Melvins, Daniel Johnston, The Meat Puppets, Young Marble Giants, The Wipers, Flipper, and The Raincoats. Cobain was eventually able to convince record companies to reissue albums by The Raincoats (Geffen) and The Vaselines (Sub Pop). Cobain also noted the influence of the Pixies, and commented that “Smells Like Teen Spirit” bore some similarities to their sound. Cobain told Melody Maker in 1992 that hearing Surfer Rosa for the first time convinced him to abandon his more Black Flag-influenced songwriting in favor of the “Iggy Pop / Aerosmith” type songwriting that appeared on Nevermind.[37]

The Beatles were an early and important musical influence on Cobain. Cobain expressed a particular fondness for John Lennon, whom he called his “idol” in his journals. Cobain once related that he wrote “About a Girl” after spending three hours listening to Meet the Beatles!.[38] He was heavily influenced by punk rock and hardcore punk, and often credited bands such as Black Flag and the Sex Pistols for his artistic style and attitude.

Even with all of Cobain’s indie influences, Nirvana’s early style was influenced by the major rock bands of the ’70s, including Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Kiss, and Neil Young. In its early days, Nirvana made a habit of regularly playing cover songs by those bands, including Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song”, “Dazed and Confused”, “Heartbreaker”, and made a studio recording of Kiss’ “Do You Love Me?”. Cobain also talked about the influence of bands like The Knack, Boston, and The Bay City Rollers.

There were also earlier influences: Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged concert ended with a version of “Where Did You Sleep Last Night”, a song popularized by blues artist Lead Belly, whom Cobain called one of his favorite performers. Critic Greil Marcus suggested that Cobain’s “Polly” was a descendant of “Pretty Polly”, a murder ballad that might have been a century old when Dock Boggs recorded it in 1927.

Cobain also made efforts to include his favorite performers in his musical endeavors. At the 1991 Reading Festival, Eugene Kelly of the Vaselines joined Nirvana onstage for a duet of “Molly’s Lips”, which Cobain would later proclaim to be one of the greatest moments of his life.[39] In 1993, when he decided that he wanted a second guitarist to help him on stage, he recruited Pat Smear of the legendary L.A. punk band The Germs. When rehearsals of three Meat Puppets covers for Nirvana’s 1993 performance for MTV Unplugged went awry, Cobain placed a call to the two lead members of the band, Curt and Cris Kirkwood, who ended up joining the band on stage to perform the songs. Cobain also contributed backing guitar for a spoken word William S. Burroughs recording entitled “the “Priest” they called him”.[40]

Where Sonic Youth had served to help Nirvana gain wider success, Nirvana attempted to help other indie acts attain success. The band submitted the song “Oh, the Guilt” to a split single with Chicago’s The Jesus Lizard, helping Nirvana’s indie credibility while opening The Jesus Lizard to a wider audience.

Legacy 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.

As Cobain has no gravesite, many Nirvana fans visit Viretta Park, near Cobain’s former Lake Washington home, to pay tribute. On the anniversary of his death, fans gather in the park to celebrate his life and memory. In the years following his death, Cobain is now often remembered as one of the most iconic rock musicians in the history of alternative music.

Gus Van Sant based his 2005 movie Last Days on what might have happened in the final hours of Cobain’s life. In January 2007, Courtney Love began to shop the biography Heavier Than Heaven to various movie studios in Hollywood to turn the book into an A-list feature film about Cobain and Nirvana.

Books and films on Cobain Prior to Cobain’s death, writer Michael Azerrad published Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana, a book that chronicled Nirvana’s career from its beginning, as well as the personal histories of the band members. The book explored Cobain’s drug addiction, as well as the countless controversies surrounding the band. After Cobain’s death, Azerrad re-published the book to include a final chapter discussing the last year of Cobain’s life. The book is notable for its involvement of the band members themselves, who gave interviews and personal information to Azerrad specifically for the book. In 2006, Azerrad’s taped conversations with Cobain were transformed into a documentary about Cobain, titled Kurt Cobain About a Son.

In the 1998 documentary Kurt & Courtney, filmmaker Nick Broomfield investigated Tom Grant’s claim that Cobain was actually murdered, and took a film crew to visit a number of people associated with Cobain and Love, including Love’s father, Cobain’s aunt, and one of the couple’s former nannies. Broomfield also spoke to Mentors bandleader Eldon “El Duce” Hoke, who claimed that Love had offered him $50,000 to kill Cobain. Though Hoke claimed that he knew who killed Cobain, he failed to mention a name, and offered no evidence to support his assertion. Broomfield inadvertently captured Hoke’s last interview, as he died days later, reportedly hit by a train while drunk. In the end, however, Broomfield felt he hadn’t uncovered enough evidence to conclude the existence of a conspiracy. In a 1998 interview, Broomfield summed it up by saying, “I think that he committed suicide. I don’t think that there’s a smoking gun. And I think there’s only one way you can explain a lot of things around his death. Not that he was murdered, but that there was just a lack of caring for him. I just think that Courtney had moved on, and he was expendable.”[41]

Journalists Ian Halperin and Max Wallace took a similar path and attempted to investigate the conspiracy for themselves. Their initial work, the 1999 book Who Killed Kurt Cobain? argued that, while there wasn’t enough evidence to prove a conspiracy, there was more than enough to demand that the case be reopened.[42] 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. In particular, Halperin and Wallace insisted that Grant play them the tapes of his conversations with Carroll so that they could confirm his story. Over the next several years, Halperin and Wallace collaborated with Grant to write a second book, 2004’s Love and Death: The Murder of Kurt Cobain.

In 2001, writer Charles R. Cross published a biography of Cobain titled Heavier Than Heaven. For the book, Cross conducted over 400 interviews, and was given access by Courtney Love to Cobain’s journals, lyrics, and diaries.[43] However, neither Dave Grohl nor Cobain’s mother contributed to the book.[44]

In 2002, a sampling of Cobain’s writings was published as Journals. The book is 280 pages with a simple black cover; the pages are arranged somewhat chronologically (although Cobain generally did not date them). The journal pages are reproduced in color, and there is a section added at the back that has explanations and transcripts of some of the less legible pages. The writings begin in the late 1980s, around the time the band started, and end in 1994. A paperback version of the book, released in 2003, included a handful of writings that were not offered in the initial release. In the journals, Cobain talked about the ups and downs of life on the road, made lists of what music he was enjoying, and often scribbled down lyric ideas for future reference. Upon its release, reviewers and fans were conflicted about the collection. Many were elated to be able to learn more about Cobain and read his inner thoughts in his own words, but were disturbed by what was viewed as an invasion of his privacy.[45]

References â–ª Azerrad, Michael. Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana. Doubleday, 1994. ISBN 0-385-47199-8. â–ª Cross, Charles. Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain. Hyperion, 2001. ISBN 0-7868-8402-9. â–ª Summers, Kim. “Kurt Cobain”. All Music Guide. Accessed on May 9, 2005. â–ª Kitts, Jeff, et al. Guitar World Presents Nirvana and the Grunge Revolution. Hal Leonard, 1998. ISBN 0-79-35900-6X.

Notes 1. ^ Garofalo, p. 447 2. ^ Azerrad, p. 13 3. ^ Gaar, Gillian. “Verse Chorus Verse: The Recording History of Nirvana.” Goldmine Magazine. February 14, 1997. 4. ^ Azerrad, p. 17 5. ^ Savage, Jon. “Kurt Cobain: The Lost Interview”. Guitar World. 1997. 6. ^ Azerrad, p. 22 7. ^ Azerrad, pp. 20-25 8. ^ Cobain, Kurt (2002). Journals. Riverhead Hardcover. ISBN 978-1573222327. 9. ^ Allman, Kevin. “The Dark Side of Kurt Cobain”. The Advocate. February 1993. 10. ^ Cross, p. 68 11. ^ Azerrad, p. 35 12. ^ a b Azerrad, p. 37 13. ^ Cross, Charles R. “Requiem for a Dream.” Guitar World. October 2001. 14. ^ Azerrad, p. 43 15. ^ Azerrad, p. 46 16. ^ Azerrad, p. 22 17. ^ Azerrad, p. 45 18. ^ Azerrad, p. 169 19. ^ True, Everett. “Wednesday 1 March”. Plan B Magazine Blogs. March 1, 2006. 20. ^ a b Azerrad, p. 172. Courtney Love: “We bonded over pharmaceuticals.” 21. ^ Kelly, Christina. “Kurt and Courtney Sitting in a Tree”. Sassy Magazine. April 1992. 22. ^ a b Azerrad, p. 270 23. ^ LIVE NIRVANA SESSIONS HISTORY: Spring 1991-Fall 1992. LiveNirvana.com. 24. ^ Azerrad, p. 266 25. ^ Azerrad, p. 66 26. ^ Azerrad, p. 41 27. ^ Azerrad, p. 236. 28. ^ Azerrad, p. 241 29. ^ Cross, p. 296-297 30. ^ Halperin, Ian & Wallace, Max (1998). Who Killed Kurt Cobain?. Birch Lane Press. ISBN 1-55972-446-3. 31. ^ David Fricke, “Courtney Love: Life After Death”, Rolling Stone, December 15, 1994. 32. ^ Seattle Police Department (1994). Incident Report – March 18. Retrieved on March 13, 2006. 33. ^ The Seattle Times (1994). Questions Linger After Cobain Suicide. Retrieved on March 13, 2006. 34. ^ Seattle Police Department (1994). Missing Person Report. Retrieved on March 13, 2006. 35. ^ Azerrad, p. 346 36. ^ Azerrad, p. 350 37. ^ Cobain, Kurt. “Kurt Cobain of Nirvana Talks About the Records That Changed His Life”. Melody Maker. August 29, 1992. 38. ^ Cross, p. 121. 39. ^ Cross, p. 195 40. ^ Cross, p. 301 41. ^ Miller, Prairie. “Kurt and Courtney: Interview with Nick Broomfield”. Minireviews.com. 1998. 42. ^ ;Halperin & Wallace, p. 202 43. ^ Heavier than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain. HyperionBooks.com. 44. ^ vanHorn, Terri. “Cobain Book Shows Singer’s Life ‘Heavier’ Than Most Imagined”. MTVNews.com. September 10, 2001. 45. ^ Hartwig, David. “Nirvana releases a hit and miss.” Notre Dame Observer. November 19, 2002.

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93 responses

He will live in our hearts 4-ever

bitch to long

Kurt was the best and still is long live Nirvana.

greetings. kurt cobain long live you.

R.I.P. Kurt Cobain 1967 – forever

Come as you are, we will always love you.

“A human is only relly dead if nobody remembers him” Kurt Cobain shall live forever!

To figure out who killed him or if he killed him self ,they should have traced the finger prints on the gun!!!!I still believe CL did itShes a bitch either or.But anyway,……Kurt….:) Oh Kurt:) Do you Know how much i love you?I do.I love you more than anything in the world!!!I miss and love you and will always.<3 Lets hope we'll all soon know the truth.And if ibecome famous,I wobt be embarressed to say that i still have a crush on you…More like im in love with you.And i know you want me to stop talking about you.But i cant and will never get over you:(And i know your dead,you want us to get over it.Just like your tombstone said ,"Stop Talking About Me You Worthless Piss Fuckheads,Im Dead,Get over it"-Kurt Cobain.And i will try babe:) I love you:) i woul do any thing to make you be alive.I would kiss you if i could:)bye .i love you soooo much

mr cobain is an inparation to millions! anyonw who cant see that should go die in a whole…………..with crocodiles!

i learned so much about kurt…..i didnt know what i do now im doing a chosen speach on him in oral comunication and this site has helped me alot i LOVE nirvanas music….rip kurt

and i agree long live kurt!!!!

and i find all of your spelling very hard to master bate too

does anyone know who wrote this because I’m writing a paper and I need an author

FIrst of all, there is no author because whoever wrote it knows it is full of lies so they are either too embarrassed to admit it , or they are afraid of being sued for plagarism. Second, There was absolutely NOT a mutual romantic feeling between Kurt and HER!! Kurt was quoted as saying he couldn’t stand her at first, she was just an annoying, loud mouthed, groupie that showed up a lot. Yeah, he did eventually start to like her, but that was only for the drugs she was supplying him with. She made sure he had plenty, actually too much, she needed him drugged up night and day, to the point where he could hardly even think for himself. It all fit in her plan , she controlled every aspect of his life. She made sure he had no more friends of his own, only her friends were allowed to hang around, she told everyone her friends wre Kurts friends, when in reality, they were actually paid to keep a very close eye on Kurt at all times. She forged all kinds of documents with his name, she got pregnant on purpose to trap him so that he had to marry her. I could go on, but I’ve explained all of this so many times, just don’t believe ANYTHING C.L.or her endless list of sidekicks, such as : Everett True; Charles Cross; Christopher Sanford;, etc…..

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Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain Paperback – April 2, 2019

Purchase options and add-ons.

• Print length 448 pages
• Language English
• Publication date April 2, 2019
• Dimensions 5.25 x 1.13 x 8 inches
• ISBN-10 0316492442
• ISBN-13 978-0316492447
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Hachette Books; Updated,Expanded edition (April 2, 2019)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 448 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0316492442
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0316492447
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 13.4 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.25 x 1.13 x 8 inches
• #32 in Rock Music (Books)
• #35 in Rock Band Biographies

About the author

Charles r. cross.

Charles R. Cross graduated from the University of Washington in Seattle with a degree in creative writing. At the UW, he served as editor of the Daily in 1979, and caused a major ruckus when he left the front page of the newspaper blank. The only type was a small line that read “The White Issue,” in deference to the Beatles’ White Album.

After college, Cross served as editor of The Rocket, the Northwest’s music and entertainment magazine, from 1986 through 2000. The Rocket was hailed as “the best regional music magazine in the nation” by the L.A. Reader, and it was the first publication ever to run a story on Nirvana. Cross wrote stories on such seminal Northwest bands as The Wailers, Jimi Hendrix, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, and hundreds, if not thousands, of lesser-known bands. In addition to The Rocket, Cross’s writing has appeared in hundreds of magazines, including Rolling Stone, Esquire, Playboy, Spin, Guitar World, Q, Uncut, and Creem. He has also written for many newspapers and alternative weeklies, including the London Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Seattle Times, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. He has lectured and read at universities and colleges around the world, and has frequently been interviewed for film, radio, and television documentaries, including VH1’s "Behind the Music."

Cross is the author of seven books, including 2005’s Room Full of Mirrors: A Biography of Jimi Hendrix (published by Hyperion in the U.S., and Hodder in the U.K.). His 2001 release, Heavier Than Heaven: The Biography of Kurt Cobain (Hyperion/Hodder), was a New York Times bestseller and was called “one of the most moving and revealing books ever written about a rock star” by the Los Angeles Times. In 2002, Heavier Than Heaven won the ASCAP Timothy White Award for outstanding biography. Cross’s other books include the national bestseller Cobain Unseen (Little Brown), Backstreets: Springsteen, the Man and His Music (Harmony, 1989); Led Zeppelin: Heaven and Hell (Harmony, 1992); and Nevermind: The Classic Album (Schirmer, 1998).

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Your complete Kurt Cobain reading guide: Journals, biographies, and more

David Canfield is a Staff Editor. He oversees the magazine's books section, and writes film features and awards analysis.

Reading to remember

On the 25th anniversary of Kurt Cobain 's death, HarperCollins ' Ecco published Serving the Servant , a fascinating biography of the Nirvana frontman by none other than Danny Goldberg, the band's iconic manager. ( Available for purchase. ) The book works to reframe Cobain's legacy by blending Goldberg's memories with information and files that have previously not been public. As Cobain is remembered, it's vital reading—though hardly the only book out there worth your time. Here, EW has rounded up the essential Cobain reading list.

Journals by Kurt Cobain

Arranged in close chronological order and kept in their rawest form, Journals is a necessary read for any Cobain fan: a collection of his writings, from scrapped notes and letter drafts to wild sketches and shopping lists, which offer unparalleled access into his interior life. The No. 1 New York Times best-seller was originally published in 2002. "The publication of this unintentional autobiography of the famously talented and infamously troubled artist is a vast leap in the mythologizing and marketing of Kurt Cobain," EW wrote at the time of release. "And the journey from Cobain's hands to a store near you involves healthy measures of the serendipitous and the surreal."

Heavier Than Heaven by Charles R. Cross

Charles R. Cross' definitive biography of Cobain traces his life story via more than 400 interviews and intimate access to the Nirvana frontman's private journals and lyrics. Despite its breadth and close sourcing, Heavier Than Heaven drew criticism for Cross' subjective account of Cobain's final hours.

Love & Death: The Murder of Kurt Cobain by Max Wallace and Ian Halperin

This 2004 best-selling book, co-written by Ian Halperin and Max Wallace, arrived as a controversial work of investigative journalism. Drawing on dozens of hours of conversation audiotapes obtained by the authors, Love & Death makes the argument that Cobain was murdered, with his then-wife Courtney Love a potential conspirator. The book is a product of a rigorous decade-long process for Halperin and Wallace.

Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck by Brett Morgen

A companion to the HBO documentary of the same name, Montage of Heck includes extensive interviews, gorgeous animation stills, and previously-unseen photography as filmmaker Brett Morgen put on screen. It doesn't shed a ton of new light on Cobain, but it's perfect reading for those who've yet to check out the heartbreaking, illuminating documentary.

Godspeed by Barnaby Legg & Jim McCarthy & Flameboy

This explicit, starkly visual homage to Cobain combines biographical details with interpretations of the artist's internal struggles. Barnaby Legg and Jim McCarthy constructed their story accordingly, while the vivid, nightmarishly provocative art came courtesy of Flameboy.

Kurt Cobain: The Last Session by Jesse Frohman & Glenn O'Brien & Jon Savage

Get inside of Cobain's final photoshoot with Nirvana, which took place in August 1993. In The Last Session , 90 stunning photographs present a dazzling final visual memory of the man, capturing him in a plethora of extreme, intense emotional states.

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'He was ours' - Seattle remembers Kurt Cobain on 30th anniversary of his death

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Reporting by Matt McKnight in Seattle; Editing by Steve Gorman and William Mallard

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Matt McKnight is a staff visual journalist who is based in Seattle and covers the Pacific Northwest, as well as stories across the greater American West. Beyond daily and breaking news coverage, his work focuses on the environment and political issues in the United States. He has been a journalist covering stories in the American West since 2010, and previously was on staff at Crosscut a non-profit newsroom associated with Seattle's PBS station. McKnight is a longtime member of the National Press Photographer's Association, and served two terms with the Western Washington chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, when he helped steward a Passion Projects grant for independent visual journalists to complete projects that might not have otherwise been funded by news organizations.

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The angst, the sensitivity… and the songs: how gen Z got hooked on Nirvana

For a new generation of fans and musicians, the 90s grunge band – and in particular their frontman Kurt Cobain, who died 30 years ago next month – have provided not only inspiration but a blueprint for a more inclusive style of rock stardom

F ive years ago, when the alternative artist Ekkstacy was 16, he stole two T-shirts from a record shop in a mall by his childhood house in Vancouver. They were both merch for Seattle bands: one was a Nirvana shirt, the other was an Alice in Chains shirt. “I was like, I’m not wearing this unless I know what this is,” he remembers. After listening to the artists, one of the shirts got a lot of use; the other was an Alice in Chains shirt.

Next month it will have been 30 years since frontman Kurt Cobain’s death in April 1994. Over these decades, there has been a natural and constant flow of artists name-checking Nirvana in interviews – Lorde and Lil Nas X count themselves as fans – or creating work that sounds similar to theirs, perhaps without even realising it. In the words of alternative singer-songwriter and performance artist Poppy, 29: “You can’t throw a dart and not hit a band who hasn’t been influenced by them.” But how did Nirvana become one of the most influential bands for a generation born after Cobain’s death?

Last year, 27-year-old rapper Kevin Abstract, previously a member of hip-hop boyband Brockhampton, released a Nirvana-inspired album called Blanket . In a big pop culture moment, Boygenius, the supergroup composed of singer-songwriters Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker and arguably the biggest band of their generation, appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone recreating Nirvana’s 1994 cover shoot of them in suits, captured months before Cobain’s death.

Both the Rolling Stone team and band had the idea independently of each other. “Nirvana were responsible for injecting not just rock but popular music with new life at a time when a lot of the Top 40 seemed stale,” says Christian Hoard, the magazine’s music editor. “Boygenius are the vanguard of a newer era of bands keeping rock alive.” When Hoard grew up in the 90s, he listened to both Nirvana and classic rock. “Now Nirvana counts as classic rock, and kids are still listening. But it’s classic for a reason – those songs are timeless. They still sound fresh. And they get at something inside of us that’s ineffable.”

In the 2000s, kids learned about Nirvana through rock magazines and CD compilations. Before singer-songwriter Samia , 27, emerged as one of indie rock’s most poignant songwriters, she was a 10-year-old obsessed with Nirvana. She credits an early boyfriend who recommended them to her. “I had posters of a musician who had died by suicide plastered on my bedroom walls and was listening to Bleach every day. My dad was probably very concerned,” she laughs. In the 2010s, social media platform Tumblr birthed the first online nostalgia phase: gen Z rock journalist, DJ and presenter Yasmine Summan remembers the “pastel grunge” era of reposting images of rock music lyrics – girls in grunge-inspired outfits, cityscapes and cute iconography overlaid with a pink or pastel filter. It was mostly about romanticising grunge-era fashion, but still directed plenty of women and LGBTQ+ fans towards 90s alternative bands including Nirvana. Alexia Roditis, 24, frontperson of California punk rock band Destroy Boys, says they became a Nirvana fan after seeing a picture of Kurt Cobain in a dress on Tumblr: “I know that’s maybe the most gen Z answer I could give and it’s the truth!”

Today, says Summan, young people find Nirvana through the web of links between artists, streaming services’ rock playlists and fan accounts sharing fashion, lifestyle and culture from the 90s, along with fancams and video edits of Kurt Cobain . “With a lot of gen Z who missed the boat, myself included,” she says, “you can see in the way they talk and act, it’s about trying to relive that 90s era, trying to be a part of something they weren’t a part of. The Fomo is the way they express their love for them.”

I n the 90s, Nirvana were effortlessly successful in a way that artists would struggle to be now in a world of social media marketing, streaming numbers and the barriers to entry for those who aren’t wealthy and well-connected. Something that retrospectively makes their career so alluring is that they were never supposed to be there. Nick Ruskell, longtime Kerrang! staffer and author of last year’s celebration of 40 years of the magazine, Kerrang! Living Loud , recalls that Nirvana’s breakthrough album, Nevermind, knocked Michael Jackson off the top of the Billboard chart when he was at the peak of his powers. “They were very organically transported from the underground to the room with Michael Jackson in, with their personality, clothes, awkwardness and piss-taking intact,” Ruskell says.

They wore ballgowns on MTV’s Headbanger’s Ball, performed their crude, raw track Territorial Pissings on Jonathan Ross’s chatshow instead of their hit Lithium and worked with Steve Albini to make In Utero , a rough, weird follow-up to their mainstream album. Those anti-celebrity moves are still perceived to be authentic and thrilling, as they were then. “They were the most visible of a new generation of bands who weren’t so enamoured by the idea of being in a band as a route to owning a gold helicopter, as rock stars [such as Mötley Crüe] had been in the past.” As Ruskell says: “This did just make them very cool.”

Just as the Beatles defined the construct of a rock band, Nirvana redefined what a band was – both in the public consciousness and to other musicians: unpretentious, tough and sensitive, embraced by the system while threatening it. “Nirvana were so big and their impact was so pervasive they shaped the idea of what rock’n’roll could be, how a record should sound, how musicians should act,” says Ruskell. Scenes have come and gone, but that concept of a band hasn’t been updated or evolved into anything new. (It’s notable that possibly the biggest name in rock since Cobain has been his bandmate Dave Grohl, who went on to form Foo Fighters.)

What has changed about the makeup of bands is diversification: more women and out queer and trans people play in bands than ever before. Nirvana – with their progressive politics and push for equality and respect – had a significant role in that. “The level of angst was unprecedented,” says Samia of their music. “And I think for a lot of teenage girls especially that strikes a chord.” When she looked beyond the music into Cobain’s published journal entries and interviews, she found that him speaking about feminism and issues of social justice drew her in deeper. “I found Kathleen Hanna and the whole riot grrrl movement through Kurt. That stuck with me.”

Cobain’s softness and empathy is something that spoke to the 26-year-old English singer-songwriter L Devine . “I remember being surprised to learn how much of a sensitive human he was and I think he was truly punk in that sense,” Devine recalls. “To be situated in what was predominantly a hyper-masculine corner of music and be so outspoken about sexism, racism and homophobia, bringing those messages into the mainstream challenged what it meant to be a rock star in that era – his ideologies have transcended generations.” The current young generation find his freedom of expression authentic. Alexia Roditis says Cobain’s values are infused in everything from performances to the content of the music: “I think people still need that, maybe even more so today than before.” That expression, they remark, is angry, melancholic, numb, depressed, hopeful.

For Poppy, Nirvana’s emotional impact is unlike anything she’s heard in a long time. “There’s a fearlessness that’s missing in a lot of current music. They represent no fear: scream if you want, cry if you want, break things,” she says. “Apparently they created an environment at their live shows that was very accepting of anyone: gay, straight, trans, any colour, and they had a very no bullshit ethos. Of course I wasn’t around for that – I just missed out on them, which is a wild thing to think about.” This sentiment is repeated by others too – a feeling that Nirvana are so big in their lives, so modern a cultural reference point that it’s odd their existences never crossed over. Their experiences with Nirvana are too big to have been posthumous.

Samia is not ashamed of saying she’s a descendant of such a major and obvious teacher as Kurt Cobain. “You might only be able to hear it sonically a little bit in my earlier songs, but what has lasted from him in my music is more in his lyrics – I spent so much time reading his journals,” she says. Now five albums into her career, Poppy feels similarly; her musical project and previous life as a viral multimedia artist have involved consciously adopting certain subcultural scenes such as heavy metal or experimental art pop. Playing with ideas of authenticity, artifice and replication is part of her methodology, which has led to comparisons to Andy Warhol. Have Nirvana found a way into her music? Of course, she says, but you won’t be able to pin it down. “If you’re gonna make a smoothie, come up with the most interesting ingredients but make them untraceable.”

N irvana are a band, but they’re Kurt Cobain’s band – forever entangled with the size of his personality and the tragedy of his death. The myth of being part of the 27 Club – a group of artists including Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix who died by suicide or a high-risk lifestyle at that age – plays some unfortunate part in their appeal. The fact he’s the sandy-haired, blue-eyed poster boy of grunge doesn’t hurt. Cobain was a Pisces, which the astrologically inclined gen Z will know is the sign of compassion and spiritual sacrifice for others, typically associated with Jesus; in his own music and suicide note, he made that very comparison, calling himself “the sad little, sensitive, unappreciative Pisces, Jesus man”. Celebrities carry symbolic meaning of their own, and Cobain, with his open struggles with his mental and emotional health, is totemic of the difficulties faced by the modern disaffected masculine identity.

I was two years old when Cobain died, and remember having a large black and white poster of him playing guitar on my wall that looked like a photo you’d see on an order of service booklet. To young people who experience him through images, he is something like a Marilyn Monroe – almost a mythological being, or as Samia puts it, “it’s like worshipping an idol, thinking about someone like him”.

That was partly intentional: despite his anti-celebrity feelings, Cobain was conscious of the tools needed to make meaning in his art and legacy as a serious artist, and actively desired that his band become extremely successful. In the 2023 update of his Nirvana biography, The Amplified Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana , Michael Azerrad wrote: “Kurt, being a student of rock history, knew that the story of a rock band is essentially a legend – in the sense that there’s some wiggle room in the truth as long as it serves the overall myth.” He goes on to explain that in Cobain’s imagined grand opus, he fights antagonists and there was always another one to replace the last to blame everything on and rage against: his home town, bullies, his parents, homophobes, misogynists, racists, his own body, his record label, rock journalists. His greatest antagonist of all was himself: as he stated in the title of a 1993 song, he hated himself and wanted to die.

It’s easy to fall in love with a historical figure when you have a full and timelessly dramatic story. Nirvana never had the chance to make average albums or fall off into obscurity. Cobain never hit an awkward middle age. We only have the greatest hits and the idiosyncratic moments. For a generation hooked on nostalgia for seemingly every recent-enough decade they barely lived through – the 90s, the 00s, even the 2010s – Cobain is an emotional entry point into his decade. “If you didn’t experience 90s culture, it’s all an imaginary world,” says Samia. “We get to see that world through his lens, and I think it’s a particularly special lens, so I feel grateful for that. He’s a wellspring of nostalgia.”

If you’re picking up a guitar or drumsticks today and considering how you might start a band, you would probably look, as Ekkstacy did, to Nirvana as a template for how to do that successfully. The Canadian artist made his first collection of music alone with a producer. Next he wants to write and record with a group of musicians and is taking inspiration from how Nirvana made their debut album, Bleach . Why Nirvana, I ask, why not any other band of that era such as Pearl Jam or Soundgarden? Ekkstacy shrugs, trying to list the reasons – he loves the drums, melody, lyrics – and then just laughs and says, “What are you gonna say, they’re just better than everyone else.”

Hannah Ewens is the author of Fangirls: Scenes from Modern Music Culture (Quadrille Publishing, 2019)

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Kurt Cobain remembered on 30th anniversary of death by daughter Frances Bean

On the 30th anniversary of Kurt Cobain 's death, his daughter Frances Bean Cobain has paid a moving tribute to the late rock star.

Cobain, who died April 5, 1994, was remembered by his only child with Courtney Love in an Instagram post that discussed grief, loss and her ache to have known the Nirvana frontman, who died when she was just 1 year old.

"I wish I could've known my Dad," she said. "I wish I knew the cadence of his voice, how he liked his coffee or the way it felt to be tucked in after a bedtime story. I always wondered if he would've caught tadpoles with me during the muggy Washington summers, or if he smelled of Camel Lights & strawberry nesquik (his favorites, I've been told)."

In a carousel, Frances Bean Cobain included an image of her father's hands, his childhood photos and two images of her as a child, "the last time we were together," she said in the caption.

She wrote that her grandmother, Wendy Cobain, would hold her hands and remark how much they were like her son's.

The 31-year-old continued: "In the last 30 years my ideas around loss have been in a continuous state of metamorphosing. The biggest lesson learned through grieving for almost as long as I’ve been conscious, is that it serves a purpose. The duality of life & death, pain & joy, yin & yang, need to exist along side each other or none of this would have any meaning."

The artist and model said the "impermanent nature" of being human leads us to lead more "authentic lives."

"As It turns out, there is no greater motivation for leaning into loving awareness than knowing everything ends," she said. "(My father) gifted me a lesson in death that can only come through the LIVED experience of losing someone. It's the gift of knowing for certain, when we love ourselves and those around us with compassion, with openness, with grace, the more meaningful our time here inherently becomes."

Frances Bean Cobain has been open about her grief, guilt and struggle with being the child of celebrities. She told RuPaul in a 2019 interview that she felt guilty due to her inheritance from Kurt Cobain's estate.

"It's almost like this big, giant loan that I’ll never get rid of," she said. "I have an almost foreign relationship to it or guilt because it feels like money from somebody that I've never met, let alone haven't earned myself."

Courtney Love remembers Kurt Cobain on what would have been their 28th wedding anniversary

She later added that being in the spotlight as the child of a celebrity was made easier by her childhood friend  Billie Lourd , daughter of late actress  Carrie Fisher , and her connection with  Sean Lennon , the son of Yoko Ono and John Lennon.

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Frances Bean Cobain: ‘I Wish I Could’ve Known My Dad’

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Frances Bean has honored her dad, Kurt Cobain , on the 30th anniversary of his death. The Nirvana frontman died on April 5, 1994.

“30 years ago my dad’s life ended,” she wrote on Instagram. “The 2nd and 3rd photo capture the last time we were together while he was still alive. His mom Wendy would often press my hands to her cheeks and say, with a lulling sadness, ‘you have his hands.’ She would breathe them in as if it were her only chance to hold him just a little bit closer, frozen in time. I hope she’s holding his hands wherever they are.”

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She also shared a quote from a letter Cobain wrote her before she was born in August 1992. “The last line of it reads, ‘Wherever you go or wherever I go, I will always be with you,'” she said. “He kept this promise because he is present in so many ways. Whether it’s by hearing a song or through the hands we share, in those moments I get to spend a little time with my dad and he feels transcendent … To anyone who has wondered what it would’ve looked like to live along side the people they have lost, I’m holding you in my thoughts today. The meaning of our grief is the same.”

Frances Bean was months away from turning two years old when Cobain died. Now an artist, photographer, and writer, she recently married skater Riley Hawk (son of Tony) in a ceremony officiated by her godfather, Michael Stipe.

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April 7, 2024

Life Story of Famous People

Short Bio » Rock Singer » Kurt Cobain

Kurt Cobain

Kurt Donald Cobain was an American singer, songwriter, guitarist and musician. Kurt Cobain was the founder of Grunge band Nirvana . He was the front man of the band. Kurt Cobain was one of the greatest rockstars the world has ever seen. He was the main reason for Nirvana’s success. It is unfortunate he committed suicide at the age of 27.

Kurt Cobain was born on February 20, 1967. He was born in Aberdeen, Washington. He was born to Wendy Elizabeth and Donald Cobain. He was of Irish, English and German descent. Kurt Cobain had a musical background. He was a talented kid. He was described to be a happy child. His parents divorced when Kurt Cobain was 7 years old. Since then he changed a lot.

He formed nirvana with schoolmate Novoselic. They formed nirvana in 1987. The band released songs in the next couple of years. They attained worldwide fame after including drummer Dave Grohl . The band became a major hit in 1991 with the release of Nevermind. With the success, they became the pioneer of Grunge music. He was the main songwriter for the band. He co-wrote classics like Smells Like Teen Spirit, Come as You Are, Lithium and All Apologies. Smells Like Teen Spirit is regarded as the band’s best song. Kurt Cobain’s death ended the Seattle grunge band Nirvana. The band sold multi million copies of their songs. Kurt Cobain has made a mark on history. Nirvana had a small yet memorable run.

Kurt Cobain was addicted to drugs. Particularly he was addicted to heroin. Kurt Cobain met Courtney Love in 1990. Courtney Love, herself is a musician. The couple grew close through their mutual interest in drugs. They eventually married in 1992. Love gave birth to Frances Bean Cobain in 1992.

Duff McKagan said he met Kurton a flight. Duff also said Cobain was happy to see him. That was not a normal feeling due to Nirvana and Guns n Roses’ history. Their front men Axl Rose and Cobain hated each other. In April 8, 1994, Kurt Cobain was found dead at his home. She shot himself with a shotgun. It was reported he died three days earlier. The death was confirmed as a suicide. Cobain was under heroin influence at the time.

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'He Was Ours' - Seattle Remembers Kurt Cobain on 30th Anniversary of His Death

'He Was Ours' - Seattle Remembers Kurt Cobain on 30th Anniversary of His Death

Kurt Cobain's daughter Frances Bean Cobain attends the opening of 'Growing Up Kurt' exhibition featuring personal items of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain at the museum of Style Icons in Newbridge, Ireland, July 17, 2018. REUTERS/Clodagh Kilcoyne

By Matt McKnight

SEATTLE (Reuters) - Fans and admirers from around the world descended on Seattle this week to pay tribute to Kurt Cobain 30 years after the troubled songwriter and lead singer of the seminal grunge rock band Nirvana took his own life.

Juan Prado Teno, a drummer from Chile and member of the fan group Nirvana Latino, said he identified with the raw energy of Cobain and Nirvana's music, as well as messages in their work vigorously denouncing homophobia, misogyny and racism.

"Nirvana for me is the philosophy to respect women, do it yourself, rock and roll. That's to me, Nirvana and the legacy of Cobain," Teno said while standing outside the Central Saloon, a storied grunge venue.

Teno said he was visiting the U.S. for the first time for Friday's anniversary of Cobain's death on April 5, 1994.

The singer, who was 27, was found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound at the Seattle home he shared with fellow rocker and wife Courtney Love overlooking Lake Washington. He had been recovering from a drug and alcohol overdose the previous month.

According to excerpts from a suicide note read at a memorial service days later, Cobain took his life because he no longer felt the passion to go on with his music.

Nirvana's punk-influenced, raw-edged sound and the angst-filled lyrics penned by Cobain had propelled the band to the top of the pop music charts and put the Seattle-based grunge sound squarely in the mainstream.

But the lyrics that struck such a powerful chord in Nirvana's "Generation X" fans were rooted in Cobain's own troubled childhood and personal unhappiness, which appeared to deepen with the band's success.

Brad Graham, 34, traveled from Kelowna, British Columbia, to a park next to Cobain and Love’s final home together, pausing to pay his respects at a wooden seat known to fans as Kurt Cobain’s bench and transformed into a makeshift shrine.

"When I was definitely in my early 20s, and I was confused about life and what I wanted out of it, a lot of that resonated with me,” Graham said of Nirvana's music. “A lot of the frustration in the music, that resonated with me a lot."

Journalist, author and Seattle music historian Charles Cross said he sees Cobain's life and talent, though cut short, as a profound gift from a "generational spokesperson."

“Yes, losing him at 27, so young and so in the prime of life, is a horrible tragedy,” said Cross, who knew Cobain and wrote the biography "Heavier than Heaven."

“But given how difficult his life was and how often suicide and drugs had been an issue, it's a miracle in the way we got as much of Kurt Cobain as we did," Cross said, adding that people of Seattle feel "an extra layer of grief."

"We felt like he was ours," Cross said.

While thumbing through photographs he took during the 1990s, some ultimately curated into a book about Nirvana, rock 'n' roll photographer Charles Peterson pondered Cobain and Nirvana’s legacy.

“For me personally, it's really about the music, and the power of the music and the staying power of it,” Peterson said. “I don't really think as a personality, as a celebrity, he would he would have that spot that he still maintains if it wasn't for the power and the voracity of the music."

(Reporting by Matt McKnight in Seattle; Editing by Steve Gorman and William Mallard)

Copyright 2024 Thomson Reuters .

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Frances Bean Cobain mourns dad Kurt Cobain on 30th anniversary of his death

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Frances Bean Cobain is honoring her late father Kurt Cobain’s life 30 years after his passing.

The 31-year-old wrote a lengthy tribute to the Nirvana frontman via Instagram while sharing throwback photos — including two sweet snaps from “the last time [they] were together while he was still alive.”

The artist wrote, “I wish I could’ve known my Dad. I wish I knew the cadence of his voice, how he liked his coffee or the way it felt to be tucked in after a bedtime story.”

She noted that there was “deep wisdom being on an expedited path to understanding how precious life is.”

Frances explained that in the wake of the musician’s April 1994 suicide, “he gifted me a lesson in death that can only come through the LIVED experience of losing someone.”

She explained, “It’s the gift of knowing for certain, when we love ourselves & those around us with compassion, with openness, with grace, the more meaningful our time here inherently becomes.”

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The model concluded by citing a letter Kurt wrote to her before he died.

“The last line of it reads, ‘wherever you go or wherever I go, I will always be with you,'” Frances wrote. “He kept this promise because he is present in so many ways. Whether it’s by hearing a song or through the hands we share, in those moments I get to spend a little time with my dad & he feels transcendent.”

Her fellow A-list offspring, from Paris Jackson to Ireland Baldwin, commented on the social media upload with heart emojis.

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Frances was born to Kurt and Courtney Love in August 1992 and was 1 when the Grammy winner died.

Friday’s post is not the first time she has honored her father on social media over the years.

On what would have been the rocker’s 50th birthday in February 2017, she wrote, “ You are loved and you are missed. Thank you for giving me the gift of life.”

That same year, Frances was battling her ex-husband , Isaiah Silva, in court over one of Kurt’s guitars — which she allegedly gave to the Eeries singer, 39, when they tied the knot.

Silva was awarded the famed instrument , a 1959 Martin D-18E guitar, in May 2018.

Following their divorce, Frances moved on with Tony Hawk’s son Riley Hawk . The duo got married in October 2023.

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