kurt cobain’s road from nowhere: walking the streets of aberdeen
It is early on a rainy Saturday night in Aberdeen, Washington, and nearly everybody in this small tavern off the main drag is already drunk. Aaron Burckhard is considerably less drunk than most—he’s only on his third beer—though, in truth, he has fair reason to be drinking. It has been just a little over a week since the body of his old friend, Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, was found in Seattle, the victim of a suicide, and Burckhard is still reeling from the news.
Burckhard, who was Nirvana’s first drummer, had not seen or spoken with Cobain in some time. Though the two of them had their share of disagreements—which came to a head when Kurt fired Aaron for being too hungover to show up for a rehearsal—Burckhard still had friendly feelings for his old bandmate, and for what he had seen Nirvana accomplish. “Kurt was the coolest person I knew, and still is,” says Burckhard, staring straight into his beer glass. “I loved him.”
Burckhard, who is now thirty, begins to tell how he heard the news of Cobain’s death on the radio—how he began shaking so violently that he had to lay his five-month-old daughter down on the sofa next to him so that he would not drop her in his grief—when a guy in a jeans jacket comes reeling through the tavern door and stumbles across the room, toppling tables on his way. He staggers to the bar, orders a beer, and then sees Burckhard and edges our way. He begins telling Aaron about a mutual friend who recently began shooting heroin again, until Aaron, visibly pissed, cuts him off. “That’s just fucked, man. That guy just got clean. Why would he start using again?”
The other man shrugs and sips from his beer. “You’re right, that shit’s bad. But then, hell, I’m strung out on it right now myself.” The guy in the jeans jacket grips his beer and lurches to the other side of the tavern.
Burckhard shakes his head, then turns back to me. “Man, that is so fucked. There’s been an epidemic of that shit around here lately.”
He sits quietly for a few moments, until his thoughts return to Cobain. “You know,” he says, “I never really understood why Kurt was so down on this town. I mean, everybody talks about what a depressed place it is to live, but I don’t see what there is to hate about it. Except, maybe . . . ” Burckhard pauses and glances around him—at the people staring with hard and angry looks into their beer glasses; at the woman who is talking in a loud and obnoxious voice and slapping ridiculously hard at the hands of her stymied boyfriend, who is mumbling incoherently to himself; at the junkie in the jeans jacket, who is talking quietly to a man in a cowboy hat over in the corner; at the bartender who is glowering at everybody who orders a drink. “Yeah,” says Burckhard, “I don’t know what there is to hate about this place. Except for, you know, the people who live here.”
And then Aaron laughs and returns to his beer.
ABERDEEN IS A hard-hit lumber town, located midway up the Washington coast, and nestled at the deepest cut-point of a seaport called Gray’s Harbor. The town is about three miles long and a mile wide, and it is flanked on its northern and eastern borders by a ridge of steep hills, where the richer folks—who have run the local sawmills—have traditionally lived, in lovely and ornate Victorian-style homes. Below those hills is a poorer part of town called “the flats,” and it is here that Kurt Cobain grew up. His mother, Wendy O’Conner, still lives there, in a small, greenish house, with a tidy yard and drawn curtains. It is one of the better homes in the area. Many of the nearby houses are marred by faded paint and worn roofs, and the necessary neglect that is the result of indigence.
Stand in the heart of the flats—or in Aberdeen’s nearby downtown area, where empty industrial structures stand like haunted shells—and the frequent fog that pours off the rich folks’ hill can feel like something that might bog you down here forever. Move to the other end of town, where the main drag, Wishkah Boulevard, looks out toward the Chehalis River and Pacific Ocean, and you feel like you’re staring at the end of the world—that if you kept walking or driving, you would simply drop off the last edge of America.
This is the town that Kurt Cobain could never repudiate enough. It was here that he was scorned and beat upon by both those who should have loved him, and by those who hardly knew him but recognized his otherness and wanted to batter him for it. It was here, no doubt, where Cobain first learned how to hate life.
YOU WOULDN’T know it now, but Aberdeen was once a hopping place, supported by thriving lumber companies and dozens of the West Coast’s most popular whorehouses. But the prostitution was killed off decades ago, and the lumber boom started coming to a halt a few years back, as the economy fell and the land was depleted. These days, there is widespread concern that the northwestern logging industry can never fully recover, and as a result, that a town like Aberdeen is marked for a slow and ugly death.
To make matters worse, in the days following Kurt Cobain’s suicide, Aberdeen became an object of national scrutiny and fast judgment. In large part, that’s because Cobain had been outspoken in his dislike for his hometown—describing it essentially as a place of redneck biases and low intelligence. That disdain has influenced the media’s recent depiction of the city as a dismal, hopeless place, in which those with an artistic sensibility—particularly the young—are regarded with disapproval or outright hostility. It’s as if the town were being held in part accountable for Cobain’s ruin—which is not an entirely unfathomable consideration. When you are confronted with the tragic loss of a suicide, you can’t help sorting backward through the dead person’s life, looking for those crucial episodes of dissolution that would lead him to such an awful finish. Look far enough in Kurt Cobain’s life, and you inevitably end up back in Aberdeen—the homeland that he hated and fled. Maybe there was something damaging and ineradicable that he bore from this place, and that he could not shirk or annihilate until those last few moments, in that apartment above the garage of his Seattle home.
Certainly, there are some grim truths about the town that cannot be ignored. In April 1991, Aberdeen’s local newspaper, the Daily World, ran an article chronicling the relatively high death rate in the region—especially in its suicide index. It is difficult to measure these things with any definitive accuracy, but Aberdeen’s suicide rate would appear to average out to something like 27 people per 100,000—which is roughly twice the national suicide rate (though bear in mind that the town’s population itself is something less than 17,000). Mix this news with high rates of alcohol and drug usage, as well as a high incidence of unemployment and domestic violence and a median household income of about $23,000, and you emerge with the not-so-surprising conclusion that Aberdeen can be an unusually depressing town to call your home.
One doesn’t have to look much beyond Cobain’s own family’s history to see evidence of this truth. In July 1979, one of Cobain’s great-uncles, Burle Cobain, committed suicide by way of a self-inflicted gunshot to his abdomen. Five years later, Burle’s brother Kenneth also committed suicide. There are rumors that other relatives and ancestors may have committed suicide in previous years—making for the legend that Courtney Love has referred to as the Cobain curse.
It is hard to know what impact, if any, the suicides of his great-uncles and others may have had on Cobain—whether he mourned these deaths, or in fact saw in them the glimmer of a dark promise: a surefire prescription for release, come the day that any further days of pain or torment would be unbearable. In any case, there was something clearly kindred in the manner in which the young artist chose to end his life, as well as something horribly ironic. For all the ways that Kurt Cobain reviled what he saw as this area’s redneck mentality, in the end he chose for himself the same sad style of death that others in his family and hometown had opted for: a gun to his head, obliterating his very identity, ruining the part of him that made him knowable to the outside world. As one friend, who had known him when he lived here, put it: “I hate to say it, but it was the perfect Aberdonian death.”
THERE IS LITTLE doubt that Kurt Cobain did not have an easy time of life in this town. He was born in nearby Hoquiam in 1967, the first child of Wendy Cobain and her auto mechanic husband, Donald. The family moved to Aberdeen when Kurt was six months old, and by all accounts, he was a happy and bright child—an outgoing, friendly boy who, by the second grade, was already regarded as possessing a natural artistic talent. Then, in 1975, when Kurt was eight, Don and Wendy divorced, and the bitter separation and its aftermath were devastating to the child. Instead of the sense of family and security that he had known previously, Kurt now knew division, acrimony, and aloneness, and apparently some light in him began to shut off. He grew progressively introverted, and to others, he seemed full of shame about what had become of his family. In the years that followed, Cobain was passed back and forth between his mother’s home in Aberdeen and his father’s in nearby Montesano. It was in this period that the young Kurt became sullen and resentful, and when his moods became too much for either parent, he was sent along to the homes of other relatives in the region—some of whom also found him a hard kid to reach. (There are rumors that Cobain may have suffered physical abuse and exposure to drug abuse during this time, but nobody in the family was available to confirm or deny these reports.)
In short, the young Kurt Cobain was a misfit—it was the role handed to him, and he had the intelligence to know what to do with it. Like many youthful misfits, he found a bracing refuge in the world of rock & roll. In part, the music probably offered him a sense of connection that was missing elsewhere in his life—the reaffirming thrill of participating in something that might speak for or embrace him. But rock & roll also offered him something more: a chance for transcendence or personal victory that nothing else in his life or community could offer. Like many kids before him, and many to come, Kurt Cobain sat in his room and learned to play powerful chords and dirty leads on cheap guitars, and felt the amazing uplift and purpose that came from such activity; he held music closer to him than his family or home, and for a time, it probably came as close to saving him as anything could. In the process, he found a new identity as a nascent punk in a town where, to this day, punks are still regarded as either eccentrics or trash.
The punishments that he suffered for his metamorphosis were many, and are now legend. There are numerous stories that make the rounds in Aberdeen about how Cobain got beat up for simply looking and walking differently than other kids, or got his face smashed for befriending a high school student who was openly gay, or got used as a punching bag by jocks who loathed him for what they saw as his otherness. Hearing accounts like these, you have to marvel at Cobain’s courage, and even at his heroism. It’s a wonder he made it as far as he did without wanting to kill the world for what it had inflicted on him for so many and long seasons.
THOUGH COBAIN IS now Aberdeen’s most famous native son, and though many people recall him from his time here, there’s something about his presence here that proves shadowy and inscrutable to the locals. Lamont Shillinger, who heads Aberdeen High School’s English department, saw as much of Cobain as most people outside his family. For nearly a year, during the time he played music with the teacher’s sons, Eric and Steve, Kurt slept on Shillinger’s front-room sofa, and in those moments when Cobain’s stomach erupted in the burning pain that tormented him off and on for years, Shillinger would head out to the local Safeway and retrieve some Pepto-Bismol or antacids to try to relieve the pain. But for all the time he spent with the family, Kurt remains a mystery to them. “I would not claim,” says Lamont Shillinger, “that I knew him well either. I don’t think my sons knew him well. In fact, even to this day, I suspect there are very few people that really knew Kurt well—even the people around him or the people he was near to. I think the closest he ever came to expressing what was inside was in his artwork, in his poetry, and in his music. But as far as personal back and forth, I seriously doubt that he was ever that close to anybody.”
Another Aberdeen High teacher, Bob Hunter, affirms Shillinger’s view. Hunter, who is part of the school’s Art department, began teaching Cobain during his freshman year, and worked with him for three years, until 1985, when Cobain quit school. Though the two of them had a good relationship, Hunter can recall few revealing remarks from his student. “I really believe in the idea of aura,” says Hunter, “and around Kurt there was an aura of: ’Back off—get out of my face,’ that type of thing. But at the same time I was intrigued by what I saw Kurt doing. I wanted to know where he was getting the ideas he was coming up with for his drawings. You could detect the anger—it was evident even then.”
Hunter lost track of Cobain for a while after Kurt dropped out of school, until he had Cobain’s younger sister, Kim, in one of his classes. From time to time, Kim would bring tapes of her brother’s work to the teacher and keep him informed of his former student’s progress. Says Hunter: “Even if Kim had never come back and said that Kurt was really making it as a musician, I would have kept wondering about him. I’ve taught thousands of students now, but he would have been up there in my thoughts as one of the preeminent people that I hold in high esteem as artists. Later, after I heard the contents of his suicide note, I was surprised at the part where he said he didn’t have the passion anymore. From what I had seen, I would have thought the ideas would always be there for him. I mean, he could have just gone back to being a visual artist and he would have remained brilliant.”
IN TIME, Cobain got out of Aberdeen alive—at least for a while. In 1987, he formed the first version of the band that would eventually become Nirvana, with fellow Aberdonians Krist Novoselic on bass and Aaron Burckhard on drums. A few months later, Cobain and Novoselic moved to Olympia, and eventually Burckhard was left behind. Nirvana played around Olympia, Tacoma, and Seattle, and recorded the band’s first album, Bleach, for Sub Pop in 1988. The group plowed through a couple more drummers before settling on Dave Grohl and recording its groundbreaking major label debut, Nevermind, for Geffen in 1991. With Nevermind, Cobain forced the pop world to accommodate the long-resisted punk aesthetic at both its harshest and smartest, and did so at a time when many pundits had declared that rock & roll was effectively finished as either a mainstream cultural or commercial force. It was a remarkable achievement for a band from the hinterlands of Aberdeen, and the whole migration—from disrepute on Washington’s coast to worldwide fame and pop apotheosis—had been pulled off in an amazingly short period of time. Back at home, many of the kids and fans who had shared Cobain’s perspective were heartened by his band’s accomplishment.
But when Cobain turned up the victim of his own hand in Seattle on April 8, 1994, those same kids’ pride and hope took a hard blow. “After the suicide,” says Brandon Baker, a fifteen-year-old freshman at Aberdeen High, “all these jocks were coming up to us and saying stuff like: ’Your buddy’s dead. What are you going to do now?’ Or: ’Hey, I’ve got Nirvana tickets for sale; they’re half off.’ ”
Baker is standing with a few of his friends in an alcove across the street from the high school, where some of the misfit students occasionally gather to seek refuge from their more conventional colleagues. The group is discussing what it’s like to be seen as grunge kids in the reality of post-Nirvana Aberdeen. Baker continues: “I realize that Kurt Cobain had a few more problems than we might, but him doing this, it kind of cheated us in a way. We figured if someone like him could make it out of a place like this . . . it was like he might have paved the way for the rest of us. But now, we don’t want people to think that we’re using his path as our guideline. It’s like you’re almost scared to do anything now. People around here view us as freaks. They see us walking together in a mall and they think we’re a bunch of hoodlums, just looking for trouble. They’ll throw us off the premises just for being together. I don’t know—it’s sad how adults will classify you sometimes.”
The talk turns to the subject of the summer’s upcoming Lollapalooza tour. In the last few days, Aberdeen’s Daily World’s headlines have been given to coverage of a major local wrangle: the Lollapalooza tour organizers have proposed using nearby Hoquiam as the site for their Washington show, in part as a tribute to all that Cobain and Nirvana did for alternative music and for the region. Many residents in the area, though, are incensed over the idea. They are worried about the undesirable elements and possible drug traffic that might be attracted by such an event, and even though the stopover would bring a big boon to the badly ailing local economy, there is considerable resistance to letting such a show happen in this area.
“You would think,” says Jesse Eby, a seventeen-year-old junior, “that they would let us have this one thing—that the city council would realize we might appreciate or respect them more if they let something like this show come here. It would be such a good thing for the kids around here.”
“Yeah,” says Rebecca Sartwell, a freshman with lovely streaks of magenta throughout her blond hair. “I mean, can’t we just have one cool thing to do, just one day out of the year? I mean, besides go to Denny’s and drink coffee?”
Everybody falls silent for a few moments, until Sartwell speaks up again. “I don’t know how to explain this,” she says, “but all I want is out. Maybe I’ll move to Olympia or Portland or someplace, but when I get there I don’t intend to say, ’Hey, I’m from Aberdeen,’ because then everybody’s going to assume I’m an alcoholic, manic-depressive hick. It’s bad enough having to live here. I don’t want to take the reputation of the place with me when I leave.”
Everybody nods in agreement with Rebecca’s words.
NOT FAR FROM the place where Kurt Cobain’s mother lives is a short span known as the North Aberdeen Bridge. It reaches across the narrow Wishkah River, leading into the part of town called North Aberdeen. In the winter of 1985, during a time when he had no place to live, Kurt Cobain used to spend his afternoons at the local library and his nights sleeping on a friend’s sofa, or on the porch deck of his mother’s house. Sometimes, though, he slept under the North Aberdeen Bridge, in a space up the sloping bank of the bridge’s south side, just feet below the overhead pavement. I climbed under that bridge during my last rainy afternoon in Aberdeen, to take a look around. There’s a hollow cleared into the brownish-red soil, close to the concrete buttresses, and it is here that Cobain slept. Indeed, there are more signs of him in this one place than in any other spot in Aberdeen, outside of his mother’s home. The columns and cylinders are covered by his spray-painted graffiti, bearing the names of bands like Black Flag and the Meat Puppets, and slogans like FUCK and STOP VANDALISM.
I sit down in the hollow of the dirt for a few minutes and stare out at the Wishkah River. From here, its water doesn’t appear to flow. Rather, it just seems to stand there, stagnant and green. I hear a clatter behind me and I turn around. A rat? The wind? I sit there and I think what it would be like to hear that sound in the dead of a cold night, with only a small fire at best to illuminate the dark. I try to imagine what it was like to be a boy in this town and turn to this bridge as your haven. Who knows: Maybe the nights Cobain spent here were fun, drunken nights, or at least times of safety, when he was out of the reach of the town that had already harmed him many times. But in the end I have to lapse into my own prejudices: It seems horrible that this was the kindest sanctuary a boy could find on a winter night in his own hometown.
I get up to leave and my eye catches something scrawled on a rail overhead. It is hard to make out, but the writing looks much like the examples of Cobain’s penmanship that I have seen recently in books and news articles. The scrawl reads: WELL, I MUST BE OFF. IT’S TIME FOR THE FOOL TO GET OUT.
Maybe it is indeed Cobain’s writing, or maybe it’s the script of another local kid who came to realize the same thing Cobain realized: To save yourself from a dark fate, you have to remove yourself from dark places. Sometimes, though, you might not remove yourself soon enough, and when that happens, the darkness leaves with you. It visits you not just in your worst moments, but also in your best ones, dimming the light that those occasions have to offer. It visits you and it tells you that this is where you are from—that no matter how far you run or how hard you reach for release, the darkness, sooner or later, will claim you.
You can learn a lot of bad things when you are made to sleep under a bridge in your homeland, and some of those things can stay with you until the day you die.