kurt cobain biography short

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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My Time with Kurt Cobain

By Michael Azerrad

In early 1992, when I first met Kurt Cobain, he and Courtney Love were living in a little apartment in a two-up-two-down building on an ordinary street in the Fairfax section of Los Angeles. I had flown there from New York to interview him for a Rolling Stone cover story, the one with a famous photograph of him wearing a homemade T-shirt that said “Corporate Magazines Still Suck.” I was nervous. Not much was known about Kurt at that point, other than he was this guy from Seattle who screamed in his songs, smashed his guitars, and might be a heroin addict. He was also the most celebrated rock musician on the planet.

It was dusk when a taxi dropped me off at his place. Courtney greeted me at the door and graciously offered me a plate of grapes. There was a tiny, dimly lit living room with no furniture, LPs and guitars strewn around the floor, and a small Buddhist shrine with burning candles. As “Norwegian Wood” played faintly on a crappy stereo, Courtney led me down a short hallway to the bedroom. I got to the door and opened it to find Kurt lying in a little bed in a little room, his back against the wall, facing the doorway, his shocking blue eyes gazing at me through the subdued lighting. His bare feet stuck out past the bedsheets, and his toenails were painted a rosy hue. The smell of jasmine flowers wafted through the screen of the window above his head. To this day, whenever I smell jasmine I’m transported to that moment.

“Hi,” he said, and two things struck me instantly. The first was: oh, wow, I know this guy. He wasn’t some sort of rock-and-roll space alien—he was actually like a lot of the stoners I went to high school with. (I was kind of a stoner in high school myself.) All the nervousness went away. The other thing I realized is uncomfortable to say: I sensed that he was one of those rock musicians who dies young. I’d never met someone like that before or even known many people who had died at all. I just sensed it. It turns out that a lot of other people around him did, too: his bandmate Dave Grohl sensed it, and so did Kurt’s wife, Courtney Love. Even Kurt’s own mother acknowledged it. It just wasn’t something that anyone would say out loud at the time.

I sat down on a little footstool next to his bed, started up the tape recorder, and began asking him questions. I asked Kurt what he was like as a kid, and he said something about being small for his age. I stood up, unfurled my wiry five-foot-six-inch frame, and said, in a theatrically manly voice, “I don’t know what you’re talking about!” We exchanged smiles, and our bond grew from there. Somehow I got to talking about Arlo Guthrie’s “The Motorcycle Song” and how I’d play it on the family record player and run around the house pretending I was a motorcycle. And Kurt said, “I did that, too!” He said that his parents had divorced by the time he was ten years old and he’d been melancholic ever since. I told him how I’d felt the same way about my own parents’ divorce, when I was the same age. We grew up on the bands that so many American kids of our era did—Kiss, Cheap Trick, Queen, Black Sabbath—before having our lives changed by punk rock. So here I was, a bespectacled college-boy Rolling Stone journalist from New York City, connecting with a high-school dropout from the rural timber town of Aberdeen, Washington, whose dad worked in a lumber mill counting logs. But that didn’t make me anything special—a whole lot of people could have connected to Kurt Cobain. The beautiful thing was, he had a knack for conveying that in song, and in the most ineffable way.

As I was talking with Kurt, he was experiencing heroin withdrawal. He told me he was in bed because he was nursing a cold, which made sense—he was coming off a tour that had gone from Australia to New Zealand to Singapore to Japan to Hawaii. All those shows and travel would naturally take a toll on anybody, even someone who had just turned twenty-five. It didn’t really seem like he had a cold, but I ignored that. Like many people around him, I just didn’t want to know. Which is ridiculous—I was a reporter .

A few months after the Rolling Stone story came out that April, in 1992, the magazine sent me to England to cover the big Reading Festival, whose final day featured a bill almost entirely composed of grunge bands, with Nirvana headlining. I was staying at the Holiday Inn, where a lot of the bands stayed, too. One evening, I was standing in the lobby, spacing out for a moment, when I swore I felt something gently pass over the top of my head, like a hand an inch away. I ignored it and waited for whoever it was to give up and introduce themselves, but there wasn’t anyone near me. Finally, I turned around, and there, twenty feet away, was Kurt, staring at me with his laser-beam eyes.

I walked up to him. He was glad to see me and said that he liked my Rolling Stone story. In retrospect, I can see why: the article served his purposes. I quoted an anti-drug speech he gave—which he seemed to think let him off the hook for using drugs. I acknowledged that he was truly in love with Courtney, who was getting a lot of grief from the media. I took his crippling stomach pain seriously, which few people did. And I let him plug some of his favorite bands, which helped him feel a little better about his burgeoning fame. In the hotel lobby, we furthered the connection we’d made during the interview. I bought him a vodka-and-orange-juice at the packed bar, and we chatted a bit before the swirl of acquaintances and gawking onlookers compelled Kurt to retreat to his room.

Nirvana’s concert at Reading was a triumph—and not just because they played at all. The U.K. music press had been speculating that Kurt was too heroin-sick to perform, and the rumor was that Nirvana would cancel. But not only did they play; they played what is widely regarded as one of the greatest rock concerts ever. Along with a gaggle of other journalists, I stood at the back of the stage, looking out at thousands of faces bouncing up and down in huge, rolling swells as they pogoed in the light. Onstage, some freaky guy danced with the band like a blissed-out rag doll, doing what everybody in the crowd wished they had the room to do. The music, including a new song called “All Apologies,” was transcendent.

Late one evening a month or so later, the phone rang. It was Courtney. She wanted to know whether I would like to write a book about Nirvana. “That sounds interesting,” I said, playing it as cool as I could manage, “but could I talk to Kurt about it?” She handed the phone to Kurt. “Hey,” he said, in his cigarette growl. I asked why he wanted to do the book. This was shortly after Vanity Fair had published a story that was used as evidence to briefly relieve them of custody of their infant daughter, Frances. Kurt promised me access to anyone I wanted to talk to, and that I could write whatever I wanted. “Just tell the truth,” he said. “That’ll be better than anything else that’s been written about me.”

Before I began writing what would become “ Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana ,” Courtney would sometimes call me, I think partly to try to frame the narrative and partly to ingratiate herself with the guy who was going to write the book—or maybe it was just because she and Kurt liked and trusted me without even knowing me that well. Her conversation was dense with references to various pharmaceuticals I’d never heard of, like Klonopin and diazepam and Vicodin, as if everybody knew what they were—that’s how Courtney talks, as if you’re intimately familiar with all the arcane things and people she’s mentioning at such high velocity. The pharmaceutical thing was so relentless that one day I walked over to the Strand Bookstore and bought a used copy of the “Physicians’ Desk Reference,” a big, fat book listing all prescription drugs and their uses and effects.

On the walk home, I bumped into a particularly distrustful and controlling member of Nirvana’s management team. This was before any of the interviews for the book had begun. If this manager had suspected I was going to write a lurid exposé about Kurt and Courtney’s drug use, I knew that the book would be cancelled. Of course, this person noticed the Strand bag I was now carrying and asked the very question I was dreading: “Oh, what book did you buy?” I mumbled something and quickly changed the subject, dangling the bag behind my back. I can laugh about it now, but my legs were shaking.

From 1994: a final jolt to the rock world he loved and loathed.

For the next six months, I flew to Seattle to conduct interviews, returning to New York to transcribe, research, and write. Being around intense people like Kurt and Courtney, with their constant drama and palpable charisma, was exciting but also stressful and exhausting. The publication of the book was timed to coincide with the release of the “In Utero” album that September, and, when it was done, the publisher felt that we should let Kurt read the book “as a courtesy”—publishing-biz speak for “He can read it, but he can’t change anything”—before advance versions went out to the press. But, given Courtney’s notoriously combative tendencies, they didn’t want her to see it, so we couldn’t simply mail Kurt the manuscript. Instead, I’d fly out to Seattle and have Kurt read the book in my presence. Kurt completely understood why we had to do it this way—Courtney could make things complicated, we all knew that. So I booked a room at the Warwick Hotel, in downtown Seattle, and flew from J.F.K. with the manuscript. The first night, I took out the thick pile of photocopied paper and a box of the chocolate-covered butter cookies that we both liked, set them on a little desk in the corner of the room by the windows, and waited.

Around midnight, there was a knock on my door. Kurt was sober at that time. Courtney had ordered the car-service driver not to make any detours and had somehow slipped me a tiny note asking me to make sure that Kurt didn’t call any pager numbers: “P.S. Xtra secret don’t tell I wrote this.” Kurt sat down at the desk and began reading. He smoked constantly and read intently. I kicked back on the bed and worked on an article or played solitaire on my laptop. It was very quiet. The only sounds were the distant gurgling of the hotel’s plumbing, a hum whenever the ventilation system switched on, and Kurt turning pages.

Occasionally, he’d pipe up and say, “Yeah, yeah, this reads real good.” Sometimes he would chuckle at something funny or sigh at something painful. A few times, he moaned and asked, “Aw, do you have to keep that in?” I don’t remember every passage that bothered him, but one was about a breakdown he had onstage in Rome, in the autumn of 1989. Every time Kurt objected, I’d explain why it had to stay in the book, and he never pressed the matter. After all, that was our original agreement—to do it any other way would be, as he said in our first conversation about the book, “too Guns N’ Roses.” Once in a while, he’d point out a factual error, like correcting the name of the aunt who gave him his first guitar lessons.

That first night, he got about a third of the way through the book before he started to fade. It was a lot to absorb. I imagine that he was mostly thinking about how this would play to the authorities who wanted to take his child from him. I also think he may have been looking at it as Nirvana’s chief conceptualist, weighing how everything squared with how he wanted the band—and himself—to be perceived.

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 over-all myth. So Kurt was an unreliable narrator of his own story. That’s nothing new—it would be hard to name any rock star who wasn’t the same. It’s up to the journalist to determine what’s true and what isn’t. But sometimes journalists play along because they’re naïve, lazy, or overworked, or they want to be in on the game because it makes for sensational copy. Whatever the reason, it works to the artist’s advantage. I wasn’t rigorous about investigating Kurt’s mythologizing—for one thing, a tight deadline meant that I just didn’t have the time, and, for another, he had charmed me and I unquestioningly bought a lot of his tall tales—which turned out well for him.

The second night was a repeat of the first: me and a guy reading the book I wrote about him, in a generic little hotel room, punctuated by the rustle of paper and the occasional grunt of appreciation or soft chuckle. He told me it was illuminating to read about his entire life in chronological order. Very few people have that luxury. Sometimes he’d take a break, and we’d stand together by the window overlooking Fourth Avenue and talk, eat cookies, or look down to the street, where little gangs of homeless kids swarmed around taxis stopped at red lights, trying to wangle a few bucks out of the cabbies. During those breaks, we didn’t speak about the book—instead, we talked about people we knew in common, music we were listening to, or politics. Sometimes we’d just stare out the window at the city without saying anything at all.

A little before dawn on the third night, he turned over the last page, planted his palm on the top of the stack as if absorbing its vibrations, and took a long drag on his cigarette. Then he got up, walked over to me, and said, “That’s the best rock book I’ve ever read.” He hugged me and looked me in the eye. “Thank you,” he said, and then he was gone.

My publisher was surprised and immensely relieved that Kurt had only a few minor factual corrections. They were expecting him to raise a fuss, possibly to the point that it could torpedo the whole book—which had already happened with another book about the band. What the publisher overlooked was that the most sensational things were said by Kurt himself. But also, once again, I had dutifully noted down Kurt’s key talking points, particularly about being a good, loving parent; that’s all he cared about. The rest was window dressing. There’s a popular misconception that Kurt was just a guileless junkie. But that’s a fallacy. He totally knew what he was doing.

After I was done with the book, Kurt and I became friends. I don’t claim to have been his exclusive confidant or anything, but, every once in a while, the phone would ring in the wee hours of the morning. It was ridiculous that he’d call at such an hour—he didn’t seem to have considered the time difference between Seattle and New York, or maybe he thought that everyone else was as nocturnal as he was—but I always picked up. I worried that he might be in a crisis, and I didn’t ever want to regret that I’d ignored a crucial call.

Usually Kurt would want to rail, sometimes volcanically, about management or the label or the band. And after he’d gotten it all off his chest he’d suddenly realize that he’d been talking completely about himself, pause, and ask, “So how are you?”

In July, 1993, Nirvana came to New York to play a show at the Roseland Ballroom, a cavernous former dance hall in midtown Manhattan. It was for the CMJ convention, which catered to college radio stations and was a key platform for promoting the forthcoming “In Utero.” While he was in town, Kurt had a business dinner with a bunch of “the grownups,” as he disdainfully referred to the various executives involved in the band’s affairs, at a fancy restaurant on the East Side. He asked me to come along—I suppose so he wouldn’t be completely alone with business types. Or maybe he wanted me to see for myself what he was always complaining about.

Eight of us sat around a large, circular table. I sat directly across from Kurt, out of conversation range, but I could see that he was uncomfortable. He was withdrawn and not responding much to anything anyone said to him. Everyone tried to pretend like nothing was wrong. They all ordered food—appetizers, entrées, and wine—but Kurt ordered only a slice of cake. “That’s all you’re going to have, Kurt?” someone asked. Kurt just kind of mumbled.

Kurt excused himself to go to the bathroom. He was gone a long time. I considered the possibility that he had sneaked out of the restaurant. That would have been brilliant. But, eventually, just as I was starting to think that someone should go check on him, he returned. He was high, dazed, his eyelids nearly closed. He was nodding slightly. It was the first time I’d ever been sure that Kurt was high on heroin. Surely everyone else at the table could see this, too, but no one acknowledged it in any way, and the conversation continued around Kurt, as if he were a senile grandparent. It was obvious to me that Kurt got high at that dinner deliberately, as a self-destructive protest.

The ostensible purpose of the dinner, aside from dining at a fancy restaurant and putting the bill on the expense account, was to discuss some pressing business decision with Kurt. But Kurt was in no condition to make any decisions. When the check was paid, everyone scattered. So I found myself standing on the sidewalk with Kurt, who was stoned out of his mind on heroin in a city he didn’t know well. I walked him back to his hotel, holding on to his arm—as if he were an elderly person—in case he stumbled. I made sure that he didn’t walk into other people, or traffic.

When we arrived at his hotel room, Courtney was lying on the bed, reading a magazine. She wasn’t surprised that Kurt was high, just disappointed. She’d been working hard to keep him away from drugs, and she scolded him a little bit while he stood there, sheepish and unsteady, offering only halfhearted protests and denials. Then he flopped down on the end of the bed, sidewise, and Courtney nonchalantly put up her feet on his back like he was a sofa cushion. I got the sense that something like this had happened many times before. Kurt was sleeping, or something like it, and Courtney apparently had things under control, so I left them and headed down the hall to stop by a little party the rest of the band and crew were having. Kurt overdosed later that evening. He had gone to the bathroom for a long time. Then Courtney heard a thud. She opened the door—or tried to, but Kurt’s unconscious body was blocking the doorway.

The band and crew’s party couldn’t have been more different from the heartbreaking scene in Kurt’s hotel room: here, there was booze, horseplay, and a blaring boom box. But it, too, became terrifying. Soon after I arrived, one of the guys in the band stepped out the window and onto a broad ledge on the side of the building, several stories above the street. He started walking on the ledge toward the next window of the room—which was maybe ten feet away. I was petrified. He was hammered, not the ideal condition for tightrope walking. I thought that I was about to witness a horrific moment in rock history, but he made it. Everybody in the room cheered. Then one of the crew tried it. And I was petrified all over again, but he made it, too. Then the guy in the band went a second time. By now, I was thoroughly freaked out. But he made it again, and, thankfully, there were no more ledge walks. I made a beeline for the drinks table.

Courtney eventually forced her way into the bathroom and saw Kurt turning blue. Terrified, she sent word out to the band’s crew: pack up the equipment—there will be no show tomorrow, because Kurt is dead. I’m not sure who resuscitated him, or how, but he played a great concert at Roseland the following night.

In October, 1993, I visited Kurt in Seattle while the band was rehearsing for the “In Utero” tour, and one night he invited me to a practice. He claimed it would be boring, but then he said everything about his life was boring. It wasn’t, of course.

The band’s practice space was in a loft building in the SoDo neighborhood, a grim industrial area south of downtown. The long, concrete-floored hallway leading to their room was lined on one side with cremation urns, which were manufactured in another area on the floor. It was late when we arrived, and the entire building was silent. At that point, Nirvana was perhaps the biggest band in the world, but you’d never know it from their rehearsal space. The room was about six hundred square feet, with windows that looked out onto other industrial loft buildings. A small riser for the drum set was as fancy as they got. There was a modest P.A., some ordinary-looking amps, and a couple of standard-issue microphones. They had no soundproofing, no sound person, no special lights, no recording equipment, no well-stocked bar. A few mismatched old chairs were strewn around the room, some concert posters hung on the wall, and there was a small fridge. It could almost have been your band’s practice space.

They fussed with the P.A. a little, and then they were off, running down songs from “In Utero.” Kurt ran the rehearsal, giving specific directions to each of the musicians. They played sections of songs, starting and stopping until Kurt felt that things were right. I suppose this was what Kurt thought was the boring part, but it was illuminating to see how much he controlled things, how exacting he was with music that appeared so rough-hewn. It was difficult to hear some of the flaws Kurt wanted to correct, but when the band fixed them it was obvious that everything had snapped into place.

The following month, Courtney decided that it would be good if I joined Nirvana’s U.S. tour for a little while. I was a relatively steady person, a little older, and drug-free. She figured that I would be good company for Kurt on the road, maybe help keep him on the straight and narrow—if only by example. I don’t know if I accomplished that, and I didn’t wind up spending all that much time with Kurt, but I think that having someone else on the bus did break up a little of the tension and boredom. Sometimes a cloud gathered over the touring party. That was largely due to Kurt’s mental state; his mood, dark or light, pervaded every room, and it depended a lot on whether he’d been fighting with Courtney. But everyone in the band felt some sort of tension: even if they tried to make light of it, Kurt, the bassist Krist Novoselic, and the drummer Dave Grohl felt the enormous pressure of being a world-famous rock group and resented the invasive journalism that comes with it. There were tensions within the band, too.

Once, I stopped by Kurt’s hotel room when he started yelling that he wanted to fire Dave, unquestionably one of the great rock drummers, for being an unsubtle and unspontaneous musician. The thing was, Dave was staying in the room right next door. I hissed at Kurt, “He can hear! ” “I don’t care!” Kurt yelled back, more at the adjoining wall than at me. I was sure that Dave heard the whole thing. Regardless, Dave was already aware of Kurt’s feelings. He told his biographer, Paul Brannigan, that on a flight from Seattle to Los Angeles he had overheard Kurt bad-mouthing his drumming two rows back. Once they landed, Dave told their trusty Scottish tour manager, Alex MacLeod, that he was quitting the band after the last scheduled show. MacLeod talked him out of it.

After we reached Dallas, Kurt called my room and asked whether I wanted to walk around downtown with him, the kindly Pat Smear (an early L.A. punk icon and now a rhythm guitarist on the tour), and Kurt’s daughter, Frances, fifteen months old at the time. We rolled out with Kurt pushing Frances in her stroller, making her laugh with a ridiculous assortment of rude noises. The emptiness of downtown Dallas on a weekday afternoon was baffling to me, a provincial New Yorker, but great for Kurt, who could stroll around without being hassled by fans.

Walking down a wide boulevard, we found ourselves at the edge of a big open space. An enormous flock of grackles circled above, forming an undulating disk so vast and dense that the sunlight filtering through looked gray. It felt apocalyptic. Except for the occasional car, there was not another human being in sight. It dawned on me that this was Dealey Plaza, the site of the John F. Kennedy assassination. There was the former Texas School Book Depository and, surprisingly close by, the “grassy knoll.” Like countless other people, we examined the crime scene, considered the angles, weighed conspiracy theories. Eventually, Frances needed baby supplies, so Kurt rolled off with her to a drugstore. That was the last time I saw Kurt Cobain.

On or about April 5, 1994, Kurt went up to an attic over his garage, took a lot of heroin, and then killed himself with a shotgun. He left a note. Its closing words were “peace, love, empathy.”

The quality of empathy was very important to Kurt; he spoke of it often. Which might come as a surprise, given all the wanton vandalism and assorted other mischief he committed as a teen and indeed throughout his all-too-brief adult life, not to mention his avowed disdain for so many of the people around him. How much empathy did he have when he hit a man on the head with his guitar during a show in Dallas, in 1991?

But maybe, as Kurt claimed, opiates really did still his misanthropic impulses and help him experience empathy, or something resembling it. Maybe his outspokenness about empathy was actually a passive-aggressive plea for people to have empathy for him . At any rate, Kurt avowedly cherished the ability to imagine what other people are feeling, right down to the last moments of his life. In his suicide note, the word “empathy” was underlined twice. His name was in the smallest lettering on the whole page.

Then there’s the question of why he did it. In an outtake from Grant Gee’s 2007 documentary, “Joy Division,” there’s an interview with the iconic English post-punk band’s former road manager Terry Mason. Mason describes what happens almost every time someone finds out that he used to work with the group, whose singer, Ian Curtis, hanged himself, in 1980. “All the time, they’re dancing around their humbug to ask me the big one. They always want to ask that, and it usually starts with the line ‘I’m not a ghoul like the others, but why did Ian kill himself?’ ” Mason says. “Everyone thinks there’s some deep, dark, mystical secret. And there’s not. He was a nice guy, got into a strange situation, and the only way he could think about [it] at that time was to kill himself. Sorry, no secrets.” And then, twenty-seven years after his friend’s death, it looks like Mason might start to cry. But before he does he looks straight into the camera and says, “Cut.”

People often ask me why Kurt killed himself. Actually, what frequently happens is, they wind up telling me why he killed himself. They have their opinions, despite never having met him, and dismiss my firsthand observations of Kurt as incompatible with what they already believe. Very few of them acknowledge this simple, unsensational fact: Kurt had several clinically established risk factors for suicide, including inhuman levels of professional pressure, chronic and severe physical pain, and a heroin addiction that he just couldn’t seem to shake (or didn’t want to). He also had a long family history of suicide.

Both sides of Kurt’s family are marked by suicides. In 1913, his great-grandfather’s sister Florence Cobain, seventeen years old, wanted to go to the movies, but her father wouldn’t let her, so she shot herself in the chest with a rifle. Somehow she survived and lived to be ninety-four. One of Kurt’s great-grandfathers on his mother’s side attempted suicide with a knife. He survived but died later, after purposely reopening the wounds in a psychiatric hospital. In 1938, when Kurt’s grandfather, Leland, and Leland’s brothers Burle and Kenneth Cobain, were young men, their father, John, a deputy sheriff, was sitting on a stool at the beer counter of a store in Markham, Washington, twelve miles southwest of Aberdeen. John apparently reached in his pocket for a cigarette and accidentally knocked his pistol out of its holster. The gun dropped to the floor and discharged, killing him. In 1979, when Kurt was twelve, Burle killed himself with a gun. Five years later, Kenneth did.

I didn’t know any of that history when I wrote “Come as You Are,” nor was it the kind of thing I even thought to ask about. All I knew was that I had the distinct feeling that Kurt would not live a long life. But what, if anything, could I do about it? Was it even my place to get involved?

A couple of times, I did get involved. One evening, in 1993, I got a panic-stricken call from Courtney, who told me that Kurt had locked himself in a room in their house. He was distraught, she said, and had a gun and was threatening to use it on himself. She was terrified. So was I. I asked if I could speak with Kurt, but there was no way to get the phone to him. I could hear him yelling in the background. I told her to call the police and to keep me posted. Then I called one of Nirvana’s managers. I relayed what was happening and said that such a volatile person, who did drugs and had a small child, absolutely should not have guns. There was a long pause on the other end of the line, and then a reply: “I’ll take care of it.”

When Kurt started spiralling down, I remembered a visit to his hotel room while he was on tour in New Orleans. We were lying on his bed, talking and watching a Pete Townshend concert on public television with the sound off, and Kurt marvelled at how Townshend was so passionate about making music—even after, in Kurt’s opinion, his music was no longer any good. I’d been a huge Who fan as a teen and noted his respect for his fellow guitar smasher Townshend. Months later, I was part of a team working with Townshend on a project about the history of the Who’s 1969 rock opera, “Tommy.” Townshend had helped his friend Eric Clapton recover from a heroin addiction years earlier and was all too familiar with substance abuse. I asked Townshend whether he might have a word with Kurt about beating heroin and dealing with the slings and arrows of fame. I gave him Kurt’s phone number, hoping that he would call and that Kurt would listen.

An appreciation of Nirvana’s “Nevermind.”

“When Cobain was in deep trouble with heroin addiction in 1993,” Townshend wrote in the Guardian , in 2002, “Azerrad asked if I would contact Cobain, who was in constant danger of overdosing. I had chosen this year to give booze another gentle try after 11 years. When Azerrad approached me, I was not drunk, nor unsympathetic, but I did not make the necessary judgment I would make today that an immediate ‘intervention’ was required to save his life.” To this day, Townshend probably wonders what might have happened had he gotten through to Kurt. That’s the kind of thing that haunts people who know people who have committed suicide: Is there something I could have done? Twenty-seven years later, I still ask myself that question. I tried, but perhaps I could have—and should have—tried harder. The thing is, although I was in my early thirties, I was still immature and naïve. Maybe I wasn’t so well suited to the task.

And there were other people much closer to Kurt. Krist Novoselic had known for a long time that Kurt didn’t exactly have a lust for life. In Krist’s interview with the historian John Hughes for the Washington State Web site, he recalled an early tour when he was reading “ One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich ,” the 1962 classic by the Russian dissident novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Kurt asked him what the book was about, and Krist said it was about prisoners suffering in a brutal Soviet Gulag in Siberia. “And he’s like, ‘Ah, and they still want to live?’ ” Krist recalled. “He was disgusted.”

Krist could have been a crucial port in the storm, but, sadly, Kurt had begun to push his friend away in 1990, when Krist told Kurt that he disapproved of his heroin use. They were never as close again. Things got a little better when they were rehearsing before the recording of “In Utero”—there was the excitement of playing new songs, working with the revered recording engineer Steve Albini, and starting a new, more artistically liberated phase of the band. But, by the time they recorded the “Unplugged” show in New York, in November, 1993, they had become distant again. Kurt surrounded himself with his wife and child and a different set of friends, several of whom were drug addicts, and Krist didn’t feel welcome.

In rereading “Come as You Are” recently, for an annotated version that I’m working on, I began to notice leitmotifs that I had missed when I was in the thick of writing the original. Twenty-eight years can give you some objectivity. One of those recurring themes was how Kurt understood that every good legend has a protagonist and an antagonist. There’s a Greek word for this eternal conflict: agon. The protagonist of this particular legend is Kurt Cobain, but the antagonist changes over the course of his story: Aberdeen bullies; the town of Aberdeen itself; Kurt’s mother; Kurt’s father; various drummers; homophobes; misogynists; racists; the band’s previous label, Sub Pop; his own body; “the grownups”; Pearl Jam; heroin addiction; their current label, Geffen/DGC; and so on. For every setback, there is something or someone else to blame, and when one antagonist left the stage he found a new one, usually embellishing or even manufacturing their sins in order to enhance his own victimhood. There was always, as one of his songs put it, something in the way.

This coping mechanism may have started when Kurt was very little and had imaginary friends. “There was one called Boddah,” his mother, Wendy, told me for the Rolling Stone story. “He blamed everything on him.” Another antagonist was Kurt himself: the self that he hated and wanted to die. In legends, the protagonist is supposed to vanquish the antagonist. That didn’t happen this time. Or perhaps it did.

I thought that I was prepared for Kurt’s death, although I didn’t know whether it would come in days or decades. Then, suddenly, it happened. That’s when I found out that you never really can be prepared for such a thing. I don’t remember much from the weeks and months after. I could outwardly function, but inside I felt catatonic and remained grief-stricken for several years. I can’t even imagine what people who were closer to Kurt went through. “The awful thing about suicide is, the person who commits suicide, their problems are over,” the Joy Division bassist, Peter Hook, said, in a 2020 podcast about the band. “And yet yours, and everybody left behind—his family, his parents, everybody else, in every occasion—theirs is just beginning. And they last all your life.”

Dealing with the death of someone you know is always difficult and strange, but that difficulty and strangeness is vastly compounded when the person was a public figure. When a parent dies, for instance, you can dole out the information at a rate you’re comfortable with. You can tell friends and co-workers one at a time—or not at all. They offer their condolences, share a memory of the person if they knew them, say a few supportive words, and that’s it. But, when it’s a public figure, everyone knows right away. If people know that you knew the famous person, a lot of them will reach out to you, even if they wouldn’t have done the same had a relative died. Often, they have a parasocial relationship with the celebrity, an emotional attachment to someone who did not know them. They tell you, unbidden, what that person meant to them. They don’t seem to understand that you did actually know and love this person, and they knew and loved you, and that you’re on a different level of grieving.

Many people asked what Kurt was really like. The more I explained it, the more my answer became rote, in turn pushing Kurt further and further away, reducing him to a few pat, well-rehearsed anecdotes. This went on for a long time—in fact, decades.

There are the people who tell me with absolute certainty that Kurt was murdered. They have seen a movie about it, or read something on the Internet that left them utterly convinced of this outlandish and highly improbable scenario. I understand that people have trouble coming to terms with the fact that someone they adored so much would do this to himself—and to them—so they look for someone else to blame. At first, I would patiently explain that Kurt was deeply depressed, repeatedly telegraphed what he was going to do, and that there was no evidence to the contrary. Explaining this time and time again only deepened my sadness, so eventually I learned to just abruptly cut off the conversation.

The mainstream news media were largely clueless about Kurt, and often tasteless and cruel. In an episode of “The Larry Sanders Show” that aired after Kurt’s death, Garry Shandling’s character is reading the newspaper. “It turns out the electrician found Kurt Cobain’s body two days after he was dead,” he says. “Talk about grunge.” By far the worst was the crotchety “60 Minutes” commentator Andy Rooney. “Everything about Kurt Cobain makes me suspicious,” Rooney ranted. “This picture shows him in a pair of jeans with a hole in the knee. I doubt that Kurt Cobain ever did enough work to wear a hole in his pants. He probably had ten pairs just like these hanging in the closet—all with fake holes in the knee. . . . If Kurt Cobain applied the same brain to his music that he applied to his drug-infested life, it’s reasonable to think that his music may not have made much sense, either.” I wanted to kick in my television screen.

Sales of “Come as You Are” spiked in the wake of Kurt’s death. I felt awful that I was benefitting financially from this horrific, heartbreaking thing. A wise friend reassured me, “Being a good journalist means being in the right place at the right time. That’s what you did. Don’t feel bad.” That made me feel a little better. The truth is, I would soon need the money—I was so depressed for the next few years that I couldn’t work much. The world became like the iris in old silent movies, when the picture closes up into a circle in the middle of the screen, surrounded by blackness.

For many years, if Nirvana’s music started playing, I would quietly step outside until it was over. I never played it at home, either. Hearing it triggered such vivid, intense memories—and feelings of regret. The music’s strength—it really is an open window into Kurt’s soul—only reminded me of all the hints I’d missed, things I could have done and stupid things I shouldn’t have done. But a few years ago, at a loud bar in the East Village with some friends, several songs from the band’s 1991 blockbuster album, “Nevermind,” started playing at high volume. This time, instead of stepping outside, I stayed and listened. And you know what? Those are great, enduring songs played by a world-class rock band and sung by one of the great rock singers. Despite Kurt’s torment—or in a determined attempt to overcome it—Nirvana made life-affirming music. It made me feel better.

Until recently, I hadn’t read anything about Nirvana, either. I didn’t want other people’s reminiscences and speculation to muddy my own memories. “Who put these fingerprints on my imagination?” Elvis Costello once sang. I didn’t want someone else’s fingerprints on my memories. But my strong desire to put my experience with Nirvana behind me was nothing compared with how Kurt felt. “I wish nobody ever knew what my real name was,” Kurt says in “Come as You Are.” “So I could some day be a normal citizen again.” His desire reminds me of a daydream I still have now and then, in which Kurt faked his death. He staged it so he could quit everything, run away somewhere, and start a new, anonymous life. In this fantasy, I’m walking down the street and I recognize him. He’s disguised somehow, maybe with a big beard and a baseball hat pulled down low, but his laser-blue eyes instantly give him away. He sees me, too, but we just nod at each other, smile, and keep walking.

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By Clare Sestanovich

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By Amanda Petrusich

Kurt Donald Cobain  (February 20, 1967-April 5, 1994) was the lead singer and guitarist for Nirvana. Cobain was born in Aberdeen, Washington and helped establish the Seattle music scene, as well as the style known as Grunge. He was married to the Lead Singer of the band Hole Courtney Love in which in 1992 the couple had a daughter named Frances Bean Cobain. In 1994 Cobain committed suicide in his home’s greenhouse, despite all of the rumors spoken about his death the police deemed it suicide and left the case closed until briefly reopening it in 2014.

In 2014, Cobain along with his band mates Krist and Dave were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of fame during the first year they were eligible.

Kurt Cobain was born on February 20, 1967 in Grays Harbor County Hospital in Aberdeen, Washington. His parents were Wendy Fradenburg (born 1948), a waitress, and Donald Leland Cobain (born 1946), a mechanic. The family lived in Hoquiam, Washington. On April 24, 1970 his sister Kimberley was born. In 1976 his parents divorced after 11 years of marriage. Kurt lived with his dad in Montesano, Washington. Both of his parents got remarried and Kurt had step siblings In 1979 he went to live with his mom in Aberdeen.

Kurt attended Aberdeen High School and befriended a gay student there. He later stated he was gay, just to “piss off homophobes. He dropped out when he realized he didn’t have enough credits to graduate.

Later in 1985, Cobain formed his first band “Fecal Matter”, with Dale Crover, Greg Hokanson, Buzz Osborne, and Mike Dillard. The band lasted for a year. The group’s sole recording was issued as the  Illiteracy Will Prevail  demo tape, which remains unreleased officially with exception of the song “Spank Thru”.

Kurt and Krist had a Creedence Clearwater Revival cover band that was not successful. They later founded Nirvana in 1987.

Nirvana Years

During the early days of the band Kurt was very unhappy with the band’s inability to draw in large crowds that lead he band to rotate drummers on almost a regular basis. Eventually after sometime the band settled on Chad Channing, whom they recorded their first album with Sub Pop Records in 1989, titled Bleach. It was however after the recording of this album Cobain became unhappy with Channing’s drumming style which eventually lead them to let him go and hire Dave Grohl in his place. The band didn’t return to the studio to record again until April of 1990 where they recorded the song “Polly” that was to take its place on their next studio album Nevermind that was to be released the next year.

In 1991, of May 2nd through June of the same year the band would return to the studio once again to create the album that would change the Seattle music scene forever. It was during this period the Album Nevermind was created that put out the star single “Smells like Teen Spirit” that became a hit song upon its release. It was this album that pushed Micheal Jackson’s Dangerous album off the number one spot on the Billboard 200 chart. Along with the star single “Smells like Teen Spirit” the album also produced three other top hit singles “Come as you are”, “Lithium”, and “In Bloom”. Upon the release of the album in September 24, 1991 the album opened up a whole new audience for the new genre of music opening the pathway for bands such as Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden. During this period Nirvana was considered the “Flagship band of Generation X” and frontman Cobain found himself reluctantly anointed by the media as the generation’s “spokesman.” Cobain’s discomfort with the media attention prompted him to focus on the band’s music and, believing their message and artistic vision to have been misinterpreted by the public, challenged the band’s audience with its third studio album  In Utero .

Political Views

Cobain struggled to reconcile the massive success of Nirvana to his underground roots. He also felt persecuted by the media, comparing himself to Frances Farmer. He began to harbor resentments for people who claimed to be fans of the band yet refused to acknowledge, or misinterpreted, the band’s social and political views. A vocal opponent of sexism, racism and homophobia, he was publicly proud that Nirvana had played at a gay rights benefit supporting No-on-Nine in Oregon in 1992, in opposition to Ballot Measure Nine, a ballot measure, that if passed, would have prohibited schools in the state from acknowledging or positively accepting LGBT rights and welfare.

Cobain was a vocal supporter of the pro-choice movement, and had been involved in Rock for Choice from the campaign inception by L7. He received death threats from a small number of anti-abortion activists for doing so, with one activist threatening Cobain that he would be shot as soon as he stepped on stage.

Personal Life

In 1990, Cobain started dating Courtney Love after they have met at a club. Two years later, Cobain and Love got married after learning that Love was pregnant with their only child, Francis Bean Cobain. The couple remained married until Cobain committed suicide in 1994.

Legal Issues

In 1985, Cobain was arrested for spray painting the words “God is gay” on a building in a town near Seattle.

A year later, Cobain was arrested again for spray painting. Instead of spraying words, he painted Shaggy and Scooby-Doo have “relations”.

In 1993, Cobain was arrested for assaulting his then-wife, Courtney Love, at their Seattle house. Police reports said that they found guns at the time of the arrest. Courtney Love denied Cobain ever assaulted her.

On April 5, 1994 Kurt Cobain died in his Seattle home. His body remained in his home for three days before it was discovered. The truth of his death remains unknown. Many people speculate that he did not commit suicide and was murdered. Many people also believe that Kurt did commit suicide. However, facts surrounding his death strongly point to his wife murdering him for the money. In a note found in his wallet, he talks about how he hates his wife and calls her bad names. He died from a shot gun wound, but it is not known if he shot himself in the head or somebody else killed him.

“I’d rather be hated for who I am than loved for who I am not.” -Not from Kurt Cobain, True source unknown

“Wanting to be someone else is a waste of who you are.” -Not from Kurt Cobain, True source unknown

“It’s better to burn out than fade away.” -On Suicide Note, but from the song “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)” by Neil Young.

“Nobody’s a virgin. Life f*cks us all” -Not from Kurt Cobain, True source unknown

“I’m a much happier guy than a lot of people think I am.” -From Kurt

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June 4, 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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Your complete Kurt Cobain reading guide: Journals, biographies, and more

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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Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain Paperback – August 21, 2002

There is a newer edition of this item:.

• Print length 432 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Hyperion
• Publication date August 21, 2002
• Reading age 18 years and up
• Dimensions 5.19 x 8 inches
• ISBN-10 9780786884025
• ISBN-13 978-0786884025
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About the author, product details.

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0786884029
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Hyperion; First Edition (August 21, 2002)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 432 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780786884025
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0786884025
• Reading age ‏ : ‎ 18 years and up
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8.8 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.19 x 8 inches
• #635 in Rock Music (Books)
• #637 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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