Kurt Cobain: (Mostly) Friendless in Seattle
30 years after the Nirvana headman killed himself, this post offers the context behind his 1994 death.
In 1992, just after moving to Seattle from Portland, Oregon — trading in the latter's Mt. Hood and murky Willamette River for Seattle's Mt. Rainier and glistening Puget Sound — I was invited to a party at the Crocodile Cafe, the downtown nightclub that was the epicenter of grunge.
I knew nobody there except Jim Rose — who ate lightbulbs for a living, being headman of the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow, then the rage — and Larry Reid, publicist for revered local comic book publisher Fantagraphics.
Wandering through the club packed with hipsters in flannel shirts and ripped jeans, searching out somebody who appeared approachable and not finding anyone, I passed a young man with greasy blonde hair surrounded by admirers, and joking with Larry Reid.
It was Nirvana's Kurt Cobain, I figured. Released the year before, Nirvana's first major-label album, Nevermind, was still breaking records, defining an alternative music genre; talent agents swarmed the town, searching for the next band blasting sludgy guitars and coarse vocals and epitomizing the new “Seattle Sound."
I considered sidling up to Reid and requesting an introduction, but that would have been uncool in Seattle: it wasn't Welcome Wagon Central.
I slid into a booth in the front, feeling like an outcast. Minutes later, a second young man with greasy blonde hair, this one wearing a nappy pea-green sweater, dejectedly slunk into the next booth. We looked at each other and didn't smile. Being friendly with a stranger in this chilly scene, especially in the apparent "Losers' Corner," felt as forbidden as snapping photos at the home of a heroin dealer. We sat there like that for quite a while, everyone ignoring both of us, and both of us ignoring each other. I finally left.
The next day when I asked Reid what he'd been laughing about with Cobain, he said he hadn't talked with Kurt. He'd been hanging out with Mark Arm, lead singer of Mudhoney. Cobain was sitting alone in a booth at the front, he told me. Which was to say: Kurt was the other occupant of "Losers' Corner."
I was shocked. The grunge equivalent of John Lennon had been entirely ignored? Forget groupies or autograph seekers, nobody even acknowledged him sitting alone in the booth. At least Jim Rose waved at me as he passed. Maybe Cobain was just in an anti-social mood, but I soon thought something more was at play.
An anti-establishment, anti-money, punk ethic, dominated the grunge scene, I soon realized. A band with limited national recognition, like Mudhoney, was awesome, all the more that their one sorta-hit, "Overblown," slammed outsiders: "Everybody loves us / everybody loves our town."
A wildly popular band like Nirvana, known the world over, however, was not awesome, especially Cobain, who was branded a "corporate sell-out" in Seattle — never mind that the secret shows he started giving were the hot events in town.
A few strikes against him
Beyond garnering riches and fame — neither of which he appeared to want anymore — in a scene that feigned hostility at both, Kurt had other things working against him. Born in Aberdeen, Washington, and spending several years in Olympia, he wasn't a native Seattlelite, which mattered to some. And, as plenty grumbled about, it wasn't until after Nevermind hit Number 1 that Kurt moved to Seattle from LA — with media and scouts on his tail — putting a nonstop spotlight on a town that never wanted coverage.
But his biggest black mark for many was that Kurt had brought his new wife, Courtney Love, lead singer for Hole, with him when he moved to Seattle.
Courtney, whom I’d known vaguely during her days in Portland — when she was notorious for accidentally setting houses on fire — was not widely adored in Seattle, being seen as loud, brash, and rude. Many of his friends from Olympia didn't want to hang out with Kurt when Courtney was around, which she usually was; some blamed her for Kurt's deepening problem with heroin, which she denied.
Their involvement with drugs was the reason they'd recently fled LA for Seattle. Shortly before the birth of the couple's only child, Frances Bean, on August 18, 1992, a new issue of Vanity Fair hit the stands, containing an article showing very pregnant Courtney, looking crazed, posing in a see-through gown; the cigarette she'd been holding for the photo shoot was airbrushed out by order of Tina Brown, the magazine's editor-in-chief.
The article hinted at something more eyebrow-raising than smoking while pregnant: Courtney talked about taking drugs in her very recent past; unnamed sources asserted that she'd been using heroin while with child.
Shortly thereafter, Courtney told me her version of what subsequently happened: She said that while she was giving birth, Kurt was in another wing of the LA hospital kicking heroin. Just out of delivery, Courtney was back in her hospital room when a county social worker burst in, flapping the latest Vanity Fair, saying the county would take their newborn away.
LA County Social Services did just that — granting temporary custody to Courtney's half-sister. As soon as the couple regained custody of Frances, they flew to Seattle to buy a house.
Learning that I was a stringer for Newsweek, Courtney invited me to their suite at Seattle’s ritzy Four Seasons Hotel, where she kept perching lit cigarettes on the couch, already riddled with burn marks. Along with the baby and nanny, we dined at Benihana, where Courtney suggested that I write a book about her, noting with obvious envy that writer Michael Azerrad was working on a book about Kurt.
Back at the hotel, Courtney kept couch-perching cigarettes, which I kept moving to ashtrays, but our interview was cut short by phone calls, including from Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl. Courtney said she had to go — Kurt was on a heroin binge. "I lost my husband tonight — I lost my husband to drugs," she said melodramatically.
Kurt was fine, she told me the next day when we lunched at the Crocodile Cafe with Jonathan Poneman, co-owner of local indie record label Sub Pop. The conversation was dominated by the skin-eating disease Ebola, which Courtney was obsessed with, and the media prank played by Sub Pop’s former receptionist — a stunt that illustrated local hatred of mainstream media and the social binary system of cool and uncool.
When a New York Times reporter called asking for grunge vocabulary, Seattlelite Megan Jasper fed him rubbish. A "lamestain," she said, was grunge-speak for "an uncool person," while a "cob nobbler" was synonymous with loser; "the tom-tom club," was how hipsters referred to "uncool outsiders" and staying at home on a weekend night was "hanging on the flippity-flop."
Jasper was cheered, but I felt sorry for the freelancer who'd been duped.
I was also feeling sorry for Kurt. The local megastar was often trashed.
In that regard, Seattle was the opposite of Portland, a four-hour drive to the south. In Portland, residents were thrilled when locals were nationally recognized — whether it was bands like Pink Martini and The Dandy Warhols or director Gus Van Sant and My Own Private Idaho, or author Katherine Dunn and Geek Love.
Even I’d been a minor celebrity there for my writing: when I entered a bar my whispered name echoed across the room, strangers walked up and lauded recent articles, some quoted entire paragraphs, word for word.
In Seattle, where besides stringing for Newsweek I was soon writing Seattle Weekly's nightlife column "In the Dark by Babs Babylon," I also often heard whispering when I entered a bar. This time it was a dismissive "The Mainstream Media has arrived."
I kept hearing putdowns of Cobain, whose latest album In Utero was dark and a blatant attempt to be non-commercial with its lyrics like I will eat your cancer when it turns black. Nevertheless, it too was a success, fueling a war between Cobain and Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder, each implying the other was a sell-out or not alternative enough.
Through mutual friends, I heard stories of Kurt’s dramatic late-night fights with Courtney involving guns and threats of suicide — gossip that was soon documented by news articles and police reports. He rarely saw his non-junkie friends from his Olympia days and when he did, he pulled stunts, like driving erratically on the interstate — flooring the gas pedal, then slamming on the brakes, and puttering along at 5 miles per hour.
It was none of my business, but I found his behavior alarming and tried to intervene. Courtney had said that she and Kurt idolized author Katherine Dunn — he'd even thanked her in the liner notes of In Utero. I asked Dunn, who I knew well, if Kurt could stay at her rambling 3-story abode on NW 22nd in Portland — the guy needed to be somewhere that was stable and sane in a city that didn’t loathe him.
Katherine agreed to put him up. And Esquire assigned an article — taking a road trip with Kurt to Portland. I anticipated insane maneuvers during the drive, but I was hoping he'd open up, too.
"The only problem is Kurt may kill us en route," I told the editor. "I represent the hated mainstream press and I think he's suicidal." The editor laughed. "Right Melissa, the hottest musician on the planet who's fabulously rich and adored by millions is suicidal! Good one!" My editors from Newsweek had the same reaction whenever I brought it up, which was often.
I faxed a letter to Kurt telling him about the assignment — and the invitation to stay at Katherine Dunn's house – but I never heard back. I doubt he read it, later coming across an article mentioning how he greeted incoming faxes with his trashcan.
In early 1994, Nirvana toured Europe to promote In Utero. I heard Kurt was having a rough time. I also heard that Courtney, in London doing publicity for the upcoming release of Live Through This, was talking about leaving him, that she hanging out with her old flame, Smashing Pumpkins headman Billy Corgan. And if I was hearing that, I figured Kurt was, too.
Around then Kurt took a break from the tour and flew to Rome. Courtney flew there with Frances to meet him. The next morning Seattle's premiere grunge radio station broadcast that Cobain was in a Rome hospital in a coma from a drug overdose. He pulled out of it — returning to Seattle with Courtney and Frances; his management company claimed it was an accidental overdose, from taking sleeping drug Rohypnol while drinking champagne.
"You know that's bullshit, right?" I asked one of Kurt’s good friends from his Olympia days, at a party I threw that weekend. "Kurt doesn't drink. That was a suicide attempt! Now he'll think he's a failure at killing himself."
The friend scoffed. Kurt just had a drug problem, he wasn't suicidal. The band and a few friends had done an intervention on him the night before. Kurt had flown to a rehab center in California. He was in safe hands now, the friend assured me.
“Now he’s going to think everybody ganged up on him and he has no friends!” I said. A fight ensued and the friend stomped out of my party, insisting I had it all wrong.
Three days later news broke that Kurt had scaled the wall at the rehab facility and escaped. I heard he was back in Seattle, frequenting dealers’ houses with a blonde woman — not Courtney. I heard he was buying massive amounts of heroin. The dealers didn't mind selling it to him, but demanded that he not shoot up there, not wanting to deal with a rock star corpse.
On the day that Kurt shot himself — though nobody knew it yet — I got into another tiff, this time with a DJ at the big grunge station, whom I sat next to at a bar. I mentioned I was worried about Kurt.
The DJ shrugged. "Nobody cares about Kurt Cobain," he scoffed.
"I'm sure his fans do," I replied.
"Nobody cares about Kurt Cobain," he repeated.
"I'm sure Courtney and Frances Bean do," I said.
"Melissa, NOBODY CARES ABOUT KURT COBAIN!" he yelled.
"I do," I said. "I care about Kurt Cobain."
No rooster crowed, but the moment was chilling. The DJ turned his back.
So when the DJ's station announced two days later, early on the morning of Friday, April 8th, 1994, that an unidentified body had been found at the Cobain estate, I knew it was Kurt. I called and left messages for every editor I knew in New York —Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Esquire, newsrooms where I knew nobody — saying nobody had yet confirmed it, but I was certain that the dead man was Cobain. And then I left a message for Cobain’s friend from his Olympia days. "You do know that was Kurt, right? They're not saying it, but it’s Kurt."
By the time I got to the Cobain house, they'd taken the body away, but the police soon confirmed what I'd been saying for hours. By the time I got back to my apartment, I had 28 messages — 26 from editors, including several from Newsweek. I needed to file a report for a cover story about Kurt that they were crashing.
The penultimate call was from Kurt’s friend from his Olympia days. "Oh God, Melissa, please stop. That body was probably a transient." The 28th call was also from the friend. He sounded distraught. "Oh my God, you were right, you were right all along..."
4,000 or so turned out for a candlelight vigil at Seattle Center, where Courtney read Kurt's suicide note. Hundreds showed up looking morose at Crocodile Café —including the DJ.
"I suppose you're going to write about what I said," he began.
"Nope. I'm letting you off the hook," I said. "But I'll never forget how callous you were and how people kept trashing him here. It's messed up."
Not long thereafter, I left Seattle, fed up with the compulsively cool scene. And now when I see somebody who’s sitting alone, looking dejected, I usually look over and smile, every time wishing I’d done that with Kurt.
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Then a stringer for Newsweek and nightlife columnist for the Seattle Weekly, Melissa Rossi went on to write the infamous biography Courtney Love: Queen of Noise. Shortly after Cobain’s suicide, Melissa did the reporting for the Esquire article “The Big No,” written by Stephen Wright. Courtney called to say it was by far the best and most insightful article “of all the millions of articles about my late husband.”
As for the DJ, he is off the air and now a successful restaurateur.
Lovely description of a bygone era. I can't believe 30 years have passed.