This is a Call (19 page)

In truth, both Cobain males were lonely, unhappy and unfulfilled. While Don sought solace in a new relationship with a local divorcee, Kurt retreated to his bedroom, seeking escape in his father’s record collection, through which he discovered bands such as Kiss, Led Zeppelin, Iron Maiden and Aerosmith. He took to drawing Iron Maiden’s cadaverous mascot Eddie in notebooks and on his bedroom walls, bestowing the monster with violent, vengeful urges and a powerful presence he himself lacked.

Despite reassurances to his son that he would not remarry, in February 1978 Don Cobain did just that. His new wife and her two young children moved into his trailer park home soon afterwards. Feeling pushed out by the new arrivals, and increasingly starved of both attention and affection, Kurt’s sense of rejection intensified: he decided it was time for him to move on once more. For the rest of his childhood the restless youngster bounced unhappily between both his parents, three different sets of aunts and uncles and his grandparents; in the coming years he would stay with no less than ten different families. But wherever he lay his head he felt like a burden, unwanted and unloved. Shunted between high schools in Aberdeen and Montesano, he found it hard to establish firm friendships and became increasingly withdrawn and isolated.

‘I was a rodent-like, underdeveloped, hyperactive spaz … and I was frustrated,’ he recalled in his journals in later years. ‘I needed to let off some steam.’

In time-honoured fashion, Cobain soon fell in with a group of fellow misfits, older stoner kids who shared his love of classic rock and metal. But he felt ill-at-ease in the group, and was still unsure of his own identity. In the summer of 1983, however, the teenager finally found what he’d unconsciously began searching for, a world which gave him a sense of definition and belonging. This world was punk rock. Years after the event, he sketched out his personal punk rock epiphany in vivid detail in his journals.

He wrote: ‘I remember hanging out at a Montesano, Washington Thriftway when this short-haired employee box boy who kinda looked like the guy in Air Supply handed me a flyer that read: “The Them Festival. Tomorrow night in the parking lot behind Thriftway. Free live rock music.” Montesano, Washington was a place unaccustomed to having live rock acts in their little village, a population of a few thousand loggers and their subservient wives. I showed up with stoner friends in a van … There stood the Air Supply box boy holding a Les Paul with a picture from a magazine of Kool cigarettes laminated on it, a mechanic red-headed biker boy and that tall Lukin guy … They played faster than I had ever imagined music could be played and with more energy than my Iron Maiden records could provide.
This was what I was looking for
. Ah, punk rock. The other stoners were bored and kept shouting, “Play some Def Leppard.” God, I hated those fucks more than ever. I came to the promised land of a grocery store and I found my special purpose.’

The ‘Air Supply box boy’ was Buzz Osbourne, his band Melvins. And this was the night that changed Kurt Cobain’s life forever.

Or so one version of the story goes. Again, Cobain may have been taking some liberties with the truth here. In
Come As You Are
, Cobain told the author that he’d first seen Melvins play at a rehearsal session in the attic of a local house, before they’d gone punk, and were still playing Hendrix and Who covers.

Whatever the truth of Kurt’s initial exposure to the band, there’s no doubt that Melvins, and in particular Osbourne, their wild-haired frontman, had a massive impact upon his life. The teenager began hanging out at Melvins’ practice sessions at drummer Dale Crover’s house at 609 West Second Street in Aberdeen with a group of other nerdy metalhead stoners Osbourne dubbed ‘The Cling-Ons’, so-called because they clung on to every word of wisdom the older teenager dispensed. Among his peers at Montesano High School Osbourne was considered a freak: here on home turf, among the beaten-down, the ill-at-ease and the written-off, he was revered as a philosopher, a rock star, a mentor. And here, sheltering under Osbourne’s wing with his fellow adolescent misfits, Cobain finally found the sense of community and familial security that he so craved in his domestic life.

It was Osbourne who introduced Cobain to punk rock, via a series of home-made compilation tapes featuring bands such as Flipper, Fang, MDC and Black Flag, the same bands Dave Grohl was obsessing over in his Springfield bedroom. According to legend, the first song on the first tape Osbourne handed to Cobain was Black Flag’s ‘Damaged II’, one of the snarling, slamming highlights of the California band’s 1981 début album. The track opens with vocalist Henry Rollins screaming ‘
Damaged by you / Damaged by me / I’m confused / Confused / Don’t wanna be confused.
’ This rage, this aggression, was music to young Cobain’s ears.

On 25 September 1984 Cobain travelled to Seattle with Osbourne and Matt Lukin to see Greg Ginn’s band play alongside Green River at the Mountaineers club on their My War tour. For Black Flag the show was unremarkable – Henry Rollins’s diary entry for the night read simply, ‘Show went good. Throat feeling better’ – but for Cobain the night was a revelation. Though the Californian band were increasingly moving away from the relentless, clenched-fist hardcore of
Nervous Breakdown
towards a grinding, sludgy, Black Sabbath-influenced punkmetal crossover sound, their live shows remained every bit as confrontational and punishing as ever, and Cobain felt at home amid the chaos and violence. This was not Cobain’s first concert – he had watched ex-Montrose (and future Van Halen) frontman Sammy Hagar rock the Seattle Center Coliseum in March 1983 and had checked out Judas Priest at the Tacoma Dome on their Defenders of the Faith tour in May 1984, almost a year on from his ‘conversion’ to punk rock – but the white heat of Black Flag’s performance proved to be a transformative experience. On the drive back to Aberdeen Cobain spoke excitedly of his dream to start his own punk rock band.

Cobain originally fancied himself as a drummer, and had graduated from banging on Chuck Fradenburg’s kit as an infant to playing drums in the Montesano Junior High School band by the time he reached seventh grade. But on his fourteenth birthday, in 1981, he had been gifted a guitar and a 10 watt amp by his uncle Chuck. The guitar was second-hand, Japanese and strung so high as to be barely playable, but Cobain carried it with him everywhere as a badge of pride. He began taking lessons from a local guitarist named Warren Mason, then playing in a band with his uncle, and soon learned the chords to AC/DC’s ‘Back in Black’, The Cars’ ‘My Best Friend’s Girl’, Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven’ and, inevitably, Washington’s unofficial state anthem The Kingsmen’s ‘Louie Louie’. With these cornerstones of rock ’n’ roll in place, he began writing his first songs. The following year, over the Christmas holidays, he made his first recording, at his aunt Mari Earl’s house in Seattle, utilising Earl’s bass guitar, an empty suitcase and a pair of wooden spoons to provide rhythmic accompaniment. He labelled the cassette
Organized Confusion
.

‘Most of what I remember about the songs was a lot of distortion on guitar, really heavy bass and the clucky sound of the wooden spoons,’ Mari Earl told
Goldmine
’s Gillian G. Gaar in 1997. ‘And his voice, sounding like he was mumbling under a big fluffy comforter, with some passionate screams once in a while. Musically, it was very repetitious. As far as really sharing his music with me, and saying, “What do you think of this?” or whatever, he really didn’t do that. Kurt was very sensitive about the stuff that he wrote and he was very careful about who he let hear it.’

‘I told him, “Kurt, you’re totally welcome to use my computer drummer,”’ Earl recalled to English documentary maker Nick Broomfield the following year. ‘And he says, “Oh yeah, I don’t want to use a computer, I want to keep my music pure.”’

One person permitted to listen to Cobain’s first recordings was Dale Crover. Though Kurt had flunked an audition to join Melvins as a second guitarist, their hard-hitting drummer was impressed by the teenager’s rudimentary original material, and encouraged him in his songwriting. In 1985, when Cobain announced his intention to start a band called Fecal Matter with fellow ‘Cling-On’ Greg Hokanson on drums, Crover offered to help out on bass. But by the time Fecal Matter got around to recording their first demo tape back at Mari Earl’s house in December, the Melvins man found himself playing drums too, as Hokanson was no longer part of the set-up.

While clearly indebted to Melvins, Scratch Acid, Black Sabbath and late period Black Flag, the most remarkable thing about Fecal Matter’s
Illiteracy Will Prevail
demo is just how clearly it prefigures Nirvana’s signature sound. Though the seven songs on the cassette are poorly recorded, and often overwhelmed by tape hiss, tinny distortion and peaking sound levels, Cobain’s pit-of-the-stomach yowl, his acerbic, none-more-bleak lyrical obsessions, childlike melodic sensibilities and gift for crafting stubbornly hook-laden punk-metal riffs all shine through the grime.

The highlight of the tape is the feedback-drenched, spiky, ‘jock’-baiting ‘Class of ’86’, Cobain’s acid commentary upon his high-school peer group. But the shape of Cobain’s punk to come is perhaps best illustrated by the churning garage grind of ‘Laminated Effect’, with the 18-year-old lashing out at Aberdeen’s small-town mores with provocative, misanthropic lyrics calculated to offend. Track four, the seesawing cow-punk of ‘Spank Thru’, mocked wholesome teenage love, celebrated masturbation and would remain a fixture in Nirvana set-lists up through to 1992. The sessions at Mari Earl’s house also yielded an early version of
Bleach
-era Nirvana track ‘Downer’: quite why Cobain held back this MDC-inspired politico-punk seether from inclusion on the demo while the noisy but unremarkable ‘Sound of Dentage’, ‘Bambi Slaughter’ and ‘Blathers Log’ made the cut is unclear, but in later years the singer admitted to a certain amount of embarrassment over its sophomoric, angry young man lyrics.

Packaged with the singer’s hand-drawn scatological artwork depicting three flies buzzing around a freshly minted pile of shit, the
Illiteracy Will Prevail
demo created quite a buzz among Aberdeen’s punk kids. With his tongue firmly in his cheek, Cobain informed friends that Fecal Matter were going to be ‘bigger than U2 or R.E.M.’. In reality, the band split without ever playing a gig, but their cassette did earn Cobain minor celebrity status within his peer group, and bestowed a genuine sense of self-worth upon him for the first time. In April 1986 Buzz Osbourne wrote a letter to another ‘Cling-On’ friend from Aberdeen who’d recently moved to Phoenix, Arizona in search of work, hailing his young protégé’s burgeoning talent.

‘Some of [Kurt’s] songs are real killer!’ Osbourne enthused. ‘I think he could have some kind of a future in music if he keeps at it.’

The recipient of the letter was 20-year-old Chris Novoselic. The firstborn son of Croatian immigrant parents, Krist Anthony Novoselic was born in Compton, California on 16 May 1965. In 1979, squeezed out of California by rising property prices, the Novoselic family moved to Aberdeen, setting up home at 1120 Fairfield Street on Think of Me Hill. Krist Novoselic senior took up a position as a machinist in one of the town’s lumber mills while his wife Maria opened a hairdressing salon, unfussily titled Maria’s Hair Design. Though Aberdeen had a sizeable Croatian community – ‘There are a lot of Croatian people here, and that’s why we are here,’ Maria Novoselic told the
Seattle Times
in 1992 – the insular small town felt alien to the family. To teenage brothers Krist and Robert, moving to Aberdeen felt like stepping back in time when stacked against the experience of growing up in California.

When the elder Novoselic boy enrolled at Aberdeen High School, he registered his name as ‘Chris’ rather than his birth name ‘Krist’ in a bid to better assimilate into his new surroundings. A name change alone, however, was never likely to be enough to help the teenager blur into the background: at six feet seven inches tall, young Novoselic stood out among his peers like a cow in a chicken coop.