![Photo by Michel Linssen]()
Photo by Michel Linssen
February 20, 1967– Kurt Cobain:
“I’d rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not.”
I was living in Seattle when Grunge happened and young people around the globe embraced the “Seattle Sound” of fat sludgy guitar sounds, fuzz and feedback. I became aware that the city was becoming a center of American culture. The look of angst & the raw sound jumped to the fashion world & a lifestyle of thrift shop flannel went international with the huge success of Nirvana’s album Nevermind. Amazing, this was 25 years ago.
Cobain’s music reflected his fractured childhood and his disconnection from the world. Cobain befriended a gay student at Aberdeen High School that suffered bullying from straight students. His classmates concluded that Cobain must be gay. Cobain claimed that he liked being identified as gay because he didn’t like people and when they thought he was a queer, people left him alone.
Cobain:
“I started being really proud of the fact that I was gay even though I wasn’t”.
Cobain claimed that he was “gay in spirit”. He also stated that he used to like to spray paint “God Is Gay” on pickup trucks around Aberdeen, Washington. Cobain:
“I am not gay, although I wish I were, just to piss off the homophobes. I used to pretend I was gay just to fuck with people. I’ve had the reputation of being a homosexual ever since I was 14. It was really cool, because I found a couple of gay friends in Aberdeen-which is almost impossible. How I could ever come across a gay person in Aberdeen is amazing! But I had some really good friends that way. I got beat up a lot, of course, because of my association with them.”
“People just thought I was weird at first, just some fucked-up kid. But once I got the gay tag, it gave me the freedom to be able to be a freak and let people know that they should just stay away from me. Instead of having to explain to someone that they should just stay the fuck away from me-I’m gay, so I can’t even be touched. It made for quite a few scary experiences in alleys walking home from school, though…”
The Husband and I used to pass through Aberdeen, 2 hours from Seattle, each time we went to our favorite spot on Washington’s Pacific Beaches. Aberdeen should be, at a first easy glance, a tourist town and arts center with an abundance of quality Victorian houses, cheap boarded-up storefronts, and unoccupied loft spaces. But the town, named for the dreary city in Scotland, has a perpetual grey misty cloud of sadness hanging overhead. In 2005, a sign went up at the city limits, paid for by the Kurt Cobain Memorial, which reads:
“Welcome to Aberdeen – Come As You Are.”
For people in their 30s and 40s, the albums by Nirvana were the first music that they ever purchased. The album Nevermind contributed to an era in music that for a certain person of a certain age has come to have lasting significance because of what was happening in Seattle in the 1990s.
When Kurt Cobain’s body was discovered on April 5, 1994, the world was shocked but not surprised. I had a friend who bought a commemorative shirt with a huge photo on it of the man who once said:
“If my eyes could show my soul, everyone would cry when they saw me smile.”
Cobain was found dead at his home on Lake Washington on that spring day, just a few blocks away from The Husband’s restaurant Plenty (yes, The Husband was once a restaurateur). I was working at his place that day and we heard the sirens and the whirl of helicopters all day long. The staff were arriving in tears, some unable to work.
A few nights ago, we watched the absorbing documentary film Soaked In Bleach (2015). The film gathers together the pile of anecdotal and more conclusive evidence that has long made some fans and friends suspect that Cobain’s death was no suicide, but a murder plot cooked up by his wife Courtney Love. If you think it might be easy to dismiss this supposition as crazy conspiracy theorizing, the doc produces testimonies from various experts, certain that the Seattle Police Department bungled their investigation. The recollections, many captured on audio tapes, from the private investigator that Love hired when it appeared that Cobain had just gone missing, are compelling and chilling. Soaked In Bleach contends that Cobain evidently shot himself to death after injecting himself with three times the lethal dosage of heroin. This leaves the private eye, Tom Grant, and the filmmaker, Benjamin Statler, to wonder whether that was even possible. Wouldn’t Cobain have instantly passed out from the drug? But oddly, the police pronounced it a suicide with questionable haste, allowing evidence to be destroyed or go unexamined. Inexplicably, photos of the death scene weren’t developed for 20 years.
Another documentary about Cobain was released last year, Montage Of Heck, a so called “official film” about the life of Cobain. This one was made with the co-operation of his family. His daughter, Frances Bean, served as executive producer. His parents, sister, first girlfriend and Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic all allowed themselves to be interviewed. Anything Courtney Love has to say about anything now leaves me highly skeptical. Strange too, Cobain’s closest friend, Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl is not included.
Cobain has no grave. His ashes are scattered in the Wishkah River. His fans visit Viretta Park which borders the house in Seattle where he lived with Love.
This world was just too much for poor Kurt Cobain. He would have been 49 years old today.
“If any of you don’t like gays or women or blacks, please leave me the fuck alone.”
I love this song. I would like to cover it. I believe it would translate well into a heartfelt saloon song:
What else should I be?
All apologies.
What else could I say?
Everyone is gay.
What else could I write?
I don’t have the right.
What else should I be?
All Apologies.
In the sun
In the sun I feel as one
In the sun
In the sun
Married!
Buried!
I wish I was like you
Easily amused
Find my nest of salt
Everything is my fault
I’ll take all the blame
I’ll proceed from shame
Sunburn with freezer burn
Choking on the ashes of her enemy
In the sun
In the sun I feel as one
In the sun
In the sun
Married, Married, Married!
Buried!
All in all is all we are…
Cobain
1990
The post #BornThisDay: Kurt Cobain appeared first on The WOW Report.
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