Kurt & Courtney, directed by Nick Broomfield

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Description of Kurt Cobain
by ELLEN COPPERFIELD

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At the age of eleven, Kurt Cobain was the subject of a description to be published in his school's newspaper, the Puppy Press, under the headline, "Meatball of the Month":

Kurt is a seventh grader at our school. He has blonde hair and blue eyes. He thinks school is alright. Kurt's favorite class is band and his favorite teacher is Mr. Hepp. His favorite food and drink are pizza and coke. His favorite saying is, "excuse you." His favorite song is "Don't Bring Me Down" by E.L.O. and his favorite rock group is Meatloaf. His favorite TV show is "Taxi" and his favorite actor is Burt Reynolds.

Kurt's biographer Charles R. Cross writes, "his doodles mostly were of cars, trucks, and guitars, but he also began to craft his own crude pornography." He had many pets. He loved animals, taking care of strays.

When he was eight his grandparents took him to Disneyland for the first time. His mother drove him from Aberdeen to Seattle where he took a plane to Arizona. It was a whirlwind, stretching his experience of the world.



In the second grade, Red Dye Number Two was removed from his diet. He could not concentrate on any one thing for long, and this was thought to be the culprit. A doctor prescribed Ritalin to remedy the problem. Kurt possessed an overactive mind.


The Cobains

Almost every time someone writes about Kurt's childhood, they invent a different way from the last person who tried it. One biography of Kurt describes him "a kind of menace," another paints him as a sensitive artist. It is as if the person talking about Kurt was never themselves young. He was without doubt his family's horcrux: he simply was not very interested in being anything they were.


at age fourteen

He was artistically gifted from the first, but he could not inure himself from criticism. When a peer could not understand one of his paintings, he lashed out at the willfully obtuse fourteen-year-old girl. His mother divorced Kurt's father when he was nine. She later said, "Everybody was telling him how much they loved his art and he was never satisfied with it."

Later, his worried parents would decide to finally send him to a child psychiatrist. He told Kurt to fit in more.



As soon as his parents got divorced, Kurt stopped eating. At the age of ten, he transferred to a new elementary school in Montesano closer to his father. Girls began noticing him for the first time, his blue eyes. He loved television, never found himself without something fascinating to absorb in silence. His favorite shows were Taxi and Saturday Night Live.

He was not happy in his town, and wanted to live with his mother again. She had moved on to an even worse relationship. Later, when Kurt confronted his mother about why she'd forced him to stay with his father, she told him, "Kurt, you don't even know what it was like. You would have ended up in juvie or jail."



His sketches became more advanced. He once showed a sketch of a vagina to a friend, and when his friend asked him what it was, he laughed.


1989

He was probably not ADHD, but he was still on a pill regimen: not just Ritalin, but sedatives, too. When something was wrong he knew where to go. He felt he could not really depend on anyone else. In junior high, he called his teachers racist and got high whenever he could. He avoided school to be alone, not to hang out with friends.


LSD, marijuana, mushrooms and amyl nitrate. Plus whatever he was taking on script.

His parents became even more concerned when, at the age of fifteen, Kurt composed his first short film, Kurt Commits Bloody Suicide, which featured fake blood pouring out of his wrists. He had thought Jimi Hendrix killed himself and wanted to evade the world in a similar fashion.



He stayed with his uncle for awhile, but the man and his wife had an infant daughter and for space reasons, they made Kurt move out. He was shuttled around between other relatives for a time. No one seemed to take much of an interest in the boy. Back in Aberdeen for high school, he was picked on more than he was admired. His still beautiful mother started dating younger men before she married a longshoreman who regarded Kurt as a kind of pestilence or plague.

In his new art class, one assignment encouraged the students to show an object as it developed. Kurt drew sperm. A classmate said, "It was such a different mental attitude. People began to talk about him, wondering, 'What does he think of?'"



When he moved back in with his father, the man made Kurt pawn his only guitar. Kurt left after he had redeemed the instrument, and turned down the Navy. Out of desperation his mother put down a $100 deposit on an abandoned house for her son. One of Kurt's first ideas was to install a tank full of turtles. One of his other ideas was to change music forever.



Ellen Copperfield is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in San Francisco. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about Madonna's adolescence.

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Kurt Cobain Biography, Videos & Pictures
by guitarlessons.com

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.

Kurt Cobain was born on February 20, 1967, to Donald Cobain and Wendy Fradenburg in Aberdeen, Washington. He took an early interest in music; at the age of two he was singing along to Beatles songs. At the age of eight, Kurt was profoundly affected when his parents divorced. According to his mother, after the divorce, her son’s personality dramatically changed. Not knowing how to cope with his parents divorce, the once charismatic Kurt became withdrawn and distant. Cobain recalled this period of his life in a 1993 interview saying, “I remember feeling ashamed, for some reason. I was ashamed of my parents. I couldn’t face some of my friends at school anymore, because I desperately wanted to have the classic, you know, typical family. Mother, father. I wanted that security, so I resented my parents for quite a few years because of that.”

Kurt lived with his mother directly after the divorce, but after a year moved from Aberdeen to Montesano to live with his father. For the first few years, father and son lived in a trailer park, however, the family moved into a house when his father remarried in 1978. In the years that followed, Kurt grew more and more rebellious, despite his still introverted nature. During this tumultuous time, the elder Cobain didn’t know how to handle his son’s rebellion and Kurt was shuffled between friends and other relatives.

When Kurt turned 14, his uncle gave him a choice of birthday presents: a guitar or a bicycle. By this time Kurt was finding escape in strong punk scene of the Pacific northwest, frequently going to see punk shows and even hanging out at the practice sessions of local area band, The Melvins. Owing to this interest in music, he chose the guitar and began to learn a few cover songs.

By the middle of his tenth grade year, Kurt was living back in Aberdeen with his mother. He would remain with his mother until two weeks before graduation, when he dropped out of school after realizing he did not have enough credits to graduate. His mother, angry at her son’s decision, gave him the ultimatum of getting a job or getting out of her house. Shortly after Kurt found all of his clothes boxed up. Without a steady home, Kurt stayed at various friends houses and occasionally would sneak into his mother’s basement to sleep. When he could not find any other place to go, Cobain hung out under a bridge on the Wishkah River.

In 1985, Kurt Cobain’s first serious attempt at forming a band resulted in a project with Melvins’ bassist, Dale Crover, entitled ‘Fecal Matter’. The band recorded it’s demo tape, ‘Illiteracy Will Prevail’, at Cobain’s aunt’s house. Kurt would play guitar and vocals, and Dale would handle bass and drum duties. In Early 1986, Buzz Osborne, also of The Melvins, joined the band on bass followed later by Greg Hokanson on drums. Shortly after, however, the group would disband. Buzz and Dale went on to record The Melvins debut album and Kurt began his search for a new band.

Kurt had long wanted to form a band with Krist Novoselic, whom he had met while hanging out at The Melvins’ practice sessions. Proud of his talent on the demo he recorded with Crover, Kurt gave it to Krist and asked him to join him in forming a band. Krist agreed and the beginnings of Nirvana were in place. In their early days, the duo played host to a revolving list of drummers before settling on Chad Channing, with whom they would record the band’s debut album, ‘Bleach’. Chad didn’t last long, however, and by the time the band recorded their major label debut, ‘Nevermind’, he had been replaced by Dave Grohl.

‘Nevermind’ was, unexpectedly, a huge commercial success. Kurt had a hard time dealing with the newfound fame, which clashed with his underground roots. Being on the national stage meant that Nirvana gained a lot of people who claimed to be fans, but did not acknowledge the band’s political message. Kurt’s lyrics were his outlet, and were deeply personal, he harbored resentment for those followers who called themselves fans but didn’t bother to listen to the band’s message.

Cobain’s future wife, Courtney Love, first met him briefly at a Nirvana show in 1989 and developed a crush on him. After being formally introduced in 1991 and told by Dave Grohl that the two shared interests, Courtney began pursuing Kurt. By late 1991 the two were spending a lot of time together, bonding over their mutual affinity for drugs. In early 1992, the couple discovered that they were expecting a baby, and were married on February 24 of that year. Their daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, was born on August 18.

A 1992 article in Vanity Fair revealed that Courtney admitted to using heroin while she was pregnant with Frances. Courtney claims that she was misquoted, but nevertheless, the incident created a big problem for the family as the Los Angeles Department of Children’s Services claimed that the two were unfit parents because of their drug use. Frances was taken from the couple and placed in the care of Courtney’s sister for several weeks. The couple regained custody, but had to submit to drug tests and random visits from a social worker.

By 1994, Kurt’s drug use was becoming an increasing problem for his health, and the band. Love organized an intervention on March 25 of that year. Following the intervention, Cobain agreed to enter a detox program and on March 30 entered the Exodus Recovery Center in Los Angeles. The next day, Kurt climbed a six foot fence and left the facility. On April 3, having not heard from her husband, Love called in a private detective to find him.

On April 8, 1994, Kurt Cobain’s dead body was found in his Lake Washington home by an electrician who had come to the house to install a security system. A suicide note was found with the body that read “I haven’t felt the excitement of listening to as well as creating music, along with really writing . . . for too many years now.” On April 10 a public vigil was held for the musician at the Seattle Center. It drew nearly seven thousand mourners.