Kurt Cobain was born in Aberdeen, Washington, in 1967. Despite his strong association with Seattle, he only lived in that city for eighteen months. He spent twenty years in Aberdeen, though, or in surrounding Grays Harbor County. His work and life were shaped by his time in Aberdeen, and he, in turn, transformed Aberdeen.
The most powerful music always comes with a sense of place that informs both the musician creating the song and the listener hearing it. A song’s setting is an entry into our imagination and a way to turn the singer’s world into our own. Sometimes place is specifically evoked in a song’s lyrics, as in Otis Redding’s “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay,” or it may be used as metaphor, as in Bob Dylan’s “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again.” And sometimes a song is set in an emotional place, an internal world with no physical address.
Kurt Cobain wrote roughly one hundred songs, and nearly half of those were either written in Aberdeen or informed by imagery from the city. No song is as closely connected with both Aberdeen’s physical place and Kurt’s emotional connection to it as “Something in the Way,” from Nevermind. The enduring power of this song with listeners—and the lure of the actual physical place to fans—illustrates how Kurt’s work transformed one tiny, real part of the world.
“Something in the Way” uses only nine lines of unique lyrics and is remarkably simple in structure. The chorus repeats the title’s four words, with Kurt stretching out every syllable with a deliberateness of pronunciation that is in complete contrast to how he sings “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” The song’s narrator is underneath a bridge, where his tarp has “sprung a leak,” and he is living off “drippings from the ceiling.” A listener travels to the emotional center of a man who feels his presence in the world is an impediment rather than a blessing. It succeeds because the minor chords perfectly suit lyrics about the universal feeling of disconnection. This was a common theme for Kurt, and a central one in his catalog of songs.
The lyrics of “Something in the Way” don’t actually mention Aberdeen, but Kurt said in several interviews he had written the song about when he was homeless and living “under a bridge.” He didn’t actually “live” there, as the bridge in Aberdeen he was referring to crosses a tidal river, which means the water ebbs twice a day, and Kurt was too sensitive a sort to live outside in any case. Still, Kurt’s explanation became a central one to his mythology, as did the bridge itself. The Young Street Bridge sits just two blocks away from Kurt’s childhood home, a fact that itself says much about how disconnected he felt from his family. The bridge is only a hundred meters long and looks no different on its surface from the road on either side. The underside is visually striking only because concrete pillars rise from the water to stand next to rotted supports from an old pier. The effect is of many broken vertical shapes, askew in different angles.
The Young Street Bridge spans the Wishkah River, a small tidal offshoot of the larger Chehalis. The Wishkah River’s water is muddy, opaque, and always brown from tidal runoff, and the spot also inspired the title to the 1996 Nirvana live album From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah. There are just thirty square yards of riverbank under the Young Street Bridge, enough for a dozen people to sit, but when the water rises, that space is greatly reduced.
Kurt spent some time here as a teenager, where it served as a sanctuary from the world of adults and a place of reflection. Nirvana fans have inflated the legend of the bridge because of Kurt’s stories about it, and because of the many incorrect rumors that the bridge was where he first did heroin. Kurt experimented with drugs in Aberdeen, but probably the most he ever did under the bridge was smoke pot or get drunk.
The underside of the bridge already had graffiti during Kurt’s time, some painted by him, but it has become a shrine of sorts now: every square inch of available space is filled with messages from fans to, or about, Kurt, many in foreign languages. It has become a way station along the Nirvana fan pilgrimage and one of the most popular tourist attractions in Aberdeen. Fans come seeking a part of Kurt, and the tiny underside of the bridge is the most significant landmark they can locate in his hometown.
Kurt is long gone from Aberdeen, and from this world. Still, the Young Street Bridge remains connected to him, transformed by a song.
Aberdeen, Washington, could not be a more unlikely place for a rock star to grow up. It was settled by trappers but became a center for timber because the natural harbor offered easy access to the nearby Pacific Ocean. That fueled initial development, but its remote location—two hours from Seattle—stymied large-scale growth. Most early logging operations were clear-cuts, which felled large swaths of virgin timber and ultimately damaged the habitat for endangered species like the spotted owl. The most obvious effects of the practice of clear-cutting are the huge swaths of stumps that cover hillsides near Aberdeen, unexpected ugliness in a region of majestic natural beauty.
Kurt grew up in an era when the timber industry was already on the decline, and unemployment was nearly twice as high in Aberdeen as in other parts of Washington State. Overfishing and overlogging had depleted remaining resources, and numerous attempts by various entities to develop more diverse employment bases had been mostly unsuccessful. One of the only recent growth industries has been a prison that opened in 2000 and has become among Aberdeen’s largest employers.
When Kurt was born on February 20, 1967, his father worked at a service station. They lived at 2830½ Aberdeen Avenue in nearby Hoquiam, though Kurt was born at the hospital in Aberdeen. The Cobains eventually moved to a house in the northeast part of Aberdeen, near the Young Street Bridge, in a neighborhood nicknamed Felony Flats because many local troublemakers lived there. Kurt himself was arrested twice during his time in Aberdeen, for graffiti and possessing alcohol as a minor.
That “half” address of 2830½ Aberdeen Avenue, where Kurt lived as a baby, would prove to be a trend. It was one of five homes in which Kurt would reside over the span of his life with “half” addresses: they were all shacks or cabins or parts of apartments or converted garages that had been carved out of other proper houses. In that manner, nearly every house Kurt ever lived in, with just a few exceptions, had a something-in-the-way feel, as if they were tacked on to other residences, never true homes—and those who lived there were just on the edge of homelessness.
Aberdeen was itself a city Kurt thought was disconnected from the rest of the world by culture and economics, but sometimes it was literally isolated. The main road into Aberdeen abuts a cliff, and occasionally, after heavy rains, a rock or mud slide blocks the road. On those days, Aberdeen isn’t just metaphorically isolated from the rest of the world—it is physically cut off, too.
Johnny Marr, the guitar player of the Smiths and later Modest Mouse, told me he had a theory that the influential music cities of Northern England and Washington State had commonalities. “They share working-class economics,” he told me, “and the kind of people who live in a rainy city.” To Marr, both Manchester and Seattle create or attract a certain breed of musician, one with an edge. “It’s more than just the gray sky and the rain,” he observed. “It’s more about the attitude. It’s an indoor culture in both those places.” Both Seattle and Manchester are known for guitar-based rock with dense layers of vocals, distortion effects, and drum beats that often shift tempo rather than lay down a consistent rhythm.
And if Marr’s observation on indoor culture is true for Seattle and Manchester, it is even truer for Aberdeen, which gets eighty-four inches of rain a year, twice that of Seattle or Manchester. Aberdeen’s extreme weather has always gone hand in hand with a preference for harder music—garage rock and heavy metal. “By the early sixties, Grays Harbor was a hotbed of garage rock,” John Hughes, the former publisher of the Aberdeen Daily World newspaper, told me. Hughes also observed links between the region and Northern England: “Grays Harbor has a gritty, Liverpool-like appetite for loud, live music.”
The first Aberdeen band to be signed to a major label wasn’t Nirvana but the thrash-metal band Metal Church. Their self-titled debut in 1984 sold seventy thousand copies and was picked up by Elektra Records. Kurt Cobain grew up a fan of that band—he liked thrash, and death metal, too. He also most likely took his frequent alternative spelling of his own name, Kurdt, from Metal Church’s lead singer, Kurdt Vanderhoof.
A bigger local influence on Kurt, though, were the Melvins, who sold very few records in the eighties but provided him the template for punk rock itself. When Kurt first saw the Melvins perform in a grocery-store parking lot in Montesano, Washington (the band took its name from the manager of that grocery store), just a few miles east of Aberdeen, he wrote in his journal, “This was what I was looking for.” He wrote it twice, and underlined it.
The Melvins played around Aberdeen for a few years but made very little money. (Kurt would help get them a major-label record deal with Atlantic in 1993, and even coproduced their Houdini album; one of his first publicly displayed artworks was a portrait of the members of the band Kiss painted on the side of the Melvins’ band van, the Mel-Van.) In 1988 the Melvins left Aberdeen, as Kurt had done just months before: he moved sixty miles west to Olympia in 1987, and it was there where he wrote most of the songs that would end up on Nevermind. Though he’d return to his hometown for the occasional gig or to visit friends and family, Kurt wouldn’t live in Aberdeen again.
When Nirvana rose to international attention in 1991, so did Aberdeen. The city was often featured when the media first began to profile the band. Many Aberdeen residents were not comfortable with the association, particularly in light of the fact that Kurt repeatedly talked about Aberdeen as if it was filled with hicks. In one band biography release he wrote for Nirvana in 1988, Kurt described Aberdeen as full of “highly-bigoted redneck snoose-chewing deer-shooting faggot-killing logger-types who ain’t too partial to ‘weirdo new wavers.’” Needless to say, Kurt did not win fans at the Aberdeen Chamber of Commerce with this depiction of his hometown.
Things soured further in 1992 when Kurt’s drug addiction became news. Though drinking and taverns were central to Aberdeen life, newspaper stories about heroin embarrassed the town’s leaders because their association with Kurt was still so strong. Of course, Kurt’s suicide in 1994 brought the kind of infamy few towns would seek. “Some joked that it was a revolting development for Aberdeen to be famous for Nirvana,” says John Hughes. Aberdeen had already had run-ins with media stereotypes in previous decades. The town’s downtown core was once so populated with brothels that in 1952 Look magazine cited it as “one of the hotspots in America’s battle against sin.” Residents seemed quicker to embrace that ribald past (a local tavern even sold T-shirts that read ABERDEEN WHOREHOUSE RESTORATION SOCIETY) than their connection with Kurt. There were several attempts immediately after Kurt’s death to have something officially named after Kurt in Aberdeen, but all failed outright. One local sculptor created a statute of Kurt, but the city wouldn’t allow it on a public street. Eventually, the statue was put on display inside a muffler-repair shop.
Aberdeen doesn’t have a bookstore that holds literary events, so when I did a reading for Heavier Than Heaven there in 2001, it was held at the library. That was appropriate in a way, as Kurt passed many days of his youth reading books in that building. There was one element, however, that I wasn’t expecting: protestors. One held a sign that said, DON’T GLORIFY DRUGGIES. But this being Aberdeen, with a small-town friendliness even in matters of heated debate, that particular protestor ended up coming to the reading and buying my book anyway. My impression of Aberdeen residents over the years has been a little different from Kurt’s experience. I’ve run into “snoose-chewing” rednecks, but I’ve also met many educated, well-read intellectuals. Many are even proud of their famous musicians.
But not all. In 2004, for the ten-year anniversary of Kurt’s death, the mayor of nearby Hoquiam put forward a proclamation honoring Kurt. The proclamation was essentially a piece of paper stating that Kurt lived in the town as a baby, and issuing it officially would have cost the city nothing. It failed to pass when some suggested it would signal a public endorsement of drug use. “What kind of message is this sending to my kids?” Hoquiam city council member Tom Plumb asked.
In the past decade, that perception of Kurt has begun to shift in Aberdeen, and surrounding Grays Harbor County. “Even the naysayers have warmed up to the idea that Nirvana was a transformative band, and a real source of pride,” John Hughes observed. Some of that shift came as motel and restaurant owners noticed a steady stream of visiting Nirvana fans. Some of the change, I suspect, reflects a wider national trend: as the sensationalistic aspects of Kurt’s life and death fade further into the past, his work becomes the larger part of his current history. Kurt’s musical legacy, easier to embrace for politicians than his personal demons, also brings much needed tourist dollars to the struggling city.
In 2004, three Aberdeen High School students wrote a story in the daily newspaper asking why their city had never done anything to officially honor Kurt Cobain. That same year, one of the newspaper’s writers and a city council member formed the nonprofit Kurt Cobain Memorial Committee. Their first goal was to place a sign at the city limits saying that Aberdeen was the birthplace of Kurt, but that was deemed too controversial. Eventually the committee raised private money to construct a small addition to the existing “Welcome to Aberdeen” sign that would read: “Come As You Are.” The organizers gambled that by mentioning Kurt’s iconic song, and not his name, they might have a greater chance of getting official approval. “We were looking to honor a guy who had said some rather mean things about his hometown and the people who lived there,” Jeff Burlingame, an Aberdeen author and co-organizer of the effort, told me. “Many were not fond of that, nor were they fond of his lifestyle or his means of death.” But the city council approved the effort, and it was installed at the city limits. It has since become an iconic part of Aberdeen’s identity.
Over the years there have been other attempts to construct a more overt memorial in Aberdeen, or to possibly name a street or a park after Kurt. A proposal to rename the Young Street Bridge the Kurt Cobain Bridge was voted down ten to one by the city council. “Is this the legacy we want to leave to our children?” local pastor Don Eden said at the time.
In 2008, a senior citizen who lived next to the Young Street Bridge became frustrated at attitudes like Eden’s and took matters into his own hands. Tori Kovach cleared out a half acre of blackberry bushes from city property near the path to the underside of the bridge and began the process of creating a “park” there with his bare hands. Other locals started to help, and businesses donated materials. This do-it-yourself attitude, which Kurt had as well, is one of the things I admire about the citizens of Aberdeen. A sign was constructed in etched metal that featured the lyrics of “Something in the Way” on it. Kovach told The Daily World he was more of a fan of Elvis Presley than Kurt Cobain, but Aberdeen was overdue to recognize Kurt. “Aspects of his life resonate with me because I was from a broken home,” Kovach said. The citizen-created park stirred some to complain, but eventually the city voted to take it over. The spot is now officially the Kurt Cobain Riverfront Park.
In 2013 a proposal was put forth to the Aberdeen city council to demolish the “Come As You Are” sign. After some consideration, the council voted unanimously to keep it as is. And when the Kurt Cobain Memorial Committee has organized benefit concerts, they’ve been well attended and supported by donations from some of the nearby governments, including even Hoquiam’s. “Today, anyone from Aberdeen who speaks of Kurt in a negative light on social media will find himself shouted down tenfold,” Jeff Burlingame says. “Time, as it does with most things, has softened the spite. The line graph of Kurt’s popularity in Aberdeen, if there were such a thing, would still be heading north.” John Hughes agrees: “With every passing year, Aberdeen has come to grips with his genius.”
A sign at Aberdeen’s Kurt Cobain Riverfront Park also notes that it is one of the many spots Kurt’s ashes were scattered after his cremation. It reads, in part: KURT IMMORTALIZED THIS RIVER. IN TURN, THE RIVER NOW IMMORTALIZES HIM.
Seattle’s relationship with Kurt was, and remains, markedly different from Aberdeen’s. “Seattle band Nirvana” was the description in nearly every story or news report on the band after they became famous. That Nirvana were from Aberdeen had been detailed in local publications like my magazine The Rocket, but as Nirvana became an international sensation, their hometown was often left out of the history. Sometimes when Aberdeen was mentioned in that 1991 wave of press, it was incorrectly described as “just outside” Seattle, when the cities were worlds away culturally and two hours by distance. I’ve even seen it written, likely by journalists who never visited the Northwest, that Aberdeen was a “suburb” of Seattle, something that would cause a howl of laughter to any resident from either of those cities. But to most of the world outside the Northwest, “Seattle” and “Nirvana” were synonymous.
At the start of 1991, though, only one member of Nirvana lived in Seattle, and that was Dave Grohl. Grohl had moved there a month before the release of Nevermind after growing tired of sleeping on the sofa in Kurt’s tiny Olympia apartment. Krist Novoselic lived in Tacoma that year and didn’t buy a Seattle home until Nevermind’s royalties started arriving in 1992. “We couldn’t afford to live in Seattle,” Novoselic told me. Kurt certainly couldn’t afford Seattle rents: he had a hard time scraping up $200 to pay for his apartment in Olympia. When he returned home after recording Nevermind in California, he’d been evicted for back-due rent. He’d just recorded an album that would go on to sell thirty-five million copies, but on the day he arrived home, all his possessions were in boxes on the curb. He slept in his car for the next week until he started rooming with friends, and eventually in hotel rooms paid for by his record label as Nirvana began to tour.
For much of 1991 and 1992, Kurt continued to stay in hotels and crash with friends as Nirvana toured more regularly. His next semipermanent address was in Los Angeles, where he and Courtney Love rented an apartment awaiting the birth of Frances Bean Cobain in August 1992. They had intended to stay in Los Angeles only temporarily, but when California Child Protective Services became involved in their lives due to rumors of their drug use that had appeared in Vanity Fair, they couldn’t move out of the state. They stayed in a few different temporary apartments, but the one they resided in the longest was in the Fairfax neighborhood. Their apartment had a large picture window, but the drapes were never opened. In one of the sunniest places in the United States, Kurt brought Aberdeen with him.
Kurt and Courtney, with baby in tow, didn’t move to Seattle until late 1992, living initially in fancy hotels. They repeatedly ran into trouble with hotel management—smoking violations, damages, drug activity, unpaid bills—and were essentially kicked out of every four-star hotel in Seattle. They rented a house in northeast Seattle for the next year, which was to be their most permanent Seattle domicile. It wasn’t until January 1994 that they bought their mansion in the Denny-Blaine neighborhood of Seattle. It was the first home Kurt ever owned, and it would be the last: he would die in the greenhouse-type room above the garage just three months after purchasing the house.
Seattle was in many ways ideally suited to Kurt’s personality and his moment of fame. The Seattle music scene was created organically—no one imagined it would become as big as it did, and thus egos were left at the door. After Nirvana struck, I’d often find myself escorting visiting New York–based journalists who wanted to see the sights of where this red-hot music “scene” had developed. But there was little to see, as the scene had come together in mostly basements and garages. Almost every other vital music scene in the nation—from Austin to Los Angeles’s Sunset Strip—had developed because of a strong local club circuit. Seattle bands broke through for the opposite reason: there wasn’t a decent club scene. Since bands couldn’t make money playing live, they retreated to basements to rehearse and imagined that recording a single or an album would be their ticket to stardom. It was the very fact that there was no chance of success and riches from playing live that forced these groups to aim higher, to go straight to making a record. And it worked.
When bands could scrape up enough luck to land a gig at one of the handful of Seattle clubs that booked original bands, audiences would inevitably number in the dozens, and everyone in the crowd knew each other. A tribe mentality existed that was insular but also nurturing. Most audience members at venues like the Vogue or the Central Tavern were members of other bands. “We played at the time not thinking we’d be successful or famous,” Soundgarden’s guitarist Kim Thayil once told me, “but simply because we wanted to impress our friends. It was a scene built on friendships, and that’s one reason bands were so supportive of each other and not competitive.” Consequently, there was no place in town for big egos and judgment, and status within the Seattle music scene, at least through the mid-nineties, was afforded only for talent, not for fame or money.
This was perfectly suited to Kurt Cobain’s attitude. Although he desperately wanted to succeed, he didn’t want to be too obvious about it. That was the source of Kurt’s beef with Pearl Jam: he felt that band had sinned by overtly wanting success. In the press, Kurt delivered what would be the sternest rebuke for a Seattle band: he called Pearl Jam “careerists.” (He described them in Rolling Stone as a “corporate, alternative and cock-rock fusion” band.) It was hypocrisy, of course, as Kurt could have easily stuck with independent record labels, but in truth he wanted to sell albums as much as anyone. Kurt, and Nirvana, left Sub Pop and signed with the “corporate” major label Geffen because they wanted the money that deal brought. But in Seattle, “desire” was a dirty word, and Kurt downplayed his.
In turn, even when Nirvana were incredibly famous, Seattleites treated Kurt as if he were a member of any other band, superstar or not. I was in Seattle clubs a dozen times when Kurt, or one of the other members of Nirvana, was present. Yes, muffled whispers would pass through the crowd that royalty was in the house, but no one would dare do something as lame as ask Kurt for an autograph, or a photograph, or harass him in any way. Even when Kurt was a huge superstar, he was given a kind of anonymity in Seattle that he could not have found anywhere else. And Kurt made himself easy to spot: though many in Seattle music dressed in essentially the same uniform—jeans, T-shirts, sneakers—in the last year of his life, Kurt frequently wore an Elmer Fudd–style hunting cap with flaps. The hat stood out on the streets of Seattle, and so did the most famous rock star in the world who was wearing it. But still, nobody bothered him.
If there is one story that most illustrates the essence of Seattle, it came when Courtney decided the couple needed a new car. She didn’t drive, but Kurt had two vintage cars, an old Valiant and a Volvo. So they went out together and bought a brand-new black Lexus. They were worth millions then and could have afforded a fleet of luxury cars. But Kurt drove the Lexus for less than a day before he became uncomfortable with the showiness of it.
He returned the Lexus to the dealership, claiming he didn’t like the color, and got his money back. Kurt then took a cab back to his million-dollar mansion. His beater cars were still parked in the driveway.
If Seattle was the ideal city for Kurt Cobain to be a star, it was also true that Kurt Cobain was the ideal rock star for Seattle. Nirvana’s rise, and the attention that Grunge music received internationally, was perfectly timed for Seattle’s big star turn. The explosion of Seattle music came at exactly the moment Microsoft, Starbucks, and Amazon were all bringing attention to the city. In prior decades, Seattle had primarily been known in business circles as the home of Boeing, and in music culture as the hometown of Jimi Hendrix. The only local band that had found platinum record success before 1991 was Heart. And even though Seattle served as headquarters for several Fortune 500 companies, prior to the nineties its unofficial symbol was the Space Needle, a UFO-shaped icon constructed for the 1962 World’s Fair.
Nirvana was only one band, and one aspect, of Seattle’s coming-out party in 1991, but Nevermind may have earned the town more national press than anything other than Microsoft that year. Record companies began to scour the Seattle music scene looking for talent, and in many cases they found it. “No one can get a seat on a plane to Seattle or Portland now,” said Ed Rosenblatt of Geffen Records at the time. “Every flight is booked by A&R people out to find the next Nirvana.” In the year following Nevermind, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chains all earned platinum records of their own. And the good news for Seattle was that every one of those bands actually resided in the city, and unlike Nirvana those bands deserved the connection.
The particular artistic sensibility of Kurt Cobain also struck a chord with Seattle residents and tastemakers. The city has always appreciated the underdog, the left-of-center artist, the outlier. “There’s something deeper here, less about money, more about art,” Knute Berger, a columnist for Seattle magazine, told me. Berger cites influential Northwest painters Mark Tobey and Morris Graves, poets Theodore Roethke and William Stafford, and other artistic types who were connected to the Northwest’s working-class roots but who were also doing world-class work. Grunge’s ascent gave Seattle a sense that it had a chance to be famous for something other than rain, software, or coffee. “Muddy, mucky, dark indigenous art could still happen here, burst forth, and capture the world’s attention,” Berger said. “Culture and validation: the perfect Seattle moment.”
If there was a moment in time when that validation was most obvious, at least when it came to commercial success, it was the summer of 1994, the year Kurt died. In that year alone, four different Seattle bands—Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden—topped the Billboard sales charts. There has not been a year since when a quartet of bands from one region of the world all scored No. 1 albums. “At that moment,” Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil told me, “it felt like the Seattle Mariners had just won the World Series in baseball. It started to seem like something was happening, not just to me, but to Seattle.”
It was an indelible time, one that has stayed with Seattle ever since. Music became a part of Seattle’s identity—apparently a permanent part, if the last two decades were a sign of things to come. Musicians from around the country, by the vanload, moved to Seattle. Some of them became famous, some didn’t, but an infrastructure of record labels, music attorneys, recording studios, managers, booking agents, and live music venues developed, none of which had been in place in the eighties. The club scene—once so lame that Sub Pop bands were driven to rehearse in basements rather than play live—burst forth and became world-class. Seattle’s superstar bands would only play in those clubs for “surprise,” announced-at-the-last-minute shows, but the clubs were packed every night of the week with all the B-level bands who were hoping for greatness, along with their fans.
At The Rocket we published a directory of working Northwest bands once a year. In the late eighties there were three hundred bands on that list, identifying themselves as “working” bands and not just pickup groups; by the early nineties that number had mushroomed to a thousand. Within those listings were a dozen bands whose members would be next in the long line of famous Northwest groups: Built to Spill, the Presidents of the United States, Seven Year Bitch, Elliott Smith, Supersuckers, Harvey Danger, Candlebox, Sleater-Kinney, Modest Mouse, Neko Case, MxPx, the Shins, Band of Horses, Walking Papers. From that early-nineties scene even came some of the musicians who would later play in the band with the biggest breakthrough of 2013, Macklemore, whose megahit “Thrift Shop” could be the first musical ode to Grunge fashion. Macklemore himself was too young to have been listed in The Rocket’s nineties-era directory of bands, but the man who sings the chorus of “Thrift Shop,” Michael “Wanz” Wansley, was there.
It wasn’t Kurt Cobain who made these bands that followed Nirvana successful—it was their talent—but the ground he broke, and the attention Nirvana brought to Seattle, helped get some of this music heard. Nirvana was a big enough tanker in the water of the music industry that many other bands saw their boats rise with them.
For me, the crystalizing moment that proved that my city was now shorthand for a certain music occurred during a vacation to St. Louis in 1992. A band poster on a telephone poll I saw listed three bands I’d never heard of. That shouldn’t be surprising, given that this was miles from my hometown, but it was the word “Seattle” that drew my eye in the first place. Atop the poster was a banner headline, ten times bigger than the band names, that read FROM SEATTLE.
It seemed absurd to me that three unknown bands could tour the Midwest as long as they made their home address bigger on a poster than their names. In early 1992, even Kurt Cobain couldn’t legitimately put “From Seattle” on a Nirvana poster, but in the public’s mind that little detail hardly mattered. He was “Seattle’s Kurt Cobain” already, and would remain so.