Kurt Cobain: Aberdeen Made Him and Could Not Keep Him

Kurt Donald Cobain was born on February twentieth, nineteen sixty-seven, at Grays Harbor Hospital in Aberdeen, Washington. Aberdeen was a timber and fishing town of about eighteen thousand people on a gray estuary at the southern edge of the Olympic Peninsula. The economy that had built it was already, in nineteen sixty-seven, beginning a slow contraction that would accelerate over the next twenty-five years.

His parents divorced when he was nine. He was passed between relatives. He did poorly in school, started drawing and playing guitar, and was passed between relatives some more. He spent at least some nights sleeping rough in Aberdeen, near the Young Street Bridge over the Wishkah River. A song he wrote in nineteen ninety-one, 'Something in the Way,' describes a man living under a bridge, catching animals for food. Cobain later said the circumstances were somewhat exaggerated for the song. The displacement, the sense of having no floor, was real enough.

He formed Nirvana in Aberdeen in nineteen eighty-seven with Krist Novoselic. The band moved to Olympia, then to Seattle, then to international attention when their second album, Nevermind, went to number one in January of nineteen ninety-two. For two years Cobain was one of the most famous musicians in the world. He was also struggling with chronic pain, a heroin dependency, and a sense of dislocation that fame, by most accounts, deepened rather than resolved.

He was found dead at his home in Seattle on April eighth, nineteen ninety-four. The medical examiner placed the date of death at approximately April fifth. He was twenty-seven years old.

Aberdeen put up a sign at the Young Street Bridge in two thousand one. It reads: 'Come as you are.' The town that produced him displays his name on tourism infrastructure. The conditions that produced him, the economic contraction, the working-class households with no margin, the social isolation that a certain kind of child experiences as unbearable, were not much changed.