After Kurt's parents divorced when Kurt was only 9 years old, he started living with his dad; Don Cobain. Kurt started to be rebellious towards his mother and sister. It just embarrassed him to death that his parents where divorced. Which at that time in the 60's was not usual. People hardly divorced, so Kurt was really ashamed that this had happend to his parents. As a result, Kurt took light bulbs out of all the lights and locked the babysitter and Kim outside. He became really unruly.
Kurt really wanted to be in a family. Game nights where very important to him. If the others didn't want to play, Kurt insisted to play games:" No, we have to"! He loved to play games with the family and it was really important for him. Kurt always wanted to win, and if he didn't win, he was mad. He wanted to be the most loved. It just wasn't the ideal world that he thought a family should be. So, he decided he wasn't going to do anything anybody said.
Different photo's of a young Kurt Cobain with his stepbrothers and sisters and his stepmother and father: Jenny and Don Cobain. Kurt is drawing and playing guitar.
Don Cobain promised Kurt that he would never marry again. Don married Jenny Cobain some time later and brought in a whole new family and didn't want the old family to interfere with the new family. It must have been really difficult for Kurt to live between two families. First he was the center of attention in his own family, then a divorce, then his mother got different boyfriends. Kurt's sister living with his mother, his father remarried with another woman. She had already kids from a previous marriage and they got some children together. Kurt was in the middle of this, so it's no surprise that Kurt became rebellious and only wanted to do his own thing. He was a talented person and he was sort of like how geniuses are.
He was way, way ahead of everybody else.
Kurt felt for some reason shame about a lot of things. He saw the divorce as a shameful thing. He really hated it. Kurt didn't like to be put down or to be ridiculed. It made him feel bad about himself. He just wanted a mom and a dad and his own family. As every child does.
Kurt at the age of nine already loved anything that had to do with music. He used to put on little plays with his stepbrother(s) and his parents where the audience! They had a lot of fun and so so creative with putting up everything. Kurt was amazing. They had a movie camera en took it in their laundry room. Kurt and Jay (his stepbrother) stared to make the film and show it to their parents later. They would work on it for days. They had so much fun doing that, it wasn't anything he had ever done before.
Aunt Mari Earl Interview about Kurt Cobain.
Kurt Cobain with his nephews, his uncle Chuck and his aunt Mari Earl.
Kurt's aunt Mari Earl is a singer herself. She once gave Kurt Beatles and Monkees records when he was seven or so. She would invite Kurt over to her house to watch her band practice. A country musician who had actually recorded a single, Mari had played in bar bands around Aberdeen for years, sometimes appeared solo and once place second on a local TV talent contest called "You Can Be a Star". Mari tried to teach Kurt how to play guitar and he used to write lyrics, play music and record songs at her house. Kurt didn't had the patience to learn to play guitar, he was hard to get him sit still for anything. He had been diagnosed as hyperactive and been treated for it. First Kurt took Ritalin but he became a zombie. When that didn't work, he had to stay away from sugar and that worked. It was hard to keep him away from sugar. But not being able to have a candy bar hardly dampened Kurt's spirits. Kurt could up every day when he was young with such joy that there was another day to be had. He was so enthusiastic. He would come running out of his bedroom so excited that there was another day ahead of him and he couldn't wait to find out what it was going to bring him.
In December 1985, Mari Earl agreed to let her nephew, an 18-year-old punk rocker, high-school dropout and sometime vagrant who, as a musician herself, she’d always had a soft spot for – using her home in suburban Burien, Washington to record a demo with his new band. It wasn’t the first time Kurt Cobain had used his aunt’s house as a recording studio. Four years earlier, he’d recorded a number of songs there under the name Organised Confusion, using wooden spoons and a suitcase for percussion instead of Earl’s drum machine because he wanted his music to be ‘pure’. That session – full of distorted guitars, heavy bass and “occasional bloodcurdling screams” – had been noisy. This one, lasting two days, took the biscuit.
“They set up in my music room and they’d just crank it up!” Earl later remembered. “It was loud. They would put down the music tracks first, then he’d put the headphones on and all you could hear was Kurt Cobain’s voice screaming through the house! It was pretty wild. My husband and I, we’d just look at each other and smile and go, ‘You think we should close the window so the neighbors don’t hear? So they don’t think we’re beating him or something?'”
Kurt Cobain around thirteen with his aunt Mari Earl.
Kurt felt somewhat unsure and he felt rejected and not part of any family that he so much wanted. It was Don Cobain, Kurt's father that had difficulties to discipline Jenny's kids, because it where not his children. It was difficult for Jenny and Don to do something about Kurt's behavior. Don was picking on Kurt a lot of times and treated Kurt a lot tougher then the other children. Kurt always wanted the biggest cake or the biggest pizza. He was a huge eater for a little guy.
The children where supposed to do chores but Kurt wouldn't do them at times because he was angry an feeling rejected by his family. Kurt picked on the other kids every once in a while but most of the time they could get along well.
Kurt playing guitar at the age of fourteen.
Don Cobain could do mean things at times. Probably because his dad: Leland Cobain didn't gave a great example either. Don could do mean things at times. He would thump Kurt in the head when he was reprimanding him for anything. If Kurt didn't do the dishes or take out the garbage. Kurt was sensitive, not to much, but a little more then the others. Don did this to the other kids as well. Which they absolutely didn't like and made sure Don knew they didn't like this behavior.
A school photo of Kurt at the age of fourteen.
Kurt around fourteen, fifteen with his pets.
Kurt changed a lot when he became a teenager. He used to say that people picked on him but his family never saw such a thing. Kurt was never a bully. He used to pick on his sister Kim Cobain and he loved the reaction out of it, but that is what brothers and sisters do all the time when they are young. Kurt loved his youngest stepbrother Chad. He was so proud with Chad. He loved his little brother. Kurt was so happy when he was born and adored him.
Don Cobain used to do a lot of different sports and played in all sorts of teams. He expected Kurt to do certain things to be a man, or to be a boy. Kurt choice to go into wrestling. More to please his dad. But Kurt stopped doing it because he didn't like to wrestle.
Kurt was always very creative an always drawing and making music. He used to make his own movies and on Cobain’s 14th birthday he was given a used electric guitar. Although it took time to master the instrument, the guitar would become his greatest creative outlet in the course of his life. He played onit for hours, and few things pleased him so much. Although Kurt later suggested that he picked up the guitar and started punk rock right away, his initial musical interest matched that of most other guys of his age: garage rock and heavy metal. The first song he started from to play until the end was Louie Louie ', which had been a regional hit in the northwest twenty years earlier of the Fabulous Wailers. After starting garage rock, Kurt switched to heavy metal. His guitar teacher reported that the song Kurt preferred to play was Stairway to Heaven. His teacher taught Kurt basic chords of Led Zeppelin and bits of AC / DC in a few months. Kurt took his guitar everywhere, just to let people know that he was now a guitarist. When the cheap instrument broke and was no longer playable, he still took it with him. I saw Kurt on the street with it, his friend Trevor Briggs recalled. "He said rain to me," Don't ask me to play anything on this thing; it's broken. " Kurt has always been interested in music, but having a guitar increased that fascination. He subscribed to different music magazine's and regularly read 'The Rocket' , a regional music magazine that cost a quarter of a dollar at the only store in Aberdeen. And although he later went out of his way to give the impression that this was a time when he only liked punk rock, his own diaries tell a completely different story: AC / DC, Led Zeppelin Judas Priest, Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath were the band logos which he then scribbled in his journals when he was expected to do homework. A good example of Kurt's revisionist history emerged when he was already famous: he told reporters that the first rock concert he had ever seen was Black Flag at a club in Seattle.
In reality, his first appearance was that of the everyday combination of Sammy Hagar and Quarterflash at the Center Coliseum in Seattle in 1983. The following day at school, he proudly wore Sammy Hagar's T-shirt he had bought the night before.
Kurt Cobain's horror movies when he was around 15.
Kurt Cobain home movie made in Aberdeen when Kurt was fifteen years old.
Already very creative!!!!!
Kurt created a sarcastic, dark sense of humor in his teens. He was always obsessed with life disease and death which you see reflected in his drawings, art and music. In school, Kurt earned praise and support from his art teachers, venting at his parents' failing marriage with illustrated comics in his journals. "He was constantly doodling," says classmate Nikki Clark. As well in high school as at home. He gravitated toward forbidden imagery, from violence, death and monsters to Satan. Kurt showed a photo realistic drawing of a ****** to seventh grade classmate Bill Burghardt, who responded, "What is that?"
Music started to be Kurt's escape when his life started to get more difficult at home. Jenny and Don Cobain tried to be a very affectionate family together with their own kids and although Kurt was very affectionate, he started picking on the children more. According to Jenny, Kurt could be really mean sometimes, at home and at school. Kurt was really nice but he could be a bully when he was not in a good mood. Jenny talked to Kurt about his behavior which didn't change much. Jenny and Don Cobain decided that it would be the best if Kurt went back to his mother. They talked to Wendy and she said: "Well, I'll give it another try".
Don Cobain: "We tried to handle it as best as we could. But it sort of didn't work out. But there were good times, you know? Everybody has good times and bad times. We tried the best we could. Both of us feel that Jenny and I didn't try hard enough though". When Kurt stared living with his mother and sister again in high school, the conflicts between Kurt and his mother became so extreme that she gave him the ultimatum of moving out or getting a job. After a week, she took it upon herself to pack up his stuff in boxes. Taking it as a message, he moved out. For a while he went living with an uncle and then to another uncle. A few months later he was living with his mother in Aberdeen. Sometimes moved out for a while and crashed on friends couches. Kurt went to a bridge near by his home in Aberdeen by the Wishkah River to smoke weed. Sometimes he sat there alone and sometimes with others from high school. The title of Nirvana’s live album: 'From The Muddy Banks Of the Wishkah' comes from the name of this bridge, and also inspiration for the song “Something In The Way.” Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic later said that “Kurt hung out there, but you couldn’t live on those muddy banks, with the tides coming up and down.” Kurt never slept under that bridge.
Jenny Cobain: Kurt had so much pain that he took it out on his mom and took it out on his dad and is siblings. It's almost as if he didn't feel worthy because he was rejected. And I don't know how anybody deals with having your whole family reject you."
Animation made by a Dutch Illustrator in were Kurt talks about him moving multiple times and talking about his family.
Kurt was experimenting with drugs at that time and used weed and alcohol if he could find any in Aberdeen. Everything to numb the pain and emptiness of being alone, rejected and misunderstood by his family.
A painting Kurt made when he was young.
A dark comic strip Kurt made in his Journals. He was an excellent artist and used his dark, weird view on life to express himself in his art.
A drawing Kurt made of a dark creature in one of his Journals.
Kurt enjoyed creating hand-drawn holiday cards for his family and recreating iconic images of his time such as the Fender logo and Iron Maiden mascots. His art begins to have become less traditional when he was in high school, where Kurt created paintings of abstract landscapes and alien-like creatures. These images showcase that Cobain's powerful, yet disturbed imagination first appeared as early on as he was sixteen. The first documented case of his imagery going more towards an even darker route appears on a Fecal Matter demo tape: ' Illiteracy Will Prevail ' when Kurt was 18 years old and in his first band. The image features a stick man who is hacking himself up with an axe, and the caption above the image reads "Mr Sunshine Hacks Himself Up". This is also the first time we see glimpses of Cobain's fascination with the human body, something that became even more apparent in his later art works as well as his music.
Kurt Cobain began to express himself into different mediums of art, creating sculptures and collages with whatever seemed to intrigue him at the time. Anatomy, as mentioned before, was something that was prominently featured in the art of Kurt Cobain. Dolls and other plastic toys were also a big part of Kurt's art, possibly because of their association with anatomy. Although most of his mixed-media creations could simply be waved off as just being "odd", his collages sometimes reflected a his self-image and his response to becoming famous.
A tape Kurt made and draw himself. He called his first demo tape: Fecal Matter 'Illiteracy Will Prevail '. Kurt became so obsessed with music that Kurt found his own band in 1987.
Kurt's first introduction to Punk Rock.
Kurt Cobain in his teens playing guitar for hours and hours in his room in Aberdeen, Washington.
More pictures of Kurt at his home in Aberdeen. Kurt probably in the living room and Kurt playing guitar in his room.
When Kurt was introduced into Punk, a seed was planted. The first time he learned about Punk Rock was in high school with Buzz Osborne (Who later became the front man for the Melvins) Buzz was older than Kurt but they really got along well. Kurt loved to read the Punk magazines Buzz gave to him. The Sex Pistols and especially Syd Vicious made a big impression on the young Kurt Cobain. He saw Syd playing guitar and saw all that blood on his face!! It was pure Punk! This was before Kurt ever heard Punk Rock. Later Buzz Osborne gave a compilation tape to Kurt with all kinds of different Punk Rock music: Black Flag, Bad Brains, The Stooges, The Sex Pistols and Sonic Youth and loads of other bands. Kurt was rejected by his family but found his true home in Punk. He would play guitar for hours and hours. He became obsessed with music.
It was around 1987 that Kurt met Krist Novoselic. They where around 18 or 19 when they met, and Kurt, a year younger, was already showing flashes of his creative spirit. Kurt loved Punk Rock which triggered Krist's musical interest. Novoselic: "I noticed what a good artist he was. He was working at the time as a janitor, but he'd always have to do some kind of art, usually defacing something. It just came out of him. He had to express himself."
The different Punk Rock bands Kurt wrote about in his Journals.
From The Stooges to the Sex Pistols. The different Punk bands Kurt wrote about in his Journals.
Drawings of Kurt Cobain used in the documentary: Montage of Heck.
Kurt when young, was quite alone, although he was surrounded by family and friends, he couldn't connect with anyone on a deep level when it came to music, art and poetry.
Most of the time Kurt was in his own dark world where he played guitar for hours, or he was drawing or painting. Even though he was young, he was very unique and talented.
Kurt uncle Chuck gave Kurt his first guitar down at Rosevear's music store.
Wendy: "I didn't even know that my brother Chuck had given Kurt a guitar. I mean, I wasn't part of that and then when Kurt showed up, he had, you know, his guitar, and of course we all thought that. Most of the time, Kurt would take up the drums, he was a really good drummer. And it was just summer and a great that day, you know, my little protector was home. He's always been my little protector."
Around 1985 Kurt and Krist Novoselic where playing more and more music wherever they went. In Kurt's garage, in Krist's room. Kurt wanted to start a Punk band.
Krist: "Kurt was an amazing artist... completely original. The best art draws you into it's own world. So Kurt build his own world".
Kurt's demo tape Fecal Matter would go on to disband some point in 1986, which Buzz Osborne said was because “Kurt got disgusted with it because I wouldn’t buy a bass system and so he said that I wasn’t dedicated enough.” The mix tape is a fascinating insight into the mindset of an 18-year-old Cobain, who was still developing as an artist. It proves his knack for storytelling was instilled in him from an early age, it would go on to blossom in the years that would follow.
Although the band had ceased to exist, Kurt was clearly proud of the work he made during his time with Fecal Matter and would go on to pass this to his acquaintances in the local underground punk scene. One person who was a fan of the tape that was passed to him was Krist Novoselic, who particularly liked the song ‘Spank Thru’.
"Kurt asked me if I wanted to be in a band with him and gave me that fecal matter tape. I listend to it and thought, "Hey, this is really good". I thought it was cool. So I went: "Yeah, let's do it". Then we worked to put the ensemble together, find a drummer... and a drum set".
The original lineup, consisting of Kurt Cobain on guitar and vocals, Krist Novocelic on bass, Dale Crover on drums—managed one show supporting The Melvins in December 1985, at the Spot Tavern in Moclips. Kurt was a high school drop-out and social outcast with a lot of pent up anger. While using music as a method of escapism was a common trend throughout his life, but during his time in Fecal Matter, music was all that mattered to him. The band would record at Cobain’s aunt Mari Earl’s house in suburban Burien, Washington where they created their one and only demo that you can still listen to today.
Fecal Matter Demo Tape - Illiteracy Will Prevail.
Kurt's home in Aberdeen where he lived with his mother and sister.
Tour of Aberdeen, Kurt's hometown and a tour through the house he grew up in.
In 1987 the duo started the band Nirvana. That year they had their first performance at Evergreen State College in Olympia, a place near their hometown of Aberdeen.
Nirvana - Rehearsal in Krist Novoselic's mother's house, Aberdeen 1988
Cobain’s aunt would speak about that period the band spent at her home some years later where she revealed: “They set up in my music room and they’d just crank it up! It was loud. They would put down the music tracks first, then he’d put the headphones on and all you could hear was Kurt Cobain’s voice screaming through the house! It was pretty wild.”
She added: “My husband and I, we’d just look at each other and smile and go, ‘You think we should close the window so the neighbors don’t hear?
"Kurt always needed something artistic".
Wendy O 'Conner: When did I kick him out? That was tough - love days. Everybody was playing tough - love parenting. And I wish that phase never would have come in. Later I apologized to him a million times. He said: "Mom, please don't apologize. I was a bad ass. I was lazy, sleeping all day, living off of you, didn't finish school . What you did was exactly the right thing".
"So he went to live with a friend from school and his mother. She called me and said: "Wendy, you know, I've got your son here living at my house". And I said:" Well, good luck, you know? All I wanted him to do was get a job and maybe get up before noon. So if you want to keep him in this condition, keep him. But if you need to kick him out, do it".
After living with different family members and friends for some months, Kurt, now 19 years of age, tried to get a job as a janitor. He was the janitor of his former high school. Kurt found a small apartment to live in. He loved animals and kept small turtles in a terrarium he specially built for them. He lived only six blocks away from home and their old grocery store.
Krist Novoselic: "I think I was eighteen, or nineteen-years-old, and Kurt was, like, seventeen when we met. He loved Punk rock music and so that piqued my interest. And he wasn't a mainstream person-he was a true counter culture person. I just thought he was easy going, and very talented. Kurt had a guitar and a guitar amp. And then I noticed what a good artist he was. He was working at the time at these resorts out in Ocean Shores, and he was a janitor. And again, he'd always have to, like, do some kind of art, usually defacing something."
One of Nirvana's first performances, January 24th, 1988, RadioShack, Aberdeen, WA.
It was at this time that Kurt met Tracy Marander. Tracy Marander was Kurt’s first real girlfriend in January 1987. Tracy was living in Olympia, Kurt was still in Aberdeen, but would shortly move there to be with her. Tracy went to work to pay their rent and put food on their table, Kurt stayed home to practice his music and his art, bridling at the suggestion that he should help tidy their apartment while she was out earning money to support them both.
Kurt and Tracy lived three years together in Olympia, Washington. They had a relationship from around January 1987 until May 1990.
Tracy still has some artwork of Kurt. Her collection consists of four paintings and an oil pastel, all made when Kurt was in his early 20's, before the world knew the word "grunge." One painting depicts a white skeletal figure with knees upraised--a self-portrait with a touch of tortured German expressionism. "Kurt always thought he was too skinny," she says. Other subjects include fetuses, a homeless man and even Charles Manson. "He didn't paint happy-looking flowery stuff." The other thing she kept from Kurt is a deteriorating fetus – that suggest the rock star's lifelong despondency.
A painting of Kurt which is supposed to be himself. Kurt thought that he was way to skinny. The painting represents a pale and emaciated figure with a long neck set against a colorful, psychedelic background. The painting belongs now to Tracy. She showed the painting in Nick Broomfields terrible documentary: Kurt and Courtney.
Kurt and Tracy photo's
Kurt and Tracy's house in Olympia
Kurt and Tracy's house front door
Kurt in the kitchen, probably making macaroni and cheese. As that is what he loved to eat!
Kurt being photographed in his kitchen in Olympia.
In that same year in 1988, Chad Channing joined Nirvana as a drummer, and things began to change for the band. With the Sub Pop deal — little more than a handshake promising minimal recording costs to cut a single — and a handful of shows in Seattle, they seemed to have momentum, or so Kurt Cobain, age 20, argued. In his journals, he wrote several bios for what he called “our little band,” revising them as soon as he had any new nugget of good news. Still, the breaks came slower than he would have liked, and it wasn’t until November of 1988 when Sub Pop finally released the “Love Buzz” single.
When Tracy complained that he’d written songs about everything but her, he took his first stab at crafting a love song. While listening to Meet the Beatles, he sat in his bathtub and wrote out an argument he’d had with Tracy the week before, turning the dialogue into a song called: 'About a Girl' She only learned later that the song was about her.
Around the same time, Kurt wrote “Negative Creep,” which was more typical of the period. Most Nirvana songs were structured around guitar chords, rather than driven by lyrics, and “Negative Creep” had only ten lines, though each was repeated three times. Other than the chorus of “Daddy’s little girl ain’t a girl no more,” repeated twenty-seven times, few of the lyrics were decipherable. Kurt went into the recording studio without having completed the song, and once the tape was rolling, he ended several couplets with a screaming whine that was fast becoming his vocal trademark and the signature of the band’s sound. The songs were undeniably catchy, but their meanings were a mystery even to Kurt’s bandmates.
Though Kurt was writing at a faster pace than ever before, Sub Pop’s financial problems held up the recording of a real album. He had expected his band to have two albums out already, and all Sub Pop had done was issue the single. Frustrated, Kurt began to send out demo tapes to other labels. With one package, Kurt included a handwritten bio that noted Nirvana was “willing to compromise on material. Tour any time forever. Hopefully the music will speak for itself. Please reply.” He had previously railed against compromise, but the long delay had made him increasingly desperate.
In December 1988, Sub Pop finally managed to budget for recording costs, and the band cut their first album with producer Jack Endino. Kurt debated a number of titles including Mandatory Breeding Laws, All Humans Are Stupid, and Ashamed to Be a Human. The one he liked best was Too Many Humans, which reflected his pessimistic view of overpopulation. Sub Pop axed that idea, so Kurt decided to name it Bleach. Named after a syringe that you clean with bleach afterwards. Kurt had not experimented with hard drugs at this time, but was always attracted to heroin in some way. For a design, the group decided to use a band photo Tracy had taken, but to print it in negative. The cover was also meant to be a play on “Negative Creep,” but few would have gotten that joke.
Bleach was released on June 15, 1989, whereupon the band undertook their first tour of the United States. Over the next three years, a season did not go by without Nirvana hitting the road. Their lives became structured around tours and shows, and it was the income from touring that kept them alive. College radio had picked up a few of the songs from Bleach, and though their first few tours lost money, they soon began to sell enough T-shirts to make a small profit.
During most of 1988, Kurt waited for Sub Pop to act, for the band to get more shows, for the new lineup to jell, or for Tracy Marander, the girlfriend he had moved from Aberdeen to live with, to come home from work.
Although Kurt toured with the band from time to time around 1988, he was still primarily living off Tracy, but now he had a few extra dollars for his own. When he wasn’t touring, he stayed at home and watched television or worked on a variety of art projects. He’d begun to haunt Olympia’s many thrift stores, and he started to buy anything weird and cheap that struck his fancy. He had a particular fascination with board games, which he could usually buy for less than a dollar. He wasn’t interested in Sorry! or Scrabble, but if the game was a knockoff of a bad TV show, he’d buy it. The castoffs of sixties culture became his fixation: He bought an Archie Bunker board game, an Adam-12 game and an A-Team game. He became a curator of the absurd debris of American pop culture. He bought a cheap tapestry of Elvis and then doctored it by putting makeup in the style of Alice Cooper on Elvis’s face; he then rechristened it “Elvis Cooper.” The band hung the Elvis Cooper tapestry behind them during some shows, and it became a hit with their then-tiny audiences. Everything Kurt created or bought was abnormal in a way or was soon made that way through his doctoring. Kurt shaped the organized confusion that was his life and art.
Kurt’s interest in painting re-emerged that summer, and since he couldn’t afford real canvas, he often used the backs of these old board games. He found that the stiff cardboard held acrylic paint well. He also occasionally bought cheap framed paintings at the thrift store and then repainted the canvases or altered them in some way. Sometimes he’d simply take the store-bought painting and paint words over it. One of his neighbors who admired his paintings offered to pay Kurt to re-create a dream she’d had. “How much do you charge?”
the neighbor asked him. He had no idea, but he told her for ten dollars he could buy a canvas. She gave him the money and then described the dream, which was of a woman eating a dead animal. It took him a few days, but he captured her vision. It helped that most of Kurt’s paintings were already ethereal and dreamlike, and that flesh-eating creatures were part of his oeuvre. The same neighbor once discovered him painting in the garage and noticed that the work glistened. She asked him what created the varnish effect. He matter-of-factly told her he’d masturbated and applied his semen as a final coat. “My seed is on this painting,” he announced it as if he were describing a shade of color.
Painting made by Kurt Cobain
Sexuality remained a theme at the center of his art. He would search thrift stores for old medical texts, and then cut out anatomy pictures to create a collage. He decorated his refrigerator with pictures of diseased vaginas interspersed with photos of meat clipped from newspaper ads. If a headline appeared in the newspaper that had a double entente (such as “Trojans beat Beavers”), he would clip it out and add it to the ever-evolving work. Collage was his favorite art form, and newspaper and magazine clippings were applied to anything flat he could find — a canvas, the refrigerator or the wall.
Artwork made by Kurt Cobain. A collection of meat and Chim-Chim. Kurt's deformed monkey from another dimension. Kurt made photo collections of meat and deformed it just as his dark, disturbed mind wanted it to be. sometimes he used female body parts in his art. When his artwork was finished, he put it on the refrigerator.
Kurt's collage of meat and puppets
Kurt also experimented with animated collage in the form of video editing: When Tracy bought a VCR, it became Kurt’s favorite household appliance. He liked to tape clips from MTV, but mostly he filled countless inexpensive VHS tapes with late-night commercials and scenes from sixties reruns. He imagined that one day these video collages would be valuable. He recorded them all on economy mode, however, so even when he tried to play them back, they were distorted.
Though the VCR had been a bonding addition to their household, by late 1989, the relationship between Kurt and Tracy began to show strains. He was often gone touring,and while she truly was the biggest supporter Nirvana had — both financially and morale wise — living with Kurt wasn’t easy for her. One of the other things they had in common was their love of animals, and their pets included turtles, rats, cats and a rabbit. Kurt had nicknamed the apartment the “Animal Farm,” and one visitor noted that it smelled “like a vivisection lab.” Their menagerie required much care, and Kurt frequently was lax in cleaning their many pet cages; this and his other housekeeping lapses became relationship issues.
Kurt and his cat's
Kurt and his turtle
Kurt’s interest in femininity, however, was more confined to the porcelain dolls he collected or the stolen statues of the Virgin Mary he looted from cemeteries. For her birthday that year, he gave her an Iron Butterfly album. It wasn’t just any album, though; he’d painted an image of Batman on it and tied to it a naked Barbie doll with a noose around its neck. To Kurt, this was romance.
One of Kurt's Virgin Mary creations. He probably found the statue in a store but who knows if he had stolen it from a cemetery. How dark poetic is that?
Another issue between them was simply how much stuff Kurt had acquired on his thrift-store jags. “He had this clutter thing,” remembered Krist Novoselic, Kurt’s friend and Nirvana band mate. “His whole house was cluttered, and there were things everywhere.” Tracy urged him to clean up, and repeatedly left him notes suggesting he do so. He ignored them, for the most part, and instead brought home more stuff. They had moved to a larger apartment in the same converted house, but Kurt quickly had packed the larger space with his ever-growing treasury.
Kurt Cobain Filming His Art
Kurt and Tracy's apartment, Olympia, WA, January 21st, 1991
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Nirvana's first tour of Europe commenced around the same time, escaping the stress at home in late 1989, but also giving Kurt a distraction. Nirvana found, much to the band members’ surprise, that they had a following in Europe. The British music tabloids were always looking for a new star to tout, and Sub Pop’s Mudhoney was the 1989 model of the year. While most of the early press on the Seattle grunge scene contained only anecdotal coverage of Nirvana, and many times it was unflattering reporting, calling them “hicks,” there was enough ink on Sub Pop that fans came to see Nirvana out of curiosity. They were certainly improving as a band live.
(more coming soon!)
Get Ready For Part 3!!
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