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  Jesse Reed, who was also a musician, invited Krist over one day to jam with him and Kurt. “You could say that the roots of Nirvana began in our house,” says the elder Reed, himself a former musician who had played in a group called the Beachcombers with Kurt’s uncle Chuck. “Kurt was really into his music; he practiced all the time and he was writing a lot of songs. He wanted to be a star. He said it all the time.” A former member of the Beachcombers had gone on to become a promo man for Capitol Records in Seattle, and after Kurt learned of Reed’s connection, he became obsessed with meeting the executive and launching a music career.

  Before long, Kurt’s flirtation with Christianity waned, he resumed smoking pot and an indignant Dave Reed eventually threw him out when Kurt broke a window one night after he had lost his key. But a small miracle had happened while he was there. Kurt began to believe that he could get out of Aberdeen and that his escape route might be rock and roll. Before long, he and Krist had formed a band with a drummer friend named Aaron Burckhard, rehearsing constantly in a room above the downtown beauty salon operated by Krist’s mother.

  By the end of our weekend in Kurt’s hometown, we had come no closer to determining whether the rejection and alienation of his dysfunctional youth had led inexorably to his self-demise. To each person we interviewed who had known him when he was young, we posed the question. Each in turn said they saw no real signs of self-destruction but blamed whatever happened after he left, perhaps unwilling or unable to indict the community to which they still clung. With the exception of Kurt’s first guitar teacher, Warren Mason, who said he “just couldn’t see himself doing that at that point in his life,” none doubted that he had killed himself. Dave Reed tells us to look elsewhere if we ever hope to make sense of Kurt’s death, saying, “It was his fame that killed him.”

  Kurt Cobain had always wanted to be famous. That was the one thing virtually everybody we talked to in his hometown agreed on. When he finally got his wish in 1991, it was and wasn’t what he’d expected.

  He finally escaped Aberdeen for good in 1987, shortly after his twentieth birthday. He had moved to the state capital, Olympia, thirty miles up the road, to live with his first serious girlfriend, Tracy Marander, and discovered what would later be described as his “spiritual mecca”—the ultrahip college town where the bohemians actually outnumbered the rednecks. By the time Kurt moved to Olympia, the band he and Krist had formed in Aberdeen had already played a few gigs under a number of incarnations, including “Skid Row,” “Ted Ed Fred” and “Fecal Matter.” They were beginning to attract a small following.

  When he wasn’t practicing his music, Kurt continued to dabble in art, creating surreal landscapes covered with fetuses and mangled animals or, memorably, a collage of photos of diseased vaginas that he’d found in medical textbooks.

  With money Kurt saved from a part-time janitorial job, the band was able to record a demo at the studio of a former navy engineer named Jack Endino, who was impressed by Kurt’s distinctive vocals and the band’s hard-edged sound. Endino passed the demo to a friend named Jonathan Poneman, the head of a new Seattle indie label called Sub Pop. Around this time, the band finally settled on a permanent name. The story goes that Kurt had discovered Buddhism after watching a TV show about Eastern religions and was enchanted by the idea of transcending the cycle of human suffering. He especially liked the name the Buddhists gave to the concept of ultimate enlightenment: Nirvana.

  By this time, he had also discovered a new drug. Since he was a teenager, Kurt had experienced intermittent stomach pains that would send him into paroxysms of agony without any warning. He saw an endless series of medical specialists, but doctors were at a loss to explain what was causing the problem, which he later described toDetails magazine: “Imagine the worst stomach flu you’ve ever had, every single day. And it was worse when I ate, because once the meal would touch that red area, I would hyperventilate, my arms would turn numb, and I would vomit.” He had been offered heroin on a number of occasions, but he had always refused, in part because he was afraid of needles. For the most part, he still confined his drug use to pot, Percodan and magic mushrooms.

  By the time he moved to Olympia, the stomach pain was unbearable. A local heroin dealer called Grunt told him that opiates were the ultimate painkiller. Krist Novoselic, who was himself battling alcoholism at the time, later recalled telling Kurt he was “playing with dynamite” after Kurt called to tell him he had just done heroin for the first time.

  “Yeah, he did it a few times back then, because he said it was the only thing that could get rid of the pain,” confirms Kurt’s best friend, Dylan Carlson, whom he first met in Olympia and who was himself a junkie. “But it wasn’t a habit or anything, at least not back then.”

  Things were looking up. When Kurt heard that Sub Pop had agreed to record the band’s first single, “Love Buzz,” he ran into the streets yelling, “I’m going to be a rock star! Nirvana rules!” An album followed, titledBleach, after the substance junkies employ to clean their needles so they can be reused.Bleach was recorded for a grand total of $606.17 at Endino’s studio. By this time, the struggling Sub Pop cofounders, Jonathan Poneman and Bruce Pavitt, already deep in debt, had decided that if the Seattle Sound, or “grunge” as it would soon be known, was going to find a wider audience, it would be necessary first to create a buzz in the UK. That’s how Seattle’s most famous rock-and-roll descendant, Jimi Hendrix, had first made a name for himself two decades earlier.

  In the United States, alternative music was still a fringe movement, confined to college radio stations and seedy clubs. The Sub Pop founders were determined to change that, borrowing money to fly in Everett True of the influential London music magazineMelody Maker to showcase their label’s talent. They couldn’t possibly have imagined how much this gambit would pay off. True would later become known as the “godfather of grunge” for his series of articles profiling Sub Pop and the burgeoning Seattle music scene. It may even have been True’s seal of approval that started the train rolling for Nirvana, which he described in an article as “the real thing. No rock star contrivance, no intellectual perspective, no master plan for world domination…. Kurdt [sic] Cobain is a great tunesmith, although still a relatively young songwriter. He wields a riff withpassion.” The music press descended on the city to see what all the fuss was about, and grunge, as the local music paperThe Rocket described it, had soon “surpassed the status of a happening regional scene to become a worldwide fashion craze.”

  The mainstream music industry began to pay attention. A & R reps swept through town, cash and contracts in hand, looking to capitalize on what everyone was sure was the next wave in music. Although a number of critics were decidedly unimpressed withBleach—Rolling Stone described it as “undistinguished…relying on warmed over 70’s riffs”—others declared Cobain a genius. Kurt was loving every second of it, recalls his best friend, Dylan, himself a struggling musician: “He kept saying they were going to be bigger than the Beatles. Everybody knew they were getting signed, and believe me, they were getting off on it. When you dream of being a rock star and it finally happens, I guess nothing really beats it.”

  WhenNevermind, Nirvana’s second album, vaulted past Michael Jackson’sDangerous in December 1991 to occupy number one on theBillboard charts, music journalists scrambled for an explanation. How could a supposedly alternative band sell three million albums in four months? A year earlier, the band had signed an unprecedented deal with Geffen Records that gave Nirvana complete creative control. It wasn’t the million-dollar advance that other labels were offering, but Kurt and his bandmates were ecstatic. They had been spared the noose of corporate rock they all feared when the majors came courting following the explosion of the Seattle music scene during the late 1980s. They would be able to make the kind of album they wanted to make, not the overproduced commercial “crap” they had so often scorned—at least in the company of their indie rock friends. They could hand in a sixty-minute tape of the band defe
cating and Geffen would have to release it, Kurt joked. What they actually did instead was go into the studio and record an inspired punk ode to the band’s pop roots, an album that would soon be recognized as a masterpiece. It still sounded like noise to most people over thirty, the feedback and hard-driving guitar drowning out the catchy musical bridges unless you listened closely enough.

  “We got more attention [than other alternative bands] because our songs have hooks and they kind of stick in people’s minds,” said Kurt, attempting to explain the album’s success. Indeed, each member of Nirvana claimed the Beatles as his favorite group, and it showed. But it was the lyrics—on topics as daring and diverse as rape and religious zealotry—that tapped into the angst of an American youth alienated by a decade of Republicans in the White House and the recently fought Gulf War, which some theorize readied a generation for the rebellion of alternative music. The angry, culture-shifting single “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” played ad nauseam on rock radio and MTV, was instantly hailed as the anthem of Generation X, and Cobain its voice. “This was music by, for, and about a whole new group of young people who had been overlooked, ignored or condescended to,” wrote Michael Azerrad.

  Still, this kind of success wasn’t supposed to happen. Had Nirvana sold out? It was a question being asked by many of Kurt’s old punk rock friends, and he was acutely sensitive to it. He had a simple explanation: “We didn’t go to the mainstream, the mainstream came to us.” Later he would tell interviewers that he hated the album, that it was the kind of album he himself would never listen to and that it was “too slick-sounding.” But the poppy hooks were no accident. Nirvana had unstinting creative control overNevermind. Kurt’s entourage—who knew he listened to his favorite album,Abba Gold: Greatest Hits, almost constantly while touring—were well aware just how absurd his protestations were.

  The most ironic by-product of the album’s success was the acquisition of a brand-new fan base largely consisting of what Kurt would describe as the “stump dumb rednecks that I thought we had left behind in Aberdeen.” Indeed, the crowds at the band’s sold-out concerts were almost indistinguishable from the fans at a Guns n’ Roses concert. So embarrassing was this turn of events that Kurt would use the liner notes of his next album to warn the homo-phobes, the racists and the misogynists in Nirvana’s audience “to leave us the fuck alone.”

  As if to underscore Leland’s claim that his mother didn’t have any use for Kurt until he became famous, Wendy wrote a letter to the local Aberdeen newspaper shortly afterNevermind hit the charts, sounding like a doting mother whose son had just left the nest for the first time. “Kurt, if you happen to read this, we are so proud of you and you are truly one of the nicest sons a mother could have. Please don’t forget to eat your vegetables or brush your teeth and now [that] you have your maid, make your bed.” The irony wasn’t lost on Kurt, who was struck by the hypocrisy of the sudden attention from Wendy and his other relatives, most of whom had wanted nothing to do with him only a few months earlier. He had left Aberdeen and his family behind for good, and no amount of sucking up would make him forget two decades of rejection.

  At the height of his band’s success, Kurt clearly identified with his favorite Beatle, John Lennon, who knew as well as anybody the price of fame. In an interview withRolling Stone, Kurt talked about this bond with Lennon: “I don’t know who wrote what parts of what Beatles songs, but Paul McCartney embarrasses me. Lennon was obviously disturbed…. I just felt really sorry for him…his life was a prison. He was imprisoned. It’s not fair. That’s the crux of the problem that I’ve had with becoming a celebrity—the way people deal with celebrities.”

  The next chapter in Cobain’s short life was to invite new comparisons between himself and his musical idol. When George Harrison was asked how he first met Yoko Ono, he replied, “I’m not sure. All of a sudden she was just there.” Kurt’s bandmates, Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic, would tell similar stories in later years about the bleached blonde who started to appear at Kurt’s side shortly afterNevermind was released. Perhaps that’s why Grohl and Novoselic both called her Yoko—at least behind her back.

  2

  When we set out to interview those who might offer us the best insight into the real Courtney Love, we encountered an unusual obstacle. The first two people we contacted said they were in hiding. Each gave us the same explanation: they were “afraid of her.” What made this even more unusual was the fact that these two people were her father and her first husband.

  Now, in the summer of 2003, we are sitting on the outdoor terrace of the Seattle Art Museum with an old friend of Kurt’s who witnessed his relationship with Courtney unfold from its beginnings. After about half an hour of candid memories about her old friend Kurt, captured by our video camera for a potential documentary, the subject turns to Courtney Love. “Tell us about her,” we say. She immediately turns pale. “You expect me to talk about Courtney with the camera running? Do you think I have a death wish?”

  The first time Kurt Cobain spotted Courtney Love, he thought she looked like Nancy Spungen. Courtney liked that. For several years, she had been obsessed with the infamous bleached blonde whose life so closely paralleled her own. Nancy was an upper-middle-class girl turned groupie, stripper and heroin addict, whose tempestuous relationship with the notorious Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious—a tortured working-class youth turned punk legend—culminated in both their deaths, one mysteriously murdered, the other from an overdose. To friends, Courtney liked to claim that she had modeled her life after the so-called punk rock Juliet. A few years before she met Kurt, she had even auditioned to play the lead in Alex Cox’s film biopicSid and Nancy and, although failing to land the role, ended up playing the smaller part of Nancy’s best friend, Gretchen.

  For her part, Courtney thought Kurt looked like Dave Pirner, the front man for Soul Asylum. At their initial encounter in the Portland club where Nirvana had just opened for the Dharma Bums, she flirted with the boyish blond musician for a while and later kept tabs on the progress of Kurt and his band—even sending him a little heart-shaped box as a gift after the Nirvana buzz started to grow louder. But, like Nancy, Courtney was a self-proclaimed groupie, and Kurt was still a relatively unknown musician. By the time they met again a year later, shortly before the release ofNevermind, that had changed. The band had signed a major record deal and was obviously on the verge of something big. The two were attending a concert in L.A. when Courtney spotted Kurt downing a bottle of cough medicine. She chided, “You’re a pussy; you shouldn’t drink that syrup because it’s bad for your stomach,” and offered him one of her prescription painkillers. “We bonded over pharmaceuticals,” she later recalled. They went home that night and had sex for the first time. “She had a completely planned way of seducing me and it worked,” said Kurt, telling friends it was the best sex he had ever had.

  But Courtney’s boyfriend at the time was Billy Corgan, whose band Smashing Pumpkins had opened for Guns n’ Roses the same week she slept with Kurt for the first time. For now, Corgan was still more famous than Kurt Cobain. Nirvana and the Pumpkins both had albums scheduled for imminent release;Nevermind andGish shared the same producer. When the albums were released, they both exceeded expectations, making Cobain and Corgan instant rock stars. On theBillboard charts, however, there was no contest. By the timeNevermind hit number one in late December 1991, Kurt and Courtney were inseparable.

  She came from a broken home and had a mother who rejected her, but that’s where the similarities ended between Kurt Cobain and the woman who would soon turn his world upside down. If we were going to obtain the clues to make sense of Courtney Love’s early years and discover whether she was really capable of committing the heinous act of which she had been accused, we would have to head as far afield as California, Oregon, Australia, Japan, England, and New Zealand. For economy’s sake, we decided to confine our quest to the U.S. Pacific Northwest.

  Courtney Love Michelle Harrison was born in San Francisco on July 9,
1965—O. J. Simpson’s eighteenth birthday. A little while after she made her appearance, Courtney’s father, Hank Harrison, headed over to share the good news with the members of the small San Francisco band he managed. They were still known as the Warlocks, but within a few months they would take on their more familiar name—the Grateful Dead. Harrison couldn’t decide which of his friends he would ask to be the godfather. Jerry Garcia was good with kids, but Hank’s roommate, bassist Phil Lesh, was the only one home, so Lesh received the honor. Instead of passing out cigars, Harrison broke out a couple of tabs of acid, and they celebrated the birth of the little rock-and-roll princess. Meanwhile, her mother’s adoptive family—heirs to the Bausch & Lomb eye care fortune—marked the occasion by setting up a trust fund for the new baby. “Courtney is not the rags-to-riches rock-and-roll story,” says her father when we finally persuade him to meet with us at his horse ranch in northern California. He had insisted we meet in the center of town so he could size us up and ensure we weren’t working for Courtney before he would escort us to his home.

  This is a man who for years has been publicly vilified by his own daughter as a grotesque, anti-Semitic, drug-crazed pathological liar. But Courtney’s accusations pale beside his own oft-repeated and publicly leveled charge—that Courtney was somehow involved in the murder of her husband Kurt. What kind of father would say these things about his own child? we wanted to know the first time we met him, convinced that—no matter what the truth of his charges—we must be in the presence of an unpleasant opportunist. However, that was apparently the least of his sins.

  In 1995, before a TV audience of 25 million Americans, Courtney told Barbara Walters that this man had given her LSD when she was three as part of a bizarre eugenics experiment. “He was anti-Semitic, his father was anti-Semitic,” she claimed. “Three people testified that he gave me acid. He wanted to make a superior race, and by giving children acid you could do that.”