0.12 Kidsplace  (Page 5/9)

Having grown up in a hardscrabble town, Aberdeen , in southwestern Washington , Cobain lived in virtually unrelieved misery for most of his life. His parents divorced when he was nine, and he spent his teenage years drifting among friends’ homes, overstaying his welcome with family after family. He had seen the brother of a friend commit suicide by hanging himself outside Aberdeen’s elementary school, had an uncle who drank himself to death and a great-uncle who shot himself to death. He talked frequently of his own impending suicide from the time he was 14 years old, telling various friends that he had “suicide genes.” He was afflicted with chronic, often crippling stomach pain that reminded me of that stomach pain suffered by Hmong refugees, which eventually was diagnosed as a symptom of depression in them. Cobain spoke quite freely of his misery from the time he was first being interviewed by the press. In a 1989 interview with the University of Washington ’s student paper, the Daily , he described Nirvana’s music as having “a gloomy, vengeful element based on hatred.” He was 21 years old. At about the same time, he wrote in his journal, “I mean to be passionate and sincere, but I also like to have fun and act like a dork.”

Eventually, I would divine that the sound later to be called grunge began taking form in the late 1970s—the heyday of Red Dress , whose echoes could be heard clearly in the sound and the lyrics of these bands that hit it big years later. By 1979, there was enough of a Seattle music population to support the launching of The Rocket , a rock tabloid edited by an Invisible Seattleite named Charles Cross .

Like matter drawn toward a center to form a spectacular new galaxy, musicians from the suburbs and small towns throughout the Northwest began coalescing around Seattle clubs, principally the Gorilla Gardens , Metropolis , the Fabulous Rainbow Tavern , Squid Row , Ditto , and the Central Tavern . Their numbers were augmented by kids from around the country drifting Seattleward as the word spread that something “cool” was going on there. By the late ‘80s, hundreds of musicians were playing Seattle venues—a second generation, including the OK Hotel , Crocodile , RKNDY , and the Off Ramp , had sprung up—drawing kids in ever-greater numbers to music that offered a bracing alternative to the horrors of mainstream radio.