The first time I caught a glimpse of Kurt Cobain smiling as a boy from the wall of his childhood living room, I gasped.
A flimsy, black-and-white print of an elementary school portrait had been taped up. Just below it, Cobain grinned from a piano stool, looking over his left shoulder with his hands poised precociously above the keys. The shade of his hair matched the leaf-patterned wallpaper, which must have seemed dingy the day it was pasted in place.
“Who?” I began, pausing to swallow and point, “Who put that there?”
As realtors Nelia Woods and Tracey Wagoner patiently explained, a dozen photos had been peppered throughout the property by the Cobain family as reminders of why this house should become a cultural landmark—a destination on the drive through the cradle of grunge. Since 2013, Kurt Cobain’s childhood home in the benighted coastal timber city of Aberdeen, Washington—where he moved when he was two and returned to as his tempestuous teenage years began—has been for sale. And now, I was here.
Moments before, I’d huddled near the side door of the century-old, Craftsman-style cottage located at 1210 East First Street. A billowing rain cloud had appeared suddenly, as they often do during sunny days in the state’s northwest corner this time of year. The realtors and I were trying to stay dry in part, I assumed, to keep from tracking more dirt into what Woods had called “a special property.”
In the beginning, this was a marquee property, sporting an aspirational $500,000 price tag and marketing efforts from a Beverly Hills firm that peddles $25 million seaside empires. To lure well-heeled Nirvana zealots, the Cobain family released photos of young Kurt at home and reiterated lore about the pre-Nirvana practices here. But the buzz didn’t yield a buyer, so after a year, the home was pulled and relisted for $400,000 in early 2015. The price has since fallen in great occasional tumbles, like Halloween candy that’s survived into spring. In early October, the listing dipped to $225,000, less than half of the original price.
For the last five months, my wife, Tina, and I have been roving the continent, seeking oddities wherever we go. A day earlier and a few hours north of Aberdeen, I scouted Cobain’s hometown for tributes and was stunned that the home was available and comparatively cheap. I called an agent who called another agent who called Woods, who quickly called me back and set a time for the next morning—pending permission from the owner, Kimberly Cobain. According to tax records, Kurt’s younger sister had been given the home by her mother, Wendy O’Connor, early this year.
Moving through the house, Woods pointed out another snapshot taped to the dining room table, where Cobain clutched a chocolate birthday cake and, again, grinned crookedly for the camera. He seemed younger still, his hair lighter and eyes brighter. Woods and Wagoner leaned toward the photo, comparing the edges of the tables pictured and present, concurring they must be the same. They turned towards me and smiled.
“So, the furniture comes with the house?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah,” Woods assured. “Everything.”
These ephemera are the first pieces for a museum that does not yet exist. Since 2013, prospectors and fans have talked about buying the home and turning it into the in situ museum Cobain deserves, a proper memorial for a musician who redirected the route of rock’n’roll. A 2014 crowdfunding campaign by a Portland journalist to raise $700,000, however, flopped catastrophically, as have other alleged efforts.
A 2015 Vanity Fair brief suggested something must be “haunting” the home, given its plummeting price and its time on the market. The real reason, of course, has more to do with appraisals than apparitions. According to Grays Harbor County, the home is worth less than $60,000. Woods, the realtor, is more charitable. After some quick mental math and the inevitable qualifier that there is a collector’s premium, Woods says she could get $99,000 for a similar spot—that is, if graffiti from one of the twentieth century’s tragic icons didn’t remain scrawled on his bedroom wall.
It’s impossible to know how much has changed at 1210 East First since Cobain left Aberdeen in the summer of 1987, at the age of 20. The roof was replaced in 2015, and a few coats of paint have been added over time—necessary maintenance anywhere, but especially along Washington’s eternally damp Olympic Peninsula, where rain and snow scrape at even the sturdiest structures. By and large, though, the home seems an unsuspecting reliquary, a time capsule that’s been allowed to grow musty and dated in hopes that stasis will conjure the right Cobain obsessive.
And so, it is falling apart. The washer and dryer are caked in rust, while holes in the garage floor could break ankles. A downstairs office still sports baby blue wallpaper covered with pastel balloons, suggesting that this is the nursery where the Cobains were reared; its water-damaged pieces curl, though, until it suggests the internal folds of a croissant.
The feature attractions, of course, are the works of Cobain’s own hand: In the garage, where he and Krist Novoselic practiced in their frozen pizza days, a spray-painted swastika and other splashes of graffiti stand out against shiny metal walls. (Always one to exploit taboo for provocation, Cobain used the swastika throughout his career.) Kurt’s bedroom, meanwhile, is a permanent gallery of adolescent originals. In one corner, he etched side-by-side tributes to Iron Maiden (their logo, rendered in red) and “Shlits Bull,” drawing the malt liquor’s bovine mascot about as badly as he spelled the name. He carved Zeppelin’s logo near his door and “Communication Breakdown!” near the window overlooking First Street. There are holes everywhere—from posters, from his fist and foot, from ostensible looters who took home some scribbled sheetrock.
This is what makes the place invaluable—how it reflects the mood and mind of someone who soon influenced so many. Still, that hasn’t been enough to overcome the price. As the home has lingered on the market, the sales pitch has grown more crass, the tone more desperate.
Spread across the house for the buyer, Cobain’s family pictures are advertisements that a dead man once lived here, handbills for a grave robbery. The fireplace, for instance, is covered in thin, faux-brick adhesive, the gas logs flanked by tarnished brass plates. Just below the mantle, in a small square photo, Kurt and Kimberly sit dressed in their Easter Sunday finery, in front of the same brick and brass nearly 50 years earlier.
When I finally stepped back into the rain outside, I felt dirty. It wasn’t the home’s fetid air or pervasive cobwebs, the dirty floors or the brittle carpets. Instead, it was a sense of betrayal: If your family will market your memory, so that even your boyhood mattress comes bundled with the mortgage, what will the rest of the world do?
Three months before visiting Aberdeen, on the day after the 4th of July, I made the most stereotypically patriotic pilgrimage possible: I visited Elvis’ birthplace, a postage-stamp-sized shotgun house on the edge of Tupelo, Mississippi. The scenes could have barely been more different.
Presley was born inside that warm little cabin in 1935, the unexpected twin to a stillborn older brother. He spent the first 13 years of his life there, before the family made the move to Memphis that became his spark plug to stardom.
Once surrounded by a thriving neighborhood, Elvis’ birthplace is now an island, largely removed from the small-town tizzy. His childhood church has been moved next door and lovingly restored. A statue of a caped, thrusting Elvis the King lords over a seated sculpture of a timid Elvis the Kid. A replica of the car the family might have used to flee to Memphis sits outside an enormous gift shop.
The house is pristine, its white exterior gleaming like some Tom Sawyer fantasy and the doily on the tiny mantle centered perfectly beneath a family portrait. When we visited, a kind woman who reminded me of my own grandmother sat just inside, offering a short primer and an eternal smile. I asked requisite biographical questions. She joked about Elvis’ libidinous hips and volunteered to take our photo on the Presley porch swing. Only sweet tea and a radio barking the blues were missing. I could understand, at least better than before, from what Elvis had come and where he would soon go.
The same opportunity exists for Cobain in Aberdeen. He once called Aberdeen “Twin Peaks without the excitement.” In recent years, the city has added a small greenway system, large downtown murals, and at least one farm-to-table restaurant—the tell-tale signs of a struggling city trying to foster a late renaissance of millennials, a prescription ripped straight from the pages of a Richard Florida tome on the “creative class.” (Weed has helped, as has a “millennial mayor.”)
Still, the basic malaise of Cobain’s post-industrial childhood hovers, from the slate gray skies to a storied timber empire that has, in most ways, collapsed. It is quintessential small-city America, with 9 percent unemployment and rows of houses that seem to have been boarded since they were built. Upstairs in his bedroom, I felt the same new communion with and comprehension of Cobain I’d had with Elvis. This is entirely the point of a museum.
At least I caught a glimpse of this ideal at Kurt Cobain Landing, a modest collection of curious statues (there’s a purple pipe sculpture titled “Kurt’s Air Guitar”) and awkward plaques (“Welcome to NIRVANA,” one asserts) where the Young Street Bridge spans the Wishkah River. Cobain infamously claimed to have slept here, just two blocks away from his actual home, a setting he immortalized with “Something in the Way.” The place is now so quaint I could imagine the acerbic scoff it might elicit from Cobain. But the effort, as earnest as it may be, is there.
Back at Aberdeen’s actual museum, a hodgepodge of oversized installations crowded inside an erstwhile armory, I asked the director, Dave Morris, why his museum hadn’t expanded to the Cobain place. He’d heard the suggestion innumerable times. The museum, after all, already houses a couch Cobain slept on as a troubled teen and a graffiti tribute to him, plus a comprehensive index of Cobain’s local haunts.
Morris patiently explained the logistical problems—the zoning, the parking, the neighbors. I nodded, but we both knew this wasn’t enough. The United States excels at preserving what it finds important, now listing more than 90,000 locations on the National Register of Historic Places (many of which are entirely obscure). We move houses to save them and isolate entire neighborhoods if it means preserving some vital piece of our patchwork history. We did it for Elvis, even if we failed to do it for Jimi Hendrix.
“For a long time, the city council was just a bunch of old-timers,” Morris admits much later. “And they decided, ‘Well, he’s just a junkie. We don’t want to promote that.’”
The town, the state, or a gaggle of nearby Microsoft investors haven’t stepped in to save Cobain’s home not because of price or zoning hurdles, but, I think, because he and Aberdeen remind us of what we can all become, of how badly it can all go. Cobain is as much of a complex representation of time and place and context as Elvis, a lens vital to understanding successive generations. But Elvis died swaddled in his own luxury, on the toilet after a racquetball game; Cobain went less quietly.
Kurt Cobain is an absolute oxbow of the American Dream—the genius kid of working-class divorcees who became rich and famous, then miserable and dead. The setting is a reminder, too, of the boom, bust, and latent promise of Aberdeen and countless other sad towns. His childhood home isn’t the gilded cradle of our teenage hero; it’s a tattered reminder that everything can fall apart, just as it’s doing in a town simply trying to survive.
On my way out of Aberdeen, I slowed to a roll in front of 1210 East First Street one more time. The clouds had temporarily dispersed, so the sun streaked across the fresh coat of mustard-seed paint and gray-green trim. Suddenly, in the daylight, the place didn’t look so bad. The orange Daily World paper box, the enormous boxwood, the façade’s perfect asymmetry: It looked like the start to something, the beginning of a story that needs to be told.
The blinds were open in Kurt’s room, a rarity from the photos I’ve seen. I imagined all the people who had stood here, staring up and, in turn, imagining what had gone on in Cobain’s youth. Here was a chance to show them, to demystify even slightly the life of someone who remains a romantic mystery, so shadowy that even the director of his hometown museum wants to debate his cause of death with a stranger.
The school kid who smiled inside, the 20-year-old who fled Aberdeen, the dad who died in Seattle: They all deserve better.
