Kurt Cobain: from Aberdeen to the top of the Billboard 200 | Ultimate Guitarist Reunion

Why fans still care

KURT COBAIN wrote Smells Like Teen Spirit, and on the Billboard chart dated 11 January 1992 Nevermind was the number 1 album in America. The Rock Hall says Nirvana “accidentally kicked off a cultural revolution” from the Pacific Northwest.

Nevermind went Diamond, and in December 2024 Smells Like Teen Spirit reached 10 million US units on its own.

Early life

Cobain was born in Aberdeen, Washington, on 20 February 1967, the only son of Donald and Wendy Cobain. His parents divorced in 1976.

For his 14th birthday, in 1981, he was given a used Japanese electric guitar. In a 1993 interview with Jon Savage he looked back on his school years: “I felt so different and so crazy.”

The band that showed him what to do was the Melvins. He and Krist Novoselic hung around with a group of local kids who sat on the back porch at drummer Dale Crover’s parents’ house, listening to the Melvins rehearse for hours. “We’re gonna be like the Melvins,” Novoselic remembers them saying.

His own record collection ran wider than punk. He told Rolling Stone in 1994 that his favourite albums included Aerosmith’s Rocks, the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks, Led Zeppelin II and AC/DC’s Back in Black. And on the Beatles: ”John Lennon, Who’s Who number 5 in · The Ultimate Reunion (story coming soon) was definitely my favorite Beatle, hands down.”

Career chapters

1. 1981First electric guitar, for his 14th birthday
2. 1987Starts a band with Krist Novoselic and drummer Aaron Burckhard
3. 1988First studio demo with Jack Endino, and the first show as Nirvana
4. 1989Bleach, on Sub Pop
5. 1990Dave Grohl joins
6. 1991Signs to DGC and releases Nevermind
7. 1992Nevermind goes to number 1
8. 1993In Utero; MTV Unplugged recorded in New York
9. 1994Last show, Munich, 1 March
10. 2014Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

Aberdeen to Sub Pop 1987 to 1990

By late 1987 Novoselic had agreed to start a band with Cobain and drummer Aaron Burckhard. The name kept changing. They played their first show as Nirvana on 19 March 1988 at Tacoma’s Community World Theatre.

On 23 January 1988 they cut their first studio demo with Jack Endino at Reciprocal Studios in Seattle, with Dale Crover borrowed from the Melvins on drums. Endino played the tape to Jonathan Poneman of Sub Pop, who signed them. Chad Channing took over the drum stool, and their first album, Bleach, came out on Sub Pop on 15 June 1989, with About a Girl on it. Cobain later said putting it on the album was “risky”, because it was a pop song in the style of R.E.M.

Five drummers played with them before Dave Grohl: Aaron Burckhard, Dale Crover (twice), Dave Foster, Chad Channing and, for one show, Dan Peters. Grohl, from the band Scream, auditioned on 25 September 1990 and played his first show with them on 11 October 1990 in Olympia.

Nevermind 1991 to 1992

Nirvana signed to the Gold Mountain management company and then to DGC, a Geffen label, on 30 April 1991. The advance was $287,000 and the recording budget $65,000, according to Guitar.com and Mojo.

They played Smells Like Teen Spirit for the first time at Seattle’s OK Hotel on 17 April 1991. Cobain introduced the band as “major-label corporate-rock sell-outs”, as a joke. In May and June they recorded the album with Butch Vig at Sound City in Van Nuys, on the studio’s Neve desk.

Teen Spirit went to radio on 27 August 1991 and Nevermind came out on 24 September. MTV put the video on its Buzz Bin playlist on 14 October. By January it was number 1 on the Billboard 200, and Smells Like Teen Spirit had climbed to number 6 on the Hot 100 that same week.

In February 1992 he married Courtney Love on Waikiki Beach, and their daughter Frances Bean was born that August.

In Utero and Unplugged 1993

In Utero came out on 21 September 1993 and went straight in at number 1. Novoselic says Cobain “had this urge to scar the music”, pairing pretty melodies with rough sounds. On Heart-Shaped Box, Cobain and producer Steve Albini wanted a strange effect on the guitar solo, and Novoselic argued against it until they took it off.

In November the band recorded MTV Unplugged in New York, including a cover of David Bowie’s, Who’s Who number 16 in · The Ultimate Reunion (story coming soon) The Man Who Sold the World.

1994

Nirvana’s last show was in Munich on 1 March 1994. Kurt Cobain was found dead at his Seattle home on 8 April 1994. He was 27. The King County medical examiner ruled that he had taken his own life.

MTV Unplugged in New York came out after his death and won the Grammy in 1996, Nirvana’s only win from seven nominations.

Seattle, Sub Pop and grunge

The bands that built it

Nirvana were the band that broke grunge to the world, but they weren’t the first in Seattle. Green River formed there in 1984, with Mark Arm, Steve Turner, Jeff Ament and Alex Shumway, and later Stone Gossard. Their EP Dry as a Bone came out on Sub Pop in July 1987, sold as “ultra-loose GRUNGE that destroyed the morals of a generation”.

Jack Endino, who recorded them at Reciprocal, summed up the sound as “Seventies hard rock with an Eighties punk attitude”. The 1986 compilation Deep Six had already put the Melvins, Soundgarden, Malfunkshun, Skin Yard and the U-Men on one record.

Green River split at Halloween 1987. Arm and Turner started Mudhoney soon after. Gossard and Ament formed Mother Love Bone, and after the death of its singer Andrew Wood they made Temple of the Dog with Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell, then started Pearl Jam. Alice in Chains, Screaming Trees and the Melvins were part of the same scene.

Sub Pop

Sub Pop began as Bruce Pavitt’s fanzine Subterranean Pop in Olympia. Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman opened the label’s office on 1 April 1988. They flew in the English writer Everett True, whose 1989 pieces in Melody Maker helped make Seattle news in Britain.

Nirvana’s first single, Love Buzz, came out on Sub Pop in 1988, and by 2008 Bleach was the label’s biggest seller, with about 1.6 million copies. In 1995 Sub Pop sold 49 per cent of itself to Warner.

Against the hair metal years

Grunge set itself against the look and attitude of 1980s glam metal. The Los Angeles Times says it moved rock away from hair metal’s “bikini-clad arm candy” image. In one sense the sound wasn’t new. Endino heard Seventies hard rock in it, and Green River and Cobain both counted Aerosmith’s Rocks among their favourite records.

It didn’t happen overnight. MTV was already playing Alice in Chains’ Man in the Box before Teen Spirit. Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden all released major albums within weeks of each other in 1991. Mr. Big still had a US number 1 in 1992, but the producer Tony Berg told the Times that hair metal had become “so not cool”.

The two sides met head on at the 1992 MTV Video Music Awards, where Cobain and Axl Rose, Who’s Who number 2 in · Highway to Hell (story coming soon) of Guns N’ Roses feuded.

Kurt, Krist and Dave

How the songs came together

Cobain was the band’s main voice and writer, and Novoselic has always said so. Some songs he brought in finished. Others came out of jams and took a few rehearsals to find their shape. Once an arrangement was settled, Novoselic says, it never changed.

Teen Spirit started as a riff Cobain thought sounded close to Boston or Louie Louie. Novoselic told him “That is so ridiculous,” so Cobain made the band play it for an hour and a half until it turned into something else.

Novoselic came from what he calls “the school of John Entwistle and Geezer Butler, Who’s Who number 26 in · Highway to Hell (story coming soon), and of course Paul McCartney, Who’s Who number 4 in · Ultimate Beatles Reunion (story coming soon)”. He kept his lines simple and melodic and left room for the guitar. “We were a collaboration,” he says. “Dave and Kurt had to like the bass parts, too.”

The drummer who joined last

Dave Grohl knew neither of them when he joined. “They’d had a team of drummers before me,” he told Apple Music, and he spent the early years nervous. “I didn’t want to get fired!”

Cobain told Rolling Stone in January 1994 that he tried to reassure Grohl, who felt he could be replaced. “Dave, Krist and I have never screamed at each other,” he said. By the split he described in the same interview, Cobain had the royalties for all the lyrics and a 75 per cent share of the music.

Grohl was writing songs too. He took a demo of Alone + Easy Target to Cobain’s Seattle hotel and Cobain listened to it in the bath on a Walkman. Grohl says he took the headphones off and said, “now I don’t have to be the only songwriter in the band!”

Their last session together was at Robert Lang Studios in Seattle. Cobain turned up on the third and final day, and Nirvana recorded You Know You’re Right.

Fame

He told Rolling Stone in January 1994 that he would have liked to take “a Rock Star 101 course”, if one had existed. Novoselic put it more bluntly: he called his friend the Windmill for contradicting himself, and said he “wanted to be a rock star” and hated it.

The OK Hotel joke about being “corporate-rock sell-outs” came months before Nevermind made them rich and famous. Once it did, Cobain publicly attacked Pearl Jam. By January 1994 he had changed his tune. “I slagged them off because I didn’t like their band,” he told Rolling Stone. “It was my fault; I should have been slagging off the record company instead of them.” He said the feud had come close to being fixed.

Craft, sound and style

Rhythm guitar first

“I just wanted to play rhythm guitar,” he told Rolling Stone in 1994. He never set out to be a lead player. Novoselic says he was inspired by Greg Ginn of Black Flag and “wasn’t like a technical riff guitarist”. As Novoselic puts it, “he just made this kind of abstract sound.”

The shape of his songs came from the Pixies. “I was basically trying to rip off the Pixies,” he admitted. That meant quiet verses and loud, hard choruses, which Novoselic calls “hard/soft, loud/quiet dynamics”. It’s the whole engine of Smells Like Teen Spirit.

Left-handed, on cheap guitars

He played left-handed. In the Aberdeen days, photos show him with a right-handed sunburst Univox Hi-Flyer flipped over and restrung, through a tiny Fender Champ. Univox Hi-Flyers with stock pickups were his favourites before Nevermind, and he smashed plenty of them. He also played a left-handed Greco Mustang copy from Guitar Maniacs in Tacoma.

On Nevermind his main guitars were a 1969 Lake Placid Blue Fender Competition Mustang and a 1965 Fender Jaguar fitted with DiMarzio humbuckers. Amps in the studio included a Mesa/Boogie, a Fender Bassman and a Vox AC30.

The five-string Stella

What was probably his first acoustic, a Stella 12-string from a pawn shop, cost him about $30 in 1989. “It barely stays in tune,” he told Guitar World in 1992. “I have to use duct tape to hold the tuning keys in place.” He used it with only five strings on Polly and Something in the Way. Butch Vig recorded Something in the Way with Cobain sitting on a couch in the control room.

Pedals

Guitar World notes he wasn’t fussy about gear, except for his pedals. A little orange Boss DS-1 distortion was on the floor from the early days. In 1990 he bought an Electro-Harmonix Small Clone chorus, and it stayed on his pedalboard for the rest of his life. Vig says it made “the watery guitar sound” on the build-up of Teen Spirit and on Come as You Are. On Lithium they used a Big Muff fuzz through the Fender Bassman for a darker sound.

After April 1994

Dave Grohl

“Losing Kurt was earth-shattering,” Dave Grohl told 60 Minutes in 2014. “I was afraid of music after he died.” He has described how strange it felt to wake up the next day, and said it took “months and months and months” to feel his way back.

On his honeymoon in Ireland that summer he wrote This Is a Call in a Dublin hotel room. He called it “a renewal or a reawakening”. It became the first Foo Fighters single.

Courtney Love and Nirvana’s surviving members

These are the documented facts. Courtney Love, Cobain’s widow and the executor of his estate, went to court in 2001 against Grohl and Novoselic over Nirvana LLC, the company that runs the band’s affairs. Grohl and Novoselic sued in return. The cases were settled in 2002, and that cleared the way for the release of You Know You’re Right that year.

At the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction on 10 April 2014, Love hugged Grohl and Novoselic on stage. “This is my family I’m looking at right now,” she said.

Grohl’s song I’ll Stick Around (1995) is also on the record. In 1995 he told Rolling Stone it was not about Kurt. In an interview for Paul Brannigan’s 2011 biography This Is a Call, he said: “I don’t think it’s any secret that I’ll Stick Around is about Courtney.”

What’s speculation: fans and the press have long read other Foo Fighters songs as being about Love. Rolling Stone wrote in 2014 that most people assumed Let It Die was about her. That was the magazine reporting an assumption, not a confirmation.

Stories people still tell

1. Bowie’s verdict.

   David Bowie, Who’s Who number 16 in · The Ultimate Reunion (story coming soon) said he “liked it a lot” when he heard Nirvana’s version of his song. “It was very painful,” he added, “and I mean that in the kindest possible way.”

2. The six-million-dollar guitar.

   The 1959 Martin D-18E he played on MTV Unplugged sold at Julien’s Auctions in Beverly Hills on 20 June 2020 for US$6 million. The buyer was an Australian, Peter Freedman, who owns Røde Microphones. It was reported as a record for a guitar at auction.

Legacy

Nirvana went into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame on 10 April 2014, Cobain with Novoselic and Grohl. In 2023 the Recording Academy gave the band a Lifetime Achievement Award. Nevermind, released on 24 September 1991, marked its 35th anniversary in September 2026.