Here We Are Now by Charles R Cross Page B

“Seattle band Nirvana” was the description in nearly every story or news report on the band after they became famous. That Nirvana were from Aberdeen had been detailed in local publications like my magazine The Rocket, but as Nirvana became an international sensation, their hometown was often left out of the history. Sometimes when Aberdeen was mentioned in that 1991 wave of press, it was incorrectly described as “just outside” Seattle, when the cities were worlds away culturally and two hours by distance. I’ve even seen it written, likely by journalists who never visited the Northwest, that Aberdeen was a “suburb” of Seattle, something that would cause a howl of laughter to any resident from either of those cities. But to most of the world outside the Northwest, “Seattle” and “Nirvana” were synonymous.
    At the start of 1991, though, only one member of Nirvana lived in Seattle, and that was Dave Grohl. Grohl had moved there a month before the release of Nevermind after growing tired of sleeping on the sofa in Kurt’s tiny Olympia apartment. Krist Novoselic lived in Tacoma that year and didn’t buy a Seattle home until Nevermind ’s royalties started arriving in 1992. “We couldn’t afford to live in Seattle,” Novoselic told me. Kurt certainly couldn’t afford Seattle rents: he had a hard time scraping up $200 to pay for his apartment in Olympia. When he returned home after recording Nevermind in California, he’d been evicted for back-due rent. He’d just recorded an album that would go on to sell thirty-five million copies, but on the day he arrived home, all his possessions were in boxes on the curb. He slept in his car for the next week until he started rooming with friends, and eventually in hotel rooms paid for by his record label as Nirvana began to tour.
    For much of 1991 and 1992, Kurt continued to stay in hotels and crash with friends as Nirvana toured more regularly. His next semipermanent address was in Los Angeles, where he and Courtney Love rented an apartment awaiting the birth of Frances Bean Cobain in August 1992. They had intended to stay in Los Angeles only temporarily, but when California Child Protective Services became involved in their lives due to rumors of their drug use that had appeared in Vanity Fair, they couldn’t move out of the state. They stayed in a few different temporary apartments, but the one they resided in the longest was in the Fairfax neighborhood. Their apartment had a large picture window, but the drapes were never opened. In one of the sunniest places in the United States, Kurt brought Aberdeen with him.
    Kurt and Courtney, with baby in tow, didn’t move to Seattle until late 1992, living initially in fancy hotels. They repeatedly ran into trouble with hotel management—smoking violations, damages, drug activity, unpaid bills—and were essentially kicked out of every four-star hotel in Seattle. They rented a house in northeast Seattle for the next year, which was to be their most permanent Seattle domicile. It wasn’t until January 1994 that they bought their mansion in the Denny-Blaine neighborhood of Seattle. It was the first home Kurt ever owned, and it would be the last: he would die in the greenhouse-type room above the garage just three months after purchasing the house.
    Seattle was in many ways ideally suited to Kurt’s personality and his moment of fame. The Seattle music scene was created organically—no one imagined it would become as big as it did, and thus egos were left at the door. After Nirvana struck, I’d often find myself escorting visiting New York–based journalists who wanted to see the sights of where this red-hot music “scene” had developed. But there was little to see, as the scene had come together in mostly basements and garages. Almost every other vital music scene in the nation—from Austin to Los Angeles’s