KURT DONALD COBAIN

Kurt Donald Cobain was born on February 20, 1967, Aberdeen, Washington,
U.S. and died on April 5, 1994, Seattle, Washington.
Kurt was an American rock musician who rose to fame as the lead singer,
guitarist, and primary songwriter for the seminal grunge band Nirvana.

Cobain had a generally happy childhood until his parents divorced when he was
nine years old. After that event, he was frequently troubled and angry, and his
emotional pain became a subject of, and catalyst for, much of his later music.
As a teenager, he moved between various relatives’ houses, stayed with
friends’ parents, and occasionally slept under bridges while he began to use
drugs and take part in petty vandalism as forms of teenage rebellion. Cobain
was musically inclined from an early age, and in the mid-1980s he began to
play with members of the local “sludge rock” band the Melvins.In 1985 he
created a homemade tape of some songs with the drummer of the Melvins that
later caught the attention of local bassist Krist Novoselic. Cobain and Novoselic
formed Nirvana in 1987 and thereafter recruited a series of drummers to record
demo tapes with them and play small shows throughout the Northwest.

One of the group’s demo tapes found its way to Jonathan Poneman of the
Seattle independent record label Sub Pop, which signed the band to produce its
first single, “Love Buzz”, in 1988 and its first album, Bleach, in 1989. The album
had a unique sound that mixed the rawness of punk rock with pop hooks, and
the group soon became a target of major record labels. With new
drummer Dave Grohl (who joined the band in 1990) Nirvana released its major-
label debut, Nevermind (1991), which featured the hit single “Smells like Teen
Spirit”; it became the first alternative-rock album to achieve widespread
popularity with a mainstream audience. Nevermind catapulted Nirvana to
worldwide fame, and Cobain came to be hailed as the voice of his generation, a
title that he was never comfortable with.

In 1992 Cobain married Courtney Love, then the leader of the band Hole, and
the couple had a daughter that same year. The following year Nirvana released
its final studio album, In Utero, in which Cobain railed against his fame. Cobain
had long suffered from depression and chronic stomach pain. He treated his
issues with drugs: Cobain was a frequent user of heroin in the years after
Nirvana’s breakthrough, and he took a variety of painkillers in an attempt to
numb his constant stomach agony. In March 1994 he was hospitalized in Rome
after overdosing and slipping into a coma in what was later characterized as a
failed suicide attempt. One month later he snuck out of a Los Angeles-area drug
treatment centre and returned to his Seattle home, where he died at 27 years
old.