Tag Archives: Aberdeen

Kurt Cobain – Style Icon

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He was the reluctant crown-prince of my generation.  Had he lived, he would be 45 today and an Indie Rock God Legend or a bloated cliche or a recluse.  There is no way to predict something that will never be.  We will always remember him as beautiful, and sad.  My family and I were in Aberdeen over the weekend and probably went over the Wishkah a half dozen times.  The rain was heavy and constant, like it always is this time of year, and we hid out in an old mausoleum in the cemetery where my great-grandparents  are buried.  If I were a kid growing up in Aberdeen, I would have made it one of my haunts, it is very quiet and empty and full of the forgotten founders of a town whose prime has passed.  Ladies and gentlemen, Kurt Cobain.  Style Icon.

Kurt Cobain, born in Aberdeen, Washington (1967). He was the son of an auto mechanic and a cocktail waitress. His parents divorced when he was seven, and the split was traumatic, which influenced a lot of the pain in his lyrics. “I remember feeling ashamed, for some reason,” he told an interviewer in 1993. “I was ashamed of my parents. I couldn’t face some of my friends at school anymore, because I desperately wanted to have the classic, you know, typical family. Mother, father. I wanted that security, so I resented my parents for quite a few years because of that.”

He dropped out of high school three weeks before graduation, took a job as a janitor, and started playing in a band. They called themselves Nirvana, pooled their money — $606 — and recorded their first album, Bleach, in 1989. Bleach did well enough to get them a contract with a major label. In 1991, the group came out with its second album, Nevermind, which received rave reviews and propelled the band to stardom. The album featured the singles “Come as You Are” and “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Nevermind sold more than 24 million copies and Cobain became the reluctant poster child of Generation X.

In 2005, a sign was put up in Aberdeen, Washington, that read “Welcome to Aberdeen – Come As You Are” as a tribute to Cobain. The sign was paid for and created by the Kurt Cobain Memorial Committee, a non-profit organization created in May 2004 to honour Cobain. The Committee planned to create a Kurt Cobain Memorial Park and a youth center in Aberdeen. Because Cobain was cremated and his remains scattered into the Wishkah River in Washington, many Nirvana fans visit Viretta Park, near Cobain’s former Lake Washington home, to pay tribute. On the anniversary of his death, fans gather in the park to celebrate his life and memory.

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You are assigned your family, you choose your friends

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At times of difficulty and loss, families close ranks, they circle the wagons and protect. At least my family does, gladly. Those long elastic familial threads that stretch across thousands of miles and years of separation tighten and draw everyone closer. To support. And protect. To say “we are here, let us carry this pain for you, let us make you laugh, let us remind you of every amazing detail about life the pain is trying to blur”. There isn’t a single person here that wouldn’t drop everything and rush to be by each other’s side to help carry the pain if asked.

But when our family gets together, its guaranteed there’s going to be a huge agreement. When educators and artists marry other educators and artists and raise compassionate children, there’s nothing to argue about. We truly enjoy each other’s company and are not only relatives, but friends. I trust them completely and am proud of their accomplishments and successes.

I wrote the next couple sentences about Waldie the other afternoon and another uncle was kind enough to incorporate it into his conclusion at the service:

If the footprint of a man’s life is measured by the lives of the people he has loved and influenced, then Waldie’s footprint reaches from Aberdeen to Finland, from Interlochen to Tallahassee and around the world again and again. It spans a century of generations back and will stretch on into the future with no end in sight.