Kurt Cobain - a fameous american

Biografioppgave om Kurt Cobain.
Sjanger
Temaoppgave
Språkform
Engelsk
Lastet opp
2001.11.10
Tema
Rock
Kurt Donald Cobain was born the 20th of February in Aberdeen, with an Irish mother and a German father. His mother worked as a cocktail waitress, but when Kurt was born, she decided to stay home with him and his older sister Kim. Their father, Donald, worked as an auto mechanic, but the family was never poor. Their house was in the trashiest neighbourhood, but it was the nicest of all the houses in that area. His father spent all his spare time and money on making the house as respectable as possible.

Kurt early showed a talent in music, but he was to hyper to develop it. In order to combine these things, his mother bought him a Mickey Mouse drum set. In this drum set Kurt found a valve for both his energy and his musical talent.

By the time Kurt started school, the drum set was no longer enough to keep him calm. After a lot of temper tantrums his mother took him to a doctor. The doctor gave him a morphine-based drug called Ritalin. This would sometimes keep him up until 4 am, and he had to take even more drugs to be able to get some sleep. This made his childhood very special, because the pills controlled his life.

When he was 8 his parents divorced. It was an ordinary divorce, but Kurt got very upset with it. He was ashamed that his parents had split up and became shy and reserved. After the divorce he lived with his mother, but when she remarried a guy called Pat O’Connor, he wanted to move back to his father. The problem was that his father had also remarried and his new wife had kids of her own. Kurt moved in with them anyway, but he did not get along with his new family, especially his step mum. He quickly noticed that his father was paying more attention to his step kids than his own son. Kurt therefore moved back to his mother, but he didn’t like it there either. After moving back and forth with his parents for a while, Kurt moved in with his grandmother. There he was happy until she had a heart attack and couldn’t take care of him anymore. Then he moved in with his uncle Chuck.

Kurt didn’t like school, he felt lonely and lost. He liked to paint and sing, but the other boys were more into sports. The girls liked Kurt and he spent a lot of time with girls. Some boys tried to get friends with Kurt so that he could help them with the girls, but Kurt used to tell hem he was gay to make them stay away from him.

When Kurt was 14 his uncle gave him his first guitar. His music idols at that time were Aerosmith, Led Zepplin and Black Sabbath, but he also listened to Sexpistols and the Clash. He taught him self how to play a guitar and became very good at it. Already at this time Kurt wanted to start a band, but he didn’t know any other boys that liked the same kind of music as he did.

Kurt dropped out of Aberdeen High, only a few weeks before the graduation. The reason he dropped out so near the graduation was that he already new that his grade points were so bad. When he had done this, his uncle got very mad at him and told him to support him self. He therefore had to get work somewhere. Because he didn’t have an education he never the well paid jobs and most of the time he work at cheep restaurants. None of his jobs were a success and he never held on to a job for too long.

In 1986 Kurt still didn’t have a proper job, but this was about to change, because now he met a guy named Krist Novaselic, who played bass guitar. They started playing together, Kurt on guitar and Krist on the bass, but they quickly realised they needed a drummer. They put up posters asking for a drummer that wanted to start a band. After a few attempts they met Dave Grohl, who became they drummer. The band was named Nirvana, after the paradise in the Buddhism. They released their first single in 1988 and the year after their first album came out. It was called bleach and it didn’t cost more than 600$ to produce. This wasn’t a big success, but at least they got some profit. The following year they released a lot of singles, but none of them were a success and Nirvana were longing to get their breakthrough.

In 1991 they got a contract with Geffen records and started to produce their first album, which was called “Nevermind”. “Nevermind” became the breakthrough Nirvana had been looking for. They were interviewed on Saturday Live Show and their top single for the album, “smells like teen spirit”, was the most popular single in UK for three weeks.

Kurt had never thought they would be so popular and he didn’t handle the success very well. When Nirvana preformed live he used to stop the audience from coming and he told them not to buy their records. One of the reasons he did this was that he thought most of the fans were false fans that only like the band because of “smells like teen spirit”. Another reason was that at the moment Kurt was taking heavy drugs, such as morphine and heroine.

24th of January in 1992 Kurt married the former stripper Courtney Love in Waikiki, Hawaii. She was known for her band Hole and they met trough the music. It was not an ordinary wedding, Kurt was wearing pyjamas and Courtney was wearing an old dress that was far too big for her. Six months after the marriage, 18th August, they had a daughter named Frances Bean. Kurt loved Frances Bean and actively involved himself in her upbringing, but as is quite usual with "show-biz" parents, the Cobains had a nanny to take care of Frances while her parents worked. Still, Kurt’s instincts were to give his child the happy childhood that was snatched away from him when his parents divorced. Unfortunately, he just didn’t have the emotional equipment to do the job and he never managed to show his daughter how much he really cared about her. Instead Frances faces the sad fate of having to grow up with the memory of a famous father that she barely had the chance to know.

The other members of Nirvana hoped that with a wife and a daughter Kurt would calm down. He actually did, for a short while. This period Nirvana recorded their third album, “Insecticide.”
In the beginning of 1993 they recorded their last studio album, “Utero”. This album only took two weeks to produce and it was a big success.

In July 1993 Kurt took an overdose of heroin, but Courtney saved him by injecting him with an illegal drug. This proved that Kurt’s drug abuse now was out of hand, and so was his marriage. Kurt and Courtney was fighting all the time and once the police were called to their home in Seattle after Kurt had locked himself in the bathroom and was threatening to shoot himself. The police took him and seized several weapons that he had at the house. Courtney threatened several times to divorce him if he did not get treatment for his abuse. He agreed to get treatment for his abuse, but didn’t last long at the rehab centre. He later escaped from this centre although it was voluntary.

After this Kurt went in and out of hospitals. After a long hospital stay in March 1994 he disappeared. He was reported missing by his wife and she also hired a private investigator to find him. Though the changes were small, she still hoped to find him alive, but the 8th of April 1994 Kurt Cobain was found dead in his own house. He had shoot him self in the head three days earlier.
Beside him lay a suicide letter, saying the reason he committed suicide was that he hated him self so much, that he couldn’t live with it. In the letter he said this about him self: “There’s good in all of us and I think I simply love people too much, so much that is makes me feel too fucking sad”. Kurt was never able to enjoy life, because he always thought of all the sad things that happened in the world. Even when he was on stage he had this depressive thoughts. He tried to make the audience feel like he was having a great time, while he really felt horrible and when the concert was over, he felt like he had been lying to them. This is how he expressed it in his suicide letter:
”For example when we’re backstage and the lights go out and the manic roar of the crowd begins, it doesn’t affect me the way in which it did for Freddy Mercury, who seemed to love, relish in the love and adoration from the crowd which is something I totally admire and envy. The fact is, I can’t fool you, any of you. It simply isn’t fair to you or me. The worst crime I can think of would be to rip people off by faking it and pretending as if I’m having 100 % fun.”
Kurt felt that his musical career was coming to an end, because he didn’t have the same passion for the music that he had had in the earlier days. He also felt that he owned his fans an explanation and in his letter he says it like this: “I’m too much of an erratic, moody, baby! I don’t have the passion anymore, and so remember, it’s better to burn out than fade away.”
Kurt loved his daughter very much, but she reminded him so much of how he was before he became so depressive and he would hate to se her end up like him: ”I can’t stand the thought of Frances becoming the miserable, self-destructive, death rocker that I’ve become.”
Kurt ended the letter telling his wife and daughter how much he loved them

Peace, Love, Empathy
Kurt Cobain

Frances and Courtney, I’ll be at your altar.
Please keep going Courtney, for Frances.
For her life, which will be so much happier without me.


In the memorial three days later Courtney said that Kurt has never expected to reach the age of 30. Unfortunately he was right. He became a rock legend like Jimmy Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison, they all became 27.

Short wile after Kurt’s death the album ”Unplugged in New York”, a recording of Nirvana playing their most popular songs live in NY, was released. Though this became Nirvanas most selling record ever, Krist and Dave never considered getting a new vocalist and move on with the band. They said Nirvana would never be the same without Kurt and referred to Kurt’s suicide letter: it’s better to burn out than fade away.”

List of sources :

http://studenter.hig.no/ann_west/unplugg.html
http://nirvanaway.hypermart.net/mp3/index.htm
http://usuarios.tripod.es/DeckardJ/entrar.htm

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