An awkward visit to Aberdeen, the city where Kurt Cobain was born
You feel guilty. This is what happens when you fulfill your teenage dream: knowing that place where your idol was born, grew up, wrote his first stories, sketched his first comics, composed his first songs.
This is what happens when you appear in a city that welcomes you with an eternal fog, a cold humidity that penetrates your bones, a gray sky and a horizon full of industrial buildings and tremendous chimneys that smoke incessantly.
Don't sit in the cradle of grunge. You feel in a lynchian universe closer to eraserhead . That's how it is Aberdeen (Washington). You begin to understand how this adverse environment, this sad arrival, could be the origin of an entire musical and social movement.
And you feel very foreign, far outside the comfort of your roadside motels and bacon diners. Something has radically changed in the feeling of your trip: the tourism that comes to this part of Washington only comes for one reason: to know the history of Kurt Cobain , the most recognized neighbor of him.
Kurt Cobain
You know you've arrived in Aberdeen when you see the city's welcome road sign with its Come as you are. I admit that my stomach knotted. "But how many hours of my life did I spend listening to his broken voice?" I still remember saving all my pay so I could afford the biography of Charles R Cross . And that delicious special edition called With the lights out.
I still remember feeling closer to Nirvana's music than to my parents or my friends. That was the level (oh, poor me, privileged city girl who never lacked for anything...). But that was the power of his voice and his lyrics. And that was the power of a music that screamed full of rage but that touched the deepest when you needed it..
And here I am, in Aberdeen, almost two decades after my teenage obsession. And everything comes back. The damn poster, that damn poster, has turned my stomach inside out, it has kicked my heart and makes me fully remember those Galician days of gusty wind listening on loop 'Polly', 'Versus Chorus Verse', 'Frances Farmer will have her revenge on Seattle' ... and many others.
My adventure partner, my tireless driver and my other self (yes, he is all that and more), decides to leave the podcasts of Millennium 3 and **Black and Criminal** to voice Kurt. Call me dramatic, call me crazy. But a tear began to appear. That is the power of nostalgia, of destinations, of travel.
Come as you are sign as you enter Aberdeen
I decide to search my phone notes for the addresses I hastily wrote down with Charles R. Cross reading beside me, wondering if we'd ever make it this far. And we arrived.
Here is the "memorial" to Kurt , right on the banks of the Wishkah River, the one that inspired the title of the album From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah . I put quotation marks around the word because the state it is in is deplorable. "Never mind," I think, "this is grunge, right?" We park the car at the end of the cart and a sign warns us...
No, this is not a giftshop
No, Kurt didn't live here
I lived at 1210 E, 1st
No, we didn't know him
Phil next door did
Needles & stuff watch out
Yes, we have lots of traffic
Yes, we get tired of it
If you think there's trouble
You call 911
Please don't steal our stuff
1210 E First street, Aberdeen
A friend, Sergio, writes in my Instagram post warning: "Be careful that the rock is quite strange over there, or so I have been told", just at the moment in which we hear some distant voices, coming from under the famous bridge of wood, which announce shouts and fights. We were there for a very short time, with that feeling of not belonging, of not being welcome. What the hell are you doing here, leave us alone.
We decided to leave and go around the entrance to the town along the street of the house where he grew up, happily, until his parents divorced. 1210 E First street . Is closed. A boy, sitting on the porch of the house next door, doesn't even look at us. Normal, this happens every damn day. Tourists coming. Come the house. They take the photo. They go.
We feel uncomfortable. We don't get out of the car. What are we doing, really? I tell Luigi to get out of there, what a bad feeling.
Bridge over the Wishkah River
We decided to leave, passing by a specialty coffee shop beforehand, resting somewhere cozy, looking for the warmth of the coffee... Tinder Box Coffee Roasters It's open. Mix an area of vinyl and coffee with another somewhat strange disguised as a Hawaiian tiki bar. The barista is not particularly nice (as all baristas and waiters in the United States tend to be, with that smile from ear to ear) but she serves us with assertiveness after looking us up and down several times.
We went out. Just opposite, the old Rosevear's Music Center , now closed, where Krist Novoselic and Kurt Cobain learned to play their first chords. Nothing remains of that time.
Suddenly, you are a piece that does not fit in the puzzle ; you are a foreigner who once again crosses the iron drawbridges (those that try in vain to maintain the tranquility and privacy of the town) to enter the town and absurdly search for that house in which he lived and that bridge under which, supposedly, also lived.
Bridge over the Wishkah River
This is what happens when, looking for the little house of the Cobain family You have deviated from Highway 5 for almost two hours, leaving "for later" your other grunge destination (Seattle). You may ask: is it worth it? I still don't know the answer.
I still feel a certain guilt when I remember those awkward moments . I still feel that with that visit we invaded a little piece of the intimacy of someone who has long been gone from this world, like when you visit a cemetery looking for a recognized tombstone and you have to go quickly and shivering between other tombstones.
He wrote about the city of him:
In a community that stresses macho male sexual stories as a highlight of all conversation I was an under developed immature fat little dude that never got laid and was constantly razzed "Oh, poor little kid!"
Now I understand it all.