Love & Death Read Online Free Page B

life was a mess,” recalls Reed, who was a Christian youth counselor at the time. “He had big problems with his mother, and he was going through a really bad time. He and my son were always together, so I asked him if he wanted to stay with us. He jumped at the chance. I think Kurt saw me as a Ned Flanders–type guy, although I don’t think The Simpsons were even airing yet. I was with the South Aberdeen Baptist Church. Kurt became a born-again Christian through my son, Jesse, and our family environment. He went to church almost every time the door was open. I was a youth group leader, and Kurt would always come to church with Jesse. For a while, he took Christian life very seriously. But mostly he was into art, horses and music.”
    By this time, Kurt had dropped out of high school and entered what he would later call his “aimless years.” For hours on end, he would sit in the local library reading voraciously or writing the poems that would eventually form the lyrics to many familiar Nirvana songs. Hilary Richrod, the reference librarian at Aberdeen’s Timberland Library, recalls Kurt coming every day and reading for hours at a time: “It was hard to miss him. He usually had multicolored hair, and that kind of stuck out in a town like Aberdeen.”
    The most significant by-product of his churchgoing period was Kurt’s burgeoning friendship with a gawky teenage giant named Krist Novoselic, who attended the same church as the Reeds. Kurt and Krist had met in high school, but it was while attending the Baptist church—which Krist joined because he was dating a Christian girl at the time—that they actually bonded, says Reed.
    Jesse Reed, who was also a musician, invited Krist over one day to jam with him and Kurt. “You could say that the roots of Nirvana began in our house,” says the elder Reed, himself a former musician who had played in a group called the Beachcombers with Kurt’s uncle Chuck. “Kurt was really into his music; he practiced all the time and he was writing a lot of songs. He wanted to be a star. He said it all the time.” A former member of the Beachcombers had gone on to become a promo man for Capitol Records in Seattle, and after Kurt learned of Reed’s connection, he became obsessed with meeting the executive and launching a music career.
    Before long, Kurt’s flirtation with Christianity waned, he resumed smoking pot and an indignant Dave Reed eventually threw him out when Kurt broke a window one night after he had lost his key. But a small miracle had happened while he was there. Kurt began to believe that he could get out of Aberdeen and that his escape route might be rock and roll. Before long, he and Krist had formed a band with a drummer friend named Aaron Burckhard, rehearsing constantly in a room above the downtown beauty salon operated by Krist’s mother.
    By the end of our weekend in Kurt’s hometown, we had come no closer to determining whether the rejection and alienation of his dysfunctional youth had led inexorably to his self-demise. To each person we interviewed who had known him when he was young, we posed the question. Each in turn said they saw no real signs of self-destruction but blamed whatever happened after he left, perhaps unwilling or unable to indict the community to which they still clung. With the exception of Kurt’s first guitar teacher, Warren Mason, who said he “just couldn’t see himself doing that at that point in his life,” none doubted that he had killed himself. Dave Reed tells us to look elsewhere if we ever hope to make sense of Kurt’s death, saying, “It was his fame that killed him.”

    Kurt Cobain had always wanted to be famous. That was the one thing virtually everybody we talked to in his hometown agreed on. When he finally got his wish in 1991, it was and wasn’t what he’d expected.
    He finally escaped Aberdeen for good in 1987, shortly after his twentieth birthday. He had moved to the state capital, Olympia, thirty miles up