Behind "Cobain Unseen": Charles R. Cross on Kurt's Private Archives

Where is the archive collection?
An "undisclosed location." And it literally was at an underground bomb-proof bunker that Bill Gates stored his stuff in. When I first went to visit it, it was the first time I my life my retina was ever scanned. It was like James Bond. The week Kurt died, Courtney had the sense to tell someone "put all this stuff away," and it had all been boxed up and never opened. I think I was the first person to open these boxes — and I cannot tell you how freaky that was, to open up a Rubbermaid container and inside were Kurt Cobain's board games that had been put away.

He was amassing all of this stuff over the years but moved around so much, so how were they able to keep it all?
Well that was one of the things that amazed me. If you read Heavier Than Heaven and you know a little of Kurt's history, he was homeless after he recorded Nevermind. But that didn't mean he wasn't a major collector. He had a bunch of crap, he basically carried these boxes around everywhere. Most of the stuff in the archive was bought after he got famous, because when he got money, he started buying stuff. The basement of the last home he lived in, which he only lived in for three months, there was something like 80 boxes of stuff in there that — a lot if it was Kurt's junk. So that stuff, after he died, was moved into this archive and never touched.

There are only a few of Kurt's paintings in the book. Why include so few?
Many of the paintings are three-dimensional and multifaceted, and there was just not a way to reproduce those in any book that would do them justice. At some point, there will be a gallery showing. He would take a porcelain doll, and then paint something on it — maybe blood, maybe paint, I don't know — and then glue his own hair on these dolls. So to be in these archives and holding this stuff, to literally have pieces of Kurt's DNA falling off me as I held it, just blew me away.

Would you say that the Chim Chim monkey is the most valuable piece of memorabilia that he's left behind?
I wouldn't — there's several Chim Chims. There's the one pictured on Nevermind, but Kurt had so many of them, and the names occasionally changed. One of my favorite pictures in the book is that page where we stacked like nine monkeys. But you know, there's another 30 of them that we couldn't picture. It's almost impossible to describe how obsessive Kurt was over monkeys, anatomical models, you know the things that he was obsessed by he was obsessed in a large degree.

Why was he so interested in these things?
Well, that's a question for Dr. Freud. That was the theme of the things that he was interested in, fascinated by birth and death and feces, elimination and sexuality. And these things show up in his songs. I think people forget how many songs are about masturbation in Nirvana's catalog. Certainly there are some about suicide, but there's more about masturbation. I'm not sure why he was obsessed with the monkeys. And ironically, you know that's one of the reasons that this is still fascinating for me, having spent numerous years of my life writing about him, I still can't completely figure it all out. He was such an odd character that that's one reason I think we're still talking about him.