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

How cooperative was Courtney during the making of this book?
She was very cooperative. Completely hands-off. Her only direction was "make sure the material is in good taste, don't put things that are ghoulish, and don't put things that focus on the darkness."

What did you come across that might have been considered in bad taste?
The only thing that there was a debate on was the X-ray of Kurt that is reproduced there. There has been some debate about Kurt's drug addiction and how much of that was his own fabrication and how much [was the result] of the physical problems that he wrote about — they literally showed up in the songs, there are lines about how his bones hurt. So this was not stuff that he kept to himself. The fact that he still had an X-ray that showed that he had scoliosis as an adult, that to me was fascinating. Kurt kept all this stuff. He didn't get a report card or a note from the doctor that he didn't stash somewhere.

What other photos really stood out for you when you came across them?
The pictures near the end of the book of Kurt and Frances. He took so many pictures of himself and Frances and every single one of them breaks your heart to look at. There's a picture where Kurt is sitting in an overstuffed striped chair, and Frances is sitting on his lap — it absolutely sent a chill through my body. What really struck me, and I've seen thousands if not hundreds of thousands of pictures of Kurt before, but these are not pictures you would see, normally. These are pictures of a family, not Kurt Cobain. There's also a picture on there towards the end that, again, just absolutely slayed me. It's a picture of Kurt lying in this iron bed, kind of in a fetal position. And Courtney told me that that was her favorite picture of Kurt. And it's so beautiful, it's so him. And yet at the same point it's so sad, so harrowing, so haunting, and so innocent — it's all caught up in there.

What's fascinating to me is you can see the stuff in the periphery of these photos.
There were some debates about what to put on the cover. I really like the picture of Kurt in his Olympia apartment. Basically everything is there: you've got the Visible Man poster on the wall, you've got these little tiny beetle figurines glued to a speaker. But all the stuff on the wall, or in the periphery as you say — this is Nevermind. It's right there. All the elements end up in his work. That's the room he wrote "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in. It's Picasso in his studio, to a degree. It's Bob Dylan at the house in Woodstock.

When did you first meet Kurt?
Well the magazine that I was the editor of, The Rocket, wrote about the very first single, and I knew [Sub Pop founder Jonathan] Poneman and knew the band when they were on Sub Pop, but I don't think I met him until seeing them in early shows, in the late '80s. You know it's funny, I know Novoselic far better. He would come into our office and basically say, "Will you write about our band?" Everybody thought he was the leader of the band.