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

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Can you talk about the werewolf picture in the book?
When I wrote Heavier Than Heaven I interviewed one of Kurt's kindergarten classmates, and you know you meet all these people in Aberdeen, and to be blunt it's hard to know what to believe. And he said, "You know, Kurt could draw anything. There was a picture once he took of a werewolf out of a comic book and drew it, and it looked exactly like the werewolf." I thought, "This guy's making this up. How can he remember something from kindergarten?" And then in the process of doing this book, we discover this picture, and it's like, "Oh my God! This kindergarten kid was exactly right." That was April 1975, when the giant-sized werewolf came out.

There's a striking photo of Kurt with his dad — can you talk a little bit about their relationship?
Well, it was a very complicated relationship and I think that unfortunately Kurt said some things when he became famous that lead people to believe that he hated his father when the truth was in his childhood he was closer to his father than he was to his mother. But once his father remarried it brought so many complications to the family. In some ways that was a betrayal for Kurt who always wanted attention, and who loved it when he and his father lived alone. They essentially both acted like teenagers and shot bee-bee guns and rode motorcycles or motor bikes. And when his dad remarried that was a relationship fraught with emotional problems for Kurt, though again all this stuff gets apocryphal. You know the story is Kurt hated this, and Kurt hated that. The truth was we have copies of letters and cards, and there are a few of these that are actually in the book — he clearly had a much closer with relationship with his step brothers and sisters, and enjoyed that relationship when it first began. But, he had been, his intimate relationship with his father shifted and there's no way that could ever remain the same.

What about the 1989 photo where he's drinking strawberry Quik? He wasn't doing heroin at this point was he?
He was having serious stomach problems then and his thought drinking strawberry Quik would help relieve his stomach, and of course any physician who understands bowel problems would tell you is that that was the exact opposite of what you should do, that milk products are only gonna irritate your stomach problems and not soothe them. Kurt was convinced that that was the cure.

He wasn't doing heroin. What's remarkable about that particular tour is that Kurt not only didn't do drugs, he didn't smoke, he didn't even smoke pot and he didn't drink. Kurt's drug stories always get so blown out of proportion, but for the majority of the band's touring he was the most straight-laced one in the band, and would freak out if someone smoke a cigarette near him, because he felt that his vocal chords were so sensitive that he couldn't stand to be around that.

[From Issue 1064 — October 30, 2008]

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