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While researching his Kurt Cobain biography Heavier Than Heaven, journalist Charles R. Cross came across the nearly 100 boxes of the rocker's belongings that had been moved into a secure storage facility. "When I went and saw that stuff, I called up Courtney and I said 'Jesus fucking Christ, I cannot believe this art and how amazing all this stuff is.' " Cross' new book, Cobain Unseen mines that archive for artwork, photographs and journal entries that have been locked away since the Nirvana leader's death. Rolling Stone spoke to Cross about the project, and what it revealed about its mysterious subject. (See a gallery of images from the book here.)
I'm familiar with a lot of Nirvana photos, but I've
actually never seen a lot of the photos in Cobain
Unseen.
I had seen Kurt's archives and it would take a lot to surprise me,
at this point, but I was surprised by some of the stuff. We were
working on this book when we found out that there were undeveloped
rolls of film that Kurt had shot at least 15 years ago — and
they were still sitting around the archive collection, and no one
had ever developed them.
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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.
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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.
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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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