Video will appear as you scroll through the story
Nirvana · S1 E1
Welcome to Aberdeen
Aberdeen, Washington. A logging town on the rain-soaked coast where the timber industry is dying and there is nothing for teenagers to do except drink, fight, or leave. Kurt Donald Cobain is born here on February 20, 1967, and the town will spend decades trying to decide whether to claim him or forget him
Aberdeen, Washington: fewer than twenty thousand people, two hundred rainy days a year, and a timber industry bleeding to death. A boy born on East First Street in 1967 will turn this dying town into the most famous origin story in rock.
Nirvana, Smells Like Teen Spirit. This is the sound that came out of a dying logging town on the Washington coast. Four chords, a scream, and the end of everything that came before.
Aberdeen, Washington
A logging town on the rain-soaked coast of Washington State, ninety miles west of Seattle. Kurt Cobain spent his first nineteen years here, and the town has spent the decades since trying to decide whether to claim him or forget him.
The Town
In the 1970s, Aberdeen is a place that is slowly shutting down. The timber mills that employed the whole county are closing one by one, heroin fills the void, and Grays Harbor County's suicide rate runs well above the national average. There is nothing for a kid to do except watch it happen.
“I had a really good childhood, until the divorce. Then, all of a sudden, my whole world changed. I became antisocial. I started to understand the reality of my surroundings, which didn't have a lot to offer.”
— Kurt Cobain
Smells Like Teen Spirit, Nirvana (1991)
Four chords, a riff Kurt thought sounded too much like the Pixies, and a vocal tracked in just a few takes at Sound City Studios in Van Nuys. Butch Vig told Kurt to double-track his vocals to thicken them, a pop production trick that Kurt would later resent. Listen for the dynamic shift from verse to chorus: thin, clean guitar explodes into full distortion in two beats. That contrast, quiet to deafening, is the sound of a kid who learned the only way to be heard in a town like Aberdeen was to be louder than everything around him.
TAP TO REVEAL: What does the welcome sign at the entrance to Aberdeen say?
Aberdeen: The File
What was the primary industry in Aberdeen, Washington when Kurt Cobain was growing up?
Something in the Way, Nirvana
The closing track on Nevermind, whispered over a barely audible cello. Kurt claimed he wrote it while living under the Young Street Bridge over the Wishkah River in Aberdeen. The literal truth of that story is debated, but the emotional truth is not. This is what Aberdeen sounds like after midnight: cold, wet, and impossibly lonely.
Kurt is nine years old when his parents' marriage falls apart. The happy, screaming, constantly drawing boy disappears overnight, and what takes his place will take another decade to find its voice.
0 XP earned this session