 "In between gigs I always set up the equipment in a corner of the dining room so I could rehearse," she explains. "Kurt was probably about 10 years old when he first started asking if he could turn on the equipment, play my guitar and sit behind the microphone. I don't have any vivid memory of what he sounded like, but I remember him being very careful not to damage the equipment. He respected it." As his interest in music accelerated, Cobain was given a guitara Lindellfor his fourteenth birthday by his uncle, Chuck Fradenburg, who also worked as a musician.
By this time, Cobain's musical influences ranged from '60s pop groups like the Beatles and Monkees to classic '70s rock acts like Led Zeppelin, Queen, and Black Sabbath. As he learned to play guitar in the early '80s, his musical tastes widened again, after meeting Matt Lukin and Buzz Osborne at Montesano High School (Montesano being another neighboring town in the area). Both Lukin and Osborne played in a local band called the Melvins (Lukin would go on to play in Mudhoney), and through Osborne, Cobain learned about the burgeoning hardcore scene and such bands as Black Flag and Flipper. Back at Aberdeen High, Cobain met Chris Novoselic, born in California in 1965, who'd moved to Aberdeen with his family in 1979. The two hung out at the Melvins' practice space, largely because of the lack of anything else to do in Aberdeen. During this period, Cobain made what may be his first recorded effort, again at Earl's house, who had married and moved to Seattle (two hours drive from Aberdeen). While visiting over Christmas vacation in 1982, Cobain brought along his electric guitar, and made a tape, also using Earl's bass, and drumming on an empty suitcase with wooden spoons. "Most of what I remember about the songs was a lot of distortion on guitar, really heavy bass, and the clucky sound of the wooden spoons. And his voice, sounding like he was mumbling under a big fluffy comforter, with some passionate screams once in awhile. Musicially, it was very repetitious. He called the recording Organized Confusion." Cobain would continue to make home recordings on a regular basis, both before and during the Nirvana years, up to the last weeks of his life. It's not known how much of this material has survived, or what the quality isor if tracks said to be "Kurt's home recordings" on the innumerable bootlegs on the market are indeed what they claim to be. "Kurt enjoyed coming up here," Earl adds. "He always was very very careful; whenever he ran into any problems, he would always ask me, 'Aunt Mari, could you help me with this?'" But though she was a musician herself, Earl says Cobain rarely discussed the specifics of his work with her. "As far as really sharing his music with me, and saying, 'What do you think of this?' or whatever, he really didn't do that," she says. "Kurt was very sensitive about the stuff that he wrote and he was very careful about who he let hear it. 'Cause he didn't really like someone just poking fun at it. And being a songwriter myself, I can understand that." |