Aberdeen's Influence on Kurt Cobain

Aberdeen's Influence on Kurt Cobain

The towns of Hoquiam and Aberdeen are located on the eastern edge of Grays Harbor in western Washington state. If you are a fan of the band Nirvana, you have probably heard of these names. If not, you are about to read how a town affected a person who in turn affected many people's lives.

Kurt Cobain was the singer and guitarist for Nirvana. He was born in Hoquiam (population 9,000) and after six months of life moved to Aberdeen (pop. 16,500), an old lumber town at the eastern-most point of Grays Harbor. The town is about four miles wide and three miles long. On the northern and eastern sides of town are steep hills where the richer families live in Victorian-style houses. At the foot of the hills is the poorer part of Aberdeen where Kurt grew up. (Gilmore 44)

Seattle is known to get a lot of rain. Aberdeen gets more: they get up to seven feet a year. The rain casts a "constant, dreary pall over the town" (Azerrad 11). Route 12 into Aberdeen is "bordered by an endless succession of trailer parks" with forests of trees behind them that have "vast stubbly scars where the loggers have been clear-cutting" (12). To author Sallie Tisdale, Hoquiam and Aberdeen are "sprawling and untidy" and "dull, mediocre, undecorative" towns. Almost all the views of the water are "marred by piles of logs and steaming mills." (213)

Aberdeen and Hoquiam are two of the oldest logging, sawmilling, and paper-manufacturing towns in the Northwest. Paper-producing companies, like Weyerhaeuser, ITT Rayonier, and others, have their mills here. (Fodor's 139) Logging used to dominate Aberdeen. But business has been declining lately and "layoffs are turning Aberdeen into a ghost town." One of the biggest mills wh...

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... Cobain is dead at the age of 27. He leaves behind a wife who loved him, a daughter who will never know him and millions of strangers whose lives have been enriched because he lived. (53)

Works Cited

Azerrad, Michael. Come As You Are: the Story of Nirvana. New York: Doubleday, 1994.

Fodor's Pacific North Coast. New York: Fodor's Travel Publications, Inc., 1989.

Gilmore, Mikal. "The Road From Nowhere." Rolling Stone. 2 Jun. 1994: 44-46, 53.

Jeschke, Rebecca A., ed. Let's Go: The Budget Guide to the Pacific Northwest, Western Canada, and Alaska. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993.

Mundy, Chris. "The Lost Boy." Rolling Stone. 2 Jun. 1994: 51-53.

Oberrecht, Kenn. Driving the Pacific Coast, Oregon, and Washington. Chester, Connecticut: The Globe Pequot Press, 1990.

Tisdale, Sallie. Stepping Westward. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1991.