Summary
The stringy blond hair, the striped shirt, the unshaven face, and the unmistakable voice: such is the iconic image of Kurt Cobain, the front man for Nirvana whose musical genius influenced an entire generation of musicians long after his early death. Cobain lived a life that was influenced heavily by drugs and by his bleak Seattle upbringing. His outlet was music. By 1987, Cobain was playing in bars with a band he and Krist Novoselic called Nirvana. But the end of 1988, they had recorded an album, Bleach, that gained moderate regional success. But it was the band's second album, Nevermind, released in 1991 with drummer Dave Grohl, that catapulted the Seattle grunge band into the limelight and the mainstream. Soon, other "Seattle sound" bands like Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, and the Stone Temple Pilots were filling the airwaves with their alternative rock messages of discontent. Faced with overwhelming success along with long separations from his wife and child, Cobain coped by using drugs. On April 5, 1994, Cobain committed suicide; he was 27. Kurt Cobain tells of the meteoric rise of this influential musician and the void his early death left in the music world.