"Our family has dreaded the 10th anniversary of the death of our son, stepson and brother Kurt Cobain. Not only do we mourn his passing but we can never forget him, because even after 10 years we're constantly reminded by the controversy surrounding his death and the inneuendos that he was murdered. With the death of a loved one by suicide, a family experiences the guilt of what-ifs. With the death of an icon it never goes away. We all know that Kurt killed himself. Courtney did not kill him nor did she have him killed. We hope that all the quacks who try to make money by questioning his death will remember his music and remember that he did have a family that loved him and a beautiful little girl who doesn't deserve to forever be reminded of the garbage surrounding his death."
- Don and Jenny Cobain, and his family (Bellingham, Washington)
LAST UPDATE: APRIL 29TH
NFC News
Yahoo News
Launch News
MTV News
VH1 News
Rolling Stone News
NME News
Kerrang News
411 News
MINI-SITES:
NME Section - dedicated site for the 10th anniversary
New Music show - some interesting footage
91X Radio Station - has some exclusive interviews to download
MULTIMEDIA:
Tribute to Kurt
New Music show
0:20 min (preview)
2:00 min (entire file)
Kurt Cobain interview
Kurt Cobain's death
Some bands talking about Nirvana
PICTURES FROM SEATTLE (APRIL 5TH 2004):
ARTICLES:
10th Anniversary Of Death Sparks Reappraisal Of Cobain's Musical Legacy
Was Kurt Cobain Murdered?
Nirvana's Legacy: Ten Years Later
Still searching for closure
Nirvana: Days Of Thunder
Fans pay homage at park near Kurt Cobain's home
10 years gone: In life and death, Kurt Cobain is forever linked to Seattle
Kurt Cobain: His History And Legacy
The Soundtrack Of A Generation
Grunge Story
Endless, Nameless
Kurt Cobain: Murder Or Suicide?
Degeneration And Responsibility: The Effects Of Kurt Cobains Suicide
His Legacy Ensures; Kurt Cobain's Impact on Music
Curt answers
Nirvana's Kurt Cobain Did More Than Entertain Us
The Ghost of Generation X
Fans worldwide observe anniversary of Cobain death
Remembering Cobain on the cusp of fame
Remembering Cobain
Area fans remember Nirvana's troubled frontman
Remembering a gray Seattle day
Kennedy: 'Come as You Are' culture
Angst everlasting: Cobain's music immortal
When the Edge Moved to the Middle
Kurt Cobain: 10 years later, icon's legacy remembered
More than entertain us, Cobain inspired a generation
Cobain: 10 years of silence
Cobain's dark life left a shining legacy
Falling for the suicide blond
Kurt Cobain's place in rock history seems secure
Granted, Nirvana revived rock, but the band has Britney to answer for, too
Nirvana bandmates: Where are they now?
For Cobain, a sleepless Nirvana
10 years later, Cobain
lives on in his music
Death of a grunge legend
More questions in Kurt Cobain death?
'Nirvana' singer still makes an impression
Nirvana fans honour Cobain's memory
Fans pay homage at park near Kurt Cobain's home
Fans Mark 10 Years Since Cobain Death
Nirvana fans mark Cobain's death
Nirvana's Kurt Cobain did more than entertain us
On the Arts: Celebrate Nirvana's music, but as for the rest? Nevermind
Cobain's legacy lives on
Remembering Kurt Cobain: He led Nirvana, but never found it
Gen X's defining moment
Fans pay homage at park near Kurt Cobain's home
Kurt lives on in song
Thirteen Ways of Looking at Nirvana
Fans mark anniversary of Cobain's death
Kurt Cobain, the painter
Brown: Five songs define Nirvana's rich legacy
Ten years after death, legendary Cobain lives in memory
Cobain fans mark tenth anniversary
Cobain's Art Shows Flip Side Of His Genius
Remembering Cobain on the cusp of fame
How Nirvana changed the world
Fans remember Kurt Cobain for influence on music, style
For this fan, Cobain left him the soundtrack of his youth
Feels like ... such a waste
The legend of Kurt Cobain lives on
10TH ANNIVERSARY OF KURT COBAIN'S DEATH Part 1
10TH ANNIVERSARY OF KURT COBAIN'S DEATH Part 2
10TH ANNIVERSARY OF KURT COBAIN'S DEATH Part 3
10TH ANNIVERSARY OF KURT COBAIN'S DEATH Part 4
10TH ANNIVERSARY OF KURT COBAIN'S DEATH Part 5
Fans worldwide observe anniversary of Cobain death
The day the music died
His Legacy Ensures; Kurt Cobain's Impact on Music
Cobain fans still struggling to face the music
The Buzz: Remembering Kurt Cobain
The choice is yours/ don't be late
Five or ten - it's all the same
10 years ago today, Kurt Cobain took his life. What part of him lives on in music? In his fans? And then there's Courtney.
Remembering Cobain
Cobain 'was too heavily drugged to pull the trigger'
Looking back at Kurt Cobains
music and angst
What might have been
10 years gone: In life and death, Kurt Cobain is forever linked to Seattle
It's Cobain terrain
Brown: Fame was as deadly for Cobain as addiction
Superhero, lazy for life
Nevermind the hype
Kurt Cobain left legacy of unfulfilled potential, questions
Ten years today since Kurt Cobain died
Kurt Cobain: What was, what might have been
Grunge poster boy
Kurt Cobain: a life 10 years gone
Not Fade Away: Ten years gone, Kurt Cobain's legacy lingers -- as a rock pioneer and troubled soul
Searching for Nirvana
The ghost of grunge
The day the music died
Ten years later: Kurt Cobain's legacy endures
Cobain lives on in memory ten years after death
A generation speaks
FANS MARK 10 YEARS SINCE COBAIN DEATH:
By the Associated Press
ABERDEEN, Wash. - Kurt Cobain and his band, Nirvana, spent only three years in the public eye, and they released only three studio albums. But what he accomplished before committing suicide 10 years ago Monday at age 27 deciding it was "better to burn out than fade away," as he quoted Neil Young (news) in his suicide note was remarkable.
Beneath this bridge above the muddy banks of the Wishkah River, a troubled young Cobain would come to escape his unhappy home and the persistent gray drizzle of the Washington coast.
Among the cracking concrete supports, he would smoke pot and drink and plot his stardom, bragging to friends of his "suicide genes" and that he would die a young rock star.
It's here that many of his fans have come to pay their respects since he fulfilled that prophesy with a needle and a shotgun.
"Peace, love, empathy," reads one message scrawled in graffiti under the bridge.
"Kurt," says another, "Your spirit will bounce on happily."
Critics describe 1991's "Nevermind," which has sold more than 10 million copies, as one of the decade's most important albums. Its biggest hit, "Smells Like Teen Spirit," remains a seminal expression of teen angst. Cobain brought the dark, driven sound of grunge rock to the nation, helped save the world from hair metal, and with a single line "Here we are now, entertain us" captured and captivated a generation that had grown bored and cynical about popular music.
Andrew Harms, a 24-year-old disc jockey on a Seattle radio station, still remembers his first exposure to Nirvana, which remains his favorite band: seeing the video for "Teen Spirit" on MTV.
"It filled me with an energy that music had not done for me before," Harms says. "The guy had an amazing creative mind, and he took all the emotions within him and expressed it through music. It was music of substance, music that seemed real to me."
Cobain biographer Charles Cross says that when Nirvana went to record "Nevermind," they followed Warrant into the studio a band known for big hair, open shirts and their "Cherry Pie" video.
"Music at that point was so prefabricated, so fake, so hairspray that Nirvana was really a breath of fresh air," Cross says. "It was more organic than anything we'd seen in music in years."
Much of the screaming desperation in Cobain's songs can be traced to his life in this timber town on the Washington coast, and in Montesano, just inland, where his grandparents and father lived. Cobain's parents divorced when he was 9, an event that scarred him deeply, and much of his adolescence was spent bouncing among the homes and garages and vans of his parents, grandparents, relatives and friends.
As Cross writes in "Heavier Than Heaven," a family history of alcohol abuse and suicide weighed on him, but several relatives on both sides were artistically talented. Many friends recall Cobain saying he would one day join the "27 Club" a reference to the age Jim Morrison (news), Janis Joplin (news) and Jimi Hendrix (news) were when they died.
Cobain found an outlet for these emotions in guitar, punk rock and painting, through which he would express himself for the rest of his life. He spoke frequently during the last two years of his life of giving up music for painting.
Shortly before he dropped out of Aberdeen's Weatherwax High School, Cobain began playing with classmate Krist Novoselic (news). They formed Nirvana after moving to Olympia in the late 1980s, and drummer Dave Grohl now of the Foo Fighters joined the band in 1990, the year Cobain began taking heroin, and the year Nirvana's first album, "Bleach," helped it win a major label deal with DGC, part of Geffen Records.
Over the next year, Nirvana and grunge exploded onto the national stage, with Seattle becoming the locus, thanks to Nirvana and other local bands such as Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Alice in Chains. In September 1991, when "Nevermind" went on sale, Cobain had just been evicted from his Olympia apartment and was sleeping in his car. Geffen initially expected to sell only 50,000 copies of "Nevermind." By year's end, it sold 2 million.
Shortly before Cobain brought his dyed locks and emaciated frame onto "Saturday Night Live," he learned "Nevermind" had knocked Michael Jackson (news)'s "Dangerous" out of the No. 1 spot on the charts.
As his fame soared, though, so did his heroin use, in part as a self-treatment for his chronic stomach pain. Encouraged by his wife, Courtney Love (news), who had her own drug problems, Cobain checked into detox several times over the next 2 1/2 years. But he always returned to heroin, even around the time his daughter was born in the summer of 1992.
Nevertheless, his songwriting remained impressive and became more polished with Love's collaboration, especially on "Heart-shaped Box" and other songs for Nirvana's third album, "In Utero."
In January 1994, as Cobain's despondency spiraled, he recorded his last great song, "You Know You're Right." It would not be released until 2002, following a long legal battle between Love and the surviving Nirvana members, but the song's ironic couplet "Things have never been so swell/ and I have never been so well" lent a serious insight into Cobain's mind at the time.
While in Rome a month after recording it, he tried to kill himself by taking 60 tranquilizers. The overdose left him in a coma.
He survived, but in early April he jumped a wall at a detox center in Los Angeles and flew back to Seattle.
On April 5, 1994 give or take 24 hours Cobain wrote a suicide note, in which he said he couldn't stand to think of his daughter becoming "the miserable self-destructive, death rocker that I've become." He went into the greenhouse of his mansion, injected himself with a massive dose of heroin, put a 20-gauge shotgun against the roof of his mouth, and fired.
An electrician found his body the morning of April 8.
Thousands of people attended a vigil for him at Seattle Center back then. There is no such widespread event planned for the 10th anniversary of his death, though some fans communicating on the Internet have suggested meeting at Seattle Center. Others will come here, beneath the Young Street Bridge, or to the benches at Viretta Park, next to Cobain's house in Seattle, where some of his ashes are scattered.
Radio stations around the country plan to devote airplay to Nirvana's music Monday, and the Aberdeen Museum of History plans to open an exhibit and walking tour of Cobain-related sites this summer.
"You can't get around the drug use, but we're not going to dwell on it a lot," curator Dann Sears says. "What's important is his legacy, his music ... and he revolutionized music."
