There he was again, Kurt Cobain. This time with intense (almost accusing) eyes near the top of a mixed media collage by Nelson Wilbur. It’s called “KC,” and is part of a show at Vermillion Gallery that features work by artists associated with Georgetown’s Fogue™ Studios & Gallery. I looked at “KC” for several minutes (the iconic sunglasses, strips of music notes, words from Nirvana’s biggest hit, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” the mysterious number 2567), and then I spent several minutes wondering why I never fail to stop and stare at any work featuring the dead rock star. “KC” is, for sure, a fine piece of art, but if it wasn’t for its subject, I would have moved on to the next work by Wilbur. Cobain’s image always presents me with a riddle that I try to solve, and always fail to do so. Is it in his eyes? The reddish fish in “KC” is almost kissing him. Why?

Late the following day, August 11, I learned that Seattle’s eminent rock critic Charles Cross died in his sleep.

Cross authored the definitive Cobain biography, Heavier Than Heaven, which was published in 2001. In 2008 (or thereabouts), I met him at a dinner party organized by PopCon, and we talked on and on about Sister Rosetta Tharpe. In 2019, Cross proposed on Facebook that the City of Seattle buy Kurt Cobain’s former house on Lake Washington Boulevard—then on the market and asking for $7.5 million—demolish it, and transform the property into a park connected to the park with the bench that’s become a Cobain shrine. Indeed, it’s now called the Kurt Cobain Memorial Bench. Flowers, notes, loving graffiti are always to be found on and around it. People from around the world visit it. Some even experience something that can only be described as religious (“I tackled my midlife crisis by visiting Kurt Cobain’s Seattle shrine…“)

Sadly, our town had no time for such talk. City Hall is painfully pragmatic. The council is rarely guided by voices. Cross be damned. Cobain’s house, according to records, was sold during the not-long-enough lockdown for $7,050,000. It’s now another of Seattle’s many missed opportunities. 

“It is possible for an owned thing to entirely lose its private value and become valuable only to the public,” I wrote in a Slog post that did all it could to support Cross’s proposal. “For example, could you imagine selling the actual Roman, wooden cross Jesus was nailed to? Could you imagine putting it on the market? And putting it into the home of one person? Something similar can be said of Cobain’s house. It is has a value for millions upon millions of humans whose lives are attached to the music and life of Kurt Cobain.”

What I failed to point out in that post was our city’s inability to name and raise to the heavens its worldly gods. Think only of the Museum of Pop Culture. The late city prince Paul Allen built it as a church for Jimi Hendrix, the subject of Charles Cross’s biography Room Full of Mirrors. It was designed by starchitect Frank Gehry to look like a guitar Hendrix lit on fire. But the neo-church thing never really worked out. The believers never showed up. Eventually reference to Hendrix, Experience Music Project, was watered down to the Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum, and finally “Experience” was entirely dropped, as was the bit about science fiction, for the current generic name.

The statue of Jimi Hendrix on Broadway is a joke. The cafe Starbucks devoted to the once-thriving jazz scene on Jackson was closed long ago and is still empty. It’s hard to believe that “a young Ray Charles had a regular gig at The Rocking Chair nightclub near 14th Avenue and East Yesler Way.” And let’s not get into Ernestine Anderson. Kurt Cobain, a god of the rock world, had no chance under conditions like this. He was lucky to get a bench. Our grunge dead have almost no shrines, memorials, Meccas. Why?

Flying into Memphis in 2017, I was stunned to see that the Mississippi delta did indeed shine “like a national guitar.” Paul Simon was right. He was going to Graceland. I was going to Graceland. But, as I later found, the whole city is devoted to its pop-music gods. Bar after bar, Beale Street (what Jackson failed to become), the Stax Museum of American Soul Music (what the Museum of Pop Culture failed to become)—Memphis displays at every opportunity its enthusiasm to deify the worldly. In fact, one of the biggest recent stories and controversies to come out of Memphis concerns Graceland. Poor Lisa Marie Presley died; she, of course, had debts; the house she left now belonged to the market. The city said no.

At the eleventh hour on a Tuesday in May, a Memphis, Tennessee, judge put a halt to the process that could have seen the famous estate of Elvis Presley auctioned off to the highest bidder. The whole episode was surreal and appeared to mark a sad postscript to the death of Lisa Marie Presley, the only child of the King of Rock and Roll, who died 16 months earlier. 

Why do we, as a city, not feel this way about the house on Lake Washington Boulevard? Cross certainly did. Seattle did not. Unlike Memphis, we seem to lack this sense urgency or the understanding that certain parts of our culture are supernatural. It’s nearly impossible for us to spiritualize the material. We just can’t. How to explain this chilling lack? Maybe Gene Balk has the answer: “Seattle is the least-religious large metro in the U.S.” Is that what it comes down to? Toots & The Maytals’ call “to feel the spirit” is lost on us nonbelievers? The eyes of Wilbur’s Kurt Cobain’s looked angry to me. 

 

Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory...

16 replies on “Seattle Lamentably Ignored Charles Cross’s Call to Turn Kurt Cobain’s Property Into a Park”

  1. Jimi’s boyhood home is inarguably much more important to Seattle history than was the house in which Kurt Cobain barely lived. And Seattle didn’t want that either (much to Cross’s dismay).

  2. Gee, maybe as you so often point out Seattle should spend such funds on things like low income housing and not another park in the richest part of town because Cobain shot himself there. And then tear down the house itself, which is the connection to Cobain? Charles’s lack of pragmatism on full display here.

  4. @1 I think that’s also the key difference between Cobain’s Seattle house and, say, Graceland. The latter was an integral part of Presley’s life (both public and private) for two decades. It’s one of those places about which we say “If only those walls could talk!” But did anything truly memorable — anything at all — ever happen at Cobain House other than, sadly, his death? The house just isn’t something that comes readily to mind when one thinks of him, and thus it has little if any significance for most Seattleites. But I agree with Charles that much of Seattle’s musical legacy (especially the contributions by musicians of color) has in general been poorly conserved.

  5. Charles lamenting that Seattle failed to spend over $7 million on a 1/2 acre parcel situated with 100 yards of two existing city parks is peak Stranger.

  6. “Our grunge dead have almost no shrines, memorials, Meccas. Why?”

    Because building shrines would be antithetical to grunge. I stood in MoPop many years ago looking at Kurt’s thrift-store cardigan in a glass case; the whole thing was like some sort of reliquary. It was fascinating, and I think Kurt would have been appalled, or at the very least bewildered that he was Saint Cobain of the depressed and dispossessed, with his once 4-dollar purchase accessible only with paid admission.

    Chris Cornell is on the side of Easy Street Records. He adorns a utility box in West Seattle as well. So does Kurt. That seems appropriate.

    As does the the bench, the most perfect memorial one could imagine. His house? He lived there for just a few years. Maybe we should put a blue plaque at the Marco Polo Motel though.

    PS: Thank you for acknowledging the lockdowns weren’t long enough. More journalists need the guts and insight to say that.

  8. Oh, Chuck, who would laugh more at the idea of the city spending millions to buy a waterfront home — and demolish it, than Kurt himself?

  9. Nirvana is hugely overrated, an amplified rehash of 60’s/70’s garage punk, loud and soft based on basic pop song structure. Surfer Rosa came out several years before and go back further, Iggy, MC5, the Sonics, The Seeds kicked the door down decades earlier. Grunge is nothing but a movement brought on by (drumroll), corporate heads at record labels manufacturing rock to the masses. Money. Capitalism. In reality, music had already progressed to trip-hop and various offshoots of electronica with the advent of computers, even Madonna knew this with “Erotica” influenced by Massive Attack and the Bristol sound. The real rock pioneer of the 90’s is Kevin Shields who managed to reinvent rock with “Loveless” a glorious masterpiece of chaotic backwards and forwards feedback and vocals. Kurt Cobain is a tragedy and his suicide should not be glorified.

    Also, it’s starchitech and not stararchitecht. I know many architects and none of them ever use that term.

  10. Expanding on @6, MoPop actually has multiple Cobain sweaters in its collection, in addition to other clothing items, guitars, set lists, etc. I guess Charles missed that section of the museum?

  11. Can Seattle grunge be considered musically innovative? Probably not. Was it exploited commercially to a cringe-inducing degree? Oh god yes. But it’s still significant because it caught the mainstream zeitgeist like few local music scenes have ever done (Memphis in the ’50s and Detroit, L.A. and San Francisco in the ’60s are perhaps the only ones that surpass it in this regard). Grunge resonated widely with young people who were just then, in the midst of the early ’90s recession, coming to the realization that the postwar boom was really and truly over, that the era of plentiful well-paying jobs anyone could do was probably gone for good, and that making a life as an adult would be much harder for them than it had been (or seemed to have been) for their parents’ generation. It was Gen X’s collective primal scream, and that’s what makes it culturally important and its leading figures worth memorializing.

    I’m not against creating a park honoring Cobain similar to the one (rightly) honoring Jimi Hendrix. I just don’t think that a house he barely lived in and never created any widely shared memories in (except for one that nobody should celebrate) represents a particularly lamentable missed opportunity to do this.

  15. Toots must be some of the happiest sounds in our spherical corner of the universe, sweet contrast with the somber CK.

    From the comments so far, seems you’re as under-appreciated as other Portland public figures, some coincident, and I can see why you’d propose that’s Portland’s most enduring trait: under-appreciation.

    Were used to myth-making in Chicago, but Portland’s wind doesn’t seem to blow as hard.

  16. @11: “It was Gen X’s collective primal scream, and that’s what makes it culturally important and its leading figures worth memorializing.”

    Agreed. It was also the last spasm of true Rock’n’Roll, a musical movement which would last seventy (!) years and revitalize the world, as the Blues, Jazz, and R&B had done before, and Rap/Hip Hop would do then and after.

    I moved to Seattle just ahead of “Nevermind,” and after it dropped, I recall DJ Jon Ballard on KISW-FM, telling us kids that Nirvana was nothing new, and then playing “The Witch,” by The Sonics to prove it. I could not believe how well that song connected the Beatles to Nirvana. That was my introduction to the Pacific NW’s long musical history, which the EMP would later memorialize in their “NW Passage” exhibit.

    “But it’s still significant because it caught the mainstream zeitgeist like few local music scenes have ever done (Memphis in the ’50s and Detroit, L.A. and San Francisco in the ’60s are perhaps the only ones that surpass it in this regard).”

    The Seattle Music Scene was a moment which defined and began the international phenomenon which became Seattle In The ’90s. To your list, I would add New York City in the ’40s and ’50s, Chicago in the ’20s, New Orleans in the 20th Century, and then continue with the dot-com boom, echoing the rise of telephone and radio in the 1920s. We’d won the Cold War (as proof, a block of the Berlin Wall was on display at Seattle Center), it was an incredible, revolutionary time, and we who lived and made it can always look back upon it with pride and wonder.

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