Nirvana Group Members

Kurt Donald Cobain (February 20, 1967 - April 5, 1994) was the lead singer and guitarist of the grunge band Nirvana, which also included bassist Krist Novoselic and drummer Dave Grohl.

Cobain was highly influential in popularizing what came to be termed grunge music - a style that evolved in part as a reaction against the perceived superficiality of 1980s stadium rock and over-the-top metal bands with preened images and elaborate stage shows. His best known song is "Smells Like Teen Spirit", which was often referred to by the media as an anthem for Generation X. Among other well known Cobain songs are "Lithium", "In Bloom", "Come As You Are", "Heart Shaped Box", "All Apologies", and the highly controversial "Rape Me".

Early Career:

Kurt Cobain was born in Hoquiam, Washington, USA and spent his early years in Aberdeen, Washington, after his parents, Wendy and Donald, divorced. He moved to the Seattle area in 1985.

As a teenager with a chaotic home life growing up in small town Washington, Cobain took part in the thriving Pacific Northwest alternative culture, going to punk rock shows in Seattle and forming a lifelong friendship with fellow Aberdeen musicians The Melvins, whose music heavily influenced Nirvana's sound. He had a small "K" tattooed on his forearm, the insignia of Olympia, Washington, label K Records, largely chosen for the coincidental ellipsis of his name.

At school Cobain didn't take much interest in academics or sports, mostly focusing on his art courses. He was an outspoken supporter of homosexual students at his school, sometimes suffering physically at the hands of homophobes for his beliefs. (Although he once claimed in an interview with The Advocate that he was arrested for spray-painting a pro-gay slogan on a bank, Aberdeen police records show the phrase he was arrested for in 1985 was actually "Ain't got no how watchamacallit.")

It has been rumored that Cobain was gay or bisexual; however, Cobain himself said numerous times that he was heterosexual. In a February, 1992, interview with gay magazine The Advocate, Cobain admitted that he thought he was gay while in high school and stated, "I could be bisexual... If I wouldn't have found Courtney, I probably would have carried on with a bisexual lifestyle." In his journals he wrote that he was heterosexual, but wished he was gay just "to piss off homophobes."

Cobain spent a lot of time reading in the local library, discovering such literary figures as William S. Burroughs, whose cut-up technique Cobain later utilised to write lyrics for some of Nirvana's songs. Cobain also later recorded with Burroughs a spoken word/ guitar improvisation piece called The Priest They Called Him, whose words were originally one of Burroughs' short stories out of The Exterminator.

Nirvana:

Before dropping out of high school Cobain met fellow punk rock devotee Krist Novoselic, with whom he would later form what would become Nirvana. After years of playing in the band, Nirvana exploded into the mainstream, seemingly changing the music industry overnight.

Cobain struggled to reconcile the success of his band with his underground roots. He also felt persecuted by people, especially the media, comparing himself to Frances Farmer, and harbored no small amount of resentment for people who claimed to be fans of the band but believed in nothing that Nirvana stood for or what it came from.

Cobain's Marriage:

In a 1992 ceremony in Hawaii, Cobain married Courtney Love, lead singer of the band Hole. Later that year the two had a daughter, Frances Bean Cobain. The unusual middle name was given to her because Cobain thought she looked like a bean on the first sonogram he saw of her. Her namesake is Frances McKee of The Vaselines, of whom Cobain was a close friend.

Cobain was also a devoted champion of alternative rock acts. He would often make reference to his favourite bands in interviews, more often than not placing a greater importance on the bands that influenced him than on his own music. Making references to obscure performers like The Vaselines, Daniel Johnston, The Meat Puppets, Young Marble Giants and The Raincoats as well as sharing a split single with American rockers The Jesus Lizard, proved beneficial to both parties in that the bands found a larger audience and Cobain cemented his indie rock credibility. Both The Raincoats and The Vaselines records were reissued by Nirvana's record company Geffen Records and Curt and Kris Kirkwood from the Meat Puppets appeared with Nirvana on Nirvana's MTV Unplugged special, playing on three Meat Puppets covers. The set also featured cover versions of the aforementioned Vaselines as well as legendary bluesman Leadbelly.

Death of Kurt Cobain:

Throughout most of his adolescent life, Cobain had battled depression and pain due to a chronic stomach condition. Because of stomach problems he blamed on the stresses of performing, he self-medicated by use of heroin. This use developed into an addiction, which he battled until his death in 1994, when he committed suicide on April 5, at the age of 27, using a shotgun he had purchased a week before from best friend Dylan Carlson, who was rumored to be the inspiration for the song "In Bloom". His body was discovered three days later in his home by an electrician who he had commissioned to install security lighting. Toxicology experts have stated that even though Cobain's tolerance level was extremely high, the amount of heroin injected into his body would have been enough to kill him (225 mg, three times the lethal dosage for an addict, 75 times the lethal dosage for a non-user). His death triggered several copycat suicides, and the unclear circumstances surrounding it inspired a multitude of conspiracy theories stemming from the investigations of detective Tom Grant.

Grant was hired by Courtney Love following Cobain's disappearance from a hospital in which he was recovering from an apparent suicide attempt, and is now certain Cobain was murdered by Love. Filmmaker Nick Broomfield made a documentary film on this theory entitled Kurt and Courtney.

In his suicide note, Cobain quoted a lyric from Neil Young's song "My My, Hey Hey": "It's better to burn out than to fade away." Cobain's use of the lyric had a profound impact on Young, who recorded portions of the Sleeps With Angels album in Cobain's memory. The conspiracy theories alledge that the suicide note was actually a letter he was writing about his intent to leave Nirvana, and the authenticity of the last four lines has been questioned by many handwriting experts.

Kurt Cobain was cremated; one third of his ashes were scattered in a Buddhist temple in New York, another third were scattered in the Wishkah River, Washington State, and the rest are in the possession of Courtney Love.

Many attribute some of Cobain’s extraordinary abilities (and his suicide) to his being affected by bipolar disorder, commonly known as manic depression.

Krist Novoselic:

Krist Anthony Novoselic (born May 16, 1965) is an American rock musician. He was born in Compton, California. His parents were immigrants from Croatia, and Novoselic spent some time living there.

He is, by far, best known for playing bass in the band Nirvana. After Nirvana's dissolution in the wake of Kurt Cobain's suicide, Novoselic formed the band Sweet 75 , which was a commercial failure. Later, he joined Jello Biafra and former Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil in the No WTO Combo. He was the bassist for the super-group band Eyes Adrift, which also included former Meat Puppets frontman Curt Kirkwood and former Sublime and Long Beach Dub Allstars drummer Bud Gaugh. After dismal sales of their self-titled debut, the trio disbanded in 2003.

Novoselic remains active in politics, making appearances to advocate electoral reform (especially instant-runoff voting and proportional representation) and running the website fixour.us. He considered a 2004 run for Lieutenant Governor of Washington (as a Democrat, challenging an incumbent of the same party), but ultimately decided against it. He recently got married. His first book, Of Grunge and Government: Let's Fix This Broken Democracy, was published in October 2004.

Dave Grohl:

Dave Grohl (born January 14, 1969 in Warren, Ohio) is a rock musician, who was the drummer of the grunge band Nirvana from 1990 until the band split up in 1994 after frontman Kurt Cobain's suicide. He formed the band Foo Fighters later that year.

Grohl, who was raised in Alexandria, Virginia, began his music career in the 1980s as the drummer for the band Freak Baby , and later joined the Washington, DC punk rock band Scream. Buzz Osbourne of The Melvins recommended him to Nirvana after the departure of drummer Chad Channing. Dave Grohl joined Nirvana and moved to Seattle in 1990, where at first he shared an apartment with Kurt Cobain. Grohl's distinctively heavy-handed drumming, a style he learned from banging marching band sticks on his bed as a teenager, were a driving force behind Nirvana's breakthrough album Nevermind.

Although while a member of Nirvana Grohl was known to most fans only as a drummer and backing vocalist, he had in fact played guitar for several years. In 1990 he released a cassette demo, Pocketwatch, under the name "Late!", for which he played all of the instruments. From this recording, the song "Marigold" would later become a Nirvana b-side (with Grohl on vocals), while "Winnebago" would later be released as a Foo Fighters song, as the b-side of "This Is A Call". Grohl also contributed a riff which would later become "Scentless Apprentice", from Nirvana's album In Utero.

Following Cobain's death Grohl recorded a fifteen-track demo, on which he again played all instruments with the exception of a guitar part on "X-Static", played by Greg Dulli of the Afghan Whigs, and the bass part of "Alone + Easy Target", which was played by Krist Novoselic. The demo gained considerable buzz and was released, unchanged except for trimming three tracks, in 1995 as the Foo Fighters' debut album. Grohl did not want the effort to be considered the start of a solo career, so he recruited other band members. Former Nirvana member Pat Smear(guitar), and two members of the band Sunny Day Real Estate, William Goldsmith(drums) and Nate Mendel(bass).

After the release of their debut, the band released their second album The Colour and the Shape in 1997. Considered by many as the band's finest work to-date, it consists of hits such as: "Everlong", "My Hero", and "Monkey Wrench". However, after the release two members, Pat Smear and William Gold Smith left the band. Two new musicians soon replaced the departed members, Taylor Hawkins, who replaced Goldsmith and Franz Stahl, who replaced Smear. Stahl later left the group in the midst of a world tour and was replaced shortly thereafter by Chris Shiflett.

The Foo Fighters' tremendous success led once again to a life of touring and traveling for Grohl, who throughout the 1990s lived in Seattle, Washington and Los Angeles before returning to his native Virginia, where his basement served as the recording studio for the 1999 album There Is Nothing Left to Lose.

Aside from the Foo Fighters, Grohl has worked on several other musical projects, earning a reputation as a rock and roll "jack of all trades". He recorded the score for the 1996 film Touch . In 2001 he joined Queens of the Stone Age as a drummer, both for the recording of their album Songs for the Deaf and the tour which followed the album's release. In 2002 also played drums for Tenacious D. He has also drummed on the latest Killing Joke album.

Grohl spent the last several years working on a new side project named PROBOT. According to an interview published in the magazine Guitar World , the project began as a self-induced backlash against the more commercial friendly material Grohl wrote for There Is Nothing Left to Lose. The album features various metal singers on vocals, notably Lemmy of Motörhead, and is entirely Grohl's instrumentation except for 2 lead guitar tracks performed by Soundgarden's Kim Thayil.

In the 2002 Triple J Hottest 100 Dave Grohl achieved a new record of having a part in 10 of the top 100 songs, including the Nirvana track "You Know You're Right", over the release of which he and Novoselic had spent years battling with Cobain's widow Courtney Love.

In 2002 the Foo Fighters returned to the studio and released their fourth album, One by One.

Then later in 2003 he, once again on drums, helped Chan Marshall of the band Cat Power in recording the album "You Are Free".

Recently, one of Dave's demo tapes from 1993 has surfaced, which features early versions of some of the songs that ended up on the first Foo Fighters album. The demo also contains a previously unreleased song called "Mountain of You" (which was originally thought to be titled "Mountain View", but Dave has confirmed the real title in a posting on the official Foo Fighters message board).

In 2004 Dave Grohl drummed for industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails' upcoming album With Teeth scheduled to be release in early 2005.

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