Kurt Cobain
The autopsy report of Kurt Cobain — the frontman of Nirvana, 1967–1994.
Early Life
Kurt Donald Cobain was born February 20, 1967, in Hoquiam, Washington, and raised in nearby Aberdeen. A musically inclined child — he drew constantly and taught himself guitar — he was deeply affected by his parents' divorce when he was nine. By his teens he was bouncing between relatives and friends' homes, but he had found his anchor: music. In high school he befriended Krist Novoselic, a fellow Aberdeen kid who shared his love of punk rock and heavy metal.
After years of basement rehearsals and lineup changes, Cobain and Novoselic formed Nirvana in Aberdeen in 1987. The band cut its teeth on the Seattle-area underground, releasing its raw debut album Bleach on the independent label Sub Pop in 1989, produced for just $606.17. Drummer Dave Grohl joined in 1990, completing the classic trio lineup.
Nirvana and the Grunge Era
Everything changed with Nevermind, released on DGC Records in September 1991. Fueled by the explosive single “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” the album knocked Michael Jackson's Dangerous from the top of the Billboard charts in January 1992 and went on to sell tens of millions of copies worldwide. Nirvana’s mix of punk fury, pop melody, and raw confessional songwriting — almost all of it written by Cobain — made him the reluctant voice of Generation X and put Seattle’s grunge scene at the center of popular culture.
Cobain married musician Courtney Love in February 1992; their daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, was born that August. The band’s follow-up, In Utero (1993), was a deliberate, harsher record that debuted at number one on the Billboard 200. But as the band’s fame grew, Cobain withdrew. He suffered from chronic stomach pain and used heroin, and he spoke openly about his misery with celebrity — calling fame “the worst thing that happened to me” in interviews. In early April 1994, after an intervention and a brief stay at a Los Angeles rehabilitation facility, he left the facility and flew home to Seattle.
The Death
On April 8, 1994, Cobain’s body was discovered at his home on Lake Washington Boulevard in Seattle, in the greenhouse above the garage, by an electrician who had come to install a security system. A suicide note was found nearby — addressed to Cobain’s childhood imaginary friend, Boddah — in which he wrote that he had not “felt the excitement of listening to as well as creating music, along with really writing ... for too many years now.”
The coroner estimated that Cobain had been dead for days, dating his death to April 5, 1994. He was 27 years old. The official cause of death was listed as a “contact perforating gunshot wound to the head,” and the manner of death was ruled a suicide. Toxicology reports noted the presence of heroin in his system at the time of his death. Cobain was cremated, and his ashes were scattered in McLane Creek in Olympia, Washington. His death made him a member of the so-called “27 Club,” and Nirvana’s music has only grown in stature in the decades since.