The Aberdeen Origin

April 8, 1994, the guest cottage above the garage of a Lake Washington Boulevard estate in Seattle. Kurt Donald Cobain, twenty-seven, the singer and guitarist of Nirvana, is found dead by an electrician installing a security system. He has been dead at least three days. The shotgun is across his chest. He has joined the 27 Club. The medical examiner will rule the death a suicide by self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head.

Donovan Hadley's biography opens earlier — in Aberdeen, Washington, where Cobain was born in 1967, the eldest of two children of a teen-mother waitress and an auto-mechanic father — and follows the arc through the long Aberdeen-and-Montesano-childhood the parents' divorce shaped, the early-1980s couch-surfing punk-rock years, the 1987 formation of Nirvana with Krist Novoselic and the long succession of drummers, the 1989 Bleach on Sub Pop, the September 1991 release of Nevermind, the Smells Like Teen Spirit video that broke alternative rock to MTV's mainstream, the February 1992 Courtney Love marriage and the August 1992 birth of Frances Bean, the September 1993 In Utero, the long Rome hospital overdose of March 4, 1994, the home from Rome and the Exodus Recovery Center, and the morning of April 8.

What emerges is a portrait of the Aberdeen logging-town teenager whose three Nirvana studio albums redefined what American rock could sound like — and the suicide that the music press has spent thirty years writing about.