Aberdeen, Washington Wants To Be The Graceland For Kurt Cobain
By Andrew Karpan
Last Thursday was Kurt Cobain Day — a holiday you’re forgiven for perhaps forgetting, as its existence had only been revealed last month by Aberdeen, Washington mayor Bill Simpson. But if you forgot to celebrate, there is no need to worry. The upcoming Thursday of April 10 has also been reserved for Kurt Cobain Day festivities by the mayor of nearby Hoquiam, Washington — a city Cobain lived in very briefly in the 80s. Tastefully, the second Kurt Cobain Day comes only five days away from the twentieth anniversary of his April 5, 1994 suicide.
“Aberdeen residents may justifiably take pride,” Simpson exclaimed to his fellow constituents when he announced the holiday a month ago, “[in] the international recognition our community has gained from its connections with Kurt Cobain and his artistic achievements.” Most of the event’s activities have been run through The Aberdeen Museum of History — a local cultural institution which already offers visitors to the city walking tours through “Kurt Cobain’s Aberdeen” and the chance to buy 7-inch Cobain action figures. On display in the museum proper is a couch that Cobain is believed to have once slept on.
Already 5,000 people visit Aberdeen’s museum every year (they compete with Seattle’s own EMP Museum — whose new Nirvana exhibit features, according to their website, “the world’s most extensive exhibition of memorabilia celebrating the music and history of Seattle grunge luminaries, Nirvana”). With Aberdeen Mayor’s Simpson’s benediction, staff there are publicly expecting their own number to double. The mayor explained his ambitions: “We hope this is just as big as Graceland. Eventually.”
A quest that Aberdeen has the head start in: it was a little less than a decade ago that the first meeting of the Kurt Cobain Memorial Committee came together at Aberdeen City Hall, delivering the vehement consensus that not enough was being done to celebrate Cobain by the small and otherwise fairly insignificant town. Carl Weber, a retired multinational marketing director who attended the meeting was quoted in the local paper: “I think it’s an ideal thing that we should do… there’s some money that could actually be brought into this town.”
Also attending that notable meeting was Randi Hubbard — designer of the almost twenty year old “weird crying statue” that has received some notoriety for this week. Hubbard already received some local attention for a seven-foot firefighter sculpture she finished months after 9/11 and installed in the lawn of the EMS Academy in Queens. But it is the single tear painted onto Cobain’s concrete face that has generated the most attention of anything in her career.
The more grunge-tired Washington State local news teams also received some of the popular notoriety as well, namely for introducing the singer only as a “well-known heroin addict who shot himself,” earlier this week. But maybe that’s honest. It’s well know that Cobain had little more than contempt for the kinds of tools who work for local news stations, they’ve got every right to be a bit sick of him by now.
