How Kurt Cobain discovered his music taste

It’s not uncommon for people to inherit the musical tastes of their parents. That doesn’t mean that they only listen to the music they heard in the family home, but instead that they found their love for music through their parent’s taste and then expanded upon it depending on what was released at the time. That wasn’t the case for Kurt Cobain, though, as he said, “My parents were never music lovers; I don’t recall my Mum really owning any albums apart from John Denver’s greatest hits.”

Like many people, Cobain’s first insight into music was through The Beatles, and as soon as he heard them, he knew that he wanted to make music professionally. “The first band that I was really into was The Beatles and then all that top 40 radio,” he said.

He continued: “At a really early age, I wanted to be a rock n roll star; I wanted to play drums ever since I got my first Beatles record; I wanted to play drums in a band. I wanted to have the adoration of John Lennon but the anonymity of Ringo Starr. I didn’t want to be a frontman, I just wanted to be back there but be a rock n roll star at the same time.”

Of course, things ended up panning out slightly differently for Cobain. Not only did he end up playing the guitar instead of the drums, but as one of the founding fathers of grunge, he became one of the most famous musicians on the planet. The turning point came from one of his father’s divorced friends and an untapped LP gold mine.

He continued: “At a really early age, I wanted to be a rock n roll star; I wanted to play drums ever since I got my first Beatles record; I wanted to play drums in a band. I wanted to have the adoration of John Lennon but the anonymity of Ringo Starr. I didn’t want to be a frontman, I just wanted to be back there but be a rock n roll star at the same time.”

Of course, things ended up panning out slightly differently for Cobain. Not only did he end up playing the guitar instead of the drums, but as one of the founding fathers of grunge, he became one of the most famous musicians on the planet. The turning point came from one of his father’s divorced friends and an untapped LP gold mine.

“When I was in fourth grade, I was living with my father and one of his friends; he was a bachelor; he had just recently got divorced, and he was a bachelor, so one of his bachelor friends had told him to get one of those subscriptions,” said Cobain. The subscription Kurt is referring to isn’t the usual one a newly divorced man would turn to, but one that centred around music instead, as new records were frequently hand-picked and delivered.

“He didn’t even open them up, he didn’t even open up half the records that came, they were just sitting there in the plastic still. One day, I opened them all up, and there was some great music. Finally, I got to hear Black Sabbath, you know, the harder stuff they wouldn’t have played in Aberdeen.”

After that, Cobain had a love for hard rock music that he couldn’t shake. When he eventually started making music, that heavy distortion-laden sound he had found from his father’s divorced friend stayed at the forefront of his mind, so when he eventually started playing guitar, he produced an off-shoot version of that. The melody of Nirvana’s music may well have been the early inspiration of The Beatles poking its way through that heavy rock and roll. There is no doubt that Cobain held all of his taste close, and it can be heard throughout everything he went on to make.