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Kurt Cobain's Pear Street House, Olympia, WA In September 1987 Kurt D. Cobain moved into the Apartment of his friend Tracy Marander. Kurt's address when he moved in with then live-in girlfriend Tracy at 114 North Pear Street, Olympia, WA and still is to this day. (Map it with Google) Happy Halloween 2008! Kurt's studio apartment kitchen window. The Washington State Lotto Building that he use to shoot at is in the background. 
| While He was here... Kurt Donald Cobain lead singer, songwriter and guitarist of Nirvana took up residence here at 114 N. Pear Street was from the fall of 1987 to the release of Nevermind in 1991, thus marking it one of his longest tenures in one residence with the exception of his home with his mother Wendy and Don Cobain in Aberdeen. Tracy Marander provided Kurt the companisonship here and the solid rock that Kurt could flourish and nuture his creativity all the while she brought home the bacon and all Kurt had to do was cleanup the dusty dump before she got home, which makes us us ponder the question, "what if Tracy and Kurt had stayed......hmmm, oh well, whatever nevermind!"
Kurt and Nirvana helped reshape popular music in the 1990s. In 1991, the arrival of Nirvana's hit single "Smells Like Teen Spirit", written while he was living here, marked the beginning of a dramatic shift of popular rock music away from the dominant genres of the 1980s and toward the ascendance of grunge and alternative rock. The music media eventually awarded the song "anthem-of-a-generation" status, and, with it, Cobain ascended as the reluctant "spokesman" for Generation X. Other hit songs written by Cobain while he was a resident at the Pear Street House include "Polly", "Clean Up Before She Comes Home" and the immense hit "About a Girl". With the band's success, Cobain became a major national and international celebrity, an uncomfortable position for a man who once said, "Famous is the last thing I wanted to be." | On his way to Nirvana. From this location Kurt would rock the world as we knew it. (excerpt from " About a Son") One night when Kurt was living on North Pear Street in Olympia, he had gone out with his friend Kathleen Hanna from the band Bikini Kill, a group that would become a pivotal force in the punk-feminist "Riot Grrl" movement of Olympia and Seattle. They decided to indulge one of their frequent recreational bents - a graffiti spree. After making up some Olympia establishments with such incitements as "God is Gay", they returned to Cobain's apartment, where Hanna marked up a wall with the sentence "Kurt smells like Teen Spirit". Kurt took it as a compliment, thinking it was Hanna's interesting way of saying he still had the rebellious edge of an angry kid.
But Hanna was actually putting some arch humor to use - "Teen Spirit" was actually the rather insipid, niche-marketed brand name of an underarm deodorant for young women put out by the Mennen company. It wasn't until after kurt had written, recorded, and released the song that he realized a trendy anti-perspirant had provided the title for his tune wriiten on his bedroom walls at The Pear Street House. The rest as they say is history......
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For more information about our local scene, you gotta check out the MySpace page of one Mitch Holmquist. He is a champion for what we believe is the true essence behind the Kurt Cobain Memorial Project and we personally feel would have made Kurt very proud: Mitch Holmquist |
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