5 Never-Before-Heard Stories About Nirvana, As Told By The Band’s First Drummer

Kurt Cobain had a tendency to try and hide what Nirvana was really like. In 1991, he blew off his New York Times interview to promote “Nevermind.” Cobain told Spin in 1992, “We lead such boring lives that we start to make up stuff.” With Cobain gone and much of the truthfulness of his interviews in question, we must rely on people like Aaron Burckhard in trying to piece together the almost forgotten backstories.

Burckhard was Nirvana’s very first drummer (he now drums for the band Under Sin). But as a former member of the band — from even back in the days when it was called Skid Row, Ted Ed Fred, Pen Cap Chew and Bliss — he had a few previously unknown tales from when Nirvana was just getting started. To celebrate Cobain’s birthday, Feb. 20, The Huffington Post spoke to Burckhard to get the behind-the-scenes stories of what Cobain was like in the early days.

1. Nirvana’s first-ever show was an extremely wild house party.

According to Burckhard, Kurt Cobain’s first performance ever took place at 17 Nussbaum Road in Raymond, Washington, and as Burckhard told Nirvana News, the whole band was drunk and wild enough to scare the concert-goers to other parts of the house. Burckhard elaborated to HuffPost:

BONUS: Aaron Burckhard thinks Kurt Cobain was a much happier person than he ended up being remembered.

Concluding his 2014 interview with Nirvana News, Burckhard said, “[Cobain] wasn’t always depressed. He was never depressed, he was always pulling pranks and funny stuff. Everybody portrays him as this depressed, hating life type of person.”

Similarly, Burckhard told HuffPost that Cobain was fun-loving at heart, but heroin changed that: “Everyone paints him as sad, but he wasn’t, he was happy,” he said. “He just got a hold of a whole lot of heroin and that fucked him up. I’m a recovering addict myself, I’ve been clean almost five years. When you’re on that shit, you don’t even want to live.”

All images Getty unless otherwise noted.

The Huffington Post