An electrician discovered Kurt Cobain's body in the greenhouse above his Seattle garage; he had been dead for roughly three days. The Nirvana frontman, 27, left behind a note and a devastated generation of fans who had made 'Nevermind' the soundtrack of early-1990s disaffection. His death cemented grunge's mythology and fueled decades of fascination with his final days.
Kurt Cobain had checked himself out of a Los Angeles rehabilitation facility on April 1, flying back to Seattle and vanishing from view. His wife, Courtney Love, hired a private investigator to find him, and on the morning of April 8 an electrician named Gary Smith arrived at the house on Lake Washington Boulevard to install a security system, spotting what he initially mistook for a mannequin through the greenhouse window above the garage.
Cobain had shot himself with a shotgun days earlier, on April 5 according to the coroner's estimate, meaning the body had lain undiscovered through the very days fans and bandmates were desperately searching for him. A note, addressed partly to his childhood imaginary friend, quoted Neil Young's lyric 'it's better to burn out than to fade away.'
Nirvana had, almost against its own wishes, dragged underground punk and Pacific Northwest grunge into the commercial mainstream, and Cobain's discomfort with fame became inseparable from the band's legend. His death at 27 placed him in rock's grim pantheon alongside Hendrix, Morrison, and Joplin, and it marked, for many, the symbolic end of grunge as a vital cultural force just as the genre was being absorbed and commodified by the industry it had briefly upended.
Key people: Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love