Mia Zapata

Born: August 8, 1965, in Louisville, Kentucky
Died: July 7, 1993, in Seattle, Washington
Band: The Gits

Raised in Kentucky on Bessie Smith, Jimmy Reed, Hank Williams, Billie Holliday, and hardcore punk Mia founded the Gits at Antioch College in 1986. A few years later, the band and a group of friends moved to Seattle in search of a new audience. Seattle’s alternative music scene, what was later labeled grunge, was about to blow up, and the Gits’ post-punk music, attitude, and poetic lyrics garnered the band a devoted following. They took the show on abroad by nickel and dimeing an independent tour of northern Europe.

The following year saw the band’s first release, Frenching the Bully. In 1993, the band was busy working on an anticipated follow-up when Mia Zapata was raped and murdered late one night on her way home, ending the band’s career. Kurt Cobain, who was a friend of Mia’s, was profoundly affected by her murder and Nirvana played a benefit concert for the singer August 6, 1993. After nine years on the run, Florida fisherman Jesus Mezquia was sentenced to 36 years in prison in 2004 for her murder.

Jimi Hendrix

Born: November 27, 1942, in Seattle, Washington
Died: September 18, 1970, in a London hotel room
Bands: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Band of Gypsys

The guitar was an extension of Jimi, a fifth limb he relied on as much as others would a leg or an arm. He played during set breaks or on the bus, recorded or jammed after shows, played along to Bob Dylan records during interviews and slept with the guitar at the edge of the bed.

Hendrix was born in Seattle by a teenage mom while his much older dad was stationed in the south. Jimi’s parents were both poor and alcoholic and they moved around a lot, living out of flop houses, cheap hotels and with friends and relatives, never staying too long in any place. With an upbringing marked by uncertainty, hunger, the death of his mother and belt whippings by his dad, Jimi became shy and introverted. One of his few joys was playing guitar on a broom along to old blues records. Somebody talked his dad into buying him a guitar and he spent his teenage years playing in a band around Seattle, including the premier club in the Northwest, the Spanish Castle. It didn’t take “half a day to get there,” as he later sang in “Spanish Castle Magic,” but traveling in beat-up cars sometimes led to unpleasant delays.

After a brief stint as a parachuter with 101st Airborne Jimi left the army guitarless, wearing issued clothes and $300 in his pocket. He walked into a jazz joint and spent all but $16. Unable to afford the Greyhound back to Seattle, he snuck back on the base and begged to get his guitar back from the guy he’d pawned it to. After recovering the axe, he spent the next three years priming his chops as a hired gun on the Chitlin’ Circuit—juke joints, cafes, dances and parties from Virginia to Florida, in the Delta and over to Texas—not unlike Robert Johnson had before him. Jimi’s knowledge of R&B, soul and rock hits of the day led to backing jobs for the stars of the day—Little Richard, Ike and Tina Turner and many others—but he kept getting fired for being too flashy. Otis Burke traded Jimi like a baseball card on the tour bus to Otis Redding for two horn players. He was fired a week later and left on the side of the road, but the penniless guitarist simply waited till another tour rolled through town for job.

Jimi eventually made it to New York City, playing with Curtis Knight—a pimp with a band—and his own, Jimmy James and the Blue Flames. Hendrix was finally in the spotlight, but his guitar reverberated nightly across an empty room at the Cheetah Club. Luckily, his dexterity caught the attention of Keith Richards’ girlfriend, Linda Keith, who kept bringing musicians and producers into the club until Chas Chandler of the Animals decided to fly Jimi to London. Finally, his career picked up speed. The day of Hendrix’ arrival, his guitantics wowed members of Britain’s musical cognoscenti and he found himself a girlfriend who had previously dated Brian Jones of The Rolling Stones and Keith Moon of the Who. Eric Burdon of the Animals who was present that night recalled later that, “It was haunting how good he was.” A week later Chandler brought Jimi to a Cream show so he could meet Clapton. Armed with his guitar he asked if he could jam—a request so ballsy that the guys were caught off guard. Nobody had ever asked to sit in with Cream before. Grafitti around London at the time proclaimed Clapton was God and here was this unknown, wild haired dude clutching a Fender Stratocaster. Jimi plugged in and played Howlin’ Wolf’s “Killing Floor” in triple speed. Eric’s jaw dropped. “I thought, ‘My god, this is like Buddy Guy on acid,’ ” he recalled later.

The years on the Chitlin’ Circuit finally paid off. Hendrix had learned how to entertain audiences from watching Little Richards, how to bend strings from Albert King, sat by the feet of B.B. and picked up techniques from an apt student of T-Bone Walker and Freddie King. The analytical musical cannibal had finally transformed into a virtuoso anxious to take on the world.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience shook the world with its innovative sounds and fierce electric assaults. He used amps and electronic effects as instruments as much as the guitar, creating dive-bombs, haunting feedback, wah-wah modulated melodies, the sound of a rapid-fire machine gun and Delta blues soaked with dripping washes from the uni-vibe. Jimi suddenly found himself as the celestial center of the psychedelic 60’s, embracing road sex and alterations from acid to speed. Although some women were more important to Jimi than others, he shied away from intimacy and commitment, perhaps ingrained from watching his parents. Off stage, Jimi remained polite, but shy and reserved. He kept few close friends and rarely ventured outside the realm of music, socializing almost exclusively with musicians, producers, groupies and hangers-on. That and an incessant tour schedule and recording dates taxed him.

Jimi Hendrix’ performances became erratic during the last two years of his life. He complained that fans came to hear his early hits and watch him play guitar with his teeth. One night he collapsed on stage. While vacationing in Morocco, most likely the only vacation of his life, an old fortune-teller with a Tarot deck drew the Death card. The card could also mean rebirth, but Jimi freaked out. A few weeks before his death, he told a Danish journalist, “I’m not sure I will live to be 28 years old. I mean, the moment I feel I have nothing more to give musically, I will not be around on this planet anymore.”

Before Hendrix went to bed for the last time, he gobbled nine sleeping pills that belonged to a girlfriend. The German pills were stronger than he was used to and sometime in the early morning hours he puked, suffocating himself in deep sleep. Before Jimi went out that last night of his life he had worked on a new lyric: “The story of life is quicker than the wink of an eye.” Jimi’s ended at 27.

Kristen Pfaff

Born: May 26, 1967 in New York
Died: June 16, 1994 in Seattle, Washington
Bands: Janitor Joe, Hole

Born in New York, Kristen Pfaff picked up bass at Boston College and ended up studying women’s studies at the University of Minnesota. After graduation she founded and toured with a local trio called Janitor Joe.

While playing a club gig in California, Courtney Love and Eric Erlandson asked if she wanted to play bass for Hole, and after a few days she accepted. Kristin Pfaff moved to Seattle to be close with the band and almost immediately joined the band for the recording of Live Through This, Hole’s first major label debut. The record went platinum and many feel Pfaff’s bass playing, piano, and backup vocals that helped elevate the overall sound. Moving to Seattle was both good and bad: Pfaff became successful, but developed a heroin habit too (which she kicked for a while in 1993).

Pfaff was deeply affected by Cobain‘s suicide, whom she was friendly with, and decided to quit Hole and move back to Minneapolis where she had a new band lined up called Palm. Courtney Love supposedly didn’t take the news lightly. Kristin Pfaff was found dead in the bathtub from an apparent overdose the morning she was supposed to leave. Over the course of two months Love lost a husband and her band’s bass player. Conspiracy theories about Love’s supposed role in the deaths abound.

Janitor Joe
Courtney-Love.org

Kurt Cobain

Born: February 20, 1967 in Aberdeen, Washington
Died: April 5, 1994 at his home in Seattle, Washington
Band: Nirvana, Fecal Matter

By Cobain’s own account, he had a happy childhood until his parents divorced when he was eight years old. For the first year he stayed with his mother, followed by a couple of years with his father, Don Cobain. After Kurt’s rebellious teenage spirits reared its ugly head his life turned transient, as he was forced to live with various friends and family members until they could no longer deal with his negativity and tantrums. Don Cobain changed the course of his son’s life when he gave Kurt a guitar for his 14th birthday.

Kurt didn’t find many people to jam with in high school, but he set out creating songs and improving his chops. One of his first bands was named Fecal Matter, fittingly named by Kurt who loved anything gross & perverted. Nirvana’s first incarnation came to life in 1987 after Cobain convinced Krist Novoselic to start a band with him. The two friends went through seemingly more drummers than Spinal Tap until they settled with Chad Channing. The trio recorded Bleach in 1988, which Sub Pop released the following year to great underground acclaim. Cobain still wasn’t completely happy with Channing’s skills on the skins, so the latter was casually replaced when Dave Grohl was available for a new gig.

With Grohl behind the drums, Nirvana gelled better than any power trio since Cream or the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and with the music industry finally looking for something else besides hard glam rock, divas, and pop posers, Nirvana seemed to fit the bill. In 1991, Nirvana’s major label debut, Nevermind, crushed the charts with a vengeance. The press jumped on the “Seattle—Grunge City” bandwagon and Cobain became an involuntarily spokesperson and tastemaker for Gen X.

Kurt Cobain first met Courtney Love after a show in Portland, Oregon, but it remained a casual encounter until Dave Grohl introduced the two during the Nevermind recordings in the summer of ’91. The two quickly developed mutual crushes, which evolved to a cross-country courtship during the fall. They didn’t bond strictly through romance, however, both claim that heroin and pills were an important part of the mix too.

The following year, in early 1992, Courtney Love was pregnant, so Kurt Cobain soon proposed they get married. The ceremony took place on Hawaii’s Waikiki Beach and photos show Kurt smiling, but his eyes are sedated from shooting up that afternoon. It didn’t take long for the press to catch on, and Courtney Love was often lambasted as a new Yoko Ono. Kurt & Courtney preferred to be compared to punk’s dreaded couple, Sid and Nancy. Following a highly publicized magazine article in Vogue where Love was quoted as saying she’d been using drugs during her pregnancy, Frances Bean Cobain came to the world August 18, 1992, as a normal healthy baby.

Although the becoming a father turned Kurt Cobain’s life into something positive, the dichotomy of mainstream success and underground cred became sort of an existential struggle for Cobain, and he chose to self-medicate with copious amounts of heroin. Cobain overdosed on heroin in July 1993 before a concert in New York City, and again from a combination of champagne and Rohypnol in March 1994 at a hospital in Rome, Italy. Cobain’s last week included a failed intervention, followed by a heroin binge, before Kurt bought a shotgun, and flew to LA where he checked himself in to rehab. Unfortunately, the stay was cut short when he jumped the fence and went back Seattle. During the first week of April Cobain’s wife, family, and friends searched for him in vain.

April 8, 1994, an electrician found Kurt Cobain with a self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head. According to the coroner’s report, Cobain died April 5, 1994. He was 27 years old. For those interested in learning more about the conspiracy theories surrounding Kurt Cobain’s death, be sure to read Love and Death: The Murder of Kurt Cobain.

TotalNirvana.net
NirvanaClub.com