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the road, to live with his first serious girlfriend, Tracy Marander, and discovered what would later be described as his “spiritual mecca”—the ultrahip college town where the bohemians actually outnumbered the rednecks. By the time Kurt moved to Olympia, the band he and Krist had formed in Aberdeen had already played a few gigs under a number of incarnations, including “Skid Row,” “Ted Ed Fred” and “Fecal Matter.” They were beginning to attract a small following.
    When he wasn’t practicing his music, Kurt continued to dabble in art, creating surreal landscapes covered with fetuses and mangled animals or, memorably, a collage of photos of diseased vaginas that he’d found in medical textbooks.
    With money Kurt saved from a part-time janitorial job, the band was able to record a demo at the studio of a former navy engineer named Jack Endino, who was impressed by Kurt’s distinctive vocals and the band’s hard-edged sound. Endino passed the demo to a friend named Jonathan Poneman, the head of a new Seattle indie label called Sub Pop. Around this time, the band finally settled on a permanent name. The story goes that Kurt had discovered Buddhism after watching a TV show about Eastern religions and was enchanted by the idea of transcending the cycle of human suffering. He especially liked the name the Buddhists gave to the concept of ultimate enlightenment: Nirvana.
    By this time, he had also discovered a new drug. Since he was a teenager, Kurt had experienced intermittent stomach pains that would send him into paroxysms of agony without any warning. He saw an endless series of medical specialists, but doctors were at a loss to explain what was causing the problem, which he later described to Details magazine: “Imagine the worst stomach flu you’ve ever had, every single day. And it was worse when I ate, because once the meal would touch that red area, I would hyperventilate, my arms would turn numb, and I would vomit.” He had been offered heroin on a number of occasions, but he had always refused, in part because he was afraid of needles. For the most part, he still confined his drug use to pot, Percodan and magic mushrooms.
    By the time he moved to Olympia, the stomach pain was unbearable. A local heroin dealer called Grunt told him that opiates were the ultimate painkiller. Krist Novoselic, who was himself battling alcoholism at the time, later recalled telling Kurt he was “playing with dynamite” after Kurt called to tell him he had just done heroin for the first time.
    “Yeah, he did it a few times back then, because he said it was the only thing that could get rid of the pain,” confirms Kurt’s best friend, Dylan Carlson, whom he first met in Olympia and who was himself a junkie. “But it wasn’t a habit or anything, at least not back then.”
    Things were looking up. When Kurt heard that Sub Pop had agreed to record the band’s first single, “Love Buzz,” he ran into the streets yelling, “I’m going to be a rock star! Nirvana rules!” An album followed, titled Bleach, after the substance junkies employ to clean their needles so they can be reused. Bleach was recorded for a grand total of $606.17 at Endino’s studio. By this time, the struggling Sub Pop cofounders, Jonathan Poneman and Bruce Pavitt, already deep in debt, had decided that if the Seattle Sound, or “grunge” as it would soon be known, was going to find a wider audience, it would be necessary first to create a buzz in the UK. That’s how Seattle’s most famous rock-and-roll descendant, Jimi Hendrix, had first made a name for himself two decades earlier.
    In the United States, alternative music was still a fringe movement, confined to college radio stations and seedy clubs. The Sub Pop founders were determined to change that, borrowing money to fly in Everett True of the influential London music magazine Melody Maker to showcase their label’s talent. They couldn’t possibly have imagined how much this gambit