“I don’t like rednecks, I don’t like macho men. I don’t like abusive people, and I guess that’s what that song (In Bloom) is about, it’s an attack on them.”
“I guess it is better to be called a moody visionary than a mindless party animal. I tried to become an alcoholic once, but it didn’t work.”
“I was 15 when I got my first guitar. My mother had just gotten married, and this was in the first year of her marriage. My stepfather went out on her, she got so irate that she took all my stepfather’s guns, various guns, pistols, rifles and stuff, walked down to the river, and threw them in. And then I hired this kid to fish a couple of them out, and I sold them, and then I got my first guitar with the money. I took lessons for a week. I learned how to play ‘Back in Black’ by AC/DC, and it’s pretty much the ‘Louie Louie’ chords, so that’s all I needed to know. I started writing songs on my own. I never did pay the guitar teacher for that week either. I still owe him money.”
Kurt: I decided to take some acid one evening and spray paint “queer” on the sides of four by four trucks, the local rednecks’s trucks. And so one of them saw me from his window and started chasing me and started screaming “There’s the queer vandal!” I’d been doing it for awhile. But that night I decided to really go for it and do a lot, a lot of vandalism. So they caught me and chased me around.
Jim: The cops caught you or just some of the local toughs?
Kurt: The locals. The local toughs, right.
Jim: And did they know who you were?
Kurt: No. Just that crazy skinny kid who never went to school. Who was probably gay.