Kurt Cobain, the ragged-voiced product of a Pacific Northwest timber town who helped to create an enormously popular sound known as grunge rock, was found dead Friday at his home here.
Police said they believed that Cobain, the lead singer, guitarist and songwriter for the influential band Nirvana, killed himself with a single shotgun blast to the head.A note was found next to Cobain's body, which was discovered by an electrician who had gone to the house Friday morning to do some work, said Vinette Tichi, a spokeswoman for the Seattle Police Department. Cobain was 28.
Although police officials were initially reluctant to identify the body, King County Medical Examiner Donald Reay said late Friday that a fingerprint examination confirmed that it was that of Cobain.
Nirvana is the most important of the half-dozen Seattle-based musical groups, lumped together as grunge, that combined heavy metal with a punk sensibility and dominated popular music in the last four years.
With its 1991 album "Nevermind," Nirvana put alternative rock, the noisy, icon-smashing spawn of punk rock, into the commercial mainstream. The album sold nearly 10 million copies worldwide, knocked Michael Jackson off the top of the popular music charts and established an anthem for a generation with the song "Smells Like Teen Spirit."
Dressed in thrift-shop plaid shirts and torn jeans, a fashion soon copied by designers around the world, Cobain and the members of his band raged against the material and synthetic trappings of pop music. They concocted a sound that was close to both the nihilistic fury of punk rock and the tunefulness of the Beatles.
Nirvana's popularity signaled the acceptability not only of grunge but also of many other bands once considered far too raw and scruffy for the mainstream.
"Nirvana will be remembered for revolutionizing the state of rock 'n' roll in the 1990s, pulling it away from a processed, rather synthetic sound and returning it to something more sincere," said Michael Azerrad, the author of "Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana," published last year by Doubleday.
As the group became successful, Cobain struggled with addictions to heroin and alcohol. He was hospitalized last month in Rome after he lapsed into a temporary coma brought on by a combination of drugs and alcohol. The coma forced his band to cut short a European tour.
Upon hearing of Cobain's death Friday, his mother, Wendy O'Connor, said, "Now he's gone and joined that stupid club." She was referring to rock stars like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison who died young after problems with drugs.
Cobain, who grew up in Aberdeen, Wash., died in the city where Hendrix, another Seattle guitarist, is buried.