“Please don’t touch the display, miss.” The security guard had already warned me twice, so I snapped some pictures and quickly moved on. Inside the display’s glass was the drum kit Dave Grohl played in Nirvana’s third album, In Utero. It was part of the Nirvana: Taking Punk to the Masses exhibit at Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture—which was the reason I was visiting on an unusually sunny Saturday afternoon in March 2013. My fear of flying means I travel only if there is something I really want to see, like my mom, or the sweater Kurt Cobain wore in the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video. I visited the exhibit multiple times while I was in Seattle, along with the other destinations on the “grunge vacation highlights” spreadsheet I carefully researched and compiled before my trip.
On my last day in Seattle, I still had one big item left on my sightseeing agenda: the house where Cobain died in 1994. The idea of visiting the spot made me uncomfortable because of the morbidity attached to it, but like many other Nirvana fans, I was also curious. In the end, I decided I would regret not seeing it, so I mapped my route to 171 Lake Washington Boulevard East and, because I am a total cliché, listened to In Utero on the walk from my hotel.
