The Who‘s Pete Townshend believes that his late friend and bandmate Keith Moon once bought dinner in Seattle for a nine-year-old Kurt Cobain.
This intriguing anecdote was relayed second-hand during an interview that Death Cab For Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard conducted with Jesse David Fox, from New York Magazine’s online entertainment hub Vulture.
Gibbard shared a conversation that he had with Townshend backstage at the 2006 staging of the Oxegen festival at Punchestown Racecourse in County Kildare, Ireland. On the day, July 8, 2006 to be precise, Gibbard and original Death Cab For Cutie guitarist Chris Walla were hanging out with the legendary guitarist in his trailer, and the American musicians informed Townshend that they were from Seattle, and that they had actually shared some mutual friends, namely the members of Pearl Jam.
“He kinda takes a moment, and goes, ‘Yeah, I remember, we were playing in Seattle in the 70s, and we were staying at the Edgewater Inn, and there were all these homeless kids, [living] underneath the viaduct there’,” Gibbard says, recalling Townshend’s story. “‘And Keith Moon, he brings them in to the Edgewater Inn, and he serves them all dinner. And I swear to you that one of those kids was Kurt Cobain’.
“And Walla, and I just look at each other, and we’re like, ‘What, man?'” Gibbard continues. “And in no world are we gonna correct this guy. There’s a couple of other people in the trailer, and they’re like, ‘Wow!’ And Walla and I are, like – exchanging looks – ‘We’re gonna talk about this when we leave this trailer, right?’ And it was amazing.
“And I do believe he believed that,” Gibbard concludes. “I was too nervous to correct him. I mean, I don’t know how [Cobain] got from Aberdeen [Washington] at 10 years old to Seattle, and under the viaduct. It’s possible, I suppose, but unlikely, I’d say.”
So could the story actually be true? Well, as Keith Moon passed away on September 7, 1978, and The Who’s final Seattle shows with the drummer took place on March 25, 1976, and October 14, 1976, at the city’s Seattle Center Coliseum, Kurt Cobain would have been nine years old at the time.
In writer Michael Azerrad’s official Nirvana biography Come As You Are, the band’s frontman claimed that in 1985, after being forced to vacate his rented apartment in Aberdeen due to falling behind on payments, he spent some time living underneath the North Aberdeen Bridge, which crosses the Wishkah River. This, he told his biographer, inspired the opening lyric of Nevermind classic Something In The Way.
Cobain’s story was certainly memorable, but it was also bullshit, as Michael Azerrad later learned, total myth-making on Cobain’s part. And if Cobain was lying about living under a bridge in his hometown aged 17, I think we can safely say that there’s zero chance that he was living under a bridge in Seattle, 175 kilometres from his home town, at the age of nine.
Like Ben Gibbard though, it’s unlikely that we’ll ever call out Pete Townshend on this face-to-face.
