Kurt Donald Cobain

Cobain would contribute backing guitar for a spoken word recording of beat poet William S. Burroughs' entitled "the "Priest" they called him". Cobain regarded Burroughs as a hero. During Nirvana's European tour Cobain kept a copy of Burroughs' Naked Lunch, purchased in a London bookstall. Ana Finel-Honigman, in her introduction to an interview with the artist Stella Vine on the Saatchi Gallery website, described Vine's art as bitterly honest in the same way Cobain's songs were; "acid outrage over adult lies and injustice", Holden Caulfield's observations about "a world filled with phonies", and Sylvia Plath's poetry an "over-heated anger and bitterness at the world's betrayals".
Nirvana
Cobain began learning guitar with a few covers, including "Louie Louie" and The Cars' "My Best Friend's Girl", and soon began working on his own songs. During high school, Cobain rarely found anyone with whom he could play music. While hanging out at the Melvins' practice space, he met Krist Novoselic, a fellow devotee of punk rock. Novoselic's mother owned a hair salon. Cobain and Novoselic would occasionally practice in the upstairs room of the salon. A few years later, Cobain tried to convince Novoselic to form a band with him by lending him a copy of a home demo recorded by Cobain's earlier band, Fecal Matter. After months of asking, Novoselic finally agreed to join Cobain, forming the beginnings of Nirvana.