Cobain: Have Gunnysack, Will Travel

Kurt Cobain may finally get to rest in peace--or at least his ashes will.

A source at an Olympia, Wash., cemetery confirms that plans are being made to bury the cremated remains of the Nirvana leader--two years after his suicide.

“My bosses have been talking with Wendy [O’Conner], Kurt’s mother,” says a source at Forest Memorial Gardens. “She came here a few times.”

Word of the plans came in an Internet message posted recently by someone claiming to be in the know (and writing in a style suspiciously similar to that of the famed America Online correspondence of Cobain’s widow, Courtney Love).

The note said that an “open ceremony” would be held at an Olympia cemetery on April 7, though it did not give the facility’s name. That date would mark the second anniversary of Cobain’s death. (His body was discovered in his house in a Seattle suburb on April 8, 1994, though the coroner determined that he could have died as early as April 5.)

This would bring to an end the sometimes sad, sometimes comical saga of his ashes, which Love has transported hither and yon--often encased in a teddy bear. A story in the current issue of Esquire details such incidents as an customs check (where some Cobain dust inadvertently escaped into the air) and Love’s leaving the ashes at an Ithaca, N.Y., Buddhist monastery where an elaborate altar was constructed.

But the plan raises the questions that arise with the burial of any popular cultural figure--especially a rock star, as typified by Jim Morrison’s graffiti- and litter-plagued grave site in Paris.

Love, in fact, had originally wanted to inter Cobain at Greenwood Memorial Park near Seattle, where Jimi Hendrix is buried. But the proprietors said that they already had their hands full with visitors not only to the Hendrix grave--where fans often sit smoking pot or drinking--but also to the graves of martial-arts legend Bruce Lee and his son Brandon.

Other sites in the area have also balked, most notably the Calvary Catholic Cemetery, which demanded that in addition to standard fees, Love pay $100,000 a year for special security.

“[Love] wanted it to be in Seattle,” the Internet message reads. “But Olympia makes sense . . . between Seattle and Aberdeen [Cobain’s home town].”

Dean Mathison, Love’s personal assistant, says:” We have been looking around, but we have not decided on one place yet.

Veronica Kalmer, managing editor of the Seattle rock publication the Rocket, says that fan interest in a Cobain burial site remains high, but she wouldn’t expect much trouble.

“We have people call us every day who are coming through town [and want to visit a memorial],” she says. “But that’s people from out of town. Locally, people already have places to go remember Kurt--parks or clubs or places Nirvana played. . . . They don’t need anything else.”