Come As You Are Sign

Aberdeen, Washington -- the small logging and fishing city where Kurt Cobain was born and raised -- installed a 'Welcome to Aberdeen -- Come As You Are' sign at the city limits, referencing the Nirvana song, as a public acknowledgement of its most famous son. The sign was first erected around 2005, several years after Cobain's death in 1994, as part of the city's gradual embrace of a legacy it had initially been ambivalent about. Aberdeen had a complicated relationship with Cobain during his lifetime: he was a troubled kid from a broken home who wrote bitterly about small-town constriction, and the feeling was not always mutual.

Cobain was born in Hoquiam in 1967 and grew up primarily in Aberdeen. He attended Aberdeen High School, slept under the Young Street Bridge when he was homeless as a teenager, and left as soon as he could -- first to Olympia, then to Seattle. His songs about Aberdeen are not affectionate. 'Come as You Are' itself is not a song about Aberdeen, but the lyric 'as you are, as you were' resonated with the city's desire to be seen on its own terms rather than only through the lens of its famous misfit son.

The 'Come As You Are' sign has become a tourist landmark and a pilgrimage stop for Nirvana fans visiting the Aberdeen area. Aberdeen has subsequently invested more significantly in Cobain heritage, with the Kurt Cobain Landing park near the Young Street Bridge and the recognition of his childhood home as a cultural landmark. The city has arrived, after some delay, at genuine pride in what it produced.