Before buying the expansive home at 171 Lake Washington Boulevard where he was found dead, Cobain and his wife, Courtney Love, lived in a variety of high-end Seattle hotels, including the Inn at the Market, the Sorrento Hotel and the Four Seasons Olympic, now the Fairmont Olympic. The Fairmont and the other luxury hotels Cobain lived at don’t advertise the connection, but the arty Hotel Max embraces Seattle’s grunge connection with a “Sub Pop” floor devoted to the local indie record label that discovered Nirvana.

Cobain is often linked to Seattle, but he spent less than two years living in the city. He lived in more than a half-dozen homes, and slept in countless other places in Aberdeen and the neighboring towns of Montesano and Hoquiam, and wrote many of Nirvana’s best-known songs in Olympia before moving to Seattle in 1992. I started my Cobain homes tour in Montesano, a small town where members of the influential punk band the Melvins grew up.

Standing outside 413 Fleet Street South, the home that Cobain lived in with his father from late 1978 to March 1982, was a neighbor named John Bell, who told me that when Cobain’s mom used to visit him, he could hear them yelling at each other from across the street. Fleet Street was a step up for Cobain, but Mr. Bell said that the modest, century-old house with red vinyl siding and newspapers covering the windows seemed mostly empty.

A few minutes outside Montesano, I drove into the Country Estates mobile home park, where Cobain lived with his paternal grandfather, Leland Cobain, after leaving Fleet Street. While parked next to a speed limit sign that warned, “Violators will be Prosecuted, Survivors will be Shot,” a man named Jerry who was out for a walk offered to introduce me to Gary Cobain, Leland’s son and Kurt’s uncle.

“My dad greeted Nirvana fans from all over the world here,” said Gary Cobain, who moved into the mobile home after his father died last May. “It kept him busy.”

Shadowing the Chehalis River, I drove west along Olympic Highway to Aberdeen, an old logging city once called “the roughest town west of the Mississippi.” Before a tableau of billowing smokestacks there is a sign, erected by the Kurt Cobain Memorial Foundation in 2005, that reads: “Welcome to Aberdeen, Come As You Are,” a reference to one of Nirvana’s hit singles and now the unofficial motto of the city.