Unseen photos show a day in the life of Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love

They were greeted at the front door by rock star Courtney Love, who welcomed them into the Los Angeles home she shared with her husband, Kurt Cobain.

She offered coffee and a slice of “just delivered” guava pie.

Photographers Constance Hansen and Russell Peacock politely declined, eager to get to work. They were on assignment for Spin magazine, which was doing a cover story on the famous couple.

Love showed them around the house, a modest three-bedroom Craftsman in the Hollywood Heights neighborhood, as they waited for Cobain to come downstairs.

He never came down.

So instead, they went up to him.

When they got to Cobain’s room, they found the Nirvana frontman still in bed.

They introduced themselves and asked him if it was OK to take pictures. He nodded. He seemed unfazed by the whole thing. Meeting strangers in bed? No big deal, it seemed.

“Thirty years later, we thought, well maybe that was the whole plan all along. Because he was wearing this fancy robe, and that’s not something he would ever wear normally,” said Peacock, who along with Hansen forms the photography duo known simply as Guzman.

The photos that followed would come to be known as some of Cobain’s most famous. And a soon-to-be-released book, “Family Values: Kurt, Courtney & Frances Bean,” includes nearly 100 photos from the day, most of which have never been published.

These photos were taken in September 1992, a year after the album “Nevermind” launched Nirvana — and Cobain — into superstardom. But over that time there were some personal struggles.

Cobain was in rehab for heroin addiction earlier in the month, and he had checked into a hospital a month before that to detox, according to Nirvana biographer Michael Azerrad, who wrote the photo book’s introduction. A story in Vanity Fair magazine, released weeks before this photo session, didn’t paint the couple in the greatest light, and they were fighting for custody of their newborn daughter, Frances Bean. When Hansen and Peacock visited their home, there was a court-mandated nanny there.

The Spin magazine story gave the rock stars a chance to reframe the narrative.

When Hansen and Peacock were first given the assignment, they came up with a fun premise they thought they might try at first.

“We were going to (show) them homemaking, doing domestic chores and things like that,” Hansen remembers. “We were laughing on the way out (to Los Angeles). We were like, yeah, they’ll be mowing the lawn or ironing or cooking.”

Soon after arriving to the house, they quickly realized that wouldn’t be the vibe. They followed their subjects’ lead, and it all started with Cobain in bed.

It worked out for the best.

“Photographing someone in bed is great, because they’re vulnerable and it’s very personal,” Peacock said.

The duo took photos of Cobain and his room, which he said he was fine with. But he was never as comfortable in front of the camera as his wife was.

A short while later, Love came up with their baby girl and everything changed.

“Having the baby there made a big difference, I think. It made him more open,” Peacock said. “And so it was kind of fortuitous to have the baby there. We kind of joked like, wow, we should bring babies on more shoots because they open people up.”

Now the entire family was in bed together, and Hansen remembers how beautiful it was to see everyone in sync. “They just were loving Frances. It was really so apparent,” she said. “It was really about her. They were oblivious to us in a lot of cases, anytime they had the baby.”

Eventually, everyone would come back downstairs for more photos, including individual portraits for both Cobain and Love.

At one point, Cobain grabbed a marker and began writing the words “family values” on his wife’s stomach. At the time in 1992, “family values” was also a campaign theme for the Republican Party going into November’s election.

“We just went with it. We didn’t know (what it meant),” Hansen said.

On his own stomach, Cobain wrote “diet grrrl,” a play on words with the feminist punk movement “riot grrrl.”

Hansen and Peacock spent a few hours taking photos for what is now known among music fans as the “family values” story. They often took photos simultaneously, and they used many different types of cameras and setups to get a variety of looks. Some are more polished and posed. Others are more gritty and spontaneous.

When the story was published by Spin, only a few images were included. The rest were tucked away in storage. Recently, friends from the LABspace gallery in New York asked Hansen and Peacock about that day and wanted to see more. The photos were exhibited at the gallery before becoming a book.

Many people remember the Spin article and tell the photographers that they had it on their wall when they were growing up.

“We didn’t realize the effect that those pictures had,” Hansen said.

The photos are now especially poignant because of Cobain’s tragic suicide.

Thirty years ago, in April 1994, Cobain took his own life at the age of 27. It was a shocking story that shook a generation of music fans.

“He was an extraordinary musician and lyricist,” Hansen said. “He was really different, too. He took it to another level. He wasn’t derivative, He was just really special.”

Peacock said Cobain and Nirvana came at the perfect time, ushering in rock’s grunge era.

“The timing was just right for that music, and it embedded itself in the culture like the Beatles or the Rolling Stones,” he said.

After Cobain died, Hansen and Peacock sent a few snapshots of him to Love at her request. They would later work with her on an album cover for her band Hole.

They’re looking forward to going on the book tour later this year, to hear more about how Cobain and Nirvana impacted lives. “Their music still resonates with people,” Peacock said. “We were in a coffee shop a couple weeks ago and there’s a young girl in a Nirvana T-shirt. It’s interesting.”

Working on the book has made the photographers think deeper about the Spin assignment and what might have been going on beneath the surface.

“I think there was a lot of vulnerability in the house at that moment,” Peacock said. “I didn’t think about it at the time, but looking back, everything swirling around them, it must have been very intense to be so successful so quickly and struggle with that. Looking back, that feeling is there.”

The book “Family Values: Kurt, Courtney & Frances Bean” is being published by powerHouse Books and can now be pre-ordered.