In this short, poppy punk-grunge song, Kurt Cobain tells the story of being left at his grandparents' house for the evening, and how he violently resisted this, without success.
I have kids. When I tell them it's time to go to their grandparents' house, they nearly trample me on the way out to the car. What the hell was going on in Cobain's family that he would try to physically prevent himself from going over there?
Maybe he wanted to go to the show with his parents, maybe to see the show, maybe just to be with them. Maybe he didn't want to be where they left him. Maybe all of the above.
From what I understand, Cobain's parents were both extremely unstable, and they eventually divorced when he was young. His extended family, apparently, was not much better. I do know that his aunt played music, showed him how to record songs on her four-track recorder, and clearly served as a positive role model in the midst of his stunted upbringing in a remote logging town. But for the most part, Cobain's childhood seems to have been a lot of shuffling between imperfect hosts who would take him in for short periods.
In my experience with divorce, it can shred the minds of the children these families are responsible for. It can lead to exponential damage as time passes and circumstances compound. This is why a grown Kurt Cobain found himself writing about these memories years later, because he still felt those effects, emotional and situational, palpable to that current day.
Look at two key lines in this song.
There's the chorus line, repeated 43 times: "Grandma take me home."
The word "home" there, I believe, is more an ideal than a physical place. Where was home for this kid?
But the most bitter scream of the song erupts from the song's most important line: "I woke up in my mother's arms."
You could unpack the meaning of that line forever.
Let's just point out one more thing. Kurt Cobain almost never wrote songs that told coherent stories with identifiable people or events. He barely even used sentence grammar. He much more preferred abstract word collages or extremely opaque allusions. What would drive him, in "Sliver," to dispense with his trusted modus operandi and express himself with such clarity?
Where is he waking up?