I first heard Smells Like Teen Spirit at a party in Dublin. It was September 1991 and MTV had the video on heavy rotation; when the first crunching guitar chords came rumbling from the television set, a bunch of us turned from our beer and cigarettes, turned up the TV, and let out a collective "wow". The video showed a band playing in a high school gym, in front of a crowd of slam-dancing kids, flanked by bouncing cheerleaders and a janitor swinging his mop. The band was called Nirvana, and they sounded both heavy and heavenly. As we watched the be-stubbled, straggle-haired Kurt Cobain fill the screen and listened to him scream the chorus, "Here we are now/ Entertain us/ I feel stupid/ And contagious", we definitely caught the buzz.
Nirvana's massive, swift success changed rock 'n' roll in the 1990s, bringing a new, louder language into pop, and bringing a hitherto underground scene to the attention of the bigger global market. Nirvana didn't quite change this fledgling journalist's life but they inspired me to write about rock music with a little more passion and fire. I had foolishly missed the band's Irish gig supporting Sonic Youth earlier that year, but after seeing their video on MTV, I was sure as hell not gonna miss their upcoming headliner in McGonagles. Alas, events overtook Kurt Cobain, as they did for most of his short but spectacular career. Within a few weeks of Nevermind's release, the album had gone platinum in the US and everybody wanted a piece of Nirvana. Ireland would have to wait.
Nirvana finally made it to Dublin in summer 1992, playing to a packed Point Depot. By this time they were the world's biggest band, and the gig was memorable not for their performance - which in hindsight was rather flimsy - but for the 8,000 young Irish grungeheads who packed the venue. This was the new generation of rock 'n' roll kids; their uniform was loose shirt and jeans, their attitude was naively nihilistic and their argot was the cool alt.speak of Gen X.
That gig at the Point was the last ever Irish concert by Nirvana. Two years after that, the band were scheduled to play Dublin's RDS, but the concert was cancelled following a suicide attempt by Cobain in Rome. On April 8th 1994, the day that Kurt Cobain was to have played in Dublin, the news was beamed around the world that the troubled rock star had been found dead at his home in Seattle's Lake Washington, of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He had joined that exclusive "dead-at-27" club which includes Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin.
In the years since Cobain's suicide, the myth has grown, but anyone attempting to script the story has had to deal with a difficult co-star: his wife, Courtney Love. Famously protective of her late husband's legacy, the actress and rock singer has been locked in legal wrangles with the other members of Nirvana, Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl, over a proposed 10th-anniversary boxed set. She has generally refused to allow Cobain's music and writings to be used in books or documentaries, with the result that there is, as yet, no definitive biography of one of rock's most enigmatic icons.
Now, for the first time, Love has granted biographer Charles R. Cross exclusive access to Cobain's writings, and he has used these as source material for this new biography. They give an unprecedented insight into the mind and moods of this tortured musical genius. As well as writing great songs and creating startling artwork, Cobain kept extensive journals, filling notebooks with thoughts, rants, ideas, dreams, unsent letters, drawings and doodles. Some are straightforward diary entries, others are bitter, snarling diatribes, still others are dark, disturbing passages which show a deeply troubled psyche behind the handsome face, blond hair and azure eyes.
Cross was the editor of The Rocket, Seattle's respected alternative music and entertainment magazine, and he gave Nirvana their first front-cover feature in 1989. He spent four years researching Heavier Than Heaven (the title comes from the name of Nirvana's 1989 tour), conducting more than 400 interviews and sifting through 28 spiral-bound volumes penned by Cobain. The result is the most revealing biography to date, and the first time a Cobain book has shown more of the person than the popstar.
Kurt Cobain grew up in the logging town of Aberdeen, Washington, the eldest child of Don and Wendy Cobain. He lived in a middle-class neighbourhood, although he would later describe it as "white trash posing as middle-class". In the bosom of this nuclear family, Kurt's early childhood appeared joyful, but when his parents divorced, the young boy's sense of security began to unravel. Cross charts Cobain's meandering adolescence, as he drifted between his mother's trailer, his dad's new family, various relatives, and the houses of his friends' parents. The archetypal "latchkey kid", Kurt felt like an outsider, rejected by his parents and alienated from his peers. Increasingly, he retreated into his own reality which he mapped out in some startling and visceral writings and artwork. (None of Cobain's artwork is shown in this book, but some of the more extreme images are described in detail. Courtney Love has described Cobain's artwork as "exquisite" and has been discussing plans to exhibit it.) Many of these early scribblings show that Cobain was obsessed with suicidal thoughts from an early age, and that he was fascinated by the grotesque and gory, drawing violent, pornographic images and writing long, meandering passages filled with references to rape, suicide and disfigurement. By his teens, Cobain was a high school dropout, a borderline delinquent, a "pothead" and a rabid music fan. Pretty normal for a kid in those parts, and he could have ended up as just another white trash loser, if it wasn't for his passion and talent for cutting edge rock music.
The story of Nirvana's meteoric rise to fame and Cobain's demise through drug addiction is already well-documented, but Cross keeps his eye focused on the man in the midst of the media maelstrom, watching his every move as he tumbles headlong towards his inevitable fate.
The book documents Cobain's tortuous path through chronic stomach problems; drug addiction; sudden global celebrity; whirlwind romance and marriage to Love; shaky fatherhood; domestic quarrels; failed rehab attempts; thwarted efforts to subvert Nirvana's myth; overdoses; attempted suicide; and, tragically, a successful attempt with a 20-gauge shotgun.
Where Cross's biography succeeds is in the details; all the small things which made up Cobain's upbringing, the medium sized events which helped Nirvana gain a foothold in the Seattle scene, and the big, glaring clues that all was not right inside the man's head. These details combine to make a portrait of a gifted but cursed pop star who got lost in the forest of his own anger, confusion and self-hatred - when success came to his humble logging town, he couldn't see the good for the trees. As Cobain indicated in the aborted title of Nirvana's third album, he really did hate himself and want to die.
Kevin Courtney is a freelance journalist and music critic
