Nirvana: The Biography

Genre non fiction Author Everett True Publisher Da Capo Press External Links Official Da Capo Website

First, the quibbles.

Nirvana: The Biography offers no insights into why Quentin Tarantino was thanked in the liner notes of the trio's final studio album, In Utero. Nor does it devote anywhere near enough space and attention to bassist Krist Novoselic or drummer Dave Grohl, though this is a depressingly common oversight in band histories - sidepeople get shafted, frontpeople soak up all the ink (see Marc Spitz's limpid Green Day book from earlier this year, or better yet, don't). As a fan who came of age during the year that punk "broke," I wanted to know - needed to know - why their marriages when to crap eventually and the ins-and-outs of their lives immediately following Kurt Cobain's April 1994 suicide-by-shotgun.

Everett True didn't bother going there; he denied me that knowledge, cruelly. Yet he's given us so much other information in The Biography that it really doesn't matter; the Brit music writer/Plan B founder's doorstop-sized bio/reminiscence answers questions I - and probably you, too - didn't even know I had about these iconoclasts. It helps that True spent tons of time on the phone, on tour, reviewing, just hanging out and shooting the breeze with Nirvana, Cobain widow Courtney Love, and their peers - Calvin Johnson, Mudhoney, the Melvins, Tobi Vail, Lou Barlow, and so on, almost ad nauseum. His narrative - as much intensely personal as intensely professional - swerves off on long tangents as he sets the scene for us, from the decrepit logging town of Aberdeen, Washington where Krist and Kurt grew up and formed the band to DIY intellectual haven Olympia to official "grunge" capital and Sub Pop HQ Seattle to Los Angeles' plasticine wasteland, where Cobain waged his last losing battles with heroin abuse, even as he felt hopelessly lost, alienated from everyone save Love, out of place, and unsure he whether wanted to keep Nirvana alive - let alone himself.

Michael Azzerad's thin-gruel 1993 bio arrived too early to mean anything; Charles Cross's more thoughtful 2002 bio offered more insight but lacked the personal touches True brings to his intimate version of events -- he liberally quotes and lifts material from both books to help paint a so vivid a picture of the highs, lows, and inbetweens that we almost feel we were there with him before and during Nirvanamania, gaping backstage for pre Nevermind sets, getting sloshed with Love, mourning "the voice of a generation" with a disconsolate Mark Lanegan, fielding paranoid phone calls from a jealous Kurt, afraid Courtney was banging Billy Corgan and Evan Dando behind his back. The blanks True fills from memory, his own yellowing press clippings, and dozens interviews: other people's (though credit's given where it's due) and his own, which are all-access amazing. Those Mary Lou Lord rumors? True, sort of: she sends True a long letter, revealing that had circumstances been slightly different, Kurt may have wound up with the busker and Bevis Frond collaborator; this tale might've had a less tragic ending. The surprisingly un-bitter Chad Channing weighs in, philosophizing that the band dumped him as a drummer at just the right time: before the DGC corporate machinery swallowed the band whole and turned Nirvana's dysfunctional, anarchic disposition toxic. Turns out that Jessica Hopper isn't just a PR hack and a rock writer; in the early 1990s she, boyfriend Michael "Cali" DeWitt (that's him posing in drag on the In Utero CD), and Rene Navarette served as compensated hangers-on, pals, and live-in/travel babysitters for the first couple of grunge; all were teenagers at the time. Navarette and DeWitt, who were often as strung out as the employers they routinely scored smack for, chip in spine-tingling, Bret Easton Ellis-style testimony that portrays the final months of Kurt Cobain's life as more pathetic than the extended 1994 obituaries suggested. Eventually one loses track of all the purposeful ODs and potentially lethal marital spats and desperate, freaked-out phone calls and descriptions of squalid, unkempt Kurtney (True's term, not mine) hotel rooms; eventually one is struck through with an overwhelming sense of sadness, of genius talent wasted.