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4.03 AVERAGE
4.03 AVERAGE
I don't know how much of this is true and how much isn't (I really doubt that Kurt described every minut of his suicide) but it was very interesting book to read. It kept my interest and yes, that last page of book made me cry but what can I say, I'm emotional.
With all the interviews done and corroboration, this is the most factual biography of Kurt I’ve ever come across.
A sad story which definitely captures the thin line between genius and insanity.
dark
emotional
informative
sad
tense
slow-paced
I still love Kurt even after reading this book. The author did a very thorough job with his research. I came away from this with a new empathy for Courtney, too. Also learned lots about how the albums were made, and I followed up by going to iTunes and finding a few recordings from Nirvana I’ve missed over the years. I was a junior in high school and a big fan when Kurt ended his life.
Not one of the best written biographies I have ever read, but it was ok. If the author's intention was to make me feel immense pity for the sad, difficult life Kurt Cobain led, he did a great job!
I read this book years ago, and I remember enjoying it, but not much more than that. Last fall, I found a used copy of a “Montage of Heck” Blu-ray at a small record store in Kingston and immediately bought it, as I had been meaning to watch it for a while. And maybe I am getting old, maybe my 90s nostalgia is getting the best of me and maybe I am sentimental sap, but I cried so much watching that damn movie. I’ve been around musicians enough to know that they can be both the best and the worst people, and I have few illusions about Cobain having been any kind of saint, and perhaps this is just good editing, but that movie captured such a great sadness in him, and it really struck a nerve with me. I looked for my copy of “Heavier Than Heaven”; it appears one of my brother’s friends borrowed it and never gave it back. Those little shits are the reason I don’t lend books anymore. Anyway, I saw that there was a new updated edition out there, so I hunted that down and here we are.
I was a little too young to really get Nirvana when they were a big deal; this was a rearview mirror and secondhand situation for me, but it didn’t stop me from having my socks blown right off when I started getting into it. They played one of my favorite dives in Montreal, in the “Bleach” era if I am not mistaken (that place would not have been able to handle “Nevermind” era sized crowds), and one of their flyers is immortalized under a thick layer of shellac on one of their table tops; it always makes me smile when I end up at that table. But even today, when I get in the mood and put the legendary “MTV Unplugged” record on and listen to their cover of “Where Did You Sleep Last Night”, something inside me rattles and my heart breaks just a little bit for that poor boy (I’m 40, he was 27; he now is, and always will be, a boy) who held so much pain inside him.
The story of Kurt Cobain is in many ways a classic story of a brilliant and creative young person who battled inner demons who eventually got the best of him, someone who got hit with success so early and so fast that there was no time to process it or put his success in the right place mentally. Reading a book about him is strange at time, because I wasn’t able to stop myself from thinking about how much time he had left to live in relations to the events I was reading about. It’s also strange when the cycle of trendiness has brought 90s music and clothes back in the mainstream; there was a good ten or fifteen years during which saying you liked Nirvana was terribly passé, but now, expressing a fondness for them is met with an appreciative nod and a declaration that they are “classic”.
Urgh.
Something that stuck me in “Montage of Heck” that I hadn’t really realized before (perhaps because I was too young to think about it with the correct perspective) is that his parents, like many parents of their generation, had no idea what to do with a challenging child who had symptoms of depression and anxiety, so they sent him to a shrink who put him on meds (and eventually went as far as to basically kick him out of their houses), and that was that. Cross goes over that period of Kurt’s life, of course. The sad fact is that parenting in the 70s, 80s and 90s was a lot about managing disruptive children into being less troublesome for their parents and teachers than about figuring out why they were disruptive in the first place, and that makes me quite sad. I wonder if his life would have been very different if his folks had actually taken time to address his sadness and his anger, but that’s the sort of thing we will never know. It also feels somewhat cliché as hell to say that some children are genuinely traumatized by their parents’ divorce (I’m always amazed when I meet people my age whose parents are still together – that’s a thing?!), but it happens, and the trauma is very difficult to process, sometimes well into adulthood – and while Cross doesn’t try to analyze Kurt’s behavior, the signs of trauma are fairly obvious. People blame Courtney Love for a lot, but his folks definitely got the ball rolling… The later parts of the book, that go over how much he loved his daughter and how terrified he was of not being the father he would have wanted to have are simply heartbreaking.
It's also not uncommon for children of divorce to have strong ideals about love and romantic relationships: they crave intensity and stability because the chaos and impermanency of being raised in a split family is a discomfort they never want to experience again. The way Kurt attached a lot of meaning to sex and his relationships with women was not a surprise; it’s an extremely common yearning of kids raised by divorced parents. And on that topic, if you loathe Courtney Love, you will probably find that Cross is very forgiving of her, and paints her in a rather positive light. I’ve seen a few reviews calling this out because he needed her approval to publish this book, but as someone who has fairly neutral feelings about her, I have to say that I don’t think he made her into a saint. She comes across as deeply caring for Kurt, but carrying a ton of damage of her own into the relationship, and her history with drugs certainly didn’t help Kurt, but it doesn’t seem likely to me that she was the one who got him hooked. He had romanticized the idea of being a junkie rock star long before she was a part of his life. The bottom line is that I totally get why people dislike her (I am happy to listen to my old Hole records, but I wouldn’t hang out with her), but I also think that there is little she or anyone could have done to steer Kurt off the path he was on.
I also got the strong sense as I re-read this book, that so much of Kurt’s abrasiveness was a defense mechanism, meant to protect a very tender part of himself he didn’t trust the world with. In fact, both this book and “Montage of Heck” gave me the feeling that Kurt was someone haunted by sadness and longing, and that the only way he could successfully express those things was through his music. It’s why it remains relatable and fresh even today (yes, I did listen to a ton of Nirvana as I was reading this, I am a sentimental twit who processes emotions through music): times may have changed, but people still feel deeply alienated, they still crave unconditional love and they still long for a world without bullshit – so they still listen to Kurt’s music and get it.
Cross worked really hard to stay as objective as he could as he sorted through the enormous amount of material he gathered as someone who was an insider of the music scene – he had known quite a few of the main actors personally through his work. I appreciate that, as he doesn’t project too much in his writing, but it does feel a little clinical at times. Obviously, anyone reading this who has any kind of emotional attachment to Nirvana’s music is going to do their fair share of projection, and he was probably trying to give his readers the cleanest slate possible, which I appreciate.
When this book was originally published, Kurt had been dead for five or six years; the new edition marks the 25th anniversary of his passing, and Cross made a few interesting additions about how he feels there hasn’t really been another rock star like Kurt Cobain since, and explains his reasoning with discussing how different the music industry is today, but also specifically how we access music now vs. when Kurt was growing up. Having read Chuck Klosterman’s book “The Nineties” recently, I think he might be on to something, the same way that film-makers who were influenced by the video store culture developed a distinct style that would not have been conceivable in different circumstances. Kurt remains an icon because he was a bit like lightening in a bottle: recreating him is simply impossible.
This skinny little twerp with weird hair will always have a special place in my heart. This book is filled with great insights about him and how he became someone he never had the chance to get comfortable with. Cross is right: there just might never be another Kurt Cobain, for better or worse. For the Nirvana fans, the nostalgic idiots and those curious about a very weird, very specific moment of rock history.
I was a little too young to really get Nirvana when they were a big deal; this was a rearview mirror and secondhand situation for me, but it didn’t stop me from having my socks blown right off when I started getting into it. They played one of my favorite dives in Montreal, in the “Bleach” era if I am not mistaken (that place would not have been able to handle “Nevermind” era sized crowds), and one of their flyers is immortalized under a thick layer of shellac on one of their table tops; it always makes me smile when I end up at that table. But even today, when I get in the mood and put the legendary “MTV Unplugged” record on and listen to their cover of “Where Did You Sleep Last Night”, something inside me rattles and my heart breaks just a little bit for that poor boy (I’m 40, he was 27; he now is, and always will be, a boy) who held so much pain inside him.
The story of Kurt Cobain is in many ways a classic story of a brilliant and creative young person who battled inner demons who eventually got the best of him, someone who got hit with success so early and so fast that there was no time to process it or put his success in the right place mentally. Reading a book about him is strange at time, because I wasn’t able to stop myself from thinking about how much time he had left to live in relations to the events I was reading about. It’s also strange when the cycle of trendiness has brought 90s music and clothes back in the mainstream; there was a good ten or fifteen years during which saying you liked Nirvana was terribly passé, but now, expressing a fondness for them is met with an appreciative nod and a declaration that they are “classic”.
Urgh.
Something that stuck me in “Montage of Heck” that I hadn’t really realized before (perhaps because I was too young to think about it with the correct perspective) is that his parents, like many parents of their generation, had no idea what to do with a challenging child who had symptoms of depression and anxiety, so they sent him to a shrink who put him on meds (and eventually went as far as to basically kick him out of their houses), and that was that. Cross goes over that period of Kurt’s life, of course. The sad fact is that parenting in the 70s, 80s and 90s was a lot about managing disruptive children into being less troublesome for their parents and teachers than about figuring out why they were disruptive in the first place, and that makes me quite sad. I wonder if his life would have been very different if his folks had actually taken time to address his sadness and his anger, but that’s the sort of thing we will never know. It also feels somewhat cliché as hell to say that some children are genuinely traumatized by their parents’ divorce (I’m always amazed when I meet people my age whose parents are still together – that’s a thing?!), but it happens, and the trauma is very difficult to process, sometimes well into adulthood – and while Cross doesn’t try to analyze Kurt’s behavior, the signs of trauma are fairly obvious. People blame Courtney Love for a lot, but his folks definitely got the ball rolling… The later parts of the book, that go over how much he loved his daughter and how terrified he was of not being the father he would have wanted to have are simply heartbreaking.
It's also not uncommon for children of divorce to have strong ideals about love and romantic relationships: they crave intensity and stability because the chaos and impermanency of being raised in a split family is a discomfort they never want to experience again. The way Kurt attached a lot of meaning to sex and his relationships with women was not a surprise; it’s an extremely common yearning of kids raised by divorced parents. And on that topic, if you loathe Courtney Love, you will probably find that Cross is very forgiving of her, and paints her in a rather positive light. I’ve seen a few reviews calling this out because he needed her approval to publish this book, but as someone who has fairly neutral feelings about her, I have to say that I don’t think he made her into a saint. She comes across as deeply caring for Kurt, but carrying a ton of damage of her own into the relationship, and her history with drugs certainly didn’t help Kurt, but it doesn’t seem likely to me that she was the one who got him hooked. He had romanticized the idea of being a junkie rock star long before she was a part of his life. The bottom line is that I totally get why people dislike her (I am happy to listen to my old Hole records, but I wouldn’t hang out with her), but I also think that there is little she or anyone could have done to steer Kurt off the path he was on.
I also got the strong sense as I re-read this book, that so much of Kurt’s abrasiveness was a defense mechanism, meant to protect a very tender part of himself he didn’t trust the world with. In fact, both this book and “Montage of Heck” gave me the feeling that Kurt was someone haunted by sadness and longing, and that the only way he could successfully express those things was through his music. It’s why it remains relatable and fresh even today (yes, I did listen to a ton of Nirvana as I was reading this, I am a sentimental twit who processes emotions through music): times may have changed, but people still feel deeply alienated, they still crave unconditional love and they still long for a world without bullshit – so they still listen to Kurt’s music and get it.
Cross worked really hard to stay as objective as he could as he sorted through the enormous amount of material he gathered as someone who was an insider of the music scene – he had known quite a few of the main actors personally through his work. I appreciate that, as he doesn’t project too much in his writing, but it does feel a little clinical at times. Obviously, anyone reading this who has any kind of emotional attachment to Nirvana’s music is going to do their fair share of projection, and he was probably trying to give his readers the cleanest slate possible, which I appreciate.
When this book was originally published, Kurt had been dead for five or six years; the new edition marks the 25th anniversary of his passing, and Cross made a few interesting additions about how he feels there hasn’t really been another rock star like Kurt Cobain since, and explains his reasoning with discussing how different the music industry is today, but also specifically how we access music now vs. when Kurt was growing up. Having read Chuck Klosterman’s book “The Nineties” recently, I think he might be on to something, the same way that film-makers who were influenced by the video store culture developed a distinct style that would not have been conceivable in different circumstances. Kurt remains an icon because he was a bit like lightening in a bottle: recreating him is simply impossible.
This skinny little twerp with weird hair will always have a special place in my heart. This book is filled with great insights about him and how he became someone he never had the chance to get comfortable with. Cross is right: there just might never be another Kurt Cobain, for better or worse. For the Nirvana fans, the nostalgic idiots and those curious about a very weird, very specific moment of rock history.
Made me fall in love with Kurt Cobain. An amazing biography of him, from start to finish.
I learned a few interesting facts from the book. The author did a good job of collecting facts and putting a good story together, but it's hard to picture because no one was there for half of his intimate moments alone. The suicide scene is something only Kurt was there for and he's not here to tell the story. He was clearly disturbed and it was a dark tale. I just couldn't get into it and was happy to have finished the book.