Photo by Bruce Pavitt
April 8, 1994 was supposed to be just another day at the office for Charles R. Cross, the editor-in-chief of Seattle alt-weekly The Rocket. “I can still remember my finger pressing the flashing Line One button on my office phone, but I had no clue, at the time, that this little red light would announce a sea change in both music and culture,” he writes in Here We Are Now: The Lasting Impact of Kurt Cobain. The call was from a DJ at KXRX-FM, asking if Cross could confirm whether or not Kurt Cobain was dead.
In the book's earliest pages, Cross recounts a day of fielding calls from all over the world, gleaning bits of information where he could and wrangling his own emotions while trying to do the work of an editor. He and his team worked quickly on a feature and obituary on Cobain: “I chose an iconic Charles Peterson photo of Kurt for the cover [of The Rocket]. It showed him jumping high in the air, almost as if he was already no longer of this earth; it was perfect.”
It’s an intriguing opener, one that offers a vivid and unique account of one of rock’s great tragedies. But the fact that Here We Are Now cannot quite live up to that introduction only illustrates the difficulty in devising new ways to approach Cobain's legacy. He’s one of the most popular rock musicians of the last quarter-century, his life and career more thoroughly documented than any of his contemporaries or successors. Twenty years after his suicide, the Nirvana frontman remains a kind of cottage industry in the publishing world—the only rock artist of the last three decades to rival the ink spilled over Baby Boomer heroes like Bob Dylan and the Beatles. Every year seems to bring several new books about Nirvana or grunge in general, often rehashing the same ideas and now-iconic photos.
As the twentieth anniversary of Cobain's suicide approaches, that output has increased: A slew of new titles hit bookstores just in time for the oncoming barrage of essays, remembrances, and listicles. Some of these new books re-organize Cobain esoterica into a bullet-pointed format, which read like reference books rather than traditional band bios. John D. Luerssen’s Nirvana FAQ: All That's Left to Know About the Most Important Band of the 1990s, a new entry in Backbeat Books’ excessively accessible FAQ Series, dices the story up into easy digestible chunks of information, with subheads like “Cobain on Canvas,” “Sub Pop’s Money Woes,” and “Drawing Vaginas.” If the structure is offputting, never allowing Luerssen to delve too deeply into any one particular topic, the sheer depth of detail is impressive.
Placing more emphasis on chronology and therefore on narrative, Carrie Borzillo’s Nirvana: In the Words of the People Who Were There is a painstaking day-by-day account of the band’s career. A reprint of the original 2000 edition, it renders Cobain’s life in such matter-of-fact detail that the story becomes newly chilling, especially as Borzillo describes—without editorializing or sensationalizing—Cobain’s final days. (The author is making a limited number of signed copies available through her website, with a portion of the proceeds going to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.)
Despite their formats, Luerssen’s and Borzillo’s books are essentially Cobain biographies, not unlike Michael Azerrad’sCome As You Are (1993), Cross’ Heavier Than Heaven (2001), and so many others. But in this crowded field, Voyageur Press’ Nirvana: The Illustrated History stands out. Collecting newly penned chapters from Cross, Gillian G. Gaar, and Mark Yarm, among other contributors, the book emphasizes the visual ephemera of Nirvana’s career: photographs, concert posters, ticket stubs, t-shirts, infant onesies, even a casting call for the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video.
In some ways, this book is less about the band and more about the different ways the band was portrayed during its short run and after Cobain’s suicide. It’s not difficult to imagine a future edition that includes some of the newly released death-scene photos as well as stills from that horrendous Dutch beer commercial. By reproducing so much visual material, the book reconstructs an era when album covers and concert flyers appeared Xeroxed not in allegiance to some DIY aesthetic but out of economic necessity. Posters looked cheap because the bands had so little money to make them. Yet, even with such limited resources, these artists were able to create a distinct visual style as clever and as confrontational as the music it advertised.
Finding a new angle on Nirvana is no small feat, and that compensates for the book’s awkward overlap between chapters and the kneejerk us-against-them hostility between underground and the “vapid” mainstream. Still, in his chapter on the band circa In Utero, Todd Martens writes perceptively about Cobain’s infamous run-in with Axl Rose and how the incident illustrates the whole idea of selling out. Martens, a writer at the Los Angeles Times, manages to make the tragedy of the singer’s suicide freshly affecting by avoiding cliché or sentimentality.
A popular assumption about these and other Nirvana titles is that Cobain would have been embarrassed by all the attention, perhaps even outraged to see his music manhandled by so many writers and publishers. And yet, in taking his own life, he left it to us to make sense of his legacy and shape it ourselves. That’s the crux of Cross’ Here We Are Now, which is less concerned with the biographical details of Cobain’s life or even with a critical analysis of his songs. Instead, Cross shows how Nirvana continues to influence popular culture—not just music, but fashion, politics, suicide prevention, and addiction treatment.
Oddly, his chapters about Nirvana’s music are shaky and insubstantial; they read like they could have been written any time in the last 15 years. Cross defines the band’s legacy by units sold and rankings on best-of lists, which unwittingly treats the albums as raw product. He misses an opportunity here to discuss how Cobain’s severely introverted lyrics informed a generation’s definition of rock music as fundamentally confessional.
Here We Are Now improves considerably when Cross tracks Cobain’s influence in other fields and media besides music. The fashion industry has adopted the grunge look and revived it multiple times across the past two decades, with little regard for the irony of basing couture on thrift-shop finds. For $25 you can buy a bottle of Bed Head shampoo and get “the same look Kurt achieved with a twenty-nine-cent bar of soap.” With less outrage Cross details the long battle in Aberdeen to erect a memorial of some kind to its most famous son, even as certain city council members argue that Cobain’s drug use makes him a poor civic hero.
While that debate raged, a senior citizen named Tori Kovach began clearing away land adjacent to the Young Street Bridge, where Cobain hung out as a teenager. With help from other residents and local businesses, Kovach created a DIY park, which “stirred some to complain, but eventually the city voted to take it over. The spot is now officially the Kurt Cobain Riverfront Park.” In some ways it’s a perfectly apt tribute: street-level, illegal, anti-corporate.
Arguably the best and most revealing new book on Nirvana is also the one that is least concerned with the big picture. Rather than take in the full trajectory of Cobain’s life or Nirvana’s short run, Experiencing Nirvana: Grunge in Europe 1989 instead puts a magnifying glass to one short, relatively obscure chapter: a package tour of grunge bands touring Italy, Austria, France, and England. Because it doesn’t have to recount the same facts of Cobain’s life or the circumstances of various sessions or shows, the book, by Sub Pop co-founder Bruce Pavitt, avoids certain clichés and conventions: the sense of foreshadowing when the band plays a half-empty room, the conflicted relationship with fame, the coded intimations of suicidal thoughts.
The book is refreshing because it doesn’t care about “Teen Spirit” or Nevermind; barely mentions Courtney Love, heroin, or suicide; has no interest in generational anomie. Instead, Pavitt turns his focus squarely on the group of tired guys trudging around cities they barely have the energy to enjoy. Here, in this snapshot of pre-celebrity life, Pavitt finds a sliver of humanity.
The problem with so many books about Nirvana is that they all more or less tell the same story, even if they differ over nuance and minutia. Cobain did spark a revolution in music and popular culture; he did become a figurehead to a generation coming into its own at a time when it didn’t have much to come into; he did flame out personally, if not creatively. That story is well known and generally accepted as fact, yet it’s becoming as threadbare as one of Cobain’s cardigans. As new generations of musicians find new approaches to Cobain (or ignore him altogether), what we need from subsequent Nirvana-related titles is a new, younger voice. If there's a future for Cobain publishing, it's in the hands of millennials who never knew the band in the present tense but have inherited its legacy. Does Cobain speak to anyone under 30? If so, what does he say?