The question any new, historic work about Nirvana should have to answer is, "Why?" With a story that’s been told and retold to the point of being a well-worn musical legend, a new book purporting to enhance our understanding of Nirvana has a very high bar to clear in order to justify its own existence. (And that’s before digging into the separate deification of Kurt Cobain, himself the subject of an upcoming documentary.) I Found My Friends fails to meet this standard.
Its conceit is smart, in theory—an oral history composed of stories told by bands Nirvana played with, even in the smallest one-off dates, giving a specific arc to the narrative. I Found My Friends finds a middle ground between straightforward narrative and oral history, a format that has substantial drawbacks of its own. Soulsby inserts himself between many of the quotes, providing his own thoughts as guiding observations, like a documentarian’s narration. Unfortunately, this proves to be the book’s biggest weakness.
In the book’s preface, Soulsby writes first that "Nirvana was a bunch of normal guys" and then, just a few sentences later, says of Cobain that "His story, however, is not just the story of a normal man." There are productive ways of holding both of these things to be true and working through that tension, but Soulsby never even attempts to engage in such activity—he loses the thread of "normalcy" in favor of injecting himself into the book almost solely to fawn over the band, and while he repeatedly claims that they were just normal people, he never quite seems convincing trying to bring them back down to earth.
Certainly, Soulsby makes no effort to hide the depths of his Nirvana fandom (he’s already written another book about the band and maintains a Nirvana fan website). But when he begins to describe anecdotes as "gorgeous whimsy" and spews nonsense like "The band’s uncertain status was all-pervasive," he traps the vitality that originally infused the music in a quick-setting reverence, and makes it increasingly difficult to focus on the legitimately engaging, underserved stories of many of the smaller bands.
At times, these interjections are outright horrific, at one point describing Cobain’s drug use as "just dabbling," a dangerous bit of editorializing that he’s in no position to be able to make. By the time he refers to Dave Grohl as "the anointed ruler of the Nirvana drum stool" without any hint of self-awareness, it’s possible to read I Found My Friends as merely a collection of music writing cliches—a carelessness that extends to the organization of the book, which reuses quotes and has so many voices that it becomes difficult to keep track.
Without steady authorial control or the presence of any of the band members, Nirvana itself becomes a sort of void throughout I Found My Friends, presences who flit in and out and ultimately appear to be unknowable. (Indeed, much of the later parts of the band’s story are, by definition, unknowable, because of the distance imposed by fame.) So the best part of I Found My Friends is more a picture of the community that Nirvana emerged from, and a sense for the way their rise changed it—something that’s already captured more effectively, with far more attention to detail (and with the participation of Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl) in grunge oral history Everybody Loves Our Town.
Mostly, the unfiltered voices of smaller players means that most of the fun comes from the bloodsport of people trying to advance their personal narratives or grievances or add a ridiculous number of sides to a rather large number of small stories while telling the same anecdotes for the hundredth time. (Courtney Love hangs over the last 40 pages or so like a wraith, referred to as "Kurt’s wife" and spat on at every possible opportunity.) There are hints of better stories, like a night David Berman heckled Novoselic off the state at a gig, but, like early Nirvana, the raw materials are there, but it lacks the polish necessary to make it a hit.
The real disappointment of I Found My Friends is that many of the people it spotlights are legitimately unknown, and their words alternately hint at two separate, yet related projects: poking holes in the conceit of the punk scene at the time and understanding the way that scene was perceived around the world. Using them as a lens to tell the story of Nirvana itself, however, is destructive to those projects, especially after the fiftieth repetition of "Kurt was a pretty chill dude." Over the course of the book, Cobain comes across as less of a musical genius or generational icon and more of a savvy musician who had a sense for when a particular sound would become popular—a "one-trick pony," as Blag Dahlia puts it. That’s a reasonable way of approaching the material, but it’s frequently at odds with Soulsby’s obsessive superfan presence.
The job of a work of history is to provide context, whether that’s in the form of straightforward information about something that happened, or additional framing for something that the reader might be aware of. I Found My Friends is an enjoyable read for those friends—superfans interested in additional scraps of Nirvana trivia that have yet to be wrung for profit—but its unwillingness to do anything bold is its undoing. Kevin Rutmanis, a former bassist for the Melvins and Cows, tells Soulsby, "Grunge as a label and a genre was always repellent to me—that stuff was all so conservative musically. Like nostalgia." The writer would have done well to listen.