Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain. By Charles R. Cross. Hyperion, 381 pages, $24.95.

The public life of Kurt Cobain was grisly, beautiful, and brief. In the fall of 1991, he appears as if from nowhere, makes some of the most death-defying rock and roll of all time, and then in the spring of 1994 violently removes himself. We had him for less than 36 months. "A denial, a denial": those were the words left ringing over the closing chords of the song with which he announced himself, words that were all too convenient an epitaph following his suicide by shotgun blast on the grounds of his home, most likely on the morning of April 5, 1994.

The uncertainty of his final day mirrored the opaqueness of his life. During those 30-odd months in the spotlight, his music was unavoidable, but Cobain himself seemed singularly inaccessible. ("He needs a PR makeover," his wife, Courtney Love, chided at the time. "It's like he's a snob and he's too good for everybody. If I was a kid, I'd spend my $20 on Alice in Chains and the Chili Peppers because they like me -- I'm not good enough for Kurt.") And after "Smells like Teen Spirit," no rumor seemed too outlandish: a man who sounded like that might be anything. By the time Nirvana made their third and final studio album, in 1993, he seemed so much a creature of our collective imagination, something we'd made up out of our sheer wonder at his music, that it took his suicide to remind us in whose hands his fate rested.

Setting the record straight has not been easy. For all that's been written about Nirvana and Kurt Cobain, their story has often been as much fable as fact. An authorized biography, Michael Azerrad's Come As You Are (Main Street/Doubleday), appeared in late 1993; it has the acrid smell of a thing written in the heat of battle, and within months of its publication it was horrifically out of date. It remains in print with a sorrowful, hastily added afterward. The first few chapters betray elements of an edited past tense; most of it remains eerily in the present. Cobain's dreams linger as if they still had life: he thought about making a blues album in tribute to Leadbelly; the book's original final chapter ends with the promise that he's about to start his own label, to be called Exploitation Records.

In eight years, the story has not been significantly advanced, which is why Charles R. Cross's riveting and revelatory new Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain comes as a shock. It's a book that gives shape and depth to a story that has so often been related as a series of loaded anecdotes, a compendium of abstractions, as if Kurt Cobain were merely a symbol of the struggle between the "authentic" voice of punk and the commodifying processes of popular music, or the loner who resonated with millions, the sanctified junkie poet with angel's wings. What complicates matters is that Kurt did not exactly discourage such mythology. Cobain was not only an active participant in his own mythmaking, he was the principal architect, and he studiously massaged his official history, even as he veered from the script. Cross takes it as his duty to rescue Cobain not only from his admirers and his detractors but from himself. It's a story, Cross writes, that left him with "a deep unease and the desire to make inquiries that I know by their very nature are unknowable . . . questions concerning spirituality, the role of madness in artistic genius, the ravages of drug abuse on a soul, and the desire to understand the chasm between the inner and outer man."

Azerrad's book, a noble effort, broke down when the author proved incapable of reconciling "the inner and outer man." Come As You Are understood the distance between the two only as a crass hypocrisy, and in the book's latter pages, Azerrad admitted to finding Kurt's duality "profoundly disillusioning." For Cross, however, this distance is the starting point: it is Cobain's central truth, the thing that made him what he was. Kurt Cobain was, Cross writes, "a complicated, contradictory misanthrope, and what at times appeared to be an accidental revolution showed hints of careful orchestration. He professed in many interviews to detest the exposure he'd gotten on MTV, yet he repeatedly called his managers to complain that the network didn't play his videos nearly enough. He obsessively -- and compulsively -- planned every musical or career direction, writing ideas out in his journals years before he executed them, yet when he was bestowed the honors he had sought, he acted as if it were an inconvenience to get out of bed. He was a man of imposing will, yet equally driven by a powerful self-hatred."

The broad outline of Cobain's life story is well traveled; the details have remained shrouded. This was, Cross writes, by design. Cobain was insecure enough to take pains to deny even such trivial details as that the first song he'd wanted to learn on guitar was "Stairway to Heaven," and that the first concert he'd attended had been not Black Flag, as he liked to claim, but Sammy Hagar. At the same time, he "was a master of exaggerating a yarn so as to tell an emotional truth rather than an actual one," writes Cross, who finds this trait central to Cobain's storytelling gift, something expressed as much in the stories he told -- in the public alter ego he created -- as in the ones he sang.

A former editor of the Seattle weekly the Rocket and the author of Backstreets: Springsteen -- The Man and His Music, Cross backs up every inch of that assertion; and Heavier Than Heaven is a trove of rigorous detail. It was four years in the making, the product of some 400 interviews and, most important, unfettered access to the journals Cobain scrupulously kept from his teenage years onward -- a running dialogue in a voice recognizably Kurt's own that provides the kind of raw, naked emotional detail rare even in autobiography.

Cobain's story needs no elaboration to become the stuff of great drama; Cross more than once notes with irony that the truth about Kurt Cobain -- like where he actually lived when he wasn't, as he often claimed, living under a bridge -- is even more compelling than the myth. And so Heavier Than Heaven speaks softly and stays out of the way. Cross's meticulous reconstruction of Cobain's youth attests eloquently to the man he would become. He dreamt of being a rock star and was quietly but powerfully ambitious, bragging to friends that he would someday be bigger than U2 and R.E.M. He also repeatedly foreshadowed his tragic demise. In 1982, Cross tells us, Cobain made a graphic Super-8 home movie with elaborate special effects that he titled "Kurt Commits Suicide," in which he appeared to slit his wrists with a tin can. Soon after, he told friends, "I'm going to be a superstar musician, kill myself, and go out in a flame of glory." It's easy to imagine a childhood acquaintance suddenly "remembering" such an utterance after the superstar musician has killed himself; but Cross tells us that more than a half-dozen acquaintances reported similar versions of the same conversation. Which is either the sign of an apocryphal tale absorbed by various members of a small, close-knit community or an early instance of Kurt Cobain testing new material on an audience.

The discovery of such a vivid interior life -- Kurt's art and journals were far more troubling than even his most disturbing lyrical imagery -- sends one scrambling back to the music again, to the fire of Bleach and the elegiac, funereal grace of MTV Unplugged in New York, looking for new faces. Cross's portrait of Kurt's darkening adolescence is shot through with shafts of normality: he was for a time a popular kid, a preppie in Izod shirts who was on the track and wrestling teams and even went out for football, a kid who doodled images of Satan and pussy in his notebooks, who rocked out to ELO and REO Speedwagon. Small in stature, he once bullied a fellow student so badly that school administrators stepped in. Even after his parents' excruciating divorce -- an "emotional holocaust" that shaped his personality more than any other event in his life -- he was not unilaterally unhappy. All of this is, somehow, comforting news.

Less comforting is the sickening flail of Cobain's final act, which was already in motion before Nirvana's peak. Kurt was apparently not disingenuous about the alienation he eventually found in stardom: the onset of Nirvana mania intensified an unnamable dread that had plagued him since his parents' divorce. He was inclined to darken at the hint of acceptance: he'd learned to distrust it not through the adherence to punk ideals but from a lifelong loneliness, self-disgust, and a (not unfounded) fear of rejection. He could be counted on to veer from one extreme of opinion to another: one week he'd be euphoric about a song he'd recorded; the next he'd disavow it completely. "It was," Cross writes, "part of a larger dissatisfaction."

Cross's dissection of Cobain's demise is unflinching. Kurt's heroin habit was much worse than had been reported, and he OD'd as many as a dozen times in 1993, all months before he wrote his first suicide note as a prelude to an overdose in Rome in March of 1994. And Cross's telling of the story of Cobain's withdrawal from the world, his escalating drug abuse, his increasingly bizarre mental state, and his infantile craving for affection all ominously parallel the descent of another rock-and-roll great, the Elvis Presley of Peter Guralnick's Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley.

What makes Cross's tale even spookier than Guralnick's is that Cross's protagonist's life seems to be adhering to a script even as it spirals out of control. Kurt Cobain seemed intent on unmaking himself. He had been threatening suicide in one way or another for more than a decade; the widely publicized working title for In Utero had been I Hate Myself and I Want To Die. If anything's clear by the end of Heavier Than Heaven, it's that Kurt didn't kill himself over his art. But he didn't exactly mind if the world thought he did.

Issue Date: October 26 - November 1, 2001