Nirvana: The Amplifications

Epigraph

Maybe Kurt was exasperated by humanity itself. Exasperated, that weight of, Oh, how do I fit in this world?

—Krist Novoselic to interviewer John Hughes, 2008

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Epigraph

Contents

Chapter 1: That Would Be Too Guns N’ Roses

Chapter 2: The Hellhole of the Pacific

Chapter 3: Another Plane of Consciousness

Chapter 4: A Kindred Spirit

Chapter 5: The Promised Land

Chapter 6: The Quintessential Quality of Passion

Chapter 7: Something Big Was Going On

Chapter 8: The Most Well-Adjusted Boy I Know

Chapter 9: A Defining Generational Statement

Chapter 10: Over the Edge

Chapter 11: The Futility of Revolution (or The Utopian Performative)

Chapter 12: It’s Who Does It Second

Chapter 13: Heroin Chic

Chapter 14: In the Middle of a Hurricane

Chapter 15: A Storm in an Electric Blue Sky

Chapter 16: Fame Is a Fickle Food

Chapter 17: I Don’t Care if You Like Me, I Hate You.

Chapter 18: The Whole Thing Was Bullshit

Chapter 19: A Dark Constellation

Acknowledgments

Select Bibliography

SAMHSA

Copyright

About the Publisher

Chapter 1

That Would Be Too Guns N’ Roses

Very late one night in the autumn of 1992, the phone rang. It was Courtney Love. She wanted to know if I would like to write a book about Nirvana. Of course I did, even though I’d never written anything longer than the 4,895-word Nirvana cover story I’d done earlier that year for Rolling Stone. That sounds interesting, I said, playing it as cool as I could manage, but could I talk to Kurt about it? She handed the phone to Kurt Cobain.

Hey, he said in his cigarette growl. I asked Kurt why he wanted to do the book. And he said it was because the truth, as unflattering as it might be, would be better than all the lies that were being printed about him and Courtney and the band—this was shortly after the Vanity Fair story that was used as some of the evidence to briefly take away custody of their infant daughter, Frances. He promised me access to anyone I wanted to talk to. Just tell the truth, he said. That’ll be better than anything else that’s been written about me.

But I don’t want it to be an authorized biography, I said. Kurt was savvy—he knew the journalistic meaning of that term, which is that the subject has final approval over the manuscript. I’ll never forget his reply. No way, he said. That would be too Guns N’ Roses.

OK, I was in.

*  *  *

When I first met Kurt, in early 1992, he and Courtney were living in a little apartment in a two-up, two-down apartment building on an anonymous stretch of street in the Fairfax section of Los Angeles. They’d moved to Los Angeles to get out of the hermetic atmosphere of Seattle and live in a place where it was more comfortable to be a celebrity. I guess that it was also easier to get drugs there—and seek treatment for them. I was there to interview Kurt for a Rolling Stone cover story, the one with him on the cover wearing a homemade T-shirt that said Corporate Magazines Still Suck.

I was really nervous. Not a whole lot was known about Kurt at that point. He was the guy from Seattle who screamed in his songs, smashed his guitars, and might be a heroin addict. I had never knowingly met a heroin addict. I knew he had already done the photo shoot wearing a T-shirt that insulted the magazine I was writing the article for, so that was kind of daunting. He was also the most celebrated rock musician on the planet. I really did not know what I was going to encounter. And I was there to write a cover story for Rolling Stone, which was a really big deal back then. I was nervous.

It was dusk when my taxi dropped me off at the address. Courtney greeted me at the door and graciously offered me a plate of green grapes. I’d never met the obscure and yet somehow already notorious Courtney Love, only heard her paint-peeling shriek over Hole’s cantankerous racket, and now she was standing right in front of me, looking artfully disheveled, barefoot, in a vintage slip. I’d never met her before, and, going sheerly by her reputation, I was expecting someone approximating a feral child. Instead, as I say, she quietly welcomed me with a plate of grapes and invited me into her home.

First, there was a tiny, dimly lit living room with no furniture in it, LPs and guitars strewn around the bare floor, and against one wall a small Buddhist shrine with burning candles. (I don’t think I’d ever knowingly met a Buddhist either.) Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) was playing softly on the crappy little stereo.

And then there was the very long walk down a very short hallway to the bedroom—it couldn’t have been more than fifteen feet, but it just seemed to elongate as I walked down it, kind of like at the end of The Graduate when Dustin Hoffman runs down the sidewalk toward the church. Eventually, I got to the door and opened it to find Kurt lying in a little bed in a little room, his back against the wall, facing the doorway, his shocking blue eyes laser beaming through the subdued lighting. His bare feet were sticking out past the bedsheets, and his toenails were painted a rosy hue. The smell of jasmine flowers wafted through the screen on the window above his head, and to this day, when I smell jasmine, it shoots me straight back to that moment.

Hi, he said. And two things struck me instantly. And I mean in an instant. The first was: oh wow, I know this guy. He wasn’t some sort of rock & roll space alien; he was actually like a lot of the stoners I went to high school with. Hell, I was a stoner in high school. He was a little bit like me.

A year or so later, I told Kurt about the moment we met, about how I instantly felt comfortable with him. And he said something like, That’s how I felt about you too! I was nervous about it, but the second you walked in the door, I thought, this is going to be OK. Because, as huge as Nirvana was, Kurt had been relatively unknown only a few short months before, a one-time small-town deadbeat—and now, a guy whose articles he’d been reading for the past few years had flown out from New York City to interview him for a cover story in Rolling Stone. Kurt had been dreaming of this for most of his life: from when he was a little kid, he wanted to play in a rock band and be on the cover of magazines and stuff. As I said, this was a really big deal. For both of us.

I just played it cool about the fact that he was doing an interview while lying in bed—hey, maybe he often did interviews this way, and besides, it provided a nice bit of color. So I sat down on a little footstool next to him and started asking questions. I asked Kurt about what he was like as a kid, and he said something about being small for his age, and I stood up from my footstool, unfurled my wiry five-foot-six frame, and said, in a theatrically manly voice, I don’t know what you’re talking about! And we exchanged smiles, and that was that: we understood each other.

He said he was an artistic, sensitive kid. So was I! OK, maybe not as artistic as Kurt was. And he said his parents were divorced by the time he was ten years old and he was melancholic ever since. Same here! And somehow I got to talking about Arlo Guthrie’s The Motorcycle Song and how I’d play the song on the family record player and run around the house pretending I was a motorcycle. And Kurt said, I did that too! That Arlo Guthrie album, Alice’s Restaurant, released in 1967, also features the eighteen-minute Alice’s Restaurant Massacree, a quintessential classic of the ’60s counterculture. It’s funny to think that Kurt was familiar with it.

We grew up on the same music that so many American kids did: Kiss, Cheap Trick, Queen, Black Sabbath, and so on. We even became stoners around the same age, too. It was kind of uncanny.

So here I was, the bespectacled college-boy Rolling Stone journalist from New York City, connecting with this guy from clear across the country, from a very different background, a rural high school dropout whose dad had worked counting logs in a lumber mill.

Now, I’m not saying I was unique or special about any of this—literally millions of people have a similar story and would have had a similar experience with Kurt if they’d met him—but it was amazing how much we had in common. We hit it off.

(A couple of years after Kurt passed, I asked Courtney why Kurt had connected with me so well. And she said, He thought you had a similar kind of melancholy. I mentioned this to my father and it made him a little worried.)

Turns out Kurt was very much like a whole lot of people, actually. He just had a genius for conveying that in song and in the most ineffable way.

But the second thing I realized in the first few moments of meeting Kurt is really uncomfortable to say: I sensed that he was one of those rock musicians who dies young. I’d never met one of those people before, or even known many people who died at all. I just sensed it. He was more than enough of a student of rock paradigms that he probably realized it himself. (Frequent Nirvana photographer Ian Tilton once said, He had this sort of fascination with dead pop stars.) Other people around him felt this same feeling, but maybe they ignored their intuitions; a lot of people do. Then again, maybe they just wouldn’t say such a horrible thing out loud.

Dave Grohl knew though. In 2009, he told the BBC, There are some people that you meet in life that you just know that they are not going to live to be a hundred years old. . . . In some ways, you kind of prepare yourself emotionally for that to be a reality.

Courtney knew, too. How could I not when he talked about it every single day? she told Spin magazine’s Craig Marks in a remarkable 1995 story. If there were ninety-nine dots on the wall, he was going to kill himself. If such and such happened that day, he was going to kill himself. And, as she said in her taped message to the crowd gathered at the public memorial for Kurt in Seattle, I mean, it was going to happen.

Even Kurt’s mom, Wendy, felt it: I said if he ever lived to be thirty, she told Spin, I’d be surprised.

When you see the way he was, Neil Young once said of Kurt, there’s no way he could ever get through the other end of it. Because there was no control to the burn. That’s why it was so intense. He was not holding back at all.

At the time, there was so much phoniness in popular music. It was frustrating. The feeling in the air was, in the exasperated words of John Lennon, just gimme some truth. And then, suddenly, there was Nirvana. They were for real. There was no artifice in the music; they meant every millisecond.

At the very moment I was talking with him, Kurt was detoxing. He said he was in bed because he had a cold or something, which made sense—he was just coming off a tour that went from Australia to New Zealand to Singapore to Japan to Hawaii, and all those shows and air travel would naturally take a toll on anybody, even someone who had just turned twenty-five. It didn’t really seem like he had a cold, though, but I just partitioned it in my mind. In retrospect, it was obvious what he was going through. But I was so naive. I just didn’t know. Or maybe I just didn’t want to know. I’ve always considered that inclination to be one of my weak points as a journalist. With the sketchy stuff, I tend to look the other way.

And maybe Kurt, Courtney, and the whole apparatus around them realized that too when they asked if I’d like to write a book about Nirvana. I was a pretty nice person. And maybe it was obvious that I was pretty green. Or they thought they could successfully hide the bad parts from me. Probably all those things were true. So they took a chance on me. It was quite a risky gamble for them but a canny one.

*  *  *

The Rolling Stone cover story came out that April. I was mostly a pretty mediocre writer up until then, but somehow I rose to the occasion, and I’ll forever be grateful to Rolling Stone for taking a chance on me. It was a professional and artistic breakthrough for me. And I think it was the first coverage that connected Kurt’s personal story to the music that he made.

A few months later, Rolling Stone assigned me to cover the 1992 Reading Festival, the final day of which featured a bill almost entirely composed of grunge bands, with Nirvana headlining.

I was staying at the Reading Ramada, where a lot of the bands were staying, too, and many musicians congregated at the ground floor bar, making it quite the scene. Late one evening, I was standing in the lobby, just spacing out for a moment. And I felt something pass just over the top of my head, like maybe someone’s hand just an inch away but not touching. I figured someone was goofing on me, so I ignored it and waited for whoever it was to give up and introduce themselves. But there wasn’t anyone anywhere near me. So finally, I just turned around to see what was going on. And there, some twenty feet away, was Kurt Cobain, staring directly at me with those laser beam eyes.

(I’ve had that sensation only once since: I was at a memorial gathering for Lou Reed, and again I thought it was someone playing a trick on me, and again I played it cool and took my time to turn around. There was no one there. But maybe fifteen feet behind me, David Bowie was, for some reason, staring right at me.)

I walked up to Kurt, and he was glad to see me. He said he liked my Rolling Stone story. In retrospect, I can see how the article served his purposes: I quoted his anti-drug speech; I acknowledged that he was truly in love with Courtney, who was starting to get a lot of grief from the media; I took his stomach pain seriously, which few people did; and I let him plug a bunch of his favorite bands, which helped him feel a little better about his exploding fame.

Kurt and I reconnecting over screwdrivers at the Reading Ramada before Nirvana’s appearance at the 1992 Reading Festival.

© Charles Peterson

There, in the hotel lobby, we continued the connection we’d made during the Rolling Stone interview; we just talked really easily with each other. I bought him a vodka-and-orange at the crowded bar, which, looking back on it, means he wasn’t using at the time—like any other heroin user, he knew very well that mixing alcohol and opiates is potentially fatal. We chatted a little bit before the swirl of fellow musicians and the gawking of onlookers got to be too much and Kurt retreated to his room.

And then there was that fateful late-night phone call from Courtney, when she asked if I’d like to write a book about Nirvana.

From there, it was pretty easy to get a book deal. I signed a contract with Main Street Books, an imprint of Doubleday. The next Nirvana album was due out the following September, which was when Doubleday wanted to publish. And so I had a little less than seven months to write my first book. After that, it was nothing but pedal to the metal.

*  *  *

Before I began writing, Courtney would sometimes call me, I think partly to try to frame the narrative for me, partly to ingratiate herself with the guy who was going to write the book, and maybe just because she and Kurt liked and trusted me. Her conversations were routinely peppered with references to various pharmaceuticals that I’d never heard of, like Klonopin and Diazepam and Vicodin, as if everybody knew what they were; that’s how Courtney talks, as if you’re intimately familiar with all the arcane things and people she’s analyzing at such high velocity. The pharmaceutical thing was so relentless that one day I walked over to downtown Manhattan’s cavernous, beloved Strand Bookstore—remember, this is basically pre-internet—and bought a used copy of the Physicians’ Desk Reference, a big fat book that lists all prescription drugs and their uses and effects, so I could try to keep up with Courtney.

On the way home from the Strand, I happened to bump into someone from Nirvana’s management team who was extremely distrustful and controlling. This was before any of the interviews for Come as You Are started, and if this person suspected that I was going to write a lurid exposé about Kurt and Courtney’s drug use, they might well cancel the book. But I really just wanted to know what Courtney was talking about. And, of course, right away this person noticed the telltale Strand book bag and asked the very question I was dreading: Oh, what book did you buy? I mumbled something and quickly changed the subject, dangling the bag behind my back. I can laugh about it now, but at the time, I was practically shaking with fear.

The next six months went by quickly. All I did was fly back and forth to Seattle (and once to Los Angeles) to do interviews and then come back home to transcribe, research, and write.

Seattle rock producer Jack Endino was the first person I interviewed for Come as You Are. He was, and still is, a keystone of the entire Seattle music community, and there are few relationships more intimate than the one between a musician and their producer-engineer, so I figured he’d be a great place to start.

Just going by his name and the brutally heavy sounds he got out of bands, I pictured Jack Endino to be a tough, burly guy with black hair and beard stubble; I imagined he looked and behaved a little like Bluto. But Jack turned out to be a lanky sweetheart of a guy with a kindly baritone and a ponytail, with an easygoing intelligence that made me imagine that he smoked a pipe. He gave me all kinds of details about recording Bleach, the band’s internal dynamics, and insight into the culture of the Seattle rock community at the time.

If Come as You Are is a pearl, my interview with Jack is the grain of sand around which it formed. I’m so grateful to him for that.

But Krist Novoselic was the first member of Nirvana I interviewed for Come as You Are. In late December, I booked a room at the Inn at the Market, in Seattle’s Pike Place Market; Kurt, Courtney, and Frances were between homes and staying at the same hotel. I got a call from the hotel lobby that Krist was on his way up, so I left the door open for him. I was sitting in a low comfy chair between the door and floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out on Puget Sound when suddenly Krist burst in the door, all six-foot-seven of him, ran straight at me, jumped right over my head, and stopped right at the window, theatrically slamming his palms on the glass to stop himself. What an entrance! That was Krist back then—just slightly dangerous in the most goofy, irreverent, hilarious, and charmingly icebreaking way.

The first time I interviewed Kurt for Come as You Are was December 23, 1992. I stopped by Kurt and Courtney’s room to retrieve Kurt. The TV was blaring but no one was watching it, clothes and other belongings were draped over various surfaces, and miscellaneous baby paraphernalia was scattered about. Courtney, in thoughtful mode, asked if I wanted to join them for Christmas. That was very kind, and it sure would have been interesting, but I had family obligations. Kurt’s close friend Dylan Carlson was there, too, and we chatted for a bit as I waited for Kurt.

It’s easy to see why Kurt and Dylan Carlson got along: both were misfits, artists, and people who wanted to learn a whole lot more about art and the world in general. And they were drug buddies. Carlson is kind of renowned as a nice person, as well as an avid autodidact in the tradition of many fellow musicians, such as Peter Buck, Grant Hart, and Mike Watt. As I was talking with him, he kept mentioning an eppy-fanny. It took me a minute to realize he meant epiphany. People who mispronounce fancy words deserve respect—they discovered those words by reading them, not by being taught them by someone else.

Kurt and I headed to my room to talk, and he began by professing his love of the Clash’s 1982 album Combat Rock. That was a strange choice—it does have Should I Stay or Should I Go and Rock the Casbah, but with its ill-advised excursions into rap and reggae, Combat Rock is often derided as the beginning of the end for a once-great band. But this was at the peak of the Age of Irony, and I couldn’t tell if Kurt was kidding. Combat Rock does turn up in some of the favorite albums lists in his journals, so I guess he was actually serious.

I gave him a present that evening: a yellow-and-orange-striped vintage cardigan. He was really appreciative—when I offered it to him, he snatched it away from me and held it close to his chest as if he was afraid I was going to grab it back. I’m pretty sure he was cremated in it, along with a Breeders T-shirt. That is very strange to think about.

For another early interview with Kurt, I visited him at the Westin Seattle, where he, Courtney, and Frances were staying. I walked into their room to find Kurt and Courtney watching a Leif Garrett movie on TV. Present-day readers might not appreciate the significance of Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love being rapt during a Leif Garrett movie—and at the time neither did I. But they were a little fascinated by Garrett, a ’70s teen idol who went on to experience some very high-profile substance abuse problems, not to mention being the driver in a tragic car crash. In retrospect, I realize they were studying someone else who had grappled—not very successfully—with drugs and the bizarre experience of sudden money and fame.

The funny thing is, it goes full circle: the Melvins got Garrett to sing on their faithful cover of Smells Like Teen Spirit for their 2000 album The Crybaby. The Dallas Observer wrote that the band’s intent was only to draw an ironic parallel between two teen-idol pop stars ruined by the music industry that exploited them.

It’s one of the best, most fucked-up ideas I’ve ever come up with, said the Melvins’ ever-sardonic singer-guitarist Buzz Osborne, who had been a formative musical influence on Kurt when both were in their teens. Especially with Leif’s obvious drug past and Kurt’s public drug use.

During one interview at the Westin, Kurt showed me a gadget he was trying out: a pair of special goggles with blinking lights inside, with a little Walkman-sized controller, and the patterns allegedly could induce different kinds of brainwaves. That machine was kind of controversial—some people claimed it exacerbated depression rather than curing it. But I never saw Kurt use it again.

It was a high-tech version of the Dreamachine, which was cocreated by one of Kurt’s literary heroes, the poet, sound artist, and painter Brion Gysin, a pivotal figure who spanned the Surrealists and the Beats. One day in 1958, Gysin had a mystical-psychedelic experience from closing his eyes while the sunlight flickered through the trees as he rode on a bus to Marseilles. An overwhelming flood of intensely bright colors exploded behind my eyelids: a multidimensional kaleidoscope whirling out through space, he later wrote. I was swept out of time. And so he built the Dreamachine, the first known work of art meant to be seen with the eyes closed.

Soon, Kurt and family moved to a new house in the Matthews Beach neighborhood of Seattle. It wasn’t particularly fancy, and there was barely even any furniture in there, even though Courtney has sophisticated taste and could have decorated it very well. It was just a nice house with a few bedrooms and a two-car garage. The most luxurious aspect of it was the deck that overlooked Lake Washington. As is so often the case with famous people, they put their awards in the bathroom.

The Matthews Beach home was disheveled just like all of Kurt’s homes were. Looking back on it, that might well have been a reflection of his never having lived in a place for very long since he was a little kid. Or just rebelling against his mom’s pristine approach to keeping house.

One evening, I arrived to do an interview and Kurt and Courtney began doting on Frances, so much so that it seemed like an act. For them, that was the whole point of Come as You Are, to portray them as good parents. But they didn’t have to do that—once they relaxed, they always wound up playing with the baby in a more natural way, with Courtney singing little bits of nonsense to her in a surprisingly sweet voice, or Kurt doing his ridiculous Donald Duck impression. It wouldn’t be the last time that Kurt and Courtney doted on their child for the benefit of the press.

We did most of our interviews at the kitchen table, adjacent to the mess room, the house’s dining room, where Kurt arranged all the doll parts and various other objects that Charles Peterson photographed for the back cover of In Utero.

At one point, we headed down to the basement, where the Sliver video was filmed, and Kurt sat down at a beat-up vintage drum kit and proudly demonstrated that he could play the very cool beat of Public Image Ltd.’s Four Enclosed Walls from 1981’s The Flowers of Romance.

During this time, he was very nocturnal: his day was almost completely upside down. That couldn’t have been very good for his mental health, but it was great for doing interviews: by the time we’d get to talking, Courtney and the baby would be fast asleep, and if the TV wasn’t on, the loudest sound in the house would be the hum of the refrigerator. It was very intimate. By the time we were done talking, the sun would be coming up, and we’d stand at the floor-to-ceiling kitchen windows and look out at Lake Washington as the occasional seaplane skidded for a landing on the water. Those were great, peaceful moments, both of us completely talked out, just quietly gazing out the window together. We’d do that again after Come as You Are was finished, looking out a different window.

Sometimes while we talked, Kurt would eat—TV dinners or premade meals in plastic containers that he’d heat up in the microwave. Neither he nor Courtney cooked, and they didn’t want household help—anyone like that could have been co-opted by the tabloids—and going out wasn’t really an option, so they had to do this rich people thing with premade meals that someone dropped off every few days.

In the 1985 movie Perfect, John Travolta plays a Rolling Stone reporter and delivers a pretty famous line about how Rolling Stone writers acted toward their subjects: Always treat a famous person as if they’re not. And a person who’s not as if they were. I had written many pieces for Rolling Stone before writing Come as You Are, and maybe I absorbed that philosophy from the magazine’s culture, but I think I came to it naturally. It was the only way I could cope with someone’s fame—pretend it didn’t exist. And so, as struck as I was, like everybody else, by Kurt’s almost palpable charisma, not to mention being deeply moved by his music, I managed to ignore all that and treat him like a normal person, which put him at ease with me, since so many other people freaked out around him, which in turn freaked him out. Aside from the formative childhood experiences we had in common, I guess that’s another reason why he opened up to me. I’m not a great interviewer, really, but I’m good at having long conversations.

One evening, Kurt went off on a rant about how much he hated journalists and they were all lying scum. He’d completely forgotten that he was sitting across the kitchen table from a journalist. So I said, with a smile, Um, well, I guess I’ll be going then . . . And he got all flustered and said I wasn’t like the rest of them. It was a moment.

In our interviews, Kurt spoke of his heroin addiction in the past tense, but that wasn’t true—he had been a junkie for several years and would essentially continue to be until the day he died. Junkies, I learned, are very comfortable with being deceptive. But Kurt had to say that so he could keep his child. And I knew that, and he knew that I knew that. Perhaps he was also a shrewd enough judge of character to know that I wouldn’t challenge him on it.

I kick myself for how I naive I was about Kurt and his lies and manipulations. Kurt’s legendary tale of sleeping under the bridge near his childhood home is a good, if fairly benign, example. Others have done some good sleuthing about that particular story and determined that it wasn’t true. As Kurt says in Come as You Are, his real life was so boring that I pretty much like to make it up. He probably didn’t run away and catch fish in the Wishkah River; it was probably more like shoplifting corn dogs from a local convenience store or going over to his friends’ houses for his lifelong favorite, mac and cheese. Looking back on it, the story about the bridge is a typical fiction on Kurt’s part, intended to spite his parents and exalt his own victimhood.

Although I did recognize that Kurt’s stories were sometimes self-serving, full of rationalization and self-contradiction, I still missed a lot of stuff, and that was partly because I was just kind of green—I wasn’t skeptical enough, took a lot at face value. And because of the tight deadline, I just didn’t have time to track down everything.

Being around such high-voltage people like Kurt and Courtney, with all their drama and just the powerful ambient electricity coursing around them, was exciting, but it was also stressful and exhausting—getting close to really charismatic people is kind of exciting but it’s easy not to notice that it’s also sucking the life out of you. That, and traveling so much and then working day and night for weeks on end, took a heavy toll on my health and my personal relationships. The day I turned in the manuscript, my dad took a photo of me: I still can’t even look at it; I look pale and gaunt, almost sickly, but also really proud.

*  *  *

Many rock memoirs are done to settle one particular score, and to the writer, the rest of it is just sandwich bread. Look at Morrissey’s 2013 Autobiography, for instance: there’s lots of juicy stuff, but really it’s all just a delivery system for a lengthy screed about his former Smiths bandmates and their lawsuits against him. Likewise, in light of the debacle about their custody of their baby, Kurt and Courtney mainly just wanted Come as You Are to clear their name as parents; everything else in the story was window dressing. It’s why Kurt repeatedly referred to his addiction in the past tense, as if he were actually clean and not still engaged in an ongoing, losing battle with heroin. Comedian Mitch Hedberg used to tell a joke: I used to do drugs. I still do, but I used to, too. He died of a speedball overdose.

Yes, both of them were substance abusers, but parental love is an extremely powerful force, and Kurt and Courtney dearly loved Frances. I knew that keeping their child was the real point of the book, but that didn’t bother me—I wanted them to keep their kid, and besides, I was excited to tell the Nirvana story with no interference.

The subtitle of Come as You Are is very pointedly The Story of Nirvana. It’s not, as people sometimes say to me, your book about Kurt Cobain. That subtitle gave me a good reason (or was that excuse) not to go too deeply into dark, dark places. I just wasn’t interested in that stuff—I’m interested in how bands form, their internal dynamics, how they make the music that we all love. And I think that, as a lifelong drummer, maybe I was a little biased toward emphasizing that Nirvana was a band, that everybody in it made a meaningful, invaluable contribution. I took care to tell Krist’s and Dave’s pre-Nirvana stories and discuss their indispensable roles in the band, both on- and offstage, and I delve deeper into that with these reflections on the book.

I began doing interviews during some precious downtime: touring for Nevermind