Michael Azerrad's Achingly Human Return to the Story of Nirvana
Or: The man who sold the world the man who sold the world "The Man Who Sold The World."
[Contains SPOILERS for the book]
“All that stuff has just been so overstated, but nobody ever wants to know the truth! Like the stories that are written about Kurt sleeping under the bridge. It’s just not true! I know that he did once, but it’s not like he said, that he spent hours and days down there, becoming this tortured artist. That’s the biggest myth right there: Kurt Cobain, the tortured artist. People don’t realize that guy was a funny motherfucker.
-Dale Crover (Everybody Loves Our Town, 2011)
When I say I used to fantasize about being Kurt Cobain, I don’t mean just wanting to lead a successful rock band. I wanted to enact his career to a T. I wanted to follow his trajectory like an on-rails Kurt Cobain theme park ride. I wanted to play my sad little songs about my sad little pain to a whole bunch of people who couldn’t possibly understand what I was singing about, and I wanted to take it as far as I could go. Even if it meant losing my life in the process.
A sick thought, I know. It’s certainly embarrassing to admit that about my past, but maybe it shouldn’t be. I’m not unique. In fact, I actually can’t even begin to fathom how many people have secretly carried that particular fantasy, in some form, deep within them. I suspect I’ve met a few of them within my own musical community. You could be one of these people too - and if you are, I’m willing to bet you‘re just as reticent to admit it. It’s simply human nature to look at what happened to Cobain and, like a black mirror, see yourself in him, maybe even wonder what would happen if you were in the same situation.
Bullied relentlessly for his differences, vexed at the world around him, celebrated for changing that world specifically because of his art; a champion of progressive social ideals, and a vocal vilifier of the “grown-ups”: Cobain’s life would have been fascinating regardless of his end, and yet the fact that his demons overtook him in a dazzling display of dark violence made him into something resembling, to many, a martyr. That gothic element is catnip for the disenfranchised; in picturing ourselves reenacting that fate, we land on a temporary form of empowerment and motivation. Of course, we fall into that fantasy when we’re too young to realize that it’s immature, unhealthy, and ultimately unsustainable. Some of us don’t recognize that until it’s too late.
When I first read Michael Azerrad’s Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana, it was 2018 and I was still under 27, so I was young enough to harbor hopes that I could blossom into a rotten Cobain-shaped flower. At the time, I wanted to know more about the man who catalyzed Seattle into the music haven its residents still insist it is. These days, having transitioned into music journalism, I’m closer to being Azerrad than Cobain. I made that transition without any idea of what exactly music journalism is — what level of objectivity should be assigned to a field where so much is up to interpretation, where the very subject itself infers so much subjectivity? I don’t have that anchor, so instead I find myself fascinated with journalism as an art, a medium of self-expression as potentially potent as poetry.
That’s the mentality with which I went into Azerrad’s new annotated version of the book, The Amplified Come As You Are. In that light, I found it to be achingly human in ways music biographies rarely are.
The original Come As You Are bore its subtitle because Azerrad aimed to document the full breadth of Nirvana’s history and its impact on Western culture, rather than just its frontman. To a certain extent, The Amplified Come As You Are commits to this as well. Many of Azerrad’s annotations holistically flesh out that story, from anecdotal details of its members to a greater expansion of its early years as an underground Seattle act. They also expound on what sparked, resulted from, and was destroyed by, the peak of alternative rock, including the installment of heroin chic as a fashion trend and the resilience of punk as a sociological phenomenon.
Some of his explications are incredible, including his decoding of the back cover of In Utero; others are less essential, like redundancies of what’s already been written or some occasionally limp speculation. Altogether they nearly double the length of the original book, turning what was once a relatively swift read into a behemoth that’s occasionally unwieldy but thoroughly captivating.
Yet though Azerrad insists early on that Come As You Are’s subtitle is pointed (“It’s not, as people sometimes say to me, ‘your book about Kurt Cobain,’” he writes), this version is less adherent to that mission. Amplified, for long stretches, feels very much devoted to Cobain. Open the book to any given page and the annotations will likely be about him: analyzing his behavior, speculating on his choices, musing on what others have said about him. Even its sleeve (designed by his third cousin Lawrence Azerrad, a talented art director who also designed the album covers for the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Californication and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot) features two quotes from Cobain, one of which takes up the entirety of the back cover. It’s obviously impossible to write about Nirvana without Cobain, but his presence in the new edition is significantly more prominent. It’s unavoidable; despite every intention, he will forever be a magnet for analysis.
Azerrad’s inspiration for the book (besides another annotated rock book, Robert Greenfield’s Ain’t It Time We Said Goodbye: The Rolling Stones on the Road to Exile) started from his desire to revisit an apocryphal tale about Cobain’s time living under the bridge stretched across the Wishkaw River. “I just wanted to say something about that,” he relays in our conversation over Zoom, “and how the fact that that might be a tall tale was sort of indicative of my relationship to Kurt in terms of a journalist and a subject, and of the journalist/subject relationship in general.”
From that seed, and with endless months of the pandemic looming, Azerrad returned to his decades-old manuscript and scrutinized the pages, stopping whenever a comment felt appropriate. “I wasn't trying to really add or, generally speaking, correct the book,” he says. “I was just finding clues and little nuggets in there that would benefit from expansion and amplification.” He returned to his primary sources: oral histories, YouTube videos, and what he recorded on his own interview tapes. His process reveals Amplified to be less of a shrewdly constructed 2.0 of arguably the definitive Nirvana biography, and more of a meditative product of instinct conceived during a period of both intense solitude and intense quietude.
Amplified’s successes are twofold. Its first great triumph is in its renewed portrayal of Kurt Cobain as a person as opposed to a specter (or a parable, depending on your perspective). The original did this in a different way: for a few months, Come As You Are was the only book on the market that comprehensively detailed Nirvana’s history, and it did so without the prior knowledge that Cobain had taken his own life. Thirty years later, the macabre deliberateness of his death is inextricable from his mythos. To many, it defines it. Everything that comprises the Nirvana industry, from music rereleases to documentaries to books (including, coarsely, his journals) is set in grim tones and mired in elegiac imagery. So the pleasure of reading the original book, besides being an entertaining read, was in encapsulating yourself in a time period that gets farther and farther away every year — one where Cobain was still alive, not necessarily optimistic about his future but actively participating in it.
The Amplified version can’t possibly replicate that effect, but what it does better than most posthumous material on the same subject is to cast Cobain as an actual human rather than a statuesque legend, with an even more intimate look into the musician and his multitudes. Where the original merely hinted at it, Azerrad’s annotations help elucidate Cobain’s near-neurotic fixation on artistic image, from his meticulous fashion choices and incisive selection of live covers to his constant search for indie credibility. Similarly, they expand on which parts of him were genuine (like the conservative values he publicly campaigned against) and which were more hypocritical (the “careerist” mentality for which he skewered both Pearl Jam and Guns N’ Roses), as well as the internal dilemma he harbored between the two. Reading it all together, it’s a gratifying deconstruction of a man who sought to engrave himself in rock history from the get-go, even when that meant turning his death into part of the story.
Amplified’s inexorable focus on Cobain leads to a great deal of musing on Azerrad’s specific interactions with him, from backstage antics to late-night calls and killing time on tour. This leads to Amplified’s second great success, which exclusively surfaces in its anecdotes and speculations: its examination of the journalist/subject relationship and of the curious dynamics of music journalism as a whole.
Writing in the first person is something relatively new to Azerrad, an adherent to the classic rules of journalism. “I'm pretty old school about a lot of things,” he told me. “One of them is that in journalism, you don't put yourself into the story. You're a reporter.” But times have changed, and the technologies that allow us to actively document our own lives have changed not only the culture around celebrity but the way we cover it. Much of Amplified, subsequently, is clearly written from Azerrad’s perspective, and so the book inexorably becomes the story of Azerrad himself, a writer whose life changed irreparably the moment he first met Cobain.
In a widely-read New Yorker article about his time with the musician (which now feels like a book teaser, given that its content is reprinted verbatim across Amplified’s introduction and epilogue) Azerrad describes the meeting floridly, with an aura of preordination. The hallway in his house elongates, dream-like; the smell of jasmine flowers permanently lodges itself in the memory cortex. Within the first few paragraphs, Azerrad takes the craft he’s known for - music journalism, for which the barriers demarcating cold truth and legend are notoriously porous - and starts applying it to his own recollections, inadvertently baking himself into his coverage.
“Two things struck me instantly,” he writes at the book’s outset. “The first was: oh wow, I know this guy.” He means an understanding beyond the parasocial perception held by most of us. Though Cobain’s persona might be intensely relatable, Azerrad shares quite a few real-life similarities; as he describes, both were raised on the same music, disturbed by divorce, weed-addled in high school, and (as Courtney offered to Azerrad after his passing) similarly melancholic. Additionally, just like Cobain’s band was in the right place at the right time, Azerrad also had the fortune to be assigned the Nirvana cover story for Rolling Stone’s April 24 issue, which unlocked the rest of his career - including the impetus for this book’s existence.
In Danny Goldberg’s own account of his time working with Cobain, Serving the Servant, Goldberg reveals how Come As You Are was Courtney’s idea of countering an unauthorized biography by UK journalists Victoria Clarke and Britt Collins, which she believed would jeopardize her family. (Originally Gina Arnold was contracted, but perhaps her result, Route 666: On the Road to Nirvana, didn’t meet her needs.) Azerrad reveals early on in Amplified that Kurt insisted the book be “unauthorized” in that Azerrad would be allowed to write outside his and the band’s consent, but the book was designed as a tool, and in these annotations, Azerrad admits that he willingly capitulated to its design.
One of the tenets of journalistic ethos, established in Kovach and Rosenstiel’s The Elements of Journalism, is “independence,” which entails “not being seduced by sources, intimidated by power, or compromised by self-interest.” Bad journalism capitulates to these temptations, and yet music journalism finds a lot of wiggle room with these rules. Perhaps it’s baked into the idea of attempting to cover something as interpretable and subjective as music with such rigidity.
Ironically, we’ve seen it recently in the form of Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner, who admitted to the New York Times’s David Marchese that he treated his interviewees — rock titans like John Lennon and Mick Jagger, in articles that not only helped define their careers but established Rolling Stone as the archetypal documenter of the genre — with kids’ gloves so as not to disturb their relationship, even going so far as to let them edit their own profiles. Though his words would decimate his credibility, Wenner appeared unrepentant for his transgressions; “The friendships,” he explained nonchalantly to Marchese, “were critical.”
Azerrad wasn’t nearly as journalistically compromised during the writing of his book as Wenner, but he acknowledges that his immediate connection with Cobain led to the book deal and that his writing was manipulated by the circumstances surrounding its origins. He’s not at fault for this; because of the Cobain family’s custody troubles stemming from Lynn Hirschberg’s bombshell profile of Love in Vanity Fair, submission to their will would have been the only available path to covering them in-depth. But Azerrad also admits to other omissions - including a detail that Kurt had cheated on urine tests - in order to protect him from losing his child again.
Perhaps the most compelling through-line of Azerrad’s annotations, then, is his own dilemma at compromising his journalistic integrity for the sake of his subjects. It shows up in the shadow of his words about Robert Hilburn’s piece in the L.A. Times, quoting Cobain’s falsehoods on his drug addiction (“I feel like I was used,” he said to Nirvana manager Dany Goldberg afterward), and on the fluff piece Sub Pop head Jonathon Poneman conducted for SPIN (whose former editor Craig Marks retroactively described as “a jaw-dropping error in all of journalistic integrity.”)
“I did my best to observe Kurt’s request: ‘Just tell the truth,’” he writes, summoning the raison d’être that tellingly graces the book’s inner sleeve. “Even if I left out some inconvenient truths.”
Given its constant interruptions of the original story, The Amplified Come As You Are doesn’t totally supplant the original in terms of executing its subtitle. It is, however, something more than perhaps Azerrad intended: a meta-commentary on the fine line between truth and fiction, the result of real human connection eradicating the cold distance of professionalism. What he’s able to make more prevalent here is his palpable sense of empathy toward his subject, and it brings the reader closer to connecting with Cobain than most other coverage on the topic. “Empathy” here doesn’t mean eliding over the hard truths either; every condemnation of his manipulative tendencies, his hypocrisies, or even his heroin-addled sliminess brings him closer and closer to the reader’s reach. Even Azerrad’s final perception about the circumstances surrounding Cobain’s overdose in Rome (which is less a bombshell of reportage than fact-supported speculation) highlights the quotidian nature of his existence - who hasn’t been brought to the edge by a perceived betrayal?
By its end, Cobain, long perceived as larger-than-life, is just life: earthbound, normal, one of us. And that makes what is destined to happen at the end of every story about Nirvana even more crushing.
“The second thing I realized in the first few moments of meeting Kurt is really uncomfortable,” Azerrad continues in his first meeting with Kurt, “I sensed that he was one of those musicians who dies young.” Anyone who has befriended a heavily depressed person understands the intrusiveness of that cursed thought, which hangs over the mind like a guillotine’s blade. It’s false until it’s not. “I mean, it was going to happen,” said Courtney at his public memorial. That refrain is repeated throughout Amplified: not just by Azerrad in his annotations, but by Love, by Cobain’s mom, by bandmates Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl, by many of his musician friends, by Neil Young (whose lyrics Cobain appropriated for his suicide note), and even implicitly by the musician in question. “He was more than enough of a student of rock paradigms,” Azerrad writes later, “that he probably realized it himself.”
Inevitability - that is the way we have talked about that particular suicide for as long as it’s happened. I certainly can’t envision a world where Kurt Cobain is still alive, nor can I imagine what that world would look like and where his place in it would be. A wiser Azerrad professes the worthlessness of such an endeavor: “I prefer to stick with what actually happened. Maybe it's just the journalist in me, I don't know.” Yet the book’s final words, which come in a coda-like passage expanding upon what was borrowed for the New Yorker piece, are heartbreaking for their sincerity. In one sentence, he reiterates what was lost the moment it happened, and recasts that inevitability in the darkest of shades. What would it mean if a person of destined death, whose demise fundamentally altered our culture at large, remained alive? To whom would it be most meaningful?
There’s a long walk I’ve enjoyed taking over this summer that spans part of Lake Washington Boulevard. Every time I take it, I’m brought by the old solitary bench in Viretta Park that’s been used as a shrine to Kurt Cobain for almost thirty years. Towering over it, behind the security of tall hedges, stands the house. Every time, I pass right by it. Maybe I was over the struggle, or maybe my time in the city had made me allergic to tourist attractions. Maybe I wasn’t ready to confront the shame of the naïve fantasy that had brought me to Seattle in the first place, back when I would have been ecstatic to bask in the spiritual presence of a hero. But on an early fall day, with Azerrad’s book earmarked and weighing down my backpack, I found myself drawn, at last, to the shrine.
I stopped and gazed at the decorated bench, burdened by decades of meaningful gestures. Nearly every inch of the old wood had been marked or carved into. Stickers of bands long defunct wilted over years of wet weather; a Polaroid of a middle schooler’s portrait, their toothy smile clasped in braces, had been taped to the backrest; beneath it, a dirty pack of cigarettes rested beside a lighter. Bouquets of fresh flowers, each accompanied by a signed envelope, peppered the seat. I found it impossible to tell which of the oblations were genuine and which were merely tributes to a certain vanity, as if these prayers and well-wishes had boomeranged right back, saying, “Who I think you were, I see that in me. I am you. So pray for me.”
I stood there for a while, long enough for the sun to descend, and felt the air chill. Then I walked back to the road.
The Amplified Come As You Are arrives on October 24 via Doubleday.