Biography details Cobain's struggle with life

Biography details Cobain's struggle with life, drugs

By LUIS CABRERA

Associated Press

Tuesday, September 25, 2001

"I'm going to be a superstar musician, kill myself, and go out in a flame of glory."

With those words, spoken to a friend at age 14, Kurt Cobain mapped out his life plan.

The only thing missing was the long slide into drug addiction that saw him passed out in motels and even overdosed in the back seat of his Plymouth Valiant at a time when his band, Nirvana, was among the world's biggest rock acts.

Cobain's battle with drugs, and the events leading to his suicide at age 27 in 1994, are chronicled in chilling detail in a new biography, "Heavier than Heaven."

Cross, the 44-year-old former editor of The Rocket music magazine in Seattle, was himself a dedicated fan of the band perhaps most responsible for launching grunge rock.

But Cross' 400-page book is no love letter. It's a closely researched - involving more than 400 interviews - clear-eyed look at the mystifying character that was Kurt Cobain.

"Nirvana fans on some of the fan Web sites complained that there wasn't enough stuff about Nirvana in the book. That's good, because my intent was not to tell the story of Nirvana, but to tell the story of a man's life," Cross said.

He got an unexpected window into Cobain's private thoughts when the singer's widow, Courtney Love, offered to let him look at Cobain's diaries. Cross spent four days and nights frantically transcribing Cobain's writings from 28 spiral notebooks.

"It changed the book dramatically," Cross said. "It gave Kurt a voice in his story."

Cobain's voice is often pained, disaffected, still bitter over a difficult youth marked by his parents' divorce and moving among a string of relatives' and friends' homes around the coastal Washington town of Aberdeen.

"Every time I come back, it's the same deja vu memories that send a chill up my spine, total depression, total hatred and grudges that would last months at a time," Cobain wrote about visiting his hometown.

Cobain didn't have a truly stable living arrangement until the last years of his life. In fact, when he returned from recording Nirvana's multiplatinum 1991 release "Nevermind" in Wisconsin, he found he had been evicted from his apartment in Olympia. For weeks, he slept in the back seat of his Valiant.

At a reading in Seattle, Cross received cheers and sustained applause from a crowd of about 100. Matt Hogan, 30, bought the book at the reading, saying Cobain "was kind of a riddle, a mystery. He was the kind of person you didn't really understand." He said he hoped to gain some insight after reading it.

Cross told the crowd that one of the most striking things he found was how many of the biographical stories Cobain told to interviewers proved to be false or embellished.

"There are some great myths in the way Kurt told his story, and one is that he lived under a bridge," as a youth in Aberdeen, Cross said. "I looked at that bridge, and it's on a tidal river. It would have been impossible to live under that."

Cross found an inventory of massive, nearly constant drug use in Cobain's journals. A "pothead" as a teenager, Cobain graduated to progressively harder drugs, eventually becoming addicted to heroin.

Band members, friends, managers and Love - who had long struggled with drug addiction herself - staged interventions and persuaded Cobain to check into rehab several times. But he couldn't stay clean for long.

Cobain jumped the wall of his final rehab facility, in Marina Del Rey, Calif., in April 1994, and took a flight back to the Seattle mansion he shared with Love and their young daughter.

He carried his shotgun and heroin into the property's greenhouse, where he injected a dose probably large enough to kill him, then put the loaded shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

"I think his suicide was a very conscious decision," Cross said. "It added to his infamy."

He also believes Cobain's songs will endure: "He did great work that meant a lot to a lot of people."

Copyright 2001 Journal Sentinel Inc. Note: This notice does not apply to those news items already copyrighted and received through wire services or other media
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.