Sunday, November 17, 2002
The journal entries make it plain that his descent into darkness and death was horrifyingly quick.
By DAVE FERMAN
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
'Journals' by Kurt Cobain (Riverhead Books $30.)
Doing tons of heroin is stupid, and committing suicide is far worse -- and the central contradiction of Kurt Cobain's life is that he did both, and yet he was a very smart man.
The legendary Nirvana leader was a generational focal point long before he killed himself in April 1994, and the sad irony in reading the just-published "Journals" -- a rambling batch of journal entries, lyrics, drawings, letters and notes about music and his band -- is that he was both the perfect guy to represent adrift young Americans and totally unprepared for the job.
"Journals" is simply photographed pages from Cobain's journals presented plainly: There is no commentary, no essay by an esteemed rock critic -- just 272 pages of Kurt's ramblings, followed by a few pages of explanatory notes. This week will see the release of "Nirvana," a highly anticipated single-disc best-of that also features "You Know You're Right," the previously unreleased last song the band recorded before Cobain's death.
Obsession
"Journals" makes it plain that Cobain was both a rock 'n' roll obsessive (lists of favorite records are scattered throughout) and driven to see his band succeed: The first entry starts out as a fan letter to Melvins drummer Dale Crover but shifts, after exactly one paragraph, to an update of what Nirvana is doing: a recent appearance, plans for a single and so on. The excitement and drive Cobain feels toward the band -- which he's just named Nirvana -- all but leaps off the page.
Subsequent entries include a letter informing a drummer that he's being fired for not devoting enough energy to the music: "A band needs to practice, in our opinion, at least 5 times a week if the band ever expects to accomplish anything." There are also plans for video treatments of songs, details about artwork for what would become 1993's "In Utero" and so on.
Another letter, written to Bikini Kill drummer Tobi Vail, takes the music business to task and gleefully anticipates Nirvana being able to "pose as the enemy to infiltrate the mechanics of the system to start its rot from the inside. Sabotage the empire by pretending to play their game."
Hard working
Reading just these entries, one could easily conclude that Cobain was a hard-working, focused young musician who honestly wanted to get what he saw as better music to the masses, when he was a nobody and also after "Nevermind" made him a superstar in the space of just a few months.
But this material is mixed in with many entries that portray Cobain as a confused kid from a broken home, decidedly uncomfortable with everything from his past to what he sees as a macho, unfeeling society. Several entries talk about the guilt he feels for being so famous, and more than a few discuss both his attraction to and hatred of heroin, or, as he always spells it, "heroine."
An early journal entry -- it starts on Page 25 -- is horrific in describing his life as a teen-ager: complete aimlessness, experimenting with drugs, a bumbled sexual encounter with a young woman who may or may not have been retarded, breaking into houses to steal booze and a suicide attempt. "... But I still never had any friends because I hated everyone for they were so phony," the entry concludes.
Phoniness
Cobain clearly detested phoniness, and didn't know how to stay true to his hopes and yet deal with his sudden, consuming popularity. By the last several pages he's adrift, at once planning videos, ranting about journalists and discussing, in detail, heroin addiction. In the last two entries -- both made just weeks before his death -- he's clearly trying to hold on, and admits that beating the drug can take decades.
This is time that Kurt Cobain, of course, didn't have -- or didn't give himself. In the end "Journals" is fascinating and horrifying, a quick descent into darkness. Cobain was caught in a trap he couldn't escape: To quote Little Richard, he got what he wanted but lost what he had.
And he discovered, in the process, that he could neither slip back easily into the small-scale cult status of his favorite groups nor slog through the glare of being a generational spokesman. That's why there are all those blues songs about the terror of being at the crossroads late at night.