Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain
by Charles R. Cross
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Book Summary Information
Author: Charles R. CrossEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2001-08-15
ISBN: 0786865059
Number of pages: 400
Publisher: Hyperion
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780786865055
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain
Book Review: Cobain biography transcends rock opera cliche
Summary: 5 Stars
This article was printed first in Mean Street Magazine: In "Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain," Charles R. Cross shows a three-dimensional Cobain, complete with sharp edges and unexpected crevices. In doing so, Cross has taken the musician's life from the cliched realm of rock opera to reality.
The author is uniquely suited to his subject. Former editor of "The Rocket," Cross has an encyclopedic knowledge of the musical climate that shaped Cobain. More importantly, Cross also grew up in Washington State. Reared on the incessant rain, heartbreaking beauty and financial depression of the rural Pacific Northwest, Cross evokes Cobain's childhood in Aberdeen with the lyric beauty of Truman Capote.
Cross does not let his masterful writing obscure his subject, however. The book explores Cobain's life with razor-sharp insight and hindsight. Cobain began experiencing excruciating stomach pain and depression after his parents' vitriolic divorce. One anecdote finds the nine-year-old writing on his wall: "I hate Mom/I hate Dad/ Dad hates Mom/Mom hates Dad/ It simply makes you want to be so sad."
This book also explores Cobain's bouts of poverty and homelessness, his drug abuse, and a preoccupation with the macabre that have been genetic (a spate of suicides mar both sides of his family tree). We see Cobain as a drug and shame-addled adolescent, taking sexual advantage of a "half-retarded girl" and impressing his art teacher with precocious drawings. We see Cobain as a high school drop-out, demonstrating a death-wish so tangible one friend later described him as "the shape of suicide." We see him don the protective armor of "Kurdt" Cobain, a dark alter-ego who ingested more heroin than food. And finally, we see Cobain kill himself at the height of fame and the beginning of his daughter's life.
But "Heavier Than Heaven" is not an unmitigated weep and gore-fest. Cross paints Cobain as an ambitious man who sought fame as vigorously as he decried it. This drive led him to perform 100 shows in 1989 alone. Cobain could also be funny. Once at a party, Cobain happened upon a gold record earned by the soft-metal duo "Nelson." He declared the award "an affront to humanity" before destroying the plaque in a microwave.
Cobain could be a nerd, proudly wearing a Sammy Hagar shirt to school after attending the concert his freshman year, then shoving it in a drawer after discovering punk a few months later. And Cobain could be tender; he was limp with relief when a sonogram showed his unborn daughter would be unharmed by her parents' drug use.
Like an expert chef, Cross lays out the ingredients of Cobain's explosive sound: creativity, trauma, and a force that make it seem inevitable that Cobain explode onto the post-`80s musicscape. Then, the book is over, as abruptly and abortively as Cobain's life. "Heavier Than Heaven," destined to earn a place among the best rock biographies, is a hell of an epitaph. A+
Summary of Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain
Although the tragic circumstances of Kurt Cobains suicide are well known, the facts of his lifeand the influence of his artistryremain largely unexamined. Now veteran music journalist Charles R. Cross fuses his intimate knowledge of the Seattle music scene with his deep compassion for his subject in this extraordinary story of artistic brilliance and the pain that extinguished it. Based on more than 400 interviews; four years of research; exclusive access to Cobains unpublished diaries; and a wealth of documentation, Heavier Than Heaven traces Cobains life from his early days in a double-wide trailer outside of Aberdeen, Washington, to his rise to fame, success, and the adulation of a generation. Cross reveals the familial turmoil that fueled Cobains creativity, the generational history that forged his character, and the unusual love story that shaped his relationship with wife Courtney Love. Drawing from medical and police reports, and Cobains own private writings, Cross also reveals the truth about Cobains health struggles and his tragic final days. More than the history of a rock and roll star, Heavier Than Heaven is a portrait of creative genius and the will to turn pain into art.The art of Nirvana's Kurt Cobain was all about his private life, but written in a code as obscure as T.S. Eliot's. Now Charles Cross has cracked the code in the definitive biography Heavier Than Heaven, an all-access pass to Cobain's heart and mind. It reveals many secrets, thanks to 400-plus interviews, and even quotes Cobain's diaries and suicide notes and reveals an unreleased Nirvana masterpiece. At last we know how he created, how lies helped him die, how his family and love life entwined his art--plus, what the heck "Smells Like Teen Spirit" really means. (It was graffiti by Bikini Kill's Kathleen Hanna after a double date with Dave Grohl, Cobain, and the "over-bored and self-assured" Tobi Vail, who wore Teen Spirit perfume; Hanna wrote it to taunt the emotionally clingy Cobain for wearing Vail's scent after sex--a violation of the no-strings-attached dating ethos of the Olympia, Washington, "outcast teen" underground. Cobain's stomach-churning passion for Vail erupted in six or so hit tunes like "Aneurysm" and "Drain You.")
Cross uncovers plenty of news, mostly grim and gripping. As a teen, Cobain said he had "suicide genes," and his clan was peculiarly defiant: one of his suicidal relatives stabbed his own belly in front of his family, then ripped apart the wound in the hospital. Cobain was contradictory: a sweet, popular teen athlete and sinister berserker, a kid who rescued injured pigeons and laughingly killed a cat, a talented yet astoundingly morbid visual artist. He grew up to be a millionaire who slept in cars (and stole one), a fiercely loyal man who ruthlessly screwed his oldest, best friends. In fact, his essence was contradictions barely contained. Cross, the coauthor of Nevermind: Nirvana, the definitive book about the making of the classic album, puts numerous Cobain-generated myths to rest. (Cobain never lived under a bridge--that Aberdeen bridge immortalized in the 12th song on Nevermind was a tidal slough, so nobody could sleep under it.) He gives the fullest account yet of what it was like to be, or love, Kurt Cobain. Heavier Than Heaven outshines the also indispensable Come As You Are. It's the deepest book about pop's darkest falling star. --Tim Appelo
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