In 2002, I posted a list of what were then my thirteen favorite books.  Mi­chael Azerrad’s Nirvana tell-all Come as You Are was one of them.  As a Nirvana superfan, I had snapped up a copy the moment it hit the bookstores in the fall of 1993.  I guess it goes to show what a revo­lution took place between those two dates.  Though there are cosmetic differences, this site is pretty much the same as it was in 2002.  So is the process of information retrieval.  Hop onto a search engine, type in a search term (such as “Kurt Cobain” or “Nirvana band”), and get links to the sum total of public knowledge on that topic.  But in 1993, even though I had tried to get hold of the sum total of public knowledge about Kurt Cobain and Nirvana, that just meant whatever articles I could read while stand­ing in the magazine section at Cody’s Books, plus, while I was home for the summer, the occasional update from Kurt Loder and Tabitha Soren on MTV News.  Oh, and I guess you can throw in the music board on the GEnie online service, but that didn’t have any actual information on it⁠—it was mainly just people debating what the lyrics to the songs might be.  Thus, Come as You Are didn’t just repackage information the fans already knew.  This was the first biography of Nirvana ever published, and it was based on inter­views Azerrad personally conducted with all the relevant figures, including dozens of hours with Kurt Cobain himself, specifically for this book.  That was a claim that, very shortly after the publication of Come as You Are, no other biographer would ever be able to make.  And fortunately, Azerrad made good use of this mother lode of new information about the inner workings of the band and the lives of its members: Come as You Are is well written, offering up an evocative portrait of the dank, depressed Northwestern harbor town of Aberdeen, Washington, and of its subculture of music-obsessed stoner dropouts from which Nirvana emerged.  I was so taken by it that I wrote a 34,000-word story set in that same mili­eu.  It took two months, which is slow for most (it’s a third of the Nanowrimo pace) but lightning fast for me today.  The things I used to accomplish without the web to distract me!

Another way the world has changed since 1993 is that, back then, the big controversy in the world of American commerce was the rise of “big box” stores that threatened to drive independent shops out of business.  Locally, a Barnes & Noble had just opened on Shat­tuck Avenue, and some feared that the giant chain might end up shuttering the landmark bookstores on Telegraph.  But as much as I loved Cody’s, I also liked the new store, which offered up a lot more open space, and comfortable chairs everywhere; the selection, while weak on more academic titles like those offered at Cody’s and even more so at Moe’s, was still huge, and I wound up buying plen­ty of books there.  I remember that a few years later, Neil deMause would grumble about this on ifMUD, saying that you couldn’t really make Barnes & Noble into a villain for a lot of people because they just said that “I like Barnes & Noble! When I was growing up, it was the only decent bookstore in my whole town!”  To which Neil’s re­tort was, “Yeah, and if they get their way, that’ll be true for every­body.”  But the very fact that this conversation was happening on the Internet signaled that Barnes & Noble wouldn’t have long to strut its status as a category killer, because while these days Ama­zon competes with everyone from Walmart to Netflix, it started as a bookstore.  As a result, that Barnes & Noble on Shattuck only lasted fifteen years⁠—even the Blockbuster at the other end of the same block survived longer.  And in September the Barnes & Noble up here in El Cerrito announced that it too would be closing its doors, and would be offering big discounts in the meantime.  So a few weeks back Ellie and I went to go check it out.  And there I ran­domly happened across a book that billed itself as The Amplified Come as You Are.  Flipping through it, I discovered that it present­ed a lightly edited version of the original Come as You Are inter­spersed with comments Michael Azerrad had written thirty years later⁠—enough to double the length of the book.  I didn’t buy it, but I made a mental note to grab a copy the next time I went to the li­brary.

So, what did Azerrad have to add after thirty years?  Initially, it looked like a lot of it was just going to be a matter of cleaning up language that both he and his interview subjects had used in the ’90s that didn’t fly in 2023.  Kurt refers to “street bums and retar­ded people”, the 1993 Azerrad quotes him without objection, and the 2023 Azerrad adds a note sheepishly updating this to “the un­housed and mentally disabled people”.  (Deleted without comment is Azerrad’s description of Tori Amos as a “pretentious pop thrush”⁠—in a book full of mea culpas, this is one bit of nastiness he wasn’t willing to own.)  But more substantively, Azerrad goes into the gen­esis of the book⁠—some of which he himself had only learned about after it was published.  Of course, some of the key players’ motiva­tions for backing the project are obvious.  Here was a band that had risen from obscurity to become the hottest musical act in the world, knocking Michael Jackson off the top of the charts⁠—natur­ally, publishers were going to want to cash in.  The book was timed to come out right on the heels of Nirvana’s new record In Utero, so the record label was all for the cross-promotion.  But what would have motivated reclusive misanthrope Kurt Cobain to spend hour upon hour recounting his life story to a reporter in exhaustive de­tail?  The story Azerrad tells in 2023 is that the book was primarily Courtney Love’s idea.  In the summer of 1992 she had been profiled for Vanity Fair magazine, thinking that she would be celebrated the way she had been in the British tabloids, where her foul mouth, abrasive personality, and listener-unfriendly music went over well.  Instead, the thrust of the article was that the wife of the world’s biggest new rock star had hooked him on heroin, had cheerfully admitted to doing heroin herself early in her pregnancy⁠—oh, and here were some photos of her smoking while giving the interview, very late in her pregnancy.  As a result, two weeks after their daughter Frances was born, Kurt and Courtney briefly lost custody of her, and for some time after she was returned to them, they had to abide by a number of court-imposed restrictions: they couldn’t be alone with her and had to submit to regular drug testing.  To fight back, they arranged for a softball interview, conducted by Jonathan Poneman of Nirvana’s original record label Sub Pop, to appear in Spin magazine.  In 2023, Azerrad quotes editor Craig Marks, who laughs as he declares: “There’s no journalistic ethics at all there! We were purely a PR mouthpiece for Kurt and Courtney at that time.”  But, also at that time, the Cobains had received word that a couple of British writers were working on a Nirvana biogra­phy in the Vanity Fair vein; the fact that these writers’ chief source was Courtney Love’s ex-husband James Moreland gives a sense of the angle the project was taking.  Kurt Cobain’s response was to leave the writers a series of answering machine messages threat­ening to murder them.  Courtney’s somewhat more constructive idea was to commission a competing biography⁠—not an officially authorized biography, which Kurt dismissed as “too Guns N’ Ros­es”, but one that would satisfy the pub­lic demand for the inside scoop on Nirvana, with quotes from everyone connected with the band, from Kurt’s childhood friends to studio engineers.  This book would leave no information void for the British biography to fill.  In the end, the British book was canceled in the face of a lawsuit by Nirvana’s management company, but that cancellation was surely helped along by the fact that advance reports indicated that the book was little more than a compendium of old magazine articles, while Come as You Are was racking up rave reviews for its “amaz­ingly raw and candid”, “unsparing and extremely honest depiction of the group’s highly tumultuous history”.

But as of 2023, Azerrad laments that the stories he had passed along turned out not to be quite so “honest” as he’d thought thirty years earlier.  Though he conducted interviews with many people, the backbone of his narrative was provided by Kurt Cobain, and Azerrad reports that over the past thirty years he has discovered that Kurt lied about a lot of stuff.  Some of this was an exercise in mythologizing himself.  For instance, in the original book, Azerrad passed along the story that, with nowhere to live, Kurt had been forced to take shelter for days or weeks at a time under the Young Street Bridge spanning the Wishkah River, an experience that sup­posedly inspired the song “Something in the Way”.  Since then, Krist Novoselic and Kurt’s sister Kim have both indicated that this story would not withstand a fact check.  The original book contains myriad stories that Kurt tells of being wronged and taking revenge; thirty years later, Azerrad is skeptical that all of these could be true.  He chalks them up to a combination of Kurt telling the ver­sion he wished had happened (when Azerrad no longer believes the part about getting revenge) and telling the version that excuses bad behavior (when Azerrad no longer believes the part about be­ing wronged).  Even something as low-stakes as his taste in music at various points in his life⁠—though that was apparently of para­mount importance to Kurt!⁠—he lied about: even when everyone else interviewed attested that Kurt had once been a fan of bands that he later thought undermined his punk credentials, he still denied it.  But the main thing he lied about was high-stakes: his heroin use.  Again, Azerrad’s understanding circa 2023 is that, to Kurt and Courtney, the entire point of this book was to serve as a credible testament to their fitness as parents.  And so the story Kurt went with, which the 1993 version of Azerrad duly passed along, was that he had turned to heroin to deal with his chronic stomach pain, found that for him the negatives were overstated and thus stayed on it for a number of months, but went into a detox program around the time Frances was born.  He essentially lived out the old Mitch Hedberg joke.  What he told Azerrad: “I used to do drugs.”  What he didn’t tell Azerrad: “I still do, but I used to too.”  It didn’t take Azerrad thirty years to discover that he’d been had: in the annotations, he writes about how, before the book had even hit the shelves, he had accompanied Kurt to a dinner with a bunch of executives at a fancy New York restaurant, during which Kurt retreated to the bathroom and returned fifteen minutes later high enough that even Azerrad could tell.  He quotes others con­fessing that driving Kurt home always meant taking unexplained detours to sketchy neighborhoods in L.A. or downtown Seattle, at which point he’d pop out of the car for a few minutes and return with no explanation⁠—long after he’d supposedly gotten clean.  The original Come as You Are leaned hard into the notion that we’d reached the point in the biopic where the troubled hero had con­quered his demons and now everything was looking up: new al­bum! new baby! new attitude!  “Kurt says he’s glad he isn’t depen­dent on a chemical for his well-being anymore,” says the original text.  “Nowadays, he eats better food and even does push-ups and sit-ups before going to bed. He actually looks forward to touring again.”  This wasn’t Azerrad’s invention⁠—it was the line Kurt was taking as he fought to retain custody of his daughter.  In 2023, Azerrad quotes Kurt telling another interviewer in the lead-up to In Utero that “my whole mental and physical state has improved almost a hundred percent. I’m really excited about touring again. I’m totally optimistic.”  The night before, Azerrad reveals, Kurt Cobain had almost died of a heroin overdose.  And of course in less than a year this total optimist would be dead by his own hand.

That’s another thing Azerrad addresses in the annotations: the original Come as You Are could hardly be more jam-packed with warning signs about where Kurt was headed.  On practically every page he says something to the effect of, “If one more thing goes wrong I swear I’m going to blow my head off.” Yet, in the original text, these threats are not commented upon; it is understood that this is just how Kurt talks.  And why not?  That’s how a lot of people talk!  Maybe it’s unusual for it to be so self-directed, but to say that so-and-so “is going to kill me” is an extremely common way to ex­press that you think you might be in trouble, for instance.  So I can see how, even at the frequency we see suicide threats in Come as You Are, they might have read as hyperbole in 1993⁠—certainly I didn’t read it the first time and think, “Dang, he’s going to put a gun to his head in six months!”  But since he did, the constant drumbeat of references to suicide is hard to miss.  And speaking of drumbeats: also hard to miss this time around, though I totally missed it in 1993, is that Dave Grohl pretty clearly had a foot out the door even at the time the book was published.  He says flat out that he doesn’t feel like he’s really part of the band, that he’s frus­trated at not being allowed to make more of a contribution, and that he doesn’t expect the band to be around much longer in any case.  Meanwhile, Kurt complains that Krist “doesn’t practice enough” and that Dave “isn’t an imaginative enough player”⁠—and Azerrad adds in 2023 that this is the diplomatic version.  The still somewhat sanitized 2023 version is that Kurt⁠—not widely consid­ered a virtuoso on his instrument⁠—would bellow within earshot of Dave⁠—widely considered the premier drummer of his generation⁠—that Dave was so “unsubtle and unspontaneous” at the kit that Kurt wanted to fire him (again, the most sought-after drummer of his era!) as he had fired so many of Nirvana’s drummers in the past.  When Kurt killed himself, I was devastated at the thought of all those Nirvana albums none of us would ever get to hear, but in retrospect it looks like there might not have been any even had Kurt lived to see 1995.  Azerrad didn’t make this point in the original text, partly because he wasn’t clear on the timeline of the composition of Nirvana songs and partly because an implicit part of his remit was to hype up In Utero, but in 2023, he points out that the well was clearly running dry.  Where did the In Utero songs come from?

Actual new songs:

• “Serve the Servants”
  
• “Heart-Shaped Box”
  
• “Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle”

Old songs of Kurt’s:

• “Rape Me”
  
• “Dumb”
  
• “Pennyroyal Tea”
  
• “All Apologies”

Songs Kurt based on other bands’ songs:

• “Very Ape” (from Los Brujos)
  
• “Milk It” (from the Melvins)
  
• “Radio Friendly Unit Shifter” (from Public Image Ltd)

Originally by Dave:

• “Scentless Apprentice”

Undeveloped:

• “Tourette’s”

Three new original songs since Nevermind does not speak to a prolific career.  I’ve spent my adult life wondering how many of my favorite songs I never got to hear because they would have been on Nirvana’s 1995 album, but The Amplified Come as You Are sug­gests that a 1995 with a living Kurt Cobain in it probably would have seen the release of the first Foo Fighters album and perhaps an acoustic EP by Kurt Cobain, Michael Stipe, and some session musicians.  And to hear my favorite songs I would still have to wait a quarter of a century for a newborn Moriah Pereira to grow up and start making records.

Anyway, I could probably ramble about this book indefinitely⁠—there are hundreds of annotations, and I have at least a para­graph’s worth of stuff to say about nearly all of them⁠—but I should probably stop around here.  I did want to end with a Nirvana song, naturally enough, but which one?  I’d already used “Smells Like Teen Spirit” when I’d reviewed Montage of Heck, so that was out.  Maybe “All Apologies”, to hint at all of Azerrad’s mea culpas?  Or should it just be “Come as You Are”, as on the nose as that might be?  Then it hit me: this is a book in which a writer, who’d been in his early thirties when he’d interviewed a bunch of twentysome­things about the band that had struck a chord with a generation of teenagers, reflected at length about it now that he was in his six­ties, the surviving band members were about to get there, and even we teenage fans were hitting the half-century mark.  So, really, the choice was obvious:

“Old Age” (Nirvana, 1991, 1992)

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