Nirvana’s Saturday Night Live debut in January of 1992 allowed an entire generation to fall in love with Kurt Cobain Kurt too had fallen in love, twice in fact – his significant other was heroin, his mistress Courtney Love. Yet Kurt suffered from a stomach condition - a severe burning, nauseous sensation, exacerbated by stress - that no doctor could ameliorate opiates, Kurt found, specifically heroin, were the only drugs that dulled the pain. With his keen knowledge of the music industry, Kurt knew about the many musicians before him who had died by one hit too many he vowed not to let outside forces harm the music that he made, the music that he loved. It was in high school that Cobain first concocted a kind of alter ego, reinventing himself time and again, first as a male character known as Kurdt Kobain, later as a female named Heroine.
Cobain suffered from a bad case of puberty - he was too skinny, too awkward, too uncool and, like so many of us, secretly sad, lost, and scared. While the majority of Americans know Cobain as a man responsible for both all things Nirvana and for the tragic way in which he chose to ended his life one April morning in 1994, few know about the combative and unruly kid, pissed at the entire world, who suffered from constant physical ailments and too little love, was shuffled from relative to relative, then back again, finally making a home in friends’ cars and hospital waiting rooms. He became all that he wanted and fulfilled the American Dream past its prime - and still lived unhappily ever after. He desired nothing more than to be a rock star. While much of Cross’s book is peppered by band politics and Kurt’s romantic endeavors, Heavier Than Heaven is simply a story of a boy who wasn’t treated so great as a kid, who watched his parents’ tempestuous marriage disintegrate before his eyes and created his own world, an imaginary world of different personas to shield himself from the realities of his time.
As a youth, Kurt Cobain had told friends: “I am going to be a superstar musician, kill myself and go out in a flame of glory.” In fact, there has never been a superstar quite like Kurt Cobain, never a superstar so complex and contradictory, so outspoken and outlandish, so ready to puke-on-the-shoes of all that is MTVified about music. Robert Herrick, “To the Virgins to Make Much of Time”Ĭharles Cross’s biography of Kurt Cobain gives shape and taste, color and chronology to the life and times of a man who was more than just a little misunderstood.
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