Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Charles Cross published this book in 2001 and has never amended or updated it. Much of what is in here has been publicly questioned or straight-up disproved. This book needs to either be updated or removed from publication. Leaving it in circulation is disrespectful at the very least--and borderline slanderous at the worst. It saddens me to think that this is what young people believe Kurt Cobain was like. The most egregious lies come from Courtney Love. Her account of Kurt's lost days after his final "escape" is contradicted, on tape, by recordings Tom Grant keeps posted on his site. Courtney knew Kurt's whereabouts when he was in Los Angeles, even though she claims in the book that she did not. She also admitted to Tom Grant that she staged a fake overdose during her "hotel detox" on the day before Kurt's body was found. Her account of how and when she met Kurt has been debunked on the record by friends and journalists who were there at their first meeting. (It would belabor the point to provide more examples.). Regardless of why you think she might have done it, it's clear that Courtney has deliberately misled journalists, the public, and law enforcement on the subject of her late husband. If Charles Cross had any integrity, he would question her reliability as a source now--if he didn't when he wrote this. Moreover, this entire book reads like a loaded thesis on the subject of why Kurt Cobain committed suicide. Cross loads the deck almost from the first sentence, framing the entire narrative with a sense of the inevitable that would have made a diehard fatalist like Thomas Hardy feel the need for a little levity. No doubt Kurt was a sensitive boy whose broken home left terrible scars that he explored in his music. But Kurt was more than the sum of his miseries: his sense of humor--juvenile and sarcastic but also surreal and uplifting--was part of what made Nirvana unique. You can hear the goofball humor that comes from small-town boredom in Kurt's interviews if you listen to him talk or watch him and Krist misbehave on camera. Charles Cross never once asks what may be the most important question a rock biographer should ask: what was it about this person that all these people loved so much? One answer I can give, from experience, was that we felt like he was one of us. I can't speak for everyone, but my friends and I loved him for the weird little in-jokes built into Nirvana's gnomic public appearances. Kurt was winking at us--sometimes very, VERY broadly. Cross ignores this aspect of Kurt's personality entirely, and the result is a sadly one-dimensional portrait of a person who was much more complex than this book indicates. (This narrative also absolutely serves the theory that Kurt could not have died any other was besides suicide, but I leave it up to the reader to decide whether she or he wants to explore other theories on that subject.) Finally, there's the writing itself. So much of what is in this book is blatantly unsupported. It's terrible, lazy writing. There's the infamous last chapter, but there are plenty of other examples. Who says Buzz Osbourne was a tyrant? Who outlined the "rules" or "laws" of punk rock that Cross refers to several times in the book? (I'm a cranky old punk, and I don't buy all of them). Where did stuff like this come from? All this subjective stuff is so weird. But the worst, really, is the way that Cross jumps into Kurt's head at the beginning of the book, and doesn't get out. It's presumptious at the least, and dishonest at the worst. If you read this book, please read some other books about Kurt and Seattle in the 90s, too. Please read Tom Grant's most recent book. Please read a good oral history of Sub Pop records. Please spend some time learning about more than just Kurt, because there's more to this story than this.