Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Music journalist Azerrad (Our Band Could Be Your Life) provides an electric revision to his 1993 account of the defining band of the grunge movement. Amid ongoing accusations of Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love's drug abuse, the couple asked Azerrad to write an "unauthorized" biography to effectively "clear their name" as parents to their infant daughter. Now free of those constraints and equipped with 30 years of hindsight, he weaves in extensive annotations that offer context and depth, including analyses of the era's widespread heroin use, reflections on Nirvana's rise from underground indie band to rock powerhouse with 1991's Nevermind, and chilling omens of Cobain's 1994 suicide, as when the singer mentioned being manic depressive in a conversation with the author ("I thought he was just being melodramatic and a bit of a hypochondriac.... He talked about suicide the same way.... Even decades later, it's very difficult to make peace with the fact that these things were staring us all right in the face"). Azerrad carefully unearths how the band's own narratives, including Cobain's "big anti-drug speeches that felt obligated to give, in order to excuse his addiction," were shaped partly in response to a culture that frames its rock musicians as both gods and tabloid fodder. Ultimately, Azerrad points to a constellation of factors that precipitated Cobain's death, including addiction, a family history of suicide, and mental illness. The band's myriad fans will be rapt. Sarah Lazin and Laura Nolan, Aevitas Creative Management. (Oct.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Thirty years after its original publication, rock writer Azerrad (Our Band Could Be Your Life) updates and nearly doubles the number of pages of his groundbreaking Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana. The author intersperses hundreds of new, detailed paragraphs throughout the original text to amplify and clarify the earlier material. Most satisfying, he adds a lengthy epilogue which deals with events that happened after the 1991 release of the album Nevermind, including Kurt Cobain's last months and tragic death in 1994. New material includes the Nirvana tours and practice sessions that Azerrad attended; Cobain's meeting with one of his heroes, William Burroughs; the telltale signs that pointed to Cobain's self-destructive impulses and his eventual death; and the utter remorse that Azerrad and other insiders felt after Cobain's suicide at age 27. VERDICT Readers might sometimes find there's too much arcane minutia in this retrospective edition, but Azerrad has written a poignant afterword that makes this expanded version worth the shelf space. Nirvana fans will want to read it.--Dr. Dave Szatmary
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Rock journalist Azerrad revisits his well-received 1993 study of Nirvana and its doomed leader, Kurt Cobain. "He had this sort of fascination with dead pop stars." So said a photographer of the mercurial Cobain, who was a fan long before he became a musician. When he did become a musician, he worked out his angst in iconic songs such as "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and "Come As You Are." Writing in 1993, expanding on a long piece he wrote for Rolling Stone that met with Cobain's approval, Azerrad urged that Cobain not be considered a Dylanesque spokesperson for his generation: "He makes an anguished wail, reveling in negative ecstasy," writes the author. "And if that is the sound of teen spirit these days, so be it." Yet Cobain's ethos fit perfectly with the latchkey kids of his cohort, forgotten and powerless, frequently children of divorce--a fact that, by Azerrad's account, helps explain Cobain's despair more than any other. Even though addicted to drugs ("Junkies, I learned, are very comfortable with being deceptive"), Cobain never forgot those downtrodden fans. Nirvana was also musically more inventive than many people have assumed, thanks to the input of the urbane bassist Krist Novoselic and the inordinately good-natured drummer Dave Grohl. For all the doctrinaire punk rejection of hippiedom, Nirvana embraced all sorts of music. As Grohl said, "We all discovered punk rock and grew up listening to Black Flag but we also love John Fogerty." Cobain's is the usual rock cautionary tale: Drugs and mental illness played a role, but so did a rock-star machine populated by people who, said producer Steve Albini, are "pieces of shit." Azerrad closes his long but readable account by pondering what might have been had Cobain lived, with Michael Stipe suggesting that their sound would be "very quiet and acoustic, with lots of stringed instruments." Better than the usual run of rock biographies and essential for Nirvana fans. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
