Inevitably, in writing a biography,
there are many possible ways of framing the subject’s life. Charles R. Cross narrates the story of Kurt
Cobain’s amazing rise to fame from small-town life in a troubled family from
Aberdeen, Washington as a stroke of luck, or possibly bad luck. Cobain was a high school dropout whose main
interest was music, and who struck gold with his winning mix of heavy rock and
pop. His band Nirvana recorded one
album, Bleach, on a local independent record label, Sub Pop, before
signing a contract with a major label, DGC.
The band subsequently recorded Nevermind with its very catch hit
“Smells Like Teen Spirit” and started selling millions more albums than either
they or their record label expected.

Cobain had been using drugs of one
kind or another since he was a child.
He had been given Ritalin for his ADHD, and he had smoked marijuana
regularly as a teen. Once he was in his
twenties he started on heavier drugs, and soon became addicted to heroin. Heroin kept its grip on him for the rest of
his life, and was clearly a major factor in his ultimate suicide. Even if he had not taken drugs, it was clear
that Cobain was at risk given the history of suicide in his family and his
often unhappy childhood. Cross makes it
clear that Cobain often lied in interviews about his past, painting a darker
picture than fit the facts. For
example, he claimed that he had been homeless during his teenage years, living
under a bridge. Nevertheless, Cross
takes a psychological stance towards such lies, suggesting that they expressed
underlying emotional truths about how Cobain experienced his family. It’s very tempting to speculate what it
would have taken to prevent Cobain from killing himself, and Heavier Than
Heaven gives the impression that his early death was all but inevitable
given his family background.

The book paints Courtney Love’s
role in Cobain’s life sympathetically.
The Cobain and Love were immediately attracted to each other, and their
relationship was always passionate. While some people have held her responsible
for Cobain’s drug addiction and his estrangement from his bandmates Dave Grohl
and Krist Novoselic, Cross argues that that she tried to help Cobain. Furthermore, Cross takes pains to show that
Love was not a drain on Cobain’s artistic resources, but rather worked with him
in his own songwriting and the two influenced each other. Thus his account does not support the
widespread rumor that the songs on Live Through This, by Love’s band
Hole, were in fact written by Cobain.

Heavier Than Heaven is a
thorough and competent biography. Cross
has extensively researched his subject, and has interviewed most family
members, friends, Courtney Love and Krist Novoselic. Notably missing from the list of interviewees is Dave Grohl. The story moves quickly, and yet is full of
details that will interest both Nirvana fans and those simply interested in the
popularity of the band as a cultural phenomenon. Cross makes Cobain’s psychological vulnerability very clear, and
exposes the contradictions in his character.
It’s surprising, for instance, that even as a young adult, Cobain
retained some religious faith and occasionally prayed. Cobain’s personal
journals, an edited version of which has recently been published, are liberally
cited, and are often revealing.

Maybe the weakest aspect of this
book is that it does not explain Cobain’s artistic strengths and what set aside
his musical ability from those of his peers.
It would be tempting to conclude from the book that Cobain simply hit on
a formula of combining soft and loud, and slow and fast, into one song, and
this had widespread appeal. Cross lists
many of the bands Cobain himself idolized, including the Melvins, the
Vaselines, the Pixies, and the Knack, but he says very little about what Cobain
admired in their music. Cross writes of
Cobain’s fondness for smashing not only his guitar but also the drum kit that
started very early in Nirvana’s career, but he never explains Cobain’s
motivation. Cross does explain relate
many of Cobain’s lyrics to his life and is especially illuminating in showing
how some of the band’s best known songs refer to Cobain’s childhood, but he
refrains from any discussion of why such self-revelation might have contributed
to Nirvana’s commercial success.

One is left with the impression
that Cobain was utterly unable to cope with the pressures of success, and that
he might have been better off if he had not been able to afford drugs. Cobain’s self-hate became extremely powerful
and he was entertaining suicidal thoughts for much of his adult life. When he eventually killed himself, he not
only took a massive overdose of heroin, but also stabbed himself in the
abdomen, ripped open the wound, and shot himself in both the abdomen and the
head. Although Cross gives a very
detailed and somewhat ghoulish recreation of Cobain’s last hours, he makes no
attempt to explain how Cobain succeeded in doing such physical damage to
himself. It’s not surprising that with
such injuries there was speculation that he had been murdered, but Cross makes
clear that the authorities insisted that there was no reason to think his death
was caused by anyone else than Cobain himself.
But even if Cobain had not achieved success, it’s likely that he would
still have been troubled and self-destructive.

Rock music has expressed
frustration, pain, isolation, anger, and alienation from its early days, and
one only has to turn on a music-video TV channel to see these emotions made
utterly banal by band after band express them in with a minimum of creativity
or even a saving grace of humor. It’s
hard to believe that most fans or even the makers of this music really feel the
anguish that it expresses. It’s hard to
know if Nirvana’s millions of fans really empathized with the suffering and
anger that fueled Cobain’s music, but it’s likely that most didn’t. Nevertheless, Cobain himself does seem to
exemplify the model of a tortured artist whose conflicted emotions lay behind
his artistic creativity. At the heart
of the punk ideology that inspired Cobain lies a harsh condemnation of modern
society, a pessimism about the possibility of a meaningful or happy existence,
and a self-conscious sense of irony about the commercial cooptation of the
message of this supposedly antisocial music.
Heavier Than Heaven shows how difficult Cobain made it for people
to help him and how his ambitions contributed to his own death, making it clear
how frustrating it could be to deal with him.
When news of Cobain’s suicide was released, many people reacted with
cynicism and a complete lack of sympathy, and there’s material in this
biography to justify such reactions.
Yet he was a gifted creative force, and his allegiance to the ideals of
punk had a straightforward honesty that gave him a disarming appeal. Cross’s narrative makes it clear that
Cobain’s death was a great loss, not just for his personal circle of family and
friends, but also to rock music.
Recommended.