Heavier Than Heaven Read online

  Praise for Heavier Than Heaven

  “The narrative moves like the best Nirvana anthems. Smells like the real deal.”

  —Time

  “Until someone writes a book that is more daring in its psychological and social analysis—and as thorough in its reporting—Heavier Than Heaven will be the place to start the dark journey into Cobain’s claustrophobic inner world.”

  —Rolling Stone

  “What emerges...is the life story of someone who never grew up, someone whose maturation was half done before he was twenty-one, someone who extracted art from a perpetual adolescence that was over much too soon.”

  —The New Yorker

  “The results of Cross’ assiduous reporting show through in every chapter. A remarkable portrait.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “One of the most moving and revealing books ever written about a rock star. An invaluable look at the life of a troubled artist.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “In his early teens, Cobain told a friend, ‘I’m going to be a superstar musician, kill myself and go out in a flame of glory.’ This well-reported book... provides the most grounded account of how Cobain, not too many years later, did just that.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “The biography that the most important rocker of his generation has always deserved: exhaustively researched, full of insight into the ‘real’ Cobain as opposed to the manipulated media image, and written in a clear and compelling... voice.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “A cautionary tale of a talented, lucky musician who became fatally confused about whether fame was a reward or a death sentence.”

  —People

  “No other book on Kurt Cobain matches Heavier Than Heaven for research, accuracy and insider scoops.”

  —The New York Post

  “By keeping a steady eye on the facts, Cross mostly pierces the rumors, hype and conspiracy theories that have long confounded Nirvana’s place in history...At last, perhaps, Cobain’s ghost can find some peace.”

  —The Miami Herald

  “Charles R. Cross takes readers deeper into the life of the brilliant, troubled Kurt Cobain than anyone thought possible. The result is more than just an excellent book... Cross helps reset the standards of what biographies—not just rock bios—should be.”

  —The Rocky Mountain News

  “Shakes up the prevailing conceptions of Cobain...A compelling biography.”

  —Biography

  “A fascinating, if sometimes frightful, read, a full-scale work that manages to be respectful of Cobain’s unlikely triumphs from poverty and also critical of his stunning excesses.”

  —The Seattle Post-Intelligencer

  “A standout among rock bios and deserves its place in pop-culture collections.”

  —Booklist

  “Cross treats the strange, unhappy life of musician Kurt Cobain with intelligence and an insider’s perceptiveness.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “A thorough, cogent look at Kurt Cobain...No other book matches Heavier Than Heaven for research, accuracy, and insider scoops.”

  —The Seattle Times

  “Cross transcends the other Cobain biographies...A carefully crafted and compelling tragedy.”

  —Library Journal

  “Dozens of books have been written about Cobain and his band, most of them ridiculously lurid or worshipful or uninformed. Heavier Than Heaven is the best, by far... Excellent.”

  —The Portland Oregonian

  “Insightful, painstakingly researched...A tremendous gift to those who love Kurt Cobain’s artistry.”

  —The Seattle Weekly

  “A closely researched, clear-eyed look at the complicated, even mystifying character that was Kurt Cobain.”

  —The Associated Press

  “Heavier Than Heaven is a book that gives shape and depth to a story that has so often been related as a series of loaded anecdotes... Heavier Than Heaven is a trove of rigorous detail.”

  —The Boston Phoenix

  “Charles R. Cross has cracked the code in the definitive biography, an all-access pass to Cobain’s heart and mind....The deepest book about pop’s darkest falling star.”

  —Amazon.com

  “Exhaustively researched... Unexpectedly vivid. More riveting and suspenseful than a biography has the right to be.”

  —Blender

  “Fascinating. The most vivid account yet. Will enthrall even the most casual reader.”

  —Mojo

  “Superbly researched and harrowing. Cross has painstakingly accumulated a wealth of telling detail.”

  —The London Sunday Times

  “Leaps to the front of the class....If you can read only one Kurt Cobain book, Heavier Than Heaven is definitely it.”

  —The Montreal Gazette

  “A sublime, uncanny portrait. The way Cross recreates Cobain’s final hours is beautifully written and paced....By the end of the chapter I had my face in my hands, helpless against the tears.”

  —The Globe and Mail

  Dedication

  FOR MY FAMILY, FOR CHRISTINA, AND FOR ASHLAND

  Contents

  Praise for Heavier Than Heaven

  Author’s Note

  Prologue: Heavier Than Heaven - New York, New York: January 12, 1992

  Chapter 1: Yelling Loudly at First - Aberdeen, Washington: February 1967–December 1973

  Chapter 2: I Hate Mom, I Hate Dad - Aberdeen, Washington: January 1974–June 1979

  Chapter 3: Meatball of the Month - Montesano, Washington: July 1979–March 1982

  Chapter 4: Prairie Belt Sausage Boy - Aberdeen, Washington: March 1982–March 1983

  Chapter 5: The Will of Instinct - Aberdeen, Washington: April 1984–September 1986

  Chapter 6: Didn’t Love Him Enough - Aberdeen, Washington: September 1986–March 1987

  Chapter 7: Soupy Sales in My Fly - Raymond, Washington: March 1987

  Chapter 8: In High School Again - Olympia, Washington: April 1987–May 1988

  Chapter 9: Too Many Humans - Olympia, Washington: May 1988–February 1989

  Chapter 10: Illegal to Rock ’N’ Roll - Olympia, Washington: February 1989–September 1989

  Chapter 11: Candy, Puppies, Love - London, England: October 1989–May 1990

  Chapter 12: Love You So Much - Olympia, Washington: May 1990–December 1990

  Chapter 13: The Richard Nixon Library - Olympia, Washington: November 1990–May 1991

  Chapter 14: Burn American Flags - Olympia, Washington: May 1991–September 1991

  Chapter 15: Every Time I Swallowed - Seattle, Washington: September 1991–October 1991

  Chapter 16: Brush Your Teeth. - Seattle, Washington: October 1991–January 1992

  Chapter 17: Little Monster Inside - Los Angeles, California: January 1992–August 1992

  Chapter 18: Rosewater, Diaper Smell - Los Angeles, California: August 1992–September 1992

  Chapter 19: That Legendary Divorce - Seattle, Washington: September 1992–January 1993

  Chapter 20: Heart-Shaped Coffin - Seattle, Washington: January 1993–August 1993

  Chapter 21: A Reason to Smile - Seattle, Washington: August 1993–November 1993

  Chapter 22: Cobain’s Disease - Seattle, Washington: November 1993–March 1994

  Chapter 23: Like Hamlet - Seattle, Washington: March 1994

  Chapter 24: Angel’s Hair - Los Angeles, California–Seattle, Washington: March 30–April 6, 1994

  Epilogue: A Leonard Cohen Afterworld - Seattle, Washington: April 1994–May 1999

  Source Notes

  Index

  Acknowledgments

  Picture Section

  A
bout the Author

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  Less than a mile from my home sits a building that can send a graveyard chill up my spine as easily as an Alfred Hitchcock film. The gray one-story structure is surrounded by a tall chain-link fence, unusual security in a middle-class neighborhood of sandwich shops and apartments. Three businesses are behind the fencing: a hair salon; a State Farm Insurance office; and “Stan Baker, Shooting Sports.” It was in this third business where on March 30, 1994, Kurt Cobain and a friend purchased a Remington shotgun. The owner later told a newspaper he was unsure why anyone would be buying such a gun when it wasn’t “hunting season.”

  Every time I drive by Stan Baker’s I feel as if I’ve witnessed a particularly horrific roadside accident, and in a way I have. The events that followed Kurt’s gun shop purchase leave me with both a deep unease and the desire to make inquiries that I know by their very nature are unknowable. They are questions concerning spirituality, the role of madness in artistic genius, the ravages of drug abuse on a soul, and the desire to understand the chasm between the inner and outer man. These questions are all too real to any family touched by addiction, depression, or suicide. For families en-shrouded by such darkness—which includes mine—this need to ask questions that can’t be answered is its own kind of haunting.

  Those mysteries fueled this book but in a way its genesis began years before during my youth in a small Washington town where monthly packages from the Columbia Record and Tape Club offered me rock ’n’ roll salvation from circumstance. Inspired in part by those mail-order albums, I left that rural landscape to become a writer and magazine editor in Seattle. Across the state and a few years later, Kurt Cobain found a similar transcendence through the same record club and he turned that interest into a career as a musician. Our paths would intersect in 1989 when my magazine did the first cover story on Nirvana.

  It was easy to love Nirvana because no matter how great their fame and glory they always seemed like underdogs, and the same could be said for Kurt. He began his artistic life in a double-wide trailer copying Norman Rockwell illustrations and went on to develop a story-telling gift that would infuse his music with a special beauty. As a rock star, he always seemed a misfit, but I cherished the way he combined adolescent humor with old man crustiness. Seeing him around Seattle—impossible to miss with his ridiculous cap with flaps over his ears—he was a character in an industry with few true characters.

  There were many times writing this book when that humor seemed the only beacon of light in a Sisyphean task. Heavier Than Heaven encompassed four years of research, 400 interviews, numerous file cabinets of documents, hundreds of musical recordings, many sleepless nights, and miles and miles driving between Seattle and Aberdeen. The research took me places—both emotional and physical—that I thought I’d never go. There were moments of great elation, as when I first heard the unreleased “You Know You’re Right,” a song I’d argue ranks with Kurt’s best. Yet for every joyful discovery, there were times of almost unbearable grief, as when I held Kurt’s suicide note in my hand, observing it was stored in a heart-shaped box next to a keepsake lock of his blond hair.

  My goal with Heavier Than Heaven was to honor Kurt Cobain by telling the story of his life—of that hair and that note—without judgment. That approach was only possible because of the generous assistance of Kurt’s closest friends, his family, and his bandmates. Nearly everyone I desired to interview eventually shared their memories—the only exceptions were a few individuals with plans to write their own histories, and I wish them the best in those efforts. Kurt’s life was a complicated puzzle, all the more complex because he kept so many parts hidden, and that compartmentalization was both an end result of addiction, and a breeding ground for it. At times I imagined I was studying a spy, a skilled double agent, who had mastered the art of making sure that no one person knew all the details of his life.

  A friend of mine, herself a recovering drug addict, once described what she called the “no talk” rule of families like hers. “We grew up in households,” she said, “where we were told: ‘don’t ask, don’t talk, and don’t tell.’ It was a code of secrecy, and out of those secrets and lies a powerful shame overtook me.” This book is for all those with the courage to tell the truth, to ask painful questions, and to break free of the shadows of the past.

  —Charles R. Cross

  Seattle, Washington,

  April 2001

  Prologue: HEAVIER THAN HEAVEN

  NEW YORK, NEW YORK

  JANUARY 12, 1992

  Heavier Than Heaven

  —A slogan used by British concert promoters to describe Nirvana’s 1989 tour with the band Tad. It summed up both Nirvana’s “heavy” sound and the heft of 300-pound Tad Doyle.

  The first time he saw heaven came exactly six hours and fifty-seven minutes after the very moment an entire generation fell in love with him. It was, remarkably, his first death, and only the earliest of many little deaths that would follow. For the generation smitten with him, it was an impassioned, powerful, and binding devotion—the kind of love that even as it begins you know is preordained to break your heart and to end like a Greek tragedy.

  It was January 12, 1992, a clear but chilly Sunday morning. The temperature in New York City would eventually rise to 44 degrees, but at 7 a.m., in a small suite of the Omni Hotel, it was near freezing. A window had been left open to air out the stench of cigarettes, and the Manhattan morning had stolen all warmth. The room itself looked like a tempest had engulfed it: Scattered on the floor, with the randomness of a blind man’s rummage sale, were clumps of dresses, shirts, and shoes. Toward the suite’s double doors stood a half dozen serving trays covered with the remnants of several days of room service meals. Half-eaten rolls and rancid slices of cheese littered the tray tops, and a handful of fruit flies hovered over some wilted lettuce. This was not the typical condition of a four-star hotel room—it was the consequence of someone warning housekeeping to stay out of the room. They had altered a “Do Not Disturb” sign to read, “Do Not EVER Disturb! We’re Fucking!”

  There was no intercourse this morning. Asleep in the king-size bed was 26-year-old Courtney Love. She was wearing an antique Victorian slip, and her long blond hair spread out over the sheet like the tresses of a character in a fairy tale. Next to her was a deep impression in the bedding, where a person had recently lain. Like the opening scene of a film noir, there was a dead body in the room.

  “I woke up at 7 a.m. and he wasn’t in the bed,” remembered Love. “I’ve never been so scared.”

  Missing from the bed was 24-year-old Kurt Cobain. Less than seven hours earlier, Kurt and his band Nirvana had been the musical act on “Saturday Night Live.” Their appearance on the program would prove to be a watershed moment in the history of rock ’n’ roll: the first time a grunge band had received live national television exposure. It was the same weekend that Nirvana’s major label debut, Nevermind, knocked Michael Jackson out of the No. 1 spot on the Billboard charts, becoming the best-selling album in the nation. While it wasn’t exactly overnight success—the band had been together four years—the manner in which Nirvana had taken the music industry by surprise was unparalleled. Virtually unknown a year before, Nirvana stormed the charts with their “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” which became 1991’s most recognizable song, its opening guitar riff signifying the true beginning of nineties rock.

  And there had never quite been a rock star like Kurt Cobain. He was more an anti-star than a celebrity, refusing to take a limo to NBC and bringing a thrift-store sensibility to everything he did. For “Saturday Night Live” he wore the same clothes from the previous two days: a pair of Converse tennis shoes, jeans with big holes in the knees, a T-shirt advertising an obscure band, and a Mister Rogers–style cardigan sweater. He hadn’t washed his hair for a week, but had dyed it with strawberry Kool-Aid, which made his blond locks look like they’d been matted with dried blood. Never before in the history of live te
levision had a performer put so little care into his appearance or hygiene, or so it seemed.

  Kurt was a complicated, contradictory misanthrope, and what at times appeared to be an accidental revolution showed hints of careful orchestration. He professed in many interviews to detest the exposure he’d gotten on MTV, yet he repeatedly called his managers to complain that the network didn’t play his videos nearly enough. He obsessively— and compulsively—planned every musical or career direction, writing ideas out in his journals years before he executed them, yet when he was bestowed the honors he had sought, he acted as if it were an inconvenience to get out of bed. He was a man of imposing will, yet equally driven by a powerful self-hatred. Even those who knew him best felt they knew him hardly at all—the happenings of that Sunday morning would attest to that.

  After finishing “Saturday Night Live” and skipping the cast party, explaining it was “not his style,” Kurt had given a two-hour interview to a radio journalist, which finished at four in the morning. His working day was finally over, and by any standard it had been exceptionally successful: He’d headlined “Saturday Night Live,” had seen his album hit No. 1, and “Weird Al” Yankovic had asked permission to do a parody of “Teen Spirit.” These events, taken together, surely marked the apogee of his short career, the kind of recognition most performers only dream of, and that Kurt himself had fantasized about as a teenager.

  Growing up in a small town in southwestern Washington state, Kurt had never missed an episode of “Saturday Night Live,” and had bragged to his friends in junior high school that one day he’d be a star. A decade later, he was the most celebrated figure in music. After just his second album he was being hailed as the greatest songwriter of his generation; only two years before, he had been turned down for a job cleaning dog kennels.