Journals

by Kurt Cobain

Riverside Books, 280pp., $29.95 Journals is to rock & roll autobiographies what Nevermind was to alternative rock — revolutionary. And one of a kind, probably. “Kurt Cobain filled dozens of notebooks with lyrics, drawings, and writings about his plans for Nirvana and his thoughts about fame, the state of music, and the people who bought and sold him and his music,” proclaims the terse dust-jacket introduction to Journals. “More than 20 of these notebooks survived,” from which has been culled one of the most intimate, angry, pathos-laden music bios ever published. If it wasn’t incredible enough that a musician in the pop music continuum of Elvis, the Beatles, and the Sex Pistols ultimately relates his own Icaresque fate; that the book Xeroxes those same pages so readers get it all in his own handwriting establishes Journals as one of the Seven Wonders of DIY. It’s here — all of it: the tale of a blue-eyed, extremely bright, and precocious boy whose nirvana shatters upon his parent’s divorce. Taking solace in the Fab Four (“for which I am forever grateful knowing that my musical development would have probably come to a halt if I had to soak up one more year of the Carpenters and Olivia Newton-John”), and later the Melvins, he starts down a fabled path. Emancipated by a hardcore punk show out back of a Wal-Mart, geekboy kills time with mix tapes, correspondence with Dale Crover, and his own damaged poetry. After scoring a single with Sub Pop, sketches of album art, credits, potential producer lists, and more songs fill his head as well as Mead’s spiral-bound pages. Disclaimers about his nuclear success (“I made $5 million last year.”) parallel warnings to himself: “Needed — values, perspectives, necessities, essentials.” Idealism (“Life isn’t nearly as sacred as the appreciation of passion.”) meets cynicism (“Man is not redeemable.”). And when fame begets infamy, the heroin to self-medicate a chronic bellyache fractures this fairy tale’s last chapters: “I decided to kill myself or stop the pain. I bought a gun, but chose drugs instead.” He swore he didn’t have a gun.

This article appears in November 22 • 2002.

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San Francisco native Raoul Hernandez crossed the border into Texas on July 2, 1992, and began writing about music for the Chronicle that fall, debuting with an album review of Keith Richards’ Main Offender. By virtue of local show previews – first “Recommendeds,” now calendar picks – his writing’s appeared in almost every issue since 1993.