At several turns, it seemed as if the weight of an angel's wing could cause him to fold, yet the songs aided him: These words and riffs were so much a part of him he could sing them half dead and they'd still be potent.
Ok, let’s try this again because last night I couldn’t get a
decent start on this review. I think the gravity of the life that is being laid
out in Charles R Cross’s Heavier than Heaven, the life that couldn’t
bear more than 27 years of existence, the life that was Kurt Cobain, makes it
that much harder to review properly. It’s that or I just had writers’ block. Either
way, this was no easy read; Cross litters his narrative with images, history
and events which only serve to foreshadow Kurt’s fate.
In the prologue alone, we are presented with a body, Kurt’s
own, as he lies comatose in a hotel room after his first drug overdose in 1992,
‘only the earliest of many little deaths that will follow’, Cross remarks. And
on the second page, we are given an image the following year of Kurt’s strawberry
Kool-Aid-dyed hair looking like it’d been ‘matted with dried blood’. When the
story begins, we learn that the suicide rate is high in his hometown of
Aberdeen, Washington, that he has a family history of suicide – from his
great-grandfather stabbing himself to two uncles shooting themselves – and soon
Kurt begins to develop a fascination with it, stating he has ‘suicide genes’. After
just 76 pages, Kurt comes to be seen as ‘the shape of suicide’ by neighbour
Ryan Aigner to whom he professes he won’t live to be thirty (and oh how right
he was). From here, Kurt’s creative passions, musically and artistically, begin
to illustrate his mental state, being preoccupied with bodily functions and diseases,
torture and rape (as in the case of the song ‘Polly’) and once threatening to kill
himself on stage after technical difficulties by climbing onto a 30-foot
speaker unit. This latter event marks a trend in the early days of Kurt’s
career as the reader notices everything that fails to work – instruments, band
members, friends, and record labels – is destroyed, fired, or cast off. It
seems Kurt followed that trend himself, his own failing body no doubt being
part of the reason for his suicide. By contrast, the very thing which didn’t
fail, the dream that became Nirvana, also makes up part of that reason.
Fame, the ‘narcotic of attention’ as Cross remarks, loses
its effect on Kurt after roughly 4 years. We are told how, when reminded of how
famous he had become by 1991, he acts indifferent, searching for a response to ‘disarm
this condition of fame, as if words alone could halt something that was now unstoppable.’
The most poignant moment regarding fame comes when Cross tells of how Kurt,
hounded by interview and autograph requests, threw himself into the arms of
Jeremy Wilson, singer of the band Dharma Buns:
‘Kurt didn’t say a word, he just rested in Wilson’s bear hug
as Jeremy repeated, “It’s going to be okay.”
It’s unsurprisingly that by the last third of the book, we can
already feel the end coming. The frequency of Kurt’s drug use – which ‘frightened
even the most seasoned, cynical junkies’ – and subsequent overdoses increases,
becoming the norm, the band’s fame continues to skyrocket – despite many cancellations
due to Kurt’s reluctance and various illnesses – every interview, as Cross remarks,
makes reference to suicide, and many meetings with family or friends are for
the last time. After Nirvana bassist, Krist Novoselic, tries to take him to the
airport – he was going to Los Angeles to see a psychiatrist – he runs away, and
Krist knows ‘in his heart he would never see Kurt alive again.’ And it was the
heart-breaking simplicity of quotes like these, combined with the speed of events,
which made me initially overlook the chilling end that unfolded in the
penultimate chapter.
When Kurt goes missing, a frantic search begins, with two
references made on the same page that ‘No one thought to search the garage or
greenhouse’. It’s eerie, it’s haunting, knowing what you come to know about how
Kurt died. And how, in just five words, it could all be over: ‘And then he was
gone.’
 |
This was the only free-to-use photo I could find that I liked, but it fits really well
Montesano High School, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (1981) |
Of course, this wasn’t a tale composed entirely of death,
disease, and drugs. I read a review which remarked on how Kurt was portrayed as
‘a whiny liar’ and that she couldn’t finish the book as it would mar her
appreciation for Nirvana’s music. This may be true, but only because, as I see
it, Kurt was an eternal child, something which Cross makes very clear. Suffering
from a broken childhood when his parents divorced – an ‘emotional holocaust’ as
Cross describes it – and ending up being shuttled between family and friends,
Kurt becomes the ‘something in the way’ of his own song, forever feeling
abandoned. His lifelong desire for genuine family and friends seems to prevent
him from ever growing up. This displays itself in happier ways too as Cross tells
of how Kurt spent his first big paycheck at Toy R Us, how he returned to
Universal Studios to go on the rides, and how Cross opens Chapter Fifteen with
a statement that ‘one of the most extraordinary days of Kurt’s life’ involved ‘two
food fights, a fire extinguisher duel, and the destruction of gold record
awards in a microwave oven.’ Even Cross’s descriptions of Kurt often refer to
him as a ‘boy’ in both stature and mentality. And then there’s Kurt’s alter-ego
‘Kurdt Kobain’.
Most children have imaginary friends – Kurt had Boodah – but
Kurt also had an imaginary ‘other’ self. He spun fantastic false stories – ‘never
one to let the truth get in the way’ – he rehearsed his every word and action,
and seemed capable of pushing his physical suffering
to one side for the sake
of a good performance, almost as if becoming ‘Kurdt Kobain’ in these moments. As
Cross remarks, ‘He would bring out this carefully refined phantom when he
needed to distance himself from his own actions or circumstances’, almost like
a child needing someone else to blame.
If all of this makes Kurt a ‘whiny liar’ then so be it, but
I think having read this book, I have a new appreciation for Nirvana, and for Kurt’s
wife, Courtney Love, whose presence in his life seemed like a fountain of
inspiration, who endured so much and grieved so hard, because she ‘intrinsically
knew the smell of the shit he’d crawled through’. Cross’s ability to produce
lines like this is the reason I soldiered on, despite how gritty and oftentimes
slow the story was, because sooner or later I’d find another little seam of
gold. And because so often Cross makes you see that, however selfish Kurt may
have seen, all he had was empathy for those around him, right to his final
moment, something which Cross repeats with tragic simplicity. Empathy.
