Charles R. Cross - Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain

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 analysisand as thorough in its reportingHeavier Than Heaven will be the place to start the dark journey into Cobains 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, Im 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 Nirvanas place in history...At last, perhaps, Cobains 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 biographiesnot just rock biosshould 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 Cobains 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 insiders 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 Cobains 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 Cobains heart and mind....The deepest book about pops 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 Cobains 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

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 wasnt hunting season.

Every time I drive by Stan Bakers I feel as if Ive witnessed a particularly horrific roadside accident, and in a way I have. The events that followed Kurts 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 darknesswhich includes minethis need to ask questions that cant 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 Seattleimpossible to miss with his ridiculous cap with flaps over his earshe 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 placesboth emotional and physicalthat I thought Id never go. There were moments of great elation, as when I first heard the unreleased You Know Youre Right, a song Id argue ranks with Kurts best. Yet for every joyful discovery, there were times of almost unbearable grief, as when I held Kurts suicide note in my hand, observing it was stored in a heart-shaped box next to a keepsake lock of his blond hair.