THE AMPLIFIED COME AS YOU ARE

Rock journalist Azerrad revisits his well-received 1993 study of Nirvana and its doomed leader, Kurt Cobain.

“He had this sort of fascination with dead pop stars.” So said a photographer of the mercurial Cobain, who was a fan long before he became a musician. When he did become a musician, he worked out his angst in iconic songs such as “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Come As You Are.” Writing in 1993, expanding on a long piece he wrote for Rolling Stone that met with Cobain’s approval, Azerrad urged that Cobain not be considered a Dylanesque spokesperson for his generation: “He makes an anguished wail, reveling in negative ecstasy,” writes the author. “And if that is the sound of teen spirit these days, so be it.” Yet Cobain’s ethos fit perfectly with the latchkey kids of his cohort, forgotten and powerless, frequently children of divorce—a fact that, by Azerrad’s account, helps explain Cobain’s despair more than any other. Even though addicted to drugs (“Junkies, I learned, are very comfortable with being deceptive”), Cobain never forgot those downtrodden fans. Nirvana was also musically more inventive than many people have assumed, thanks to the input of the urbane bassist Krist Novoselic and the inordinately good-natured drummer Dave Grohl. For all the doctrinaire punk rejection of hippiedom, Nirvana embraced all sorts of music. As Grohl said, “We all discovered punk rock and grew up listening to Black Flag but we also love John Fogerty.” Cobain’s is the usual rock cautionary tale: Drugs and mental illness played a role, but so did a rock-star machine populated by people who, said producer Steve Albini, are “pieces of shit.” Azerrad closes his long but readable account by pondering what might have been had Cobain lived, with Michael Stipe suggesting that their sound would be “very quiet and acoustic, with lots of stringed instruments.”

Better than the usual run of rock biographies and essential for Nirvana fans.