Come As You Are - The Story of Nirvana - Michael Azerrad

   1993 (except the last chapter); 358 pages.  Full Title: Come As you Are – The Story of Nirvana.  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : Music; Biography; Grunge.  Overall Rating : 8½*/10.

 

    Nirvana was a three-man band from the greater Seattle area consisting of Kurt Cobain (lead singer & guitarist), Krist Novoselic (bassist), and, after five or six others early on, Dave Grohl (drummer).

 

    Nirvana is arguably the poster-child for the alt-rock subgenre “Grunge”, which first sprang up in the late 80’s and 90’s in the Seattle area, fusing together elements of heavy metal, pop, and punk-rock.  Nirvana is certainly not the first band to be labeled “grunge”, but it’s fair to say that they were the ones who propelled it forward from a local phenomenon into the mainstream music market via their incredibly popular album Nevermind, 

 

    Inherently, Rock-&-Roll needs to go through periodic revitalization in order to keep it fresh, vibrant and worthy of each new teenage fanbase's attention.  Punk had done this a half-dozen years earlier, providing an “in-your-face” alternative to the bland, rock-pop songs marketed by record companies for their mass appeal to listeners of all ages.  But now commercial success had tamed the punk rockers, and it was grunge’s time to give voice to the next generation of music-lovers looking for something new, raw, and edgy.

 

    Nirvana’s rise in the grunge scene was meteoric, but also sadly short-lived, ending abruptly in 1994 with Kurt Cobain’s suicide.  Come As You Are is their biography, as told by the respected music journalist Michael Azerrad.

 

What’s To Like...

    In preparation for his book Come As you Are, Michael Azerrad spent more than 25 hours interviewing Kurt Cobain, starting in February 1993.  The book was published the following October.  There were 18 chapters, the title of each one being a short quote from that chapter.  The book closed on a tenuous-yet-hopeful note, then Kurt committed suicide a half year later, on April 5, 1994, forcing Azerrad to add a nineteenth chapter.  I was struck by just how many suicide “clues” (Azerrad rightly calls them “announcements”) Kurt gives during the interviews, although of course I had the advantage of knowing how it would all turn out.

 

    As the title states, this is a story of Nirvana, not just Kurt Cobain.  Michael Azerrad also interviewed Krist and Dave, plus several ex-members of the band.  The result is an even treatment of some of the more-sensitive band-related material.  When Kurt laments that he had to fire one of the former drummers, said drummer remembers it differently – he says he quit.  Azerrad details intra-member band tensions the same way, which results in some enlightening insights.  Kurt may grouse that he has to do all the songwriting, but Krist and Dave point out that Kurt never asked for their input.  Courtney Love’s role in the rise and fall of Nirvana is similarly revealing.

 

    The book is a trivia buff’s delight.  You’ll read how Nirvana once got kicked out of their own record release party and learn that not one Nirvana song ends with a fade-out; why the author calls Frances Farmer (who?!) “the Cobains’ patron martyr”, that the name “Cobain” is a corruption of the name “Coburn”, and that people who live in Kurt’s hometown of Aberdeen are called “Aberdonians”.    Michael Azerrad also gives brief reviews of every track on every Nirvana studio album (plus the demo tapes), explaining the meaning of the lyrics (when there is one), and how each song, album title, and cover art, came to be.  Scattered throughout the book are some great photos (taken mostly while on tour) and some of Kurt’s sketches.

 

    Michael Azerrad namedrops a slew of other bands – some local, some “grungy”, and some Nirvana's touring partners, and I loved that.  Kurt adored some of these, such as Sonic Youth, but openly mocked others, such as fellow grunge bands Pearl Jam, and Guns N’ Roses, particularly Axl Rose.  I was surprised to learn that Nirvana in the early days covered songs from diverse genres, including CCR’s “Bad Moon Rising”, Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song”, and even Cher’s “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves”.  Equally astounding was the fact that Tori Amos once did a piano version cover of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.6*/5, based on 233 ratings.

    Goodreads: 4.05*/5, based on 8,346 ratings and 190 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    Finally, the band settled on Nirvana, a Hindu and Buddhist concept which Webster’s defines as “the extinction of desire, passion, illusion and the empirical self and attainment of rest, truth and unchanging being.”  (,,,)

    “I wanted a name that was kind of beautiful or nice and pretty instead of a mean, raunchy punk tock name like the Angry Samoans,” says Kurt.  “I wanted to have something different.”  These days Kurt isn’t so crazy about the name anymore.  “It’s too esoteric and serious,” he says.  And later on, he’d have to pay another band fifty thousand dollars for a name he didn’t even care for that much.  (loc. 1157)

 

    One night, Kurt and Kathleen Hanna from Bikini Kill had gone out drinking and then went on a graffiti spree, spray painting Olympia with “revolutionary” and feminist slogans (including the ever-popular “GOD IS GAY”).  When they got back to Kurt’s apartment, they continued talking about teen revolution and writing graffiti on Kurt’s walls.  Hanna wrote the words “Kurt smells like Teen Spirit.”  “I took that as a compliment,” says Kurt.  “I thought that was a reaction to the conversation we were having but it really meant that I smelled like the deodorant.  I didn’t know that the deodorant spray existed until months after the single came out.”  (loc. 3448)

 

Kindle Details…

    Come As you Are presently sells for $14.99 at Amazon.  Michael Azerrad has two other e-books for you, both in the “rock music” genre: Our Band Could Be Your Life for $2.99 (which is a fantastic price), and Rock Critic Law for $8.99.  There are various biographies of Kurt Cobain and/or Nirvana by other authors, most of which seem to be in the $2.99-$11.99 price range.

 

 

“All in all, we sound like the Knack and the Bay City Rollers being molested by Black Flag and Black Sabbath.”  (loc. 3007 )

    The tone of Come As you Are is at times gritty and events - both good and bad - are presented in a matter-of-fact fashion.  For me, this approach heightened the book’s believability.  As expected, there is a ton of, and an incredible variety of drug-&-alcohol use/abuse.  The mood turns somber when it details Kurt's assertion that his shooting up heroin was okay because it relieved his stomach pains, something that even Michael Azerrad is skeptical of.  Things get even sadder when Kurt and Courtney are both addicted to heroin and going in and out of rehab while trying to raise their child.

 

    There’s a fair amount of cussing, although not as much as I expected in a book filled with direct quotes from a grunge band's personnel.  I counted 17 instances in the first 20% of the book.

 

    The ending (the post-suicide chapter) recaps the events that transpired in the months after the book’s first publication up to Kurt’s suicide on the fifth of April, then jumps to the details of a public vigil (“memorial service”) held later that month.  But you’ll find very little about the suicide itself.  I suspect that the 25 hours of interviewing forged a close bond between the author and Kurt, and having to research and write about the suicide would’ve been just too painful.

 

    Full disclosure: I knew very little about Nirvana’s music (other than “Smells Like Teen Spirit”), and certainly nothing about the band’s history and any of its members other than Kurt.  I'm also leery of labeling any biography book I read (and even more so, any autobiography) “non-fiction” because usually it consists of some famous person, or his biographer, telling his version of events from a biased perspective of self-interest.  Here, Michael Azerrad also gives you the “other sides" of the story, and that impressed me.  Overall, I found Come As You Are to be both enlightening and believable.

 

    8½ Stars.  We’ll close with Nirvana trivia question:

    Q.: How many (full-length) studio albums did Nirvana put out over the course of their career?  (the answer is in the comments)