Heavier Than Heaven

PREFACE TO THE 2014 EDITION

This book was first published in September 2001, with an "official" release date of the 24th of that month, coinciding with the ten-year-anniversary of Nevermind. That ten-year Nevermind mark was hardly noted in the mainstream press because the attacks on 9/11 overshadowed the world that month, including any Nirvana-related anniversary.

In the years since Heavier Than Heaven was first published I've received thousands of letters and e-mails from readers, but none was more memorable than one that came only a week after those 9/11 attacks. The man who wrote it had worked in one of the towers of the World Trade Center. He was, in fact, sitting at his desk reading Heavier Than Heaven when the first plane struck the tower next to him. He evacuated, and survived, but he wanted me to know that he'd left his copy of Heavier Than Heaven in the tower. I had my publisher immediately mail him another copy, as he said he hadn't finished the book. It was a bizarre, surreal twist that somehow connected this particular creative work to that tragedy, or at least made me feel a linkage, however tenuous.

That feeling of personal connection—even amid unimaginable tragedy, or from an incalculable distance—mirrors what many readers of this book have expressed over the years about the bond they feel with Kurt Cobain. Hardly any of them knew Kurt, but his death nonetheless felt like a personal loss. In a way, it was a personal loss, because Kurt's death was also the death of Nirvana, and anyone who loved that band lost something there. It has been a loss felt by a generation, or two, even those who never saw Nirvana in concert, never met Kurt, can't speak English, or weren't born before he left the earth twenty years ago.

I feel that loss even thirteen years after this book's publication, and two decades after his death. Rarely does a week go by that I don't have some of that sadness float through me about what could have been or how fate might have shifted.

Because Kurt was such a public figure, with a life lived in the headlines, it is easy to forget that his death was an even greater tragedy for those who knew him personally. And in the course of writing this book, many of those people came into my life, and many have stayed part of it. Every savvy biographer knows that a writer can show only a very small part of any life—a slice, if you will—no matter how long their book. Virginia Woolf once observed that a biography is "considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may have as many as a thousand." I try to craft my biographies for a broad, general readership, and not for my subject's intimates, but nonetheless it feels vindicating when those who knew your subject say you caught a part of their essence, one of those thousand selves. You hope your book made someone feel, for even a moment, that they encountered their lost friend again. I've heard those very words, which made the effort here feel worthy.

If I were writing Heavier Than Heaven now, I might have spelled out more directly the process whereby I was given access to Kurt's journals, letters, and papers (this book was written without the "authorization" of anyone, though occasionally I have seen the opposite suggested on the Internet). I obtained these various materials though a number of sources, including Courtney Love, who controlled the bulk of his journals, but not all of them. Four other parties also had a stash of journals or letters. Love allowed me to study the diaries she had without any kind of access being granted back to her. She did not read this manuscript beforehand, and ultimately she was unhappy about certain things in it.

Love's then manager set up my examination of Kurt's diaries. I was left completely alone with several duffel bags full of Kurt and Courtney's diaries, papers, and art for three days in a house in a canyon near Los Angeles. I don't think anyone involved was aware of what was in those duffel bags because many items were of a highly personal nature—medical records and tax returns. Kurt and Courtney lived in chaos when they were together, and my guess is that their personal effects were thrown together in these bags, put in a closet after Kurt died, and left untouched until I examined them.

The journals were extraordinary. There were stains on many of the pages, which could variously have been coffee, pop, and maybe even the detritus of drug use. There were dried bloodstains as well.

Very late one night in that empty house, I stumbled on pages that included Kurt's pleas to God to help him kick his addiction. Holding those words in my hand was one of the eeriest, and saddest, moments of my life. I don't have an explanation for why Kurt was never able to get clean and sober, or why others do. Writing Heavier Than Heaven gave me many insights into the early-childhood history that shaped Kurt Cobain, but it also left me with larger spiritual questions, which are impossible to answer.

If I rewrote this book today, I might also reconsider the structure of the last chapter. As a reader, I don't like footnotes within text, as I feel they take me away from the trance I hope to enter, and from the pictures I paint in my mind as I read a biography. Still, I have had a few younger readers write over the years to ask how I knew, for example, what CD Kurt listened to at the end, or if I just "made that up."

I pieced this book together from over three hundred interviews, but also from extensive police reports. Since Kurt's suicide was thoroughly investigated—despite the gibberish on the Internet that suggests it was murder or conspiracy—there were a number of documents I was given access to that helped me put together Kurt's final days. R.E.M.'s Automatic for the People was in his CD player, which was turned on when police examined the room; the stereo had been turned off when search parties had gone through the house a few days before looking for Kurt. These details alone, about that one fact, would have made for a very long footnote to a single sentence.

I also tried to not insert myself as a first-person narrator into the text. I knew that he pressed hard on the pen when he wrote his suicide note, because when I held the actual note in my hand, I could see the deep impressions of the words on the paper. It has been almost a decade and a half since I held that note in my hand, but I can still feel its emotional heaviness. There were points where he pressed so hard his pen went through the paper. I researched suicide notes for this book, and observed that oftentimes their writers exhibit penmanship that is far better than normal, wanting so much, one last time, to communicate with the world. Again, I could have added these details as a very long footnote, but it would have been invasive to the story.

Since this book came out in 2001, parts of the story have continued on, as it is a saga that keeps unfolding. A number of my interview subjects have died, including Kurt's grandfather, whom I knew well over the years. Though this book paints a portrait of Leland Cobain that is partially damning, he still came to my debut reading for this book in Aberdeen in September 2001. Leland sat in the front row, and given his reputation for occasional violence, I wondered if he might take a swing at me. Instead, he proudly signed copies of the book at a table with me afterward. I am convinced he never read Heavier Than Heaven. He welcomed me many times into his trailer, and aging brought softness to his swagger. He looked remarkably like Kurt.

A few of those I quoted here who grew up with Kurt in Aberdeen, or ran with him in Seattle, have since died of issues related to drug and alcohol abuse. That's a horrible continuation of this story, but it's also evidence of a sad truth I've argued for a while: that Kurt's addictive struggles were as rooted in his early circumstance, and in his genetic make-up, as they were in fame.

I do understand that we all seek answers to death, particularly suicide, and that in Kurt's case it is easier to blame others than the choices he himself made. If you loved Kurt's music, you loved him too, and the anger and disappointment inherent in his suicide is hard to process. Even twenty years after his death it is hard to fathom where he was emotionally that day, the choices he made, the final moments.

Amid that pain, though, the art continues on with a life of its own. It remains vital, breathing, and, I'd argue, remains as important as it was more than two decades ago. Kurt's was a life that I still find compelling and at times inspiring, considering what he rose above. Kurt used his pain to create art, and that was surely admirable. There is much we can still learn from that.

—Charles R.. Cross

   March 2014

AUTHOR'S NOTE

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 wasn't "hunting season."

Every time I drive by Stan Baker's I feel as if I've witnessed a particularly horrific roadside accident, and in a way I have. The events that followed Kurt's 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 darkness—which includes mine—this need to ask questions that can't 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 Seattle—impossible to miss with his ridiculous cap with flaps over his ears—he 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 places—both emotional and physical—that I thought I'd never go. There were moments of great elation, as when I first heard the unreleased "You Know You're Right," a song I'd argue ranks with Kurt's best. Yet for every joyful discovery, there were times of almost unbearable grief, as when I held Kurt's suicide note in my hand, observing it was stored in a heart-shaped box next to a keepsake lock of his blond hair.

My goal with Heavier Than Heaven was to honor Kurt Cobain by telling the story of his life—of that hair and that note—without judgment. That approach was only possible because of the generous assistance of Kurt's closest friends, his family, and his bandmates. Nearly everyone I desired to interview eventually shared their memories—the only exceptions were a few individuals with plans to write their own histories, and I wish them the best in those efforts. Kurt's life was a complicated puzzle, all the more complex because he kept so many parts hidden, and that compartmentalization was both an end result of addiction, and a breeding ground for it.

At times I imagined I was studying a spy, a skilled double agent, who had mastered the art of making sure that no one person knew all the details of his life.

A friend of mine, herself a recovering drug addict, once described what she called the "no talk" rule of families like hers. "We grew up in households," she said, "where we were told: 'don't ask, don't talk, and don't tell.' It was a code of secrecy, and out of those secrets and lies a powerful shame overtook me." This book is for all those with the courage to tell the truth, to ask painful questions, and to break free of the shadows of the past.

—Charles R. Cross

   Seattle, Washington,

   April 2001