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

From Barnes & Noble

Published to coincide with the tenth anniversary of Nirvana's landmark Nevermind album, this is an engaging, comprehensive biography of the group's resident genius, the much-lamented Kurt Cobain. Utilizing more than 400 interviews and Cobain's unpublished diaries, Heavier than Heaven recounts the meteoric rise and sudden descent of the Seattle-based singer.

From the Publisher

Published on the 10th anniversary of Nirvana's landmark album Nevermind, the first in-depth biography of the troubled genius, including new information from over 400 interviews and exclusive access to Cobain's unpublished diaries.

Although the tragic circumstances of Kurt Cobain's suicide are well known, the facts of his life -- and the influence of his artistry -- remain largely unexamined. Now veteran music journalist Charles R. Cross fuses his intimate knowledge of the Seattle music scene with his deep compassion for his subject in this extraordinary story of artistic brilliance and the pain that extinguished it.

Based on more than 400 interviews, four years of research, exclusive access to Cobain's unpublished diaries, and a wealth of documentation, Heavier Than Heaven traces Cobain's life from his early days in a double-wide trailer outside of Aberdeen, Washington, to his rise to fame, success, and the adulation of a generation. Cross reveals the familial turmoil that fueled Cobain's creativity, the generational history that forged his character, and the unusual love story that shaped his relationship with wife Courtney Love. Drawing from medical and police reports, and Cobain's own private writings, Cross also reveals the truth about Cobain's health struggles and his tragic final days.

More than the history of a rock and roll star, Heavier Than Heaven is a portrait of creative genius and the will to turn pain into art.

John Marshall

The short unhappy life of Kurt Donald Cobain now has its worthy biographer. —Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Robert Christgau

. . . a compelling new biography of Cobain . . . —The New Yorker

Chris Nelson

Insightful, painstakingly researched . . . Cross' rendering of Cobain's childhood and family history is fascinating. —The Seattle Weekly

Mark Lindquist

No other Cobain book matches Heavier Than Heaven for research, accuracy, and insider scoops. —The Seattle Times

Jeff Baker

Dozens of books have been written about Cobain and his band . . . Heavier Than Heaven is the best, by far. —Portland Oregonian

USA Today

A powerful portrait.

Biography

A rich personal history of the tormented singer/songwriter . . . a much needed and clearer picture of this unlikely, unwilling rock god.

USA Today

A powerful portrait.

E! Online

A well-researched, well-written piece of rock journalism.

CNN.com

Many treatments have surfaced . . . none has dug as deep or as close to home as Cross' work.

Anthony DeBarros

Definitive . . . Cross untangles the soul of a man. A powerful portrait. —USA Today

New Yorker

A compelling new biography.

Seattle Post Intelligencer

A fascinating read that manages to be respectful . . . and also critical. The short, unhappy life of Kurt Cobain now has its worthy biographer.

Jeff Burlingame

Heavier Than Heaven will likely stand forever as the definitive Kurt Cobain biography. —Aberdeen Daily World

Justin Waite

Shakes up the prevailing conceptions of Cobain . . . A compelling biography. —Biography magazine

Eric Nuzum

. . . this is the first to take an authoritative, journalistic, and scrupulous look at the history of Cobain and his band. —Public Arts

J.D. Considine

Exhaustively researched . . . More riveting and suspenseful than a biography has the right to be. —Blender

Rasmus Holmen

An excellent description of Kurt Cobain's life, all of it's major events, and his part of Nirvana. —Nirvanaclub.com

Publishers Weekly

"And there had never quite been a rock star like Kurt Cobain," Cross eulogizes in this celebrity biography. Unfortunately, Cross, former editor of the Rocket, a Northwestern music and entertainment weekly, never proves his claim. Instead, Cobain's story, culled from more than 400 interviews with friends, family and colleagues and exclusive access to Cobain's unpublished diaries, sounds wholly ordinary, from boilerplate adolescent bitterness about his parents' divorce ("I hate Mom, I hate Dad. Dad hates Mom, Mom hates Dad. It simply makes you want to be so sad") and malt liquor, punk rock-adorned angst to the tawdry details of his drug addiction. "Even in this early stage of his career, Kurt had already begun the process of retelling his own story in a manner that formed a separate self," writes Cross as he carefully dispels some of Cobain's self-made myths, including claims of living under a bridge, "tales... about his constant abuse at the hands of Aberdeen's rednecks" and harboring an aversion to fame. The many unenlightening observations are often painted thick with sensationalism; other times, Cross trawls the bottom for sources whose credibility and relevance are dubious at best. (For instance, he interviews Cobain's drug-addicted ex-babysitter, Cali, and some of her girlfriends, yielding a depressing she-said-he-said of Kurt's final days.) Conspiracy theorists will speculate about the conditions under which Cross gained access to Cobain's private journals. Complete with gossip and meticulous references, the biography will catch the devotees, though, like junk food, it may leave them feeling unnourished. 16 pages b&w photos. (Aug. 15) Forecast: Released on the 10th anniversary ofCome As You Are and with radio giveaways, this book will sell well. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

"I'm going to be a superstar musician, kill myself, and go out in a flame of glory." So spoke 14-year-old Kurt Cobain, who could not possibly have anticipated how prophetic his statement would become. Cobain, as leader of the band Nirvana, almost single-handedly wrestled alternative rock into the mainstream via the group's massive 1991 album, Nevermind. Three years later, Cobain rebelled against the phenomenal fame he had ambitiously sought and, physically and psychologically decimated by heroin addiction and a mysterious stomach ailment, fatally shot himself at age 27. Former editor of Seattle's influential music magazine the Rocket, Cross followed the Nirvana juggernaut from the beginning, and though he nearly bludgeons the reader with tales of Cobain's debauched excesses, one is still drawn to the artist's forceful personality. Cross transcends Christopher Sandford's 1995 Cobain biography, Kurt Cobain (Carroll & Graf, 1996) by conducting over 400 interviews and gaining access not only to the singer's widow, Courtney Love, but also to the musician's private journals, which provide fascinating insights into Cobain's troubled mind. The sordid details of Cobain's addiction and suicide and Cross's occasionally over-the-top dramatics are sometimes more than the reader can stomach, but ultimately this is a carefully crafted and compelling tragedy that serves as a necessary foil to Michael Azerrad's authorized Nirvana biography, Come As You Are (Doubleday, 1993). Lloyd Jansen, Stockton-San Joaquin Cty. P.L., CA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Music journalist Cross ("Nevermind", not reviewed, etc.) treats the short, strange, unhappy life of musician Kurt Cobain with intelligence and an insider's perceptiveness. Terrible though it was, Cobain's suicide by shotgun in 1994 would never be categorized as a surprise. As Cross explains, Cobain had a lifelong affair with the act, indifferently gabbing about it as a teenager, writing and painting pictures of it, putting it in song lyrics, making a run for it in Rome-only to have his girlfriend find him comatose and rush him to a hospital. Cross picks up Cobain's life story on day one and follows it through his dreadful youth: divorced parents, one inept and the other an alcoholic, never any physical or emotional space for him, finally living out of a cardboard box as a high-schooler. It doesn't take much for Cross to convince readers of the psychological pain that Cobain endured and why he might turn to booze, then LSD, marijuana, cough syrup, and heroin. Certainly, fame was no tonic, nor, ultimately, was his marriage to fellow musician Courtney Love, or his daughter Frances. The best, or at least most telling, material here comes from interviews with friends-Cross had access to Cobain's notebooks, but he has the good sense to appreciate that they contain a good amount of posturing-who describe a wildly creative guy who could also be a "world-class whiner," someone who cultivated the grunge look, an anti-star who wanted to know why MTV didn't run his video more often, a nihilist who never could shake his shame and self-loathing. Too many demons were crawling around in his skull to ever let him bask in his artistry or the love of the few people who really cared about him. It's asthough Cobain's life was one long session with a particularly evil hair shirt. A flash of musical brilliance-"beautiful, haunting, disturbing"-suffocated by a life so relentlessly grim you wouldn't wish it on a sworn enemy.

What People Are Saying

David Browne
Written with a journalist's eye for riveting detail and a fan's heartfelt appreciation for Nirvana's music, Charles R. Cross' Heavier Then Heaven stage-dives headfirst into the heart, soul, and torment of one of rock's most galvanizing figures. Revelatory and moving, it's as essential to any rock-history bookshelf as 'Nevermind' is to any CD cabinet.
— (David Browne, author, Dream Brother: The Lives & Music of Jeff & Tim Buckley)

Product Details

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Table of Contents

Read a Sample Chapter

Chapter One

YELLING LOUDLY AT FIRST

ABERDEEN, WASHINGTON
FEBRUARY 1967-DECEMBER 1973

He makes his wants known by yelling loudly at first, then crying if the first technique doesn't work.

—Excerpt from a report by his aunt on the eighteen-month-old Kurt Cobain.

Kurt Donald Cobain was born on the twentieth of February, 1967, in a hospital on a hill overlooking Aberdeen, Washington. His parents lived in neighboring Hoquiam, but it was appropriate that Aberdeen stand as Kurt's birthplace—he would spend three quarters of his life within ten miles of the hospital and would be forever profoundly connected to this landscape.

    Anyone looking out from Grays Harbor Community Hospital that rainy Monday would have seen a land of harsh beauty, where forests, mountains, rivers, and a mighty ocean intersected in a magnificent vista. Tree-covered hills surrounded the intersection of three rivers, which fed into the nearby Pacific Ocean. In the center of it all was Aberdeen, the largest city in Grays Harbor County, with a population of 19,000. Immediately to the west was smaller Hoquiam, where Kurt's parents, Don and Wendy, lived in a tiny bungalow. And south across the Chehalis River was Cosmopolis, where his mother's family, the Fradenburgs, were from. On a day when it wasn't raining—which was a rare day in a region that got over 80 inches of precipitation a year—one could see the nine miles to Montesano, where Kurt's grandfather Leland Cobain grew up. It was a small enough world, with so few degrees of separation that Kurt would eventually become Aberdeen's most famous product.

    The view from the three-story hospital was dominated by the sixth busiest working harbor on the West Coast. There were so many pieces of timber floating in the Chehalis that you could imagine using them to walk across the two-mile mouth. To the east was Aberdeen's downtown, where merchants complained that the constant rumbling of logging trucks scared away shoppers. It was a city at work, and that work almost entirely depended on turning Douglas fir trees from the surrounding hills into commerce. Aberdeen was home to 37 different lumber, pulp, shingle, or saw mills—their smokestacks dwarfed the town's tallest building, which had only seven stories. Directly down the hill from the hospital was the gigantic Rayonier Mill smokestack, the biggest tower of all, which stretched 150 feet toward the heavens and spewed forth an unending celestial cloud of wood-pulp effluence.

    Yet as Aberdeen buzzed with motion, at the time of Kurt's birth its economy was slowly contracting. The county was one of the few in the state with a declining population, as the unemployed tried their luck elsewhere. The timber industry had begun to suffer the consequences of offshore competition and over-logging. The landscape already showed marked signs of such overuse: There were swaths of clear-cut forests outside of town, now simply a reminder of early settlers who had "tried to cut it all," as per the title of a local history book. Unemployment exacted a darker social price on the community in the form of increasing alcoholism, domestic violence, and suicide. There were 27 taverns in 1967, and the downtown core included many abandoned buildings, some of which had been brothels before they were closed in the late fifties. The city was so infamous for whorehouses that in 1952 Look magazine called it "one of the hot spots in America's battle against sin."

    Yet the urban blight of downtown Aberdeen was paired with a closeknit social community where neighbors helped neighbors, parents were involved in schools, and family ties remained strong among a diverse immigrant population. Churches outnumbered taverns, and it was a place, like much of small-town America in the mid-sixties, where kids on bikes were given free rein in their neighborhoods. The entire city would become Kurt's backyard as he grew up.

    Like most first births, Kurt's was a celebrated arrival, both for his parents and for the larger family. He had six aunts and uncles on his mother's side; two uncles on his father's side; and he was the first grandchild for both family trees. These were large families, and when his mother went to print up birth announcements, she used up 50 before she was through the immediate relations. A line in the Aberdeen Daily World's birth column on February 23 noted Kurt's arrival to the rest of the world: "To Mr. and Mrs. Donald Cobain, 2830 1/2 Aberdeen Avenue, Hoquiam, February 20, at Community Hospital, a son."

    Kurt weighed seven pounds, seven and one-half ounces at birth, and his hair and complexion were dark. Within five months, his baby hair would turn blond, and his coloring would turn fair. His father's family had French and Irish roots—they had immigrated from Skey Townland in County Tyrone, Ireland, in 1875—and Kurt inherited his angular chin from this side. From the Fradenburgs on his mother's side—who were German, Irish, and English—Kurt gained rosy cheeks and blond locks. But by far his most striking feature was his remarkable azure eyes; even nurses in the hospital commented on their beauty.

It was the sixties, with a war raging in Vietnam, but apart from the occasional news dispatch, Aberdeen felt more like 1950s America. The day Kurt was born, the Aberdeen Daily World contrasted the big news of an American victory at Quang Ngai City with local reports on the size of the timber harvest and ads from JCPenney, where a Washington's Birthday sale featured $2.48 flannel shirts. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? had received thirteen Academy Award nominations in Los Angeles that afternoon, but the Aberdeen drive-in was playing Girls on the Beach.

    Kurt's 21-year-old father, Don, worked at the Chevron station in Hoquiam as a mechanic. Don was handsome and athletic, but with his flattop haircut and Buddy Holly-style glasses he had a geekiness about him. Kurt's 19-year-old mother, Wendy, in contrast, was a classic beauty who looked and dressed a bit like Marcia Brady. They had met in high school, where Wendy had the nickname "Breeze." The previous June, just weeks after her high-school graduation, Wendy had become pregnant. Don borrowed his father's sedan and invented an excuse so the two could travel to Idaho and marry without parental consent.

    At the time of Kurt's birth the young couple were living in a tiny house in the backyard of another home in Hoquiam. Don worked long hours at the service station while Wendy took care of the baby. Kurt slept in a white wicker bassinet with a bright yellow bow on top. Money was tight, but a few weeks after the birth they managed to scrape up enough to leave the tiny house and move into a larger one at 2830 Aberdeen Avenue. "The rent," remembered Don, "was only an extra five dollars a month, but in those times, five dollars was a lot of money."

    If there was a portent of trouble in the household, it began over finances. Though Don had been appointed "lead man" at the Chevron in early 1968, his salary was only $6,000 a year. Most of their neighbors and friends worked in the timber industry, where jobs were physically demanding—one study described the profession as "more deadly than war"—but with higher wages in return. The Cobains struggled to stay within a budget, yet when it came to Kurt, they made sure he was well-dressed, and even sprang for professional photos. In one series of pictures from this era, Kurt is wearing a white dress shirt, black tie, and a gray suit, looking like Little Lord Fauntleroy—he still has his baby fat and chubby, full cheeks. In another, he wears a matching blue vest and suit top, and a hat more suited to Phillip Marlowe than a year-and-a-half-old boy.

    In May 1968, when Kurt was fifteen months old, Wendy's fourteen-year-old sister Mari wrote a paper about her nephew for her home economics class. "His mother takes care of him most of the time," Mari wrote. "[She] shows her affection by holding him, giving him praise when he deserves it, and by taking part in many of his activities. He responds to his father in that when he sees his father, he smiles, and he likes his dad to hold him. He makes his wants known by yelling loudly at first, then crying if the first technique doesn't work." Mari recorded that his favorite game was peekaboo, his first tooth appeared at eight months, and his first dozen words were, "coco, momma, dadda, ball, toast, bye-bye, hi, baby, me, love, hot dog, and kittie."

    Mari listed his favorite toys as a harmonica, a drum, a basketball, cars, trucks, blocks, a pounding block, a toy TV, and a telephone. Of Kurt's daily routine, she wrote that "his reaction to sleep is that he cries when he is laid down to do so. He is so interested in the family that he doesn't want to leave them." His aunt concluded: "He is a happy, smiling baby and his personality is developing as it is because of the attention and love he is receiving."

    Wendy was a mindful mother, reading books on learning, buying flash cards, and, aided by her brothers and sisters, making sure Kurt got proper care. The entire extended family joined in the celebration of this child, and Kurt flourished with the attention. "I can't even put into words the joy and the life that Kurt brought into our family," remembered Mari. "He was this little human being who was so bubbly. He had charisma even as a baby. He was funny, and he was bright." Kurt was smart enough that when his aunt couldn't figure out how to lower his crib, the one-and-a-half-year-old simply did it himself. Wendy was so enamored of her son's antics, she rented a Super-8 camera and shot movies of him—an expense the family could ill afford. One film shows a happy, smiling little boy cutting his second-year birthday cake and looking like the center of his parents' universe.

    By his second Christmas, Kurt was already showing an interest in music. The Fradenburgs were a musical family—Wendy's older brother Chuck was in a band called the Beachcombers; Mari played guitar; and great-uncle Delbert had a career as an Irish tenor, even appearing in the movie The King of Jazz. When the Cobains visited Cosmopolis, Kurt was fascinated by the family jam sessions. His aunts and uncles recorded him singing the Beatles' "Hey Jude," Arlo Guthrie's "Motorcycle Song," and the theme to "The Monkees" television show. Kurt enjoyed making up his own lyrics, even as a toddler. When he was four, upon his return from a trip to the park with Mari, he sat down at the piano and crafted a crude song about their adventure. "We went to the park, we got candy," went the lyrics. "I was just amazed," recalled Mari. "I should have plugged in the tape recorder—it was probably his first song."

    Not long after he turned two, Kurt created an imaginary friend he called Boddah. His parents eventually became concerned about his attachment to this phantom pal, so when an uncle was sent to Vietnam, Kurt was told that Boddah too had been drafted. But Kurt didn't completely buy this story. When he was three, he was playing with his aunt's tape machine, which had been set to "echo." Kurt heard the echo and asked, "Is that voice talking to me? Boddah? Boddah?"

    In September 1969, when Kurt was two and a half, Don and Wendy bought their first home at 1210 East First Street in Aberdeen. It was a two-story, 1,000-square-foot house with a yard and a garage. They paid $7,950 for it. The 1923-era dwelling was located in a neighborhood occasionally given the derogatory nickname "felony flats." North of the Cobain house was the Wishkah River, which frequently flooded, and to the southeast was the wooded bluff locals called "Think of Me Hill"—at the turn of the century it had sported an advertisement for Think of Me cigars.

    It was a middle-class house in a middle-class neighborhood, which Kurt would later describe as "white trash posing as middle-class." The first floor contained the living room, dining room, kitchen, and Wendy and Don's bedroom. The upstairs had three rooms: a small playroom and two bedrooms, one of which became Kurt's. The other was planned for Kurt's sibling—that month Wendy had learned she was pregnant again.

    Kurt was three when his sister Kimberly was born. She looked, even as an infant, remarkably like her brother, with the same mesmerizing blue eyes and light blond hair. When Kimberly was brought home from the hospital, Kurt insisted on carrying her into the house. "He loved her so much," remembered his father. "And at first they were darling together." Their three-year age difference was ideal because her care became one of his main topics of conversation. This marked the beginning of a personality trait that would stick with Kurt for the rest of his life—he was sensitive to the needs and pains of others, at times overly so.

    Having two children changed the dynamic of the Cobain household, and what little leisure time they had was taken up by visits with family or Don's interest in intramural sports. Don was in a basketball league in winter and played on a baseball team in summer, and much of their social life involved going to games or post-game events. Through sports, the Cobains met and befriended Rod and Dres Herling. "They were good family people, and they did lots of things with their kids," Rod Herling recalled. Compared with other Americans going through the sixties, they were also notably square: At the time no one in their social circle smoked pot, and Don and Wendy rarely drank.

    One summer evening the Herlings were at the Cobains' playing cards, when Don came into the living room and announced, "I have a rat." Rats were common in Aberdeen because of the low elevation and abundance of water. Don began to fashion a crude spear by attaching a butcher knife to a broom handle. This drew the interest of five-year-old Kurt, who followed his father to the garage, where the rodent was in a trash can. Don told Kurt to stand back, but this was impossible for such a curious child and the boy kept inching closer until he was holding his father's pant leg. The plan was for Rod Herling to lift the lid of the can, whereupon Don would use his spear to stab the rat. Herling lifted, Don threw the broomstick but missed the rat, and the spear stuck into the floor. As Don tried in vain to pull the broom out, the rat—at a calm and bemused pace—crawled up the broomstick, scurried over Don's shoulder and down to the ground, and ran over Kurt's feet as he exited the garage. It happened in a split second, but the combination of the look on Don's face and the size of Kurt's eyes made everyone howl with laughter. They laughed for hours over this incident, and it would become a piece of family folklore: "Hey, do you remember that time Dad tried to spear the rat?" No one laughed harder than Kurt, but as a five-year-old he laughed at everything. It was a beautiful laugh, like the sound of a baby being tickled, and it was a constant refrain.

In September 1972, Kurt began kindergarten at Robert Gray Elementary, three blocks north of his house. Wendy walked him to school the first day, but after that he was on his own; the neighborhood around First Street had become his tuff. He was well-known to his teachers as a precocious, inquisitive pupil with a Snoopy lunchbox. On his report card that year his teacher wrote "real good student." He was not shy. When a bear cub was brought in for show-and-tell, Kurt was one of the only kids who posed with it for photos.

    The subject he excelled in the most was art. At the age of five it was already clear he had exceptional artistic skills: He was creating paintings that looked realistic. Tony Hirschman met Kurt in kindergarten and was impressed by his classmate's ability: "He could draw anything. Once we were looking at pictures of werewolves, and he drew one that looked just like the photo." A series Kurt did that year depicted Aquaman, the Creature From the Black Lagoon, Mickey Mouse, and Pluto. Every holiday or birthday his family gave him supplies, and his room began to take on the appearance of an art studio.

    Kurt was encouraged in art by his paternal grandmother, Iris Cobain. She was a collector of Norman Rockwell memorabilia in the form of in the middle, not a single strand out of place. With her perfect posture and the manner in which her wrists hang over the arms of the chair, she looks like a queen.

    Three-year-old Kim sits on her mom's lap. Dressed in a long, white dress with black patent leather shoes, she appears as a miniature version of her mother. She is staring directly at the camera and has the appearance of a child who might start crying at any moment.

    Don stands behind the chair, close enough to be in the picture but distracted. His shoulders are slightly stooped and he wears more of a bemused look than a legitimate smile. He is wearing a light purple long-sleeved shirt with a four-inch collar and a gray vest—it's an outfit that one could imagine Steve Martin or Dan Aykroyd donning for their "wild and crazy guys" skit on "Saturday Night Live." He has a far-off look in his eyes, as if he is wondering just why he has been dragged down to the photo studio when he could be playing ball.

    Kurt stands off to the left, in front of his father, a foot or two away from the chair. He's wearing two-tone, striped blue pants with a matching vest and a fire-truck red long-sleeved shirt a bit too big for him, the sleeves partially covering his hands. As the true entertainer in the family, he is not only smiling, but he's laughing. He looks notably happy—a little boy having fun on a Saturday with his family.

    It is a remarkably good-looking family, and the outward appearances suggest an all-American pedigree—clean hair, white teeth, and well-pressed clothes so stylized they could have been ripped out of an early seventies Sears catalog. Yet a closer look reveals a dynamic that even to the photographer must have been painfully obvious: It's a picture of a family, but not a picture of a marriage. Don and Wendy aren't touching, and there is no suggestion of affection between them; it is as if they're not even in the same frame. With Kurt standing in front of Don, and Kim sitting on Wendy's lap, one could easily take a pair of scissors and sever the photograph—and the family—down the middle. You'd be left with two separate families, each with one adult and one child, each gender specific—the Victorian dresses on one side, and the boys with wide collars on the other.

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Excerpted from heavier than heaven by CHARLES R. CROSS. Copyright © 2001 by Charles R. Cross. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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