Serving the Servants: A review of Charles R. Cross's _Heavier Than Heaven_

When Kurt Cobain took his life at the peak of Nirvana’s popularity in April 1994, critics were quick to draw comparisons between his suicide and the accidental death of Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious. Superficial parallels were quickly noticed—Cobain and his loudmouthed peroxided wife, Hole front-woman Courtney Love, were habitual heroin users; Vicious and his notorious bleached-blonde companion, Nancy Spungen, were also well-known junkies. Cobain and his wife even checked into hotels under Vicious’ real name, John Ritchie. Still, the most common association made between the two musicians was their inability to deal with fame—Vicious and Cobain were both characterized as “lost souls” who were unable to reconcile their love of their respective musical genres with the commercial compromise that came with it; falling into addiction as a result, and suffering ultimate untimely deaths. Cobain ended his suicide note with words of disillusionment:

I haven’t felt the excitement of listening to as well as creating music along with reading and writing for too many years now…Sometimes I feel as if I should have a punch in time clock before I walk out on stage…I don’t have the passion anymore and so remember, it’s better to burn out than to fade away.

Although Cobain has typically been portrayed by the media as a deeply committed musician who became swept up and ultimately overwhelmed by the accidental mass appeal of his art, the newest biography of the Nirvana frontman attempts to convince the reader otherwise. Heavier than Heaven (Hyperion, 381 pp., $24.95), by former Seattle music journalist Charles Cross, details the short and tumultuous life of a man who had always dreamed of being a Rock Star, drawing on evidence from over four years of research, 400 interviews and love letters and entries from Cobain’s private journals.

What emerges definitively is a portrait of a deeply disturbed, incredibly talented individual who deliberately planned every step of his musical career—a far cry from the ethos of the musical genre of which he was emblematic and more distant still from the sad tale of Vicious, a “tough street kid” who truly saw punk rock as a cathartic respite from his unhappy life.

The grunge movement originated in Seattle when it was still a drab, frustrated port city and not a hotbed of technological advancement. Spawned from the do-it-yourself indie scene—dominated at the time by riot grrls, anti-establishment students and angry white Gen-Xers—grunge was solidified as a genre by dirty slackers Mudhoney and the magnetic caterwaul of Soundgarden. In interviews, Cobain presented himself as the posterboy for grunge: Filthy, seemingly apathetic, and disillusioned with society, using music as a respite untainted by society’s stamp of approval. Cobain would claim in interviews that he traded valuable antique guns for his first guitar, that his lyrics were not about anything in particular and that he despised attention from the media. Yet in truth, his demeanor was contrived to maximize shock—not unlike the Sex Pistols’ deliberate attempts a decade and a half before to shock and offend the masses by cursing on national television and donning Nazi armbands and swastika t-shirts. In reality, Cobain re-invented and exaggerated many of his childhood memories, often crafting potential answers to interview questions in his journals. His music and lyrics were intensely personal and autiobiographical, always facing multiple revisions. And, in fact, Cobain was known to complain frequently when he felt that Nirvana was receiving inadequate exposure on MTV.

Kurt Cobain and Nirvana were to the Olympia indie-cum-grunge scene what Malcolm McLaren and the Sex Pistols were to punk rock—what began as an esoteric musical offshoot of political turmoil (in the case of punk, economic and social turmoil in late-1970’s Britain; in the case of indie, rebellion against traditional gender roles in music and disdain towards the mass marketing of an art form) was deliberately sold as bandwagon rebellion. As Bart Simpson said while the Smashing Pumpkins played in front of him at Lollapalooza, “making teenagers depressed is like shooting fish in a barrel,” and through deliberate and contrived publicity, the UK-banned Never Mind the Bollocks became a No. 1 album, and Nirvana moved so-called “alternative” music into the oxymoronic mainstream—their major-label debut, Nevermind, sold over eight million copies.

Despite the tenets of alienation and disillusionment upon which punk and grunge were founded, the act of selling rebellion to the masses became dependent upon making music with far-reaching commercial appeal. Although this required the purveyors of such music to all but abandon the ethos of rebellion against the status quo, this was not the case for the fans. And here lies the decline of Vicious, who began as a lower-class Pistols devotee who identified with the anger and frustration inherent in punk rock. Although Vicious was a prototypical fan of punk rock, he did not mesh well as bassist for the band. Bandmates Steve Jones, Paul Cook and Johnny Rotten had respective fantasies of rock and roll stardom—Jones was even an admitted fan of the Top 40 who often played “Stairway to Heaven” on his guitar—and founded the band under Malcolm McLaren’s direction with the explicit knowledge that the Pistols’ true purpose was to drum up publicity for the King’s Road clothing store McLaren co-owned with Vivienne Westwood. Rotten’s claim that “only the fake survive” was used to incite a reaction among his fans, but in truth his statement was autobiographical. Vicious was unable to reconcile the sell-out aspect of superstardom with his belief in the tenets of punk rock, and died of a heroin overdose after the breakup of the band.

Cross, through repeated, systematic analysis of his subject’s words and actions throughout his life, proves that Kurt Cobain was truly different from Sid Vicious—that despite his claims at the end that he could not handle fame, what Cobain truly despised was the increasing lack of control over his art and his life that accompanied Nirvana’s rise to superstardom.

The book begins with a description of Cobain’s first brush with death—an accidentally-on-purpose heroin overdose less than seven hours after Nirvana’s first performance on Saturday Night Live in 1992—an honor previously unknown to grunge bands. Cross writes that

Growing up in a small town in southwestern Washington state, Kurt had never missed an episode of “Saturday Night Live,” and had bragged to his friends in junior high school that one day he’d be a star.

Yet upon the day of his performance Cobain “acted as if it were an inconvenience to get out of bed,” making the calculated decision to refuse the limo ride to NBC and wearing the same torn, unwashed outfit onstage from the previous two days. Cobain’s overdose followed an argument with NBC officials over what he considered to be a compromise of his plans—the band were required to play “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” the hit single they were sick of playing. Each subsequent overdose/suicide attempt that Cross presents follows a description of conflict between Cobain and other parties over control of his life and music—Cobain’s 1994 overdose followed arguments with his wife about curtailing his drug use while he was on a European tour he despised and Cobain’s suicide immediately followed his escape from a rehab center he was forced to enter by his friends and family. Through this repeated juxtaposition of struggle for personal control with self-harm, Cross paints a picture of a man would do anything to retain his control as a self-made Rock Star—even take his own life. And although it was true that Cobain truly wished to “burn out” rather “than to fade away,” his motivations for doing so were based upon self-retention of permanent superstar status, not upon disillusionment with selling out and abandoning grunge’s ethos of private alienation.

Heavier Than Heaven sets forth the chronology of a troubled man with escapist fantasies of fame. Beginning with a description of Cobain’s childhood, interrupted by his parents’ traumatic divorce and his subsequent attempts to attract the attention of his self-absorbed mother and father, Cross provides a possible psychological explanation for Cobain’s dreams of stardom and desire for autonomy. As a teenager, this desire for attention manifested itself as brushes with the law and repeated claims to friends that “I’m going to be a superstar musician, kill myself and go out in a flame of glory.” Still, what is most telling of Cobain’s desire for complete control was his approach to making music. As a child, Cobain insisted on taking guitar lessons and practiced diligently despite his later rehearsed claims to journalists that he disliked practicing and authority. Upon Cobain’s insistence, Nirvana went thorough a bevy of drummers before accepting the talented Dave Grohl as a permanent member, but was talking of firing Grohl towards the end of the band’s existence as the drummer tried to incorporate songs he had written into Nirvana’s sets. And despite the apathetic grunge prototype which Cobain attempted to purvey to his fans, he actively solicited labels, lawyers and radio stations, insisting on moving Nirvana to a major label when he felt that the band’s original label, Sub Pop, was unable to give the band enough commercial publicity. Cross details every plot in Nirvana’s ascension to fame and its careful planning on the part of Cobain—from biographical inventions to his songwriting, even encompassing the drug addition for which the musician was infamous.

Cobain wrote in his journal that he “chose” to become a heroin addict—an assertion unheard of amongst most junkies. Cross recounts Cobain’s mentions to friends about wishing to regularly use—not just try—heroin. Wishing to have control over his body and the stomach troubles that plagued him, Cobain felt that the drug would curb his physical suffering. The central theme of Heavier—Cobain’s desire for control—is thus recapitulated by Cross’s harrowing anecdotes regarding of Cobain’s continuous struggle with heroin and his attempts to control his intake of the drug to his exact liking.

Heavier Than Heaven provides a fascinating, honest account of a man whose life has often been shrouded by awe and urban myth. Although at times Cross fails to see Cobain as a mere mortal, lauding the inner meaning and brilliance of lyrics, childhood doodles and teenage graffiti that are not extraordinary in any way, Cross separates himself from other Nirvana biographers in that he is unafraid to prove that despite his obvious musical talent, Cobain was a self-interested hypocrite who was drastically different from how he was portrayed by other journalists and from how he wished to present himself. Through interesting, relevant anecdotes gleaned from formidable amounts of research, Heavier reiterates the omnipresent commercial theme of selling out, exposing Kurt Cobain not as a misguided follower like Vicious, but as a contradictory control freak who sacrificed his life in order ensure the perpetuation of his status as a musical legend. Cross draws on an inevitable truth about major-label music that Vicious could not fathom and that Cobain knew from the start—that no music can become popular without some degree of commercial compromise.