He Wrote the First Nirvana Bio. 30 Years Later, He Has a Few Changes

For a music journalist in the Nineties, there could have been no better phone call. Not long after Michael Azerrad hung out with Kurt Cobain for Nirvana’s first Rolling Stone cover story, Courtney Love reached out to ask him if he wanted to write a book about Nirvana. He agreed, and after nine months of breakneck work, he managed to get Come As You Are out in 1993, just in time to coincide with Nirvana’s Nevermind follow-up, In Utero.

Thirty years later, Azerrad (also the author of the beloved indie/punk history Our Band Could Be Your Life) has a new version of his Nirvana book out. The Amplified Come As You Are more than doubles the length of the original edition with new material from Azerrad’s interviews, fact-checking, and fresh revelations.

Azerrad looked back on the book, the making of In Utero (which is also out in a new 30th anniversary edition), and more in an interview that also appears in a recent episode of Rolling Stone Music Now.

(To hear the full interview, go here for the podcast provider of your choice, listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just press play above.)

 As a literary exercise, the conversation with yourself in this book is really interesting.
That was inspired by a book by the great Robert Greenfield, who wrote for Rolling Stone back in the early Seventies. He wrote a book about the Rolling Stones called Ain’t It Time We Said Goodbye. He conglomerated a bunch of his Rolling Stone pieces into a book, and then he inserted a little bit of a dialogue between his younger self and his older self. It’s not as in-depth as my annotations are, but that kind of gave me the permission to do it. I figured if the great Robert Greenfield did this, I could too.

There’s been a lot of books about Nirvana, but yours was first, which made things harder in some ways. That meant you had to lay down a lot of this story for the very first time.
I did have the advantage of talking to all the people in the band, which subsequently no one else did. That was a coup. That was a very helpful thing for constructing this story. But yeah, I didn’t have the benefit of years and years of articles about the band and many other interviews and several other books and just the power of the internet to search for YouTube clips and all those things when I was writing the original Come As You Are.

The downside of that was I really depended on the people telling me these stories to tell the truth, and sometimes they did not always do that. And I had to write the book in nine months, so I didn’t have time to fact-check a lot of stuff, and that’s partially what inspired this new edition.

Kurt supposedly wanted to dispel all the myths when he talked to you, but actually in many cases, he was trying to add to them.
He disavowed the idea that he followed music journalism. But I could tell from our conversations and just the way he spoke about rock music that he’d read quite a bit of music journalism. He understood that all the great artists constructed myths about themselves that kind of enhanced their image, or in today’s parlance, their brand. Kurt was really aware of that, and he put it in action with me, for sure. It was only 30 years later that I got a chance to debunk some of it.

For example, he did not ever live under a bridge. 
That’s actually what inspired this whole thing. I always wanted to say something about how I got bamboozled by that, and that’s how I started writing the book. I wrote something about that, not thinking about where it would appear. I figured I would just write something about how he fooled me with the bridge thing and the nature of the musician/interviewer dynamic. And I figured I’d put it on my blog and then tweet out the link and maybe a few people would see it. But then I decided, oh, well, maybe I’ll just see if there’s anything else in the book I want to say something about. So I went to page one, and there was something on page one. “Oh, I really have to say something about this.” And then two years later I’d gone through the entire book. 

Another thing I think that we learned for the first time in your new edition of the book is that there were these two British writers who were working on a Nirvana book that caused a lot of upset in the Nirvana camp. In your first edition, Kurt admitted to calling them up and basically threatening their lives. And now we learn that Come As You Are started as an attempt by Kurt and Courtney Love to preempt that book.
When Courtney called me about this, I said, “Oh, that’s great. But can I talk to Kurt about this?” And she hands the phone to Kurt. I had already done a Rolling Stone cover story about Nirvana, focusing on Kurt. We already were familiar with each other. I said, “Hey, what’s up, what’s the story with this book?” And he told me, “We want you to write a biography of Nirvana.” And I said, “It can’t be authorized.” He knew exactly what authorized meant, that the subject has basically final cut over the book. And he said, “No way. That would be too Guns N’ Roses.” He said, “Just tell the truth, and that would be better than anything else that’s been written about us.” So I took that as my marching orders. That’s how it started. 

Especially in this enhanced version, you have a really unvarnished take on In Utero. I’m not sure how many people realize how many of the best songs on In Utero were written way beforehand.
Some of the best songs on In Utero were older songs written as early as 1990, I think. And some of the newer ones were just jammed into existence, or started with a drum beat by Dave, and Kurt thought, we can kind of trick this out and make it into a song. Kurt was fighting a heroin addiction. He was also a new father. They’d moved house a couple of times. They were touring. There was all that ruckus about the Vanity Fair story [that accused Courtney Love of using heroin while pregnant]. There was a lot of stuff distracting him from being able to sit down and focus and write songs. It wasn’t just drugs, although that was certainly a major factor.

“Scentless Apprentice” is an interesting case because Dave Grohl wrote the guitar riff as well as playing the drums. You highlight the fact that Kurt felt the need to insult the riff, which does suggest a little bit of insecurity about the fact that he had used something Dave came up with.
He said, “I was thinking this is kind of boneheaded, and we worked on it, and it turned out great.” I just thought that was a little bit condescending, frankly. 

You mention that Kurt said in a sing-song voice that “Dave is the most well-adjusted boy I know.” It feels like there’s sort of a mix of condescension and perhaps even envy in that.
I think Kurt partly was mocking Dave for being, you know, fairly together and normal. He’s a popular, well-adjusted guy, he really is. I think partly Kurt was making fun of that because he wasn’t a freak like Kurt. And I think Kurt was a little bit jealous of Dave because Dave did have his act together.

Using “Serve the Servants” as an album opener feels like an example of Kurt’s brilliance and savviness — he knew how apropos and quotable “teenage angst has paid off well, now I’m bored and old” would be as the first thing you hear on this particular album.
He thought a lot about these things. He may have worn torn jeans and not washed his hair very often, but he was very meticulous as an artist. And that’s a really great example. The very beginning moments of In Utero are Dave clicking his sticks to cue in the rest of the band to start the song. That’s something that’s usually cut out of a professional recording, but they left it in as a very clear signifier that this was something raw and real. And then that huge, dissonant, gorgeous, ugly guitar chord that begins the song. It’s so beautiful. That’s a mission statement right there. And that all happens in the space of, like, five seconds. You already know what the whole record’s gonna be like just from that.  

You also solve the mystery in the new book of what the chorus line means.
It refers to feeling obligated to do whatever music-industry types asked or forced them to do,

“Dumb,” which is a great, catchy song, was written all the way back during the summer of 1990.
I got the sense that they didn’t want to include songs like that on Nevermind because especially Kurt was so acutely self-conscious of appearing to sell out for their major-label debut. Instead of “Dumb,” they would have, like, “Territorial Pissings” to broadcast their hardness and their lack of capitulation to the major-label ogre.

“Very Ape” apparently owes something to a band from Argentina.
Yeah, there’s a band called Los Brujos who opened for Nirvana at a huge stadium show in Argentina in 1993. They had a big hit with a song called “Kanishka.” And if you listen to “Kanishka” and then listen to “Very Ape,” I think you’ll hear perhaps some similarities. But again, I think Kurt took a very basic idea and embroidered it and made it into something completely different, though it is one of the lesser songs on In Utero.

 But it’s got some pretty interesting lines in it. He calls himself “the king of illiterature.” Kurt was extremely self-conscious about not being educated and cultured. He first got a taste of taking it to the next level by moving to Olympia, Washington and hanging out with all these affluent, cultured kids from the Evergreen State College. And he realized he was really curious and he wanted to leave the provincialism of his life in Aberdeen behind and become a more cultured, artistic person. Those kids taught him a lot. Then soon Courtney, who’s another extremely cultured person, taught him a lot. And the people in Sonic Youth taught him a lot.

“Tourette’s,” appropriately for the song title, doesn’t have real lyrics.
Kurt was obsessed with psychological and neurological disorders. He claimed he had narcolepsy and manic depression. I don’t think he thought he had Tourette’s, but that was maybe sort of a fantasy of him just losing his mind and being someone out on the street who stands on a corner and wears shaggy, shabby clothes. He was caricaturing the idea that he was being driven to a point where he would just swear uncontrollably. 

As honest as he was with you in these interviews, he ducked your question about the inspiration for  “All Apologies.”
In writing this book, I learned the difference between honest and candid. Honest means you’re telling the truth and candid means you’re saying stuff that’s pretty intense, but may or may not be true. I think Kurt was more candid than honest sometimes.

You write that it was a breakup song in a version from 1990 and then was seemingly updated due to there being a lot going on in his life.
I do speculate about that song in The Amplified Come As You Are, where I did not in the original. When he sings, “aqua seafoam shame,” maybe it’s a reference to being in a hospital with those bland aqua/seafoam-colored walls, and he’s feeling shame because he’s there due to his drug habit. I may be reading too much into that, but it makes sense to me.

There were reports at the time that Nirvana’s label and management were forcing them to remix Steve Albini’s original mixes of In Utero, but you personally saw Krist Novoselic’s dissatisfaction with the mix — which helped lead to the band seeking out R.E.M. producer Scott Litt to remix a few songs.
Krist was driving me out to Kurt’s house, where I was supposed to give him a Leadbelly biography, and then on the drive back, Krist put the tape of the freshly mixed In Utero in his car stereo, and listened through it for the first time in his car, as opposed to the studio. He was listening to it, and I remember distinctly, he said during “All Apologies” that the bass could sound more musical.

In the original mix, the bass sounded a little bit more like a tuned bass drum, like more thump-y. And then a couple other songs he said, “I think the vocals could be louder.” And those turned out to be the songs that they raised the vocals on. This all happened before anyone else heard the album. So I think that the ensuing brouhaha was just a bunch of BS as far as I can tell. 

It became a national story because of the power of the idea of selling out in the Nineties. Now you complain that someone is selling out and no one knows what the heck you’re talking about. But in 1993, that was a huge deal for someone who had championed independence and underground values to appear to cave to the major-label Man. So it was a really big deal. People thought, “Oh, we’re catching the world’s biggest band out on a major hypocrisy.”

Yeah, the amount of psychological torment Kurt and others put themselves through over that stuff is not to be underestimated.
In that moment, it was everything. Kurt really wanted to be accepted by the indie nation. And even at the height of his fame and success, he was really insecure about being exiled by them. Some of his friends in Olympia started the label Kill Rock Stars — and he was a rock star. He was acutely conscious of what they thought. He wrote “Fugazi” on the toes of his sneakers. He wrote the name of the head of Matador Records, Gerard Cosloy, on his bedroom wall. He was very aware of these people and their arbiter-like status, and he wanted to make sure that he was accepted by them and not rejected because he had become so famous and sold so many records. That he was selling lots of records was antithetical to the community that he came out of and still worshipped. It was a really difficult thing for him to deal with.

To your point, you write in the book that there were two people who had an advance cassette of In Utero — you and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth. It’s almost like he made In Utero in part so that he could present it proudly to Thurston Moore and say, “See what a noisy album we made?”
Yes, Thurston Moore and Sonic Youth in general being more of those arbiters I mentioned. I think that record was made for his community. The idea being that maybe he could turn millions of minds to a new mindset.

Kurt apparently told Michael Stipe he wanted to make an album that was more like Automatic for the People, maybe even working with Michael himself. Where do you think his music would’ve gone had he lived longer?
It’s a parlor game, really, to speculate about what he would have done. But just using history as a guide, either you’re like the Ramones who basically followed a pretty specific template and did quite well by it — or you get a band like R.E.M., who started out as guitar, bass, and drums, and eventually became quite sophisticated and even baroque. I would pay close attention to what Michael Stipe said. I bet he and Kurt could have come up with something much more subtle than anything that Nirvana had previously done. But it’s hard to say. 

To really progress, Kurt might have had to get over his aversion to craft.
He did work somewhat on instinct. He would often use chords that didn’t belong technically in the key of the song. I shouldn’t presume to say whether he knew he was breaking the rules or not, but he certainly did come up with some genius moves like that. Maybe he would have found an arranger, some sort of collaborator who could help walk him down a new musical path. I don’t know. 

When you wrote the original book, did you have a sense of Dave either starting to be a greater creative force in the band, or maybe even of a guy who has some talents that can’t be contained by Nirvana?
There’s a lot of instances of Dave saying that he was a little frustrated about being boxed in as just the drummer. And, as we know, he’d already written and recorded and sung his own album. He was certainly capable of being a front person, even just temperamentally. But he also said he was in awe of Kurt’s songs and that he felt it was best that he keep his own songs to himself. For someone as alpha-male and charismatic and completely talented as Dave, I could see that would be frustrating after a while. And that’s only natural. Completely understandable and also borne out to a completely astonishing degree by what actually happened.

There’s that famous quote Dave gave, where he said being the drummer in Nirvana is like being the kid who masturbated in the school bathroom. That’s all you’ll ever be known for. I think he was dropping hints right and left, consciously or not. But I think talent and ambition and charisma like that would not have lasted very long just sitting behind the drummer’s chair. He was not satisfied just being the drummer, and history has vindicated that feeling completely.