Michael Azerrad Amplifies His Nirvana Book

I’ve always thought of Michael Azerrad’s Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana (first published in October 1993) as equivalent to Hunter Davies’ The Beatles.

Like Davies, Azerrad spoke to all the key figures in the band’s story, including the band members, which in this case were Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl. He also, like Davies, wrote it while the band was still together, the story still unfolding. This gives it an immediacy and a freshness that other books on both bands don’t have; they were written without the benefit of hindsight.

Until now. As with so many creative ventures, Azerrad used the downtime during the pandemic to revisit his work and comment on it, expanding what was initially a 342-page tome to the 609-page updated edition, renamed The Amplified Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana (pet peeve; there’s still not an index). It’s akin to having a DVD commentary track for a favorite film, an analogy Azerrad agrees with. He not only addresses errors in the original text, he also covers the process involved in writing a biography of living subjects, and the compromises involved, including deciding what to use and what to hold back. It’s a 30th anniversary that coincides with the release of Nirvana’s third album, In Utero, with its own expanded edition of the album also released this month.

Azerrad had previously done a story on Nirvana for Rolling Stone in April 1992. Seven months later, a phone call from Cobain’s wife, Courtney Love, led to his getting a “once in a lifetime” opportunity to write the band’s biography. The Amplified Come As You Are reveals what a wild ride that turned out to be.

 

I wanted to go back to the first Rolling Stone story you did. How did that come about?

I was assigned it. I was one of the one or two alternative rock people at Rolling Stone at the time. Another one was Chris Mundy, and he did a really great feature on Nirvana a few months earlier. I guess they figured it was my turn.

 

What kind of feedback did you get when it finally ran? Actually, you did two stories because you had the Nirvana piece and you also did a general one about Seattle.

I got great feedback. Rolling Stone after that made me a contributing editor.

So then fast forward to November 1992. Courtney Love calls you and says “Hey, would you like to write a Nirvana biography?” And you say, “Yes.” But I wondered if there was some hesitancy on your part about it, because since your Rolling Stone piece there had been more drug rumors about Kurt, there was the controversy about [Courtney and Kurt’s daughter] Frances’s birth, you’re there at the band’s Reading performance in August and people are wondering if the band is even going to stay together. So I wondered if there was part of you that thought, “Yeah, I’d like to do this, but what am I letting myself in for?”

No, I didn’t think about that at all. I just thought, I have a chance to write a book about a band that is really tapping into the zeitgeist. It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity. I’ve got to do it.

 

So this is November 1992 and your deadline was April 1993. How did you manage to do that in six months? I don’t think I could have done the transcription in that amount of time.

Oh, yeah, I know. The day I turned in the manuscript, I had lunch with my dad and he took a picture of me. And I still can’t look at that picture because I’m just so pale and sickly looking. It’s really painful. But I mean, honestly, that’s all I did, from on your mark, get set, go! to turning it in was either flying to Seattle, doing interviews, or transcribing and writing. That’s really literally all I did during my waking hours. And that’s the kind of thing I guess you can do when you’re 30 years old.

 

What kind of sense did you have about the state of the band when you finally started working on the book? I mean, just a few months before, people had been thinking they’d break up.

Well, I thought the breakup rumors were a joke. I thought that was just a bunch of English music press hype, so I didn’t really pay much attention to it. And again; we all have the high power of hindsight. But at the time, the band was putting on a good, brave face and everyone seemed excited about the future. So I went with that. And sure enough, that was correct. The band did stay together and make another album.

 

What are the challenges of working on something when the story is still happening? Were you thinking “Gosh, how am I going to end this? How can I end this when there’s going to be more stuff happening?”

Again, honestly, I wasn’t thinking about that. I just thought, well, I’ve got a chance to write a book about Nirvana. I’m just going to dive into it. It’s like that Road Runner and Coyote cartoon where the Coyote chases the Road Runner and he goes off the cliff and he’s still walking even though he’s over the cliff because he doesn’t realize. And that’s kind of what I was doing. I was able to walk because I didn’t realize that there was no ground under me. And you could say maybe I crashed at some point, but I don’t think so. I just put my head down and did it. I didn’t really think too much about it. And also, a bulk of the book is what happened before I started the interviews. And we have the benefit of hindsight about all the drama that happened after that. But in late ’92, early ’93, we didn’t know that. 

I certainly didn’t know what was to come. So all I did was, I just wanted to tell the band’s origin story and show that they were ordinary people doing extraordinary things. Which I think taps into the whole indie ethos that they came out of, which was that ordinary people can do great art and especially people from places that are not Los Angeles or New York. And they embodied that. And that’s what I really wanted to portray. It’s like, here’s these guys, two of them anyway, from a pretty out of the way semi-rural place, making music that changed the face of rock music. And yeah, I wanted to portray their lives. So again, there was so much history to cover even before the present moment, so I wasn’t worried about that. 

They really they embodied that egalitarian indie rock mindset and, and took it to the highest heights. But I wanted to emphasize that they were actual real people. And not, you know, rock and roll space aliens.

I remember Kurt’s saying in interviews at the time In Utero was released that the songs weren’t really based on his personal life. But when you listened to the album it seemed obvious that a lot of it was personal, especially if you knew what had transpired over the previous year.

Yes, exactly. And I get into that with a lot of the songs on In Utero in the new book. There’s so many connections to his personal life, but he kind of smudges them over by introducing ostensibly unrelated imagery or ideas in the same song. But if you can pull out various lines or couplets, clearly, that’s about his own life. And songwriters do that a lot. They put in personal things and then kind of smudge it over either with something unrelated or they speak in very vague terms. And that’s how they express themselves without giving away too much.

 

People do that with poetry, too. It’s like it’s a starting point that you jump off from; it’s the initial inspiration. But with Kurt, it seemed like he was just denying it was even the initial inspiration to begin with.

Yeah, well, he was trying to protect himself. He was very aware that everything he said and sang was being rigorously dissected. And he tried to insulate himself from that. I mean, I think he was enough of a student of music journalism to know that no one was going to believe what he said, but he at least gave it a shot.

 

How did you decide to take this approach you did with the Amplified version? I thought of what other writers have done. For the Hunter Davies Beatles biography, he has extended introductions and epilogues. Philip Norman basically rewrote Shout! The Beatles in Their Generation, and Jerry Hopkins did, I guess I’d call it a companion to No One Here Gets Out Alive, a book called The Lizard King: The Essential Jim Morrison that has various essays. So obviously there’s a number of ways to approach this kind of thing. 

To begin with, when I was a kid, I was a huge fan of The Annotated Alice, which is annotations by the great Scientific American writer Martin Gardner. Gosh, I love that book. And then a little later, I read The Annotated Walden [annotated by Philip Van Doren Stern]; love that book. So enlightening. And then I read The Annotated Lolita by Alfred Appel, Jr.. Also totally brilliant, gave me new insights into a book that I thought I knew pretty well. And then a few years ago I came across a book called Ain’t It Time We Said Goodbye by the great Rolling Stone music journalist Robert Greenfield. He cobbled together a bunch of writing he did about the Rolling Stones tour after Sticky Fingers; he took his original writing, then he interjected commentary by his sixty-something year old self that provided some background on how he got the story and what was actually happening at the time, what he left out, what he regretted saying or not saying. And again, another seed was planted. 

But then at the very beginning of the pandemic, I had always meant to write a little bit about some mistakes I made in the original book. And so I wrote a little thing and I thought, “I’ll just put it in my blog and whoever reads it will read it.” And then I thought, “I wonder if there’s other stuff I could say about what’s in this book?” So I flipped to page one and sure enough, “Oh yeah. I’ve got plenty to say about this.” So I wrote that down and then I flipped the page; “Oh yeah, got plenty to say about this.” And then two years later, I’d gone through the whole book. So while everybody else was perfecting their sourdough recipe or learning Italian, I was annotating my 30 year old book.

 

You write that you wanted to tell the truth about things, but you also say held things back and didn’t put everything in. So how did you reconcile all that as you’re working on the book?

Because I was a Nirvana fan, and the book is called Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana. And rather than get into deep, dark rabbit holes of Kurt and Courtney drama, I just wanted to write about the band. And I wrote about the drama insofar as it applied to the band story and why they made the music they did, and anything else I just put off to the side because when you have a very limited amount of time to write a book, you give yourself a very specific focus. And mine was to write a book by and for people who were fans of Nirvana rather than people who were looking for gossip about Kurt and Courtney.

 

You say in the new commentary you were surprised at how open people were, especially about things like drug use. Do you think maybe there was an element of people trying to send Kurt a message, to give him a wake up call?

I think one reason that they were so candid is that I think maybe they had trouble communicating that stuff directly to Kurt. And rock history is filled with alienated bandmates who communicate with each other through the press; that’s pretty classic. You’d have to ask Krist and Dave, but it’s my guess that that’s what they were doing.

 

I wasn’t just thinking about Krist and Dave, but also the other people you interviewed; friends, family, girlfriends.

Oh, well, yeah, same thing. I mean the people I interviewed knew and often loved Kurt and they were very concerned about his well-being. But again, I can’t speak to their motives because I’m not them.

 

Why do you think Kurt bonded so well with you and kept talking to you for months after the book was finished? It almost seems like he made you kind of a therapist. 

Yeah. When we first met, we just connected. And I want to stress this so much; I don’t think I was particularly unique about connecting with Kurt. I think that was part of his genius, that he was a really relatable person and he could convey that in music. That was one of his great gifts. We just had a lot in common. And I like to think I’m a good listener. Apparently, he thought I was a good listener, and I don’t know, I just like having really long conversations, I guess. I don’t know, he just liked to talk to me. I can’t really explain why. 

Part of it was maybe that I was a somewhat bright guy from New York, you know? And Kurt, I think, really wanted to leave behind his provincial past. And he was really interested in hanging out with people who could bring him some more culture and worldliness. He definitely got that from Courtney. He even got that from Buzz Osborne [of the Melvins] and Krist. He certainly got that from Danny Goldberg [one of the band’s managers], from Sonic Youth. And maybe in some small way I was part of that too. But mostly I think he could just talk to me. Unlike a lot of people, I wasn’t freaked out around him, I was very comfortable in his presence. And someone in that position has a very sensitive radar for when people are freaked out around them. And I was not; I was very comfortable with him. And I think he recognized that and knew that he could talk to me

 

Did you get any sense that he felt isolated? 

It’s pretty well acknowledged that Kurt was quite isolated. He found it difficult to go out in public, he was really uncomfortable with being the center of attention like that, being stared at by strangers. So yeah, maybe he didn’t have that many people to talk to. I don’t know. I was certainly happy to let him rip. It might have been therapeutic for him to do these interviews, talk things out.

 

In the new material, you write about doing the book, “But, in retrospect, I also think that to a certain extent I was sold a bill of goods, that Kurt and Courtney were performing for my benefit, just as they did for [Sub Pop co-founder] Jonathan Poneman and [Los Angeles Times critic] Robert Hilburn. And that makes me a sucker.” I thought that was pretty candid for a writer to say.

Yeah. When I wrote Our Band Could Be Your Life, I interviewed quite a few people who had some regrets about things they’d done or said previously. And I was really impressed by how mature they were about their younger selves. And enough time had passed and they’d gained enough wisdom to be able to criticize themselves almost as if it was kind of another person. And that really made a huge impression on me. And I decided to embrace that, fess up to my younger indiscretions and mistakes and stuff like that.

But you were basically saying “I was used for this project.” And that’s not your mistake.

Yeah, sure it is. Because as a journalist, you’re supposed to be skeptical. And I wasn’t skeptical enough.

 

But then if you’d been skeptical enough, maybe you wouldn’t have taken on the project.

Oh no, I still would have done the project. I just would have been more skeptical about it.

 

The first thing I read from the new book was the piece that appeared in The New Yorker [“My Time With Kurt Cobain”], that used part of the last chapter. It was just riveting and, well, horrifying too, in places. I wondered what your feelings were at that time in that awful July [in 1993] when you were out [with Kurt in New York City] and you said it was the first time you knew he was on drugs. And the next day Courtney said, “Yeah, he almost died.” And your book is coming out in a few months, and I wondered what was going through your mind then, like, what’s happened with this band? Are things going to fall apart again ? I mean, it must have been upsetting.

Yeah, it was upsetting. I wasn’t thinking about it in relation to the book, I was just — I don’t know, I was just worried. But I guess I was kind of optimistic. I thought, “Oh, you know, he’ll beat this, he’ll get over it and everything will be fine.” And that was maybe some naivete on my part. Like I say in the book, I’d never known anyone who was a heroin addict. So I simply didn’t know how these things worked out. But that was my mindset. I was just like, you know, “Courtney’s got this, [management company] Gold Mountain’s got this. And Kurt has the support of Krist and [Krist’s wife] Shelli and Dave and it’ll work out.” But I actually had no idea of the depths to which he would sink. I just didn’t know. And a lot of that stuff happened while I was not around. I didn’t see him hanging out with Mark Lanegan or any of his other drug buddies. I just didn’t see that, and no one told me about it, so I just simply didn’t know. So I guess I was kind of cautiously optimistic. I was hoping for the best.

 

It almost seems like after Kurt’s death the book became something of a liability for you. You said didn’t write about the band for a while. And in that period you must have been hit up for a lot of interviews; I mean, you’d be the go-to guy for Nirvana stories. How did you deal with that?

I don’t think I ever considered the book a liability, just to get that straight. It was just really painful. And I talk about that quite a bit in the book, in that last chapter, about just regretting things maybe you could have done or said, and it was just really painful. I don’t know if you’ve been close to someone who committed suicide, but it’s really traumatic and it really messes with your head for a really long time. And so, yeah, I did precious few interviews about Nirvana for many, many years after Kurt’s death. I just didn’t want to go there. And then after a while enough time passed where I could start to get my head around it. And I talked in the book about this. One time I was out with a bunch of friends at a bar in the East Village, and they started blaring some Nirvana songs over the sound system. And usually I’d be so uncomfortable that sometimes I would actually walk out the door if that happened. But I decided to stay and I thought, wow, I hadn’t even listened to Nirvana’s music up until then. This was 2007, something like that. And I just thought, wow, they rock. This is great music. And it was uplifting. 

And it finally just dawned on me that despite this storm cloud around Kurt and the sad and horrific way he died, he was trying to save himself with music, among other things. And the music is literally transcendent. I think he purposely made it to ease his pain. And I think other people, either consciously or not, recognize that and used it to ease their own pain. I’m not saying that’s the only reason that people listen to Nirvana. It’s also just catchy rock music. But there was something much deeper about it and almost like a spiritual aspect to them, especially live on a good night, that I think was no accident. And I think those end of show smash ups and the way Kurt would throw himself into the drums and amps was just proof that the music had brought him to that point where he was feeling no pain.

 

VIDEO: Kurt Cobain: About A Son trailer

Then it must have been difficult working on About a Son [a 2006 documentary that used Azerrad’s interview tapes for Come As You Are]. I mean, even more personal because there you are listening to his voice.

Yeah, that was a very heavy experience. Sometimes a lot of the recordings are pretty rough and it’s like Walkman [quality], but sometimes they’re pretty clear. And it was a stereo mic and you’re listening on stereo speakers. That was a very moving experience. But I don’t know, I just made myself do it. It just seemed like something I should do. And then the movie came out and I never looked back.

 

What are some of your best memories of Nirvana? 

Well, I talk about this in the new book. At some point, I forget where it was, Houston, Dallas, somewhere [in 1993]. Dave stopped by my hotel room and said, “Hey, we’re all going out to do laundry.” And it was Dave and Kim Deal and Jim McPherson from the Breeders and we went to this all night laundromat. It’s the middle of the night. It’s this bright fluorescent lit place. And we were sneaking beers while doing the laundry and we’re just horsing around and having a ball. And that was really fun. It was just this kind of surreal experience. After the grind of touring, you go out and do something as humdrum as laundry in the middle of the night. That was just a really fun, pleasant experience. 

And at one point after the book was done, I went out to Seattle to visit friends and said hello to Kurt, and he invited me to a rehearsal, a practice for the In Utero tour. And they played their whole set and that was great. I mean, hearing them in this little room, there’s no audience, there’s no special effects, there’s no lights. It’s just four people in a rock band playing. And they were actually a great rock band, you know, just like that. They didn’t need any lights or special effects or anything like that. The raw ingredients were there and that was a total thrill. And at one point, Chris picked up an accordion and Dave made a beeline for the bass. I think he was sick of playing drums. And I had played drums since I was seven years old, not super well, but decently. And while they were fiddling around, I waved to Dave and I pointed at the drums and he waved me in and said, “Yeah, man, sit down.” So I sat in with the Nirvana and they jammed on “Kashmir” for a while, and then it morphed into something else. And Dave, I think, was pleasantly surprised that I could actually play drums fairly competently. I think part of it was I was just trying to keep it together.

 

And not totally disgrace yourself. It sounds like you pulled it off.

Yeah. Yeah.

 

VIDEO: Nirvana “Dumb”