But did April really end in May? Not necessarily, particularly if you're looking at the trail of money left in Kurt's wake. Billboard chart action in 1994, which, granted, all too often operated like a gemstone setting for movie soundtracks such as The Lion King, nonetheless indicated steady sales, the ever-popular "legs," for all of Nirvana's albums, and a respectable, if not overwhelming, showing by Unplugged, released seven months after Cobain's death. If they were ever off the charts, they were never far away. Meanwhile, Hole's Live Through This, after a sluggish start, went gold before the end of the year.

Books about Cobain did well too. Michael Azerrad's Come As You Are, published six months before Cobain's death, has now sold 115,000, according to Azerrad; good figures for a rock biography. During the summer, at his own request, Azerrad quietly added a final chapter. "It was just such an unfinished story," he says. "It sounds stupid but I did it for the fans. I'd made the book as thorough as possible and it seemed there should be a period on the end of the sentence. It was the hardest thing I've ever had to do, but it was kind of therapeutic, frankly." Azerrad says he was approached several times by various producers and agents about selling the movie rights, but turned them all down flat.

Seattle's Dave Thompson, whose quickie paperback Never Fade Away was rushed to market so fast you might have noticed the sonic boom--it was published April 29--was also approached about selling the movie rights. He says he also turned down all offers. "The aggravation the movie would have caused would have been too much," he says. A lot of confusion exists on this point generally: To protect themselves legally, most film producers will move a story toward development only when it is attached to a literary property whose rights they own, but nonfiction remains a gray area. While it's clear who owns the rights to Cobain's songs and even to his image, it's hard to say who "owns" the rights to his story.

Thompson says his book has sold a remarkable 200,000 copies and defends his choice to make a potboiler by saying, "If I didn't do it, someone else would. Ithink I saved the world some really terrible books." Thompson, a British native, has written dozens of other quickie paperbacks.

A third Cobain book came along toward the end of the year. Written by "the editors of Rolling Stone," Cobain collected practically every word Rolling Stone ever dedicated to Cobain (all post-1992 it seemed). Word is that it did better than expected, which is likely in the range of 50,000.

Sales promotions have happened in a relatively hushed atmosphere, particularly within Cobain's record label. "It's a very, very fine line that we're walking," says DGC publicist Jim Merlis of the approach taken to marketing Nirvana product, "and everyone in the company knows it." The result of their understandable hesitation to be perceived as exploiting a dead rock star--in spite of a market that's hungry for product--has been that releases by Nirvana (and, for a time, Hole, though that now seems to have changed) have seen minimal promotion, which can be summed up essentially as, "Here it is now." Period.

For a time there was talk of making Unplugged a double-CD set with a disc of concert tracks. Merlis says that plan was scuttled last summer. "Dave (Grohl) and Krist (Novoselic) and Scott Litt were together mixing the album and it just got to be a weird feeling. I think they got one song mixed and then they said, 'This is too much. This is too soon. We're just not ready for this yet.' So now it's going to happen whenever Krist and Dave want to do it."

On the fringes, a fair enough barometer for the mainstream in its way, fans and collectors continued to vote with their pocketbooks as the Nirvana bootleg market proved strong, though perhaps not as strong as some expected. "The history of Nirvana boots is that when Nevermind hit, they were huge with bootleggers and lots of radio shows and stuff came out," says one source in the bootleg record industry. "Then things were quiet for awhile. After the Rome radio broadcast (on February 22, 1994) things went into high gear and by the time Kurt killed himself, all the great radio shows and demo tapes came out. There's still more being released every month."

Dozens can now be found, a good many of them the same few shows (Rome is particularly popular because of the comparatively lax copyright laws in Italy) or the same couple of dozen demos recycled in varying degrees of mixdown. There are also two elaborate box sets combining concert recordings and the demos (Heart-Shaped Box and the fabulous Into the Black, which most collectors agree is the best set yet).

So far, little of the material has surfaced that Cobain was reportedly working on in the weeks before his death, and no one at DGC wanted to comment on any of it specifically. It's known that he finished at least three songs, and some rumors speculate on as many as a dozen completed tracks. One of the new songs is performed by Hole on their upcoming "Unplugged" broadcast, which was taped in New York in February. Another was intended for Mark Lanegan, and the third for Iggy Pop.

As for memorabilia, anything Cobain touched seems to be commanding impressive prices now too. In January a guitar of Cobain's was sold at auction in New York for $17,000, making it the high-ticket item at a sale that also included material associated with the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix and others. Perhaps it garnered such a high price because of the fact that Kurt had bled on it (a point the sellers publicized to no end). Memorabilia dealer Bob Adamonis, who is based in Seattle and specializes in autographs, says that the price for Cobain's signature went from $40-$50 before his death to upwards of $750 since. He also notes that a good deal of ghoulish material has become available, items he has refused to handle: Shotgun shells left behind by Cobain with the cabdriver who took him to the airport for the flight to rehab in March, and a great many personal articles stolen from the house during the chaos of the discovery of the body.