Over the course of writing this book, I got to know Kurt Cobain pretty well. You can't spend that much time with a person and not become friendly, especially when that person has told you his entire life story. After this book came out in October '93, we stayed in touch. We'd hang out when the band came to New York for a T.V. appearance, sometimes I'd fly to Seattle to see everybody, and for two one week stretches, I tagged along on Nirvana's final U.S. tour in late '93. In between, Kurt and I would hold marathon phone conversations every couple of weeks. Sometimes we would talk about whatever music we were listening to, sometimes we'd gossip a little, and sometimes we'd talk about the upheavals in our lives, but always, Kurt would complain very candidly about his career.

Things were fine between us until Kurt fell into a coma after ingesting a reported fifty tablets of Rohypnol, a powerful depressant, and some champagne in a hotel room in Rome during the bands last tour in March of '94. It didn't dawn on me until much later that this was a suicide attempt(I should have known immediately, see page 243 of this book). In the meantime, I spoke to CNN and a reporter I knew at People magazine about it. This definitely upset Courtney, and perhaps Kurt, too, although his mom assures me Kurt didn't care, I'll never know for sure.

In my heart of hearts, I had known that my being a journalist and my friendship with Kurt were on an inevitable collision course. I just thought I could provide some responsible commentary on what happened. But maybe I shouldn't have done it. At any rate, I never spoke to Kurt again

It hardly makes me feel better, but I later learned that virtually everyone close to Kurt had a similar story: Something went terribly wrong right at the end, as a result, their grief for him is riddled with the same crippling mixture of confusion, regret, and guilt.

If his music was any indication, it shouldn't have come as a surprisethat Kurt's end was so sudden. After all, not one Nirvana song ends on a fade out.

And just as his music played loud against soft, aggressive against melodious, the violence of Kurt's death contrasted it's quiet aftermath. On an uncharacteristically sunny Saturday afternoon, the day after his death was announced, a dozen or so young fans gathered in the small park next to the house, where someone had set down some flowers and candles. Everyone spoke in hushed tones. There was no music,-no boom boxes played, nobody strummed Nirvana tunes on an acoustic guitar; there was just an eerie stillness, a deafening silence that hung over a strange, haunted scene.

But there were more representatives of the media than fans hovering around the sprawling, gray shingled Cobain home overlooking Lake Washington. On hand were MTV, "Entertainment Weekly", "1st Person with Maria Shriver", Details, and a gaggle of local media. Several photographers skulked through the undergrowth that covered the hill behind the house, poking their cameras over the fence for a view of the two story garage where it had all happened. Uniformed security guards with microphones and headsets guarded the driveway, occasionally dipping the yellow police line ribbon for arriving family and friends. "This is sick", one guard said to another, "It's only a house."

With so much media and so few fans, many of those in mourning in front of the house a widespread if fleeting celebrity. The mascara-stained face of young Renae Ely made CNN, Newsweek, and the front page of the Seattle Times. Although many fans were quite ready to talk to the media, Seattle scene insiders were another story. Or rather they were no story at all. In a remarkable display of unity, the key players in the Seattle scene closed ranks decisively and refused to talk to any press. After not one, not two, but three waves of intense media exposure, they all learned some hard lessons. The media blackout in the wake of his death very effectively protected the privacy of Kurt's friends and family. If only he were alive to see how well it worked.

Sub Pop briefly considered barring the press from it's long-planned sixth anniversary party at Seattle's Crocodile Cafe that Saturday night, but then realized the media would simply write a story about how they couldn't get in. Still, cameras were not permitted inside the club, so partygoers were greeted by a small media army of the sidewalk outside. Reporters thrust microphones in people's faces and asked, "Why are you here?" In the wake of suicide, the question gained an existential force.

Some had been calling for the party to be canceled, claiming that it was disrespectful. But going ahead with the party was the best thing to do. As Sub Pop's Bruce Pavitt said at Kurt's memorial service the following day, "The most important things in our lives are our friends, our family, and our community." The Seattle scene was founded on a strong sense of community-community that gave rise to music, nurtured it, kept it's most successful members grounded, and provided solace in the face of calamity, as when Mother Love Bone's Andrew Wood died of a heroin overdose in 1990, when 7 Year Bitch guitarist Stefanie Sargent fatally overdosed in 1992, when Gits' singer Mia Zapata was murdered in 1993. And so gathering at the Crocodile, a popular musicians' hangout where Nirvana played the occasional surprise gig, was downright necessary. Still, very few partygoers talked about what had just happened.

Small clutches of journalists gathered and did a lot of well-lubricated soul searching about the ethicality of what they were doing; were we guilty of exploiting a sad story or were we documenting a historical event? The fact that so many of us had affection for Kurt compounded the problem painfully while the media blackout by the insiders drove it even further home. The rise of tabloid journalism had soured us on our own jobs, but it had also soured Seattlites on journalists, making them, in the words of one insider, "instant assholes."

Said Charlie Campbell of Pond, a Sub Pop band from Portland, Oregon, "Some woman from some magazine called me up and I didn't even know the guy. I just wanted to say 'This is the same kind of conversation that killed the poor guy.'" "One of our own has been taken away from us by outside forces," adds Ron Rudzitis, singer-guitarist for Seattle's Love Battery. "There's some resentment."

On an overcast Sunday afternoon, while Kurt's friends and family attended his memorial nearby, a candlelight vigil was held in the park in a park at Seattle Center, in the shadow of the Space Needle. The tented stage bore a modest collection of flowers and other offerings. A bootleg single of "Lithium" bore a note which began, "This song gave me the strength during a difficult breakup..." A small bouquet of flowers also contained a miniature plastic shotgun.

Before about seven thousand grieving fans, a minister intoned, a poet recited, a trio of local DJs reminisced, a crisis counselor pitched, and a DJ read a bittersweet letter from Kurt's uncle Larry Smith, Don's second wife's brother, about his memories of Kurt as a teenager.

Smith began by noting that his grandfather thought a lot of Kurt and enjoyed his company very much.

"One time Gramps invited Kurt along on one of our steelhead fishing trips. We were spread a few hundred feet apart along the Wenatchee River. All of a sudden we heard this horrendous combination of screaming, warbling, and yodeling form Kurt, who was upstream and out of sight. Gramps told me to run up there and help Kurt who must have hooked into a big fish. When I reached Kurt he didn't even have his line in the water. When I asked him what was going on he just looked at me with those piercing eyes a huge grin and said, 'I'm just trying to thicken my vocal chords so I can scream better.'

"Kurt didn't feel the general mold of society in a logging town and so he was beaten by the people who didn't understand him. One day I heard he was in a fight a few blocks away. When I ran to the scene, the fight was over, however I heard from a friend that Kurt was assaulted by a burly 250-pond logger type. Evidently Kurt did not even fight. He just presented the bully with the appropriate hand gesture every time he was knocked down until the bully gave up. [This got a big cheer from the ground.]

"A wonderful picture comes to mind. When I peeked out the window into the yard, there was Kurt with some kind of contraption on his head that resembled a tin-foil hat, sneaking around he yard followed by a half a dozen laughing toddlers. Kurt had that million-dollar grin on his face and I could tell he was definitely in Nirvana. I guess you could say he was the pied piper of compassion.

"I hope that these little examples of happiness will show that even though Kurt experienced pain in his teenage years, he still did not let that pain stop loving life as fully as he could. We should never condemn Kurt for leaving us. We should instead look inward and thank him for loving us enough to share his feelings with us. Let us all learn that no amount of pain should ever stop us from loving life. We must all maintain respect for the significance of our own lives as well as for the lives of others."

But the most powerful messages were from two people who weren't there. In their taped speeches, Chris and Courtney sent two very different messages, Chris made a brief but wonderful statement about the egalitarian punk rock ethos that Kurt stood for.

(Krist speaking) "On behalf of Dave, Pat, and I, I would like to thank you all for your concern at this time. We remember Kurt for what he was--caring, generous, and sweet. Let's keep the music with us. We'll always have it, forever. Kurt had an ethic toward his fans that was rooted in the punk rock way of thinking. No band is special, no player royalty. If you've got a guitar and a lot of soul, just bang something out and mean it. You're the superstar, plugged into the tones and rhythms that are uniquely and universally human: music. Heck, use your guitar as a drum, just catch a groove and let it flow out of your heart. That's the level that Kurt spoke to us on--in our hearts. And that's where he and the music will always be, forever."

Courtney's typically rambling message was a loving tirade, full of affection and anger, resentment and pity that everyone that everyone felt. It reduced much of the crowd to tears, leaving virtually the entire 7,000-person assembly shuddering with emotion. Courtney being Courtney, she couldn't help interjecting her own rejoinders. While they occasionally seemed overly bitter and even of questionable taste, like any good artist Courtney was being honest; she reflected the deepest feelings of everybody there. (I am omitting the next two pages, as they are just a transcript of Courtney reading the note.)

Much later, Courtney visited the sight of the vigil with her old friend Kat Bjelland of Babes in Toyland, and distributed some of Kurt's clothes to whatever fans still remained.

The speeches ended and the crowd was directed to move to the huge fountain nearby, where a sound system played an audio tape of Nirvana's recent MTV "Unplugged" appearance. Dozens of kids leaped into the forty foot jets of water to great cheers from the crowd, which still must have numbered five thousand. When the bowl like fountain was turned off, it became a circular amphitheater, with people singing along to the music at the top of their lungs, cheering after every song as if it were a real concert. Many knew the "Unplugged" performance so well that they sang along to the two rather obscure Meat Puppets songs.

In the fountain people danced, hugged strangers, did the wave, threw frisbees and batted around condom balloons, dogs ran around. But when the security detail tried to disperse the crowd once the music was over, they rebelled. A chunky kid with dyed blonde hair burst through the human circular chain the guards had made to push the kids out the bowl, dozens of kids followed, cheering and dancing, then defiantly mounted the fountain's central dome like the Marines at Iwo Jima. When a policeman waded into the crowd to eject the chunky barrier basher, people began chanting "Fuck! You! Fuck! You!" and pointing at the cop until he gave up and walked away. Kurt would have loved it.

When I began writing this book, I told my grandmother I was writing a biography of a rock band. The very first thing she asked me was "Do they do drugs?" I had to reply that yes, I was pretty sure that one of them did. "But that doesn't necessarily make him a bad person," I told her. That was a tough concept for a lot of people to grasp. But Kurt was a really nice person. He could be cranky and moody and stubborn, but those shortcomings were far overshadowed by his better qualities.

Obituaries and other press accounts centered on the "tormented rebel" and the "troubled voice of a generation." In death as in life, few if any simply talked about Kurt as if he were a real person. This is the Kurt Cobain that I knew.

At five-seven, 125 pounds, Kurt was slight, painfully thin; he'd wear several layers of clothes under his usual cardigan and ripped jeans just to appear a little more substantial. His complexion was often bad, which was due just as much to a lack of sun and a strict diet of frozen dinners as it was to his pharmaceutical intake. It was amazing that such an insubstantial body could produce such a soul-rendering sound, just like it's amazing that a tiny eight-pound baby can make such a piercing wail.

He had discovered what this fragile frame could withstand several times already, but what tormented Kurt wasn't merely physical. All that talent and charisma packed into such a little package recalled Robert Fripp's description of Jimi Hendrix as a thin wire with too much current running through it. It was a horrible, unspoken piece of common wisdom among close friends and fans alike-Kurt wasn't long for this world. Every minute spent with him was precious.

It was well known that fame did not sit well with Kurt Cobain. There were a lot of good reasons why and not simply because he was a shy person. Kurt needed to monitor every aspect of Nirvana. If the T-shirts weren't just right, it cut him to the quick; his reputation as an artist hung on every frame of every video the band made not because he was a control freak but because art was his life. That was obvious to anyone who heard, really heard, the music. Kurt was able to oversee his career for a long time, probably longer than he thought he could, but by the time of In Utero, the Nirvana organization had definitely sprawled too far.

One aspect was that Kurt vainly tried to keep tabs on was the press. Realizing that interviews were another facet of his art, and justly traumatized by the Vanity Fair article, Kurt was hypersensitive to his portrayals inthe media. The slightest nuance could send him into a fit of panic. He once called in the wee hours of the morning, pleading for me to delete something from this book. "If you keep it in," he said, "I might as well just blow my head off." It was a list of his fifty favorite albums.

Kurt complained constantly about the media prying into his personal life, but unfortunately the often painful (albeit not always truthful) candor of his music extended to his interview style. The man seemed not to be familiar with the phrase no comment." He answered every question I asked him for this book and openly told me things which I had to beg him to take off the record.

But his privacy wasn't the only casualty of Kurt's celebrity. Iconoclastic as he was, Kurt couldn't help living out at least one other cliché of success-he lost contact with most of the people he came up with. None of his friends had money; their entire creative and social lives, even their grunge fashion(an oxymoron if their ever was on), were based on poverty. He knew his wealth distanced him from his old pals and skewed their relationships. When he bought a Lexus in the winter of '93-'94, peer pressure made him trade it back and stick with his trusty old gray Volvo with one bald tire.

Indeed, friendship is one reason that Kurt stayed in the band. Chris and Dave were two of the best, most loyal friends he had left. And he couldn't deny the power of the music they made together. Even when his stomach was excruciating, he said the pain would go away during a performance because of the endorphin rush the music created in him. That's why he sometimes hurled himself into the drums at the end of a show-to prove that he was feeling no pain. That he had reached nirvana.

But in that last year of his life, Kurt was clearly growing apart from the thing he loved most. He knew he had to reinvent his music. In Utero, Kurt conceded, was virtually a remake of Nevermind, only recorded indie-style. As Kurt once pointed out, the Beatles went from "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" to Sgt. Pepper in just three years. Kurt was capable of such staggering artistic progress. The fact that there now appears to be no other musician who could say the same is just another facet of the tragedy.

At the April 9, 1993, show at San Francisco's Cow Palace, Kurt arrived to find a large entourage filling the dressing room. He slouched in a folding chair against the white cinder-block wall. There was another chair right next to him, but nobody would just plop down and talk to him. So I did. He smiled, and said hi, and plunked Frances down on my lap. We chatted about "Speed Racer," one of his favorite TV shows. He sang me the theme song as several self-appointed minders eyed us worriedly.

That night, Kurt changed what side of the stage he played on, from his usual stage left to stage right. "It makes it kind of interesting again," he explained. It seemed a bit trivial at the time, but hindsight says otherwise.

On July 23, 1993, the band played another high-pressure gig, an unannounced show at the Roseland Ballroom in New York for New Music Seminar attendees. Things went well, despite the finale, a painfully anticlimactic acoustic set. Two months later, Nirvana made it's second "Saturday Night Live" appearance. Backstage, Alex Macleod tried to clear the dressing room, which was crowded with friends. "No, the more the merrier," Kurt quietly asserted. Everybody stayed just where they were.

In October, Nirvana began their first U.S. tour in two years. On second guitar was Pat Smear, formerly of L.A. punk legends The Germs. Pat bolstered Kurt's powerful but sometimes erratic attack with chunky, propulsive chording and passionate lead work, as well as a genial and energetic stage presence. Pat also found himself another, perhaps more crucial role-radiating a remarkably upbeat brand of cool, he rarely failed to lift Kurt's spirits.

But nobody could lift Kurt's spirits like Frances, who traveled with Kurt while Courtney recorded Hole's new album. Frances was almost literally the light of Kurt's life-whenever she was around, Kurt's face would brighten, a rare grin would spread across his face, and the entire room filled with joy.

The band had resolved to make roadwork pleasant-they picked their favorite bands to open, including the Breeders, the Butthole Surfers, Chokebore, Come, Half Japanese, the Meat Puppets, Mudhoney, and Shonen Knife. They indulged in two buses, nice hotels, and a masseur. They booked plenty of days off and brought along wives, fiancees, and friends. Maybe that's why they played the most consistently amazing concerts of their career, transcendent shows where you almost felt you feet weren't touching the ground.

Halfway through the tour, a day off at an isolated hotel two hours from Boston had left everybody stir-crazy. Dave found out that legendary punk-pop band the Buzzcocks were playing in Boston, so a bunch of us drove down to catch the set. Few at the club noticed the diminutive figure in the Holden Caufield hunting cap; those who did simply smiled at him. Backstage afterward. the Buzzcocks kept saying what an honor is was to meet Kurt, but over and over he softly insisted, "No, it's an honor to meet you." Later, he hung out in front of the club, chatting with some punk rock kids who simply treated him as a peer-they didn't even think to ask for autographs. Kurt was very happy.

Not everyone found him so approachable. Kurt's piercing blue eyes, his moodiness, the question of whether he was high or not, his fame, and especially his almost palpable charisma were extremely intimidating. But ignoring all that and treating him normally, one could meet a kind, sweet man who listened sincerely, who was capable of dispensing thoughtful advice and comfort.

I discovered those things when I traveled with Nirvana on that tour for two weeks, partly to see the people who had become my friends, partly to see what were the greatest rock shows I've ever seen, and partly to escape some personal and professional crises. By the time the tour reached New Orleans by early November, I was in serious trouble and needed a sympathetic ear. From a pay phone on Bourbon Street, I made a midnight call to Kurt. He said come over to his hotel room and we'd talk.

I arrived to find Kurt lying on his bed watching a TV broadcast of a Pete Townshend concert with the sound off. Ever the guitar showman, the aging Townshend sang and played with unqualified gusto. "Look at that guy," Kurt said. "His music isn't even that good anymore but he's still so passionate about it. I wish I still felt that way." I couldn't quite believe he meant it, so I let it drop.

Kurt was exhausted but still eager to talk; he talked of his own history of failed relationships and creative lulls with a wisdom I didn' know he possessed. The, at around 4 a.m., I was in the middle of a sentence when he just shut his eyes and drifted off to sleep. He wasn't high, he simply couldn't stay awake anymore. "Why'd you leave?" he demanded the following morning.

At tour's end in November, Nirvana appeared on MTV's acoustic show "Unplugged", Kurt was in great spirits, cracking jokes between songs and singing with a cathartic intensity worthy of the most highly charged arena show. He chose an unprecedented number of covers and, revealingly, they were either about fame, death, or both. In the Meat Puppets' "Plateau," there's little more than a bucket and a mop-more work-at the top. Another Meat Puppets' tune, "Lake of Fire," pondered the ate of damned souls, while on David Bowie's "The Man Who Sold The World" Kurt intoned, "I thought you died alone a long, long time ago." "Don't expect me to cry, for all the reasons you had to die," he crooned don the gospel standard "Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam."

That was the last time I saw Kurt Cobain. He hugged me goodbye.

A six-week European tour began in early February and ended with the overdose in Rome on March 6. Having survived a suicide attempt, Kurt hadto endure the abject misery of continuing to live a life he no longer wanted. The band returned home to Seattle. On April 8 came the news.

A few days later, a Seattle limo driver who had often squired Kurt around town remarked, "Nice young man. Very quiet. But I guess he had a lot of hurtin'." Hurtin' occupied most of Kurt's waking life. Between stomach pain, chronic bronchitis, and scoliosis, even his own body was a hostile environment.

It wasn't like Kurt didn't have a sense of humor about his own misery; on the release form that he signed for this book, Kurt listed his address as "Hell on Earth." Like most suicides, Kurt provided plenty of hints, virtually all of which were documented in the slew of media coverage after his death; a few more appear in this very book. In retrospect, those clues weren't cries for help, they were announcements.

Much was made of the fact that Kurt died at the precisely the same age as Joplin, Hendrix, and Morrison, but Kurt didn't act out some hackneyed rock truism about living fast and dying young. When he said in his suicide note "it's better to burn out than to fade away," it was his sarcastic way of showing that he knew full well how his death would look.

Kurt was the first rock musician of his stature to take his own life so deliberately, rather than simply fritter it away through misadventure. A local Seattle newscast that weekend called Kurt "one of rock and roll's latest victims," but rock and roll never killed anybody. His suicide was a personal decision and it probably would have happened anyway, fame or no fame, rich or no riches, talent or no talent. But to speculate on precisely why he did it is a pointless parlor game. Although Kurt was clinically depressed and suicide ran in his family, no one will ever really know why he did it.

In the wake of his death there was one image of Kurt that refused to leave my mind. It was from the Reading Festival back in the summer of 1992. Still wearing the full-length doctor's smock he'd worn during the show, Kurt walked off stage, hand in hand with a little boy who it turned out had terminal cancer and had wangled his way backstage. Kurt slowly descended the stairs from the stage as a lone Kleigl light beamed down on him. All in white, his blond hair gleaming, he looked just like an angel, the boy a cherub. There was a horde of people all around Kurt, but somehow the light never hit them. No one made a sound. It was very quiet, especially after the thunderous noise of the show. The crowd followed him down an alleyway made by the backstage tents and then he turned a corner, still hand in hand with the little boy, and was gone.