ACCESS TO JOURNALS GIVES AUTHOR INSIGHT INTO ROCKER'S SAD LIFE

The 1994 shotgun suicide of Kurt Cobain, lead singer of Nirvana, prompted
wails of anguish from a generation branded X. From every other generation,
though, came a chorus of "Kurt who?"

"Heavier Than Heaven" may help answer the question of who that troubled
young man was. The book was published Wednesday on the 10-year anniversary
of the release of Nirvana's "Nevermind," the album widely credited with
pushing alternative rock into the mainstream.

Author Charles R. Cross, former editor of an influential Seattle music
magazine called the Rocket, conducted some 400 interviews over four years,
with Cobain's relatives, friends, bandmates, former girlfriends, teachers,
groupies, nannies and more.

But his master coup was twofold: He got access to Cobain's widow, the
fabulously outspoken Courtney Love, and to Cobain's extensive private journals.

"I knew Kurt had written a lot, but I had no idea of the extent," Cross,
44, says by telephone from his home in Seattle. "Part of writing a book
like this is gaining the trust of the family and friends. . . . One day
when Courtney and I were talking, she said, 'Oh, you've got to read Kurt's
journals.'

"My jaw virtually dropped."

With only a little more urging, Cross soon found himself in the basement of
Love's manager's house with a duffel bag full of 28 journals.

"She gave me unqualified, unlimited access to the journals, no strings
attached," Cross says.

For any biographer, that would be considered striking the mother lode. For
the biographer of a drug-addicted loner who flamed out at age 27, it's more
like finding . . . well, nirvana.

"Rarely do we have a chance -- with mental illness, depression or addiction
- -- to see exactly what someone's thinking," Cross says. "And Kurt had so
detailed his descent . . . it was sometimes chilling to read."

Over the years, Cobain wrote compulsively in his spiral-bound notebooks,
drafting song lyrics, letters (never sent), album liner notes (never used)
and occasional all-purpose rants.

"Somebody, anybody, God help, help me please," Cobain wrote in a stunning
1993 entry. "I want to be accepted. I have to be accepted. I'll wear any
kind of clothes you want! I'm so tired of crying and dreaming. I'm soo soo
alone. Isn't there anyone out there? Please help me. HELP ME!"

It was a long and twisted road from a working-class harbor town of 19,000
in Washington state, where Kurt was born in 1967.

He wrote his first "lyrics" at age 4, upon returning from a trip to the
park with his aunt: "We went to the park, we got candy." By age 6, he
showed musical talent on the piano, drums and guitar.

At age 7, the hyper-energetic little boy was prescribed his first drug,
Ritalin. And at age 9, his parents divorced.

"To Kurt, it was an emotional holocaust -- no other single event in his
life had more of an effect on the shaping of his personality," Cross
writes. "Rather than outwardly express his anguish and grief, Kurt turned
inward."

As a teenager, Kurt was petulant, restless, stoned much of the time,
decidedly uninterested in school. At 14 he told a friend, "I'm going to be
a superstar musician, kill myself and go out in a flame of glory."

Cross makes much of that statement and later ones about Cobain's "suicide
genes." (His great-grandfather and two great-uncles had died of their own
hands.) Was it destiny? Or was it simply self-fulfilling prophecy?

Cobain was an ambitious slacker, ultimately becoming a successful loser. He
courted fame tirelessly, but rebelled against it when it came.

Perhaps predictably, Cobain's wife was also a study in opposites. Courtney
Love's frankness is a wonder to behold in this book.

And the portrait Cross paints of Love is not sugarcoated: She did heroin
while pregnant with baby Frances Bean Cobain, for instance, and she and
Kurt were near divorce at the time of his death.

"There were some things Courtney wouldn't talk about," Cross says. "But she
was very honest about everything else. I got the sense that she really
wanted Kurt's story told."

Early in the book, Love recounts the first of an incredible number of
near-fatal overdoses. Seven hours after Cobain and his bandmates had made
their national television debut on "Saturday Night Live," Love woke up to
find Cobain on the floor.

"It wasn't that he OD'd," Love recalled. "It was that he was DEAD. If I
hadn't woken up at seven . . . I don't know, maybe I sensed it. . . . It
was sick and psycho."

It's one terrifying moment among many in this truncated life.