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.