The Amplified Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana

Music journalist Azerrad (Our Band Could Be Your Life) provides an electric revision to his 1993 account of the defining band of the grunge movement. Amid ongoing accusations of Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love’s drug abuse, the couple asked Azerrad to write an “unauthorized” biography to effectively “clear their name” as parents to their infant daughter. Now free of those constraints and equipped with 30 years of hindsight, he weaves in extensive annotations that offer context and depth, including analyses of the era’s widespread heroin use, reflections on Nirvana’s rise from underground indie band to rock powerhouse with 1991’s Nevermind, and chilling omens of Cobain’s 1994 suicide, as when the singer mentioned being manic depressive in a conversation with the author (“I thought he was just being melodramatic and a bit of a hypochondriac.... He talked about suicide the same way.... Even decades later, it’s very difficult to make peace with the fact that these things were staring us all right in the face”). Azerrad carefully unearths how the band’s own narratives, including Cobain’s “big anti-drug speeches that [he] felt obligated to give, in order to excuse his addiction,” were shaped partly in response to a culture that frames its rock musicians as both gods and tabloid fodder. Ultimately, Azerrad points to a constellation of factors that precipitated Cobain’s death, including addiction, a family history of suicide, and mental illness. The band’s myriad fans will be rapt. Sarah Lazin and Laura Nolan, Aevitas Creative Management. (Oct.)