Overview

As the assistant editor of Melody Maker, Everett True was the first journalist to cover the Seattle music scene in early 1989 and interview Nirvana. He is responsible for bringing Hole, Pavement, Soundgarden, and a host of other bands to international attention. He introduced Kurt Cobain to Courtney Love, performed on stage with Nirvana on numerous occasions, and famously pushed Kurt onto the stage of the Reading Festival in 1992 in a wheelchair. Nirvana: The Biography is an honest, moving, incisive, and heartfelt re-evaluation of a band that has been misrepresented time and time again since its tragic demise in April 1994 following Kurt Cobains suicide. True captures what the band was really like. He also discusses the music scene of the time-the fellow bands, the scenes, the seminars, the countless live dates, the friends and allies and drug dealers. Drawn from hundreds of original interviews, Nirvana: The Biography is the final word on Nirvana, Cobain, and Seattle grunge.

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9780306815546

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Reviews

Everything you always wanted to know about Nirvana . . . and a lot you didn't.Despite their relatively small recorded output, Nirvana put together a catalogue worthy of time-capsule placement alongside The Beatles, Miles Davis, Led Zeppelin and James Brown, which is why you can almost justify a 500-plus-page study of the band. Since veteran rock journalist and Cobain intimate True was a grunge insider, one would assume that his doorstop of a book would present insights and factoids somehow missed in Michael Azerrad's fine Come as You Are (1993) and Charles R. Cross's excellent Heavier Than Heaven (2001). Azerrad and Cross, though, didn't miss much. This new entry is a rehash bulked up by 200-or-so pages of insider gossip and True's self-serving I-was-there digressions. The author gets points for experimenting with form and format (oddball footnotes and non-linear asides that almost come off as dream sequences), but it makes for a frustrating read: Think Lester Bangs meets Mark Z. Danielewski. The author is a fine musical analyst, offering up solid evaluation and reevaluation of virtually every note that Nirvana ever played. Many of the anecdotes about random debauchery, ear- and soul-shattering concerts and recording-studio drama make for enjoyably voyeuristic reading. But the this-one-slept-with-that-one-and-that-one-got-wasted-with-this-one material becomes tiresome long before even the halfway point. The innumerable Nirvana fanatics will snap this up, but the more serious-minded are better off sticking with Azerrad and Cross.An numbingly comprehensive biography strictly for the obsessed. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Everett True is a music journalist and the author of biographies of the Ramones, the White Stripes, Supergrass, and many others. He lives in Brighton, England.

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