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This past December, my wife came down with pneumonia just before Christmas, so we didn’t get to visit any family. Thankfully, I didn’t get sick, but I still had to stay at home… I didn’t know if I would get sick at any moment, I was afraid of transmitting germs to elderly relatives, and Jet also needed me to stay home and take care of her. Thankfully, that’s all long behind us (Jet made a full recovery), but it meant that when we got together for our annual family vacation last month, we had some Christmas gifts waiting for us that no one had been able to give to us. My mom gave me a big stack of books, and I wanted to write about this one for my staff pick this week:
Michael Azerrad: The Amplified Come as You Are (HarperOne, 2023)
I’m sure I’ve said this in the newsletter many times before, but I am a Nirvana baby. Nevermind came out a few days after my twelfth birthday, and it was perfectly timed to hit me with full impact. I had loved rock music since I was a little kid and was already curious enough about it to have gotten deeper than what MTV and radio were feeding me (skateboarding had made me hip to Suicidal Tendencies and I was also exploring Slayer and Metallica), but Nevermind struck the perfect balance between the tunefulness the mainstream trains you to like and the more aggro / dangerous sounds I was getting interested in. I jumped on the Nirvana bandwagon relatively early in Nevermind’s ascent and I stayed with them for the entire ride, listening to all of their albums incessantly. Even today, hearing Nevermind takes me right back to where I was then… I can remember what shoes I wore, the boom box I played it on, and exactly how my backyard was laid out. Those were formative times.
Other Nirvana fans probably remember that Michael Azerrad wrote a book called Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana, which came out in 1993. It was the first book-length biography of Nirvana, and it was timed to coincide with the release of In Utero so that it could ride the wave of publicity surrounding that album. I definitely read Come As You Are at the time, probably multiple times. I developed my taste for reading about music as a teen, and back then it was tough to find a book that wasn’t about classic rock, which wasn’t of much interest to me. I still read books about the Beatles and the Rolling Stones because I wanted to know about music, but the music I was reading about didn’t mean that much to me. Honestly, I didn’t even really know it. My parents were really young and listened to contemporary rock radio, not the oldies stations that so many of my friends’ parents listened to. I remember reading a book that analyzed the Beatles songbook in excruciating detail, but I’d never heard 90% of the songs they were writing about. I suppose that primed me for listening to the You Don’t Know Mojack podcast, where I still listen to hours-long dissections of later-era SST releases I haven’t heard and probably won’t ever take the time to check out.
Anyway, the conceit of the book I’m writing about, The Amplified Come as You Are, is that Azerrad is revisiting Come as You Are, reflecting on the book, analyzing and updating what he originally wrote. It’s a full reprint of Come as You Are, but every few paragraphs Azerrad’s 2023 voice (set in a different typeface) interrupts the narrative. Given when Come as You Are was written—In Utero hadn’t even come out, so obviously no one knew Kurt would take his own life, that Dave Grohl would start the Foo Fighters, etc.—there is a lot to update. I heard an interview with Azerrad on The Music Books Podcast and the conceit sounded interesting when he explained it, and it is indeed a gripping read. I haven’t been able to put the book down.
A few things stand out as key themes in The Amplified Come as You Are. The first is suicide. It’s staggering how much suicide came up in the original Come as You Are. It feels like on almost every page Kurt is saying he’s going to kill himself or making some sort of reference or analogy to suicide. As Azerrad notes again and again, the signs were right there for anyone to see, but it seems like he and everyone else dismissed it as Kurt being melodramatic or just depressed, but with hindsight it’s clear that he was thinking about suicide almost constantly, normalizing the idea and getting used to it in his own mind, paving the way for him to actually do it. The lesson, of course, is that if you know someone who does the same thing, heed those warning signs. Try to help them, or at least listen to them. Ignoring those cries for help only reinforces the sufferer’s idea that no one cares and they won’t be missed. I’m not a psychologist or a counselor, but if you care, just try to do something.
That leads to the second big thing that strikes me about the original Come as You Are, and that’s how young and immature the members of Nirvana were. Kurt was 24 when Nevermind came out, and the other members of the band and most of the other key players in the story were around the same age. I’m 45 now, and I often still feel lost, alone, and totally without perspective. I look back at what I was like when I was 24, and I think about how self-obsessed, narrow-minded, and immature I was, and that’s kind of how Kurt was too. Azerrad notes repeatedly Kurt’s pattern of passive aggression. If he wants something from someone, he never tells them directly, but acts hostile to signal something is wrong, then descends into a deeper spiral of anger and alienation when the target of his displeasure doesn’t do what he wants. There’s this hilarious quote from Dan Peters (the drummer for Mudhoney, who was also briefly the drummer for Nirvana) where he blithely sums it up: “their communication skills at that time were kind of not happening.”
(An aside about Dan Peters. One thing I’d kind of forgotten that this book reminded me of is how fucked Nirvana’s treatment of Dan Peters was. They had kicked Chad Channing, the drummer on Bleach, out of the band and started playing with Dan Peters. They played one show with Peters and wrote and recorded the song “Sliver,” and were just about to leave for a UK tour. Just before the tour, they secretly auditioned Dave Grohl and decided they wanted him as the drummer. They didn’t tell Peters until literally the last minute… he had already done press and taken publicity photos with the band in advance of the tour. Kurt even, during an acoustic radio appearance, said on the air that the band had a new drummer when they hadn’t even told Peters yet. This is all pretty fucked, but it made me think of a personal story. One of my ex-wife’s good friends was Dan Peters’ niece, and when she got married, Peters came to the wedding, which I also attended. I didn’t talk to him directly as I was too shy, but I eavesdropped on some of his conversations, and it seemed like all anyone wanted to talk to him about was Nirvana and Kurt. These were total norms at the wedding, people who almost certainly didn’t know Mudhoney, so to them he was just this guy who had known Kurt Cobain. Peters insists his experience with Nirvana wasn’t painful, but surely it must have been, and worse I’m sure he has to revisit it all the time in situations like that wedding.)
This portrait of Nirvana and Kurt—dark, dysfunctional, immature—is so different from the version of Kurt I recently lived with as I listened to The Cobain 50 podcast a few months ago. (I wrote about my first impressions of the podcast in a previous staff pick, but I stayed with it for the whole series and enjoyed it.) Azerrad notes repeatedly how eager Kurt was (at least in some contexts) to secure his underground bona fides. Usually this meant downplaying his interest, as a young man, in heavy metal and classic rock and emphasizing his connections to the punk underground. Kurt’s list of all-time favorite albums, which was the basis for the The Cobain 50 podcast, is totally pitched this way. While some personal touchstones like Aerosmith and the Beatles appear, the bulk of the list is K Records-approved, politically progressive underground groups like the Raincoats, Kleenex, and the Marine Girls. There was so much of that music on the list that I kind of came away with the impression that Kurt was deeply ingrained in the Olympia scene that introduced him to all that stuff. But Come as You Are paints Kurt as kind of a redneck interloper to that scene, holed up alone in his apartment smoking cigarettes and experimenting with heroin while the rest of the Calvinists (Kurt’s derisive term for the followers of K Records founder Calvin Johnson) played kickball and listened to Talulah Gosh or whatever. Kurt was enormously self-conscious about the poverty and lack of cultural sophistication he grew up with, and that self-consciousness sometimes manifested itself as a need to impress more cultured or sophisticated people, though at other times he lashed out at these people, knowing he’d never truly be one of them. That’s something I can absolutely relate to, and I wonder if it’s one reason I latched onto Nirvana so thoroughly when I was young.
Also like Kurt, I have struggled with the depression demon my entire life. While The Amplified Come as You Are has totally engrossed me, it’s also left me in some pretty dark headspace. I’ve had some personal changes in my life over the past few weeks and months that I’ve been ruminating on and struggling to make sense of, and the portrait of depression in the book calls to me like a siren song. While I’ve been in some pretty dark places in my life, I’m lucky to have something in me that pulls me back from the brink. (Or maybe I’ve just been lucky so far?) Part of Kurt’s brilliance surely came from the fact that he could and would dive deeper into the void. The Amplified Come as You Are makes me feel like I’m following him further down there than I ever would have ventured myself, and it’s fucking scary. After all, he didn’t come back. So yeah, great book, but trigger warning: it’s fucking dark.
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