"Music journalist Azerrad provides an electric revision to his 1993 account of the defining band of the grunge movement. (...) The band’s myriad fans will be rapt." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Thirty years after its original publication, rock writer Azerrad (Our Band Could Be Your Life) updates and nearly doubles the number of pages of his groundbreaking Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana. The author intersperses hundreds of new, detailed paragraphs throughout the original text to amplify and clarify the earlier material. Most satisfying, he adds a lengthy epilogue which deals with events that happened after the 1991 release of the album Nevermind, including Kurt Cobain’s last months and tragic death in 1994. New material includes the Nirvana tours and practice sessions that Azerrad attended; Cobain’s meeting with one of his heroes, William Burroughs; the telltale signs that pointed to Cobain’s self-destructive impulses and his eventual death; and the utter remorse that Azerrad and other insiders felt after Cobain’s suicide at age 27. VERDICT (...) Nirvana fans will want to read it. — Library Journal (starred review)
"Michael Azerrad has always demonstrated a passionate feeling for the ideas, the ambitions, that drive the notable moments of recent musical history. But this annotated edition of his earlier book, which was already a very successful biography, breaks out even further into high art. He's the perfect narrator, now, for a very important question, perhaps increasingly forgotten: why was punk important and how do we talk about it now? The urgencies of this question are everywhere in this powerful, uncertain, and profoundly human work. Azzerad's restless plunging onward, represents the further entanglement in deep, fraught, endangered wisdom." — Rick Moody, bestselling author of The Ice Storm and Hotels of North America
“Enriched with new anecdotes, insights and info-morsels, this super-expanded Michael Azerrad classic is a great story made even more gripping. Nirvana’s underground-overground arc becomes a prism for understanding an entire era of rock music and pop culture.” — Simon Reynolds, author of Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-84
"Essential for Nirvana fans." — Kirkus Reviews
"A fascinating examination of a band's rise and demise; life and death, personality flaws and mistakes and the ways in which someone in the public eye deals with them" — Culture Catch
“Veteran music scribe Michael Azerrad’s absorbing, admirable and deeply personal sequel to his acclaimed 1993 bio Come As You Are: The Story Of Nirvana. (...) [This] might be the most fully rounded portrait of the artist to date” — Tinnitist
★ 10/01/2023
Thirty years after its original publication, rock writer Azerrad (Our Band Could Be Your Life) updates and nearly doubles the number of pages of his groundbreaking Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana. The author intersperses hundreds of new, detailed paragraphs throughout the original text to amplify and clarify the earlier material. Most satisfying, he adds a lengthy epilogue which deals with events that happened after the 1991 release of the album Nevermind, including Kurt Cobain's last months and tragic death in 1994. New material includes the Nirvana tours and practice sessions that Azerrad attended; Cobain's meeting with one of his heroes, William Burroughs; the telltale signs that pointed to Cobain's self-destructive impulses and his eventual death; and the utter remorse that Azerrad and other insiders felt after Cobain's suicide at age 27. VERDICT Readers might sometimes find there's too much arcane minutia in this retrospective edition, but Azerrad has written a poignant afterword that makes this expanded version worth the shelf space. Nirvana fans will want to read it.—Dr. Dave Szatmary
2023-07-26
Rock journalist Azerrad revisits his well-received 1993 study of Nirvana and its doomed leader, Kurt Cobain.
“He had this sort of fascination with dead pop stars.” So said a photographer of the mercurial Cobain, who was a fan long before he became a musician. When he did become a musician, he worked out his angst in iconic songs such as “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Come As You Are.” Writing in 1993, expanding on a long piece he wrote for Rolling Stone that met with Cobain’s approval, Azerrad urged that Cobain not be considered a Dylanesque spokesperson for his generation: “He makes an anguished wail, reveling in negative ecstasy,” writes the author. “And if that is the sound of teen spirit these days, so be it.” Yet Cobain’s ethos fit perfectly with the latchkey kids of his cohort, forgotten and powerless, frequently children of divorce—a fact that, by Azerrad’s account, helps explain Cobain’s despair more than any other. Even though addicted to drugs (“Junkies, I learned, are very comfortable with being deceptive”), Cobain never forgot those downtrodden fans. Nirvana was also musically more inventive than many people have assumed, thanks to the input of the urbane bassist Krist Novoselic and the inordinately good-natured drummer Dave Grohl. For all the doctrinaire punk rejection of hippiedom, Nirvana embraced all sorts of music. As Grohl said, “We all discovered punk rock and grew up listening to Black Flag but we also love John Fogerty.” Cobain’s is the usual rock cautionary tale: Drugs and mental illness played a role, but so did a rock-star machine populated by people who, said producer Steve Albini, are “pieces of shit.” Azerrad closes his long but readable account by pondering what might have been had Cobain lived, with Michael Stipe suggesting that their sound would be “very quiet and acoustic, with lots of stringed instruments.”
Better than the usual run of rock biographies and essential for Nirvana fans.
