“Don’t read my diary when I’m gone,” starts “Journals” (Putnam, $29.95), a collection of excerpts from over 20 of Kurt Cobain’s surviving journals and diaries.
Cobain suddenly contradicts himself in the next line:
“OK, I’m going to work now. When you wake up this morning, please read my diary, look through my thoughts, and try and figure me out.”
Fans of Nirvana have been trying to figure out Kurt Cobain for years, even before he took his own life in April of 1994.
It’s doubtful that any of us ever really will, but reading his journals offers a rare glimpse into Cobain’s most personal thoughts.
The book takes readers from 1988 when Cobain was living on the streets of Olympia, Washington, to right before he took his own life, all through the first few breaks for the band, the firing of several drummers, and eventually treatments for videos and album covers.
Scattered along the way of this unintentional history of the band are the random thoughts and drawings of a man who was either a total genius or criminally insane (if there is a difference).
But “Journals” includes a lot more than just diary entries. There are lyrics to some of the most important songs of the 90s (including an early version of “Come as You Are”), rough drafts of letters (and some that were unsent), and a multitude of sketches and comics.
In one of the comics, entitled “Mr. Moustache” (which presumably inspires the song of the same name), a father crudely pushes his ear to the stomach of the woman carrying their unborn child. The father yells that the child “better not be a little girl” and that he’ll “teach him how to work on cars and exploit women.”
Upon hearing this, the unborn child kicks through the mother’s stomach and into the man’s skull.
“Maybe someday I’ll turn myself into Hellen (sic) Keller by puncturing my ears with a knife, then cutting my voicebox out,” Cobain scrawls.
Although the subject matter is at times extremely dark, there are other times where you can’t help but feel sympathy for how tortured Cobain seems: “Everytime I see a television show that has dying children or a testimonial by a parent who recently lost their child I can’t help buy cry,” he writes in a letter to his father. “The thought of losing my baby haunts me everyday.”
These emotions linger when Cobain tries to explain how he got involved in the drug addiction that now dominates his life.
“I am not a junkie,” Cobain starts out. “I’ve had a rather unconclusive (sic) and uncomfortable stomach condition for the past three years.
“So after protein drinks and doctor after doctor I decided to relieve my pain with small doses of heroine (sic) for a walloping three whole weeks. It served as a band-aid for a while, but then the pain came back so I quit.” He goes on to almost plead with other people not to try heroin: “It was a stupid thing to do and I’ll never do it again and I feel real sorry for anyone who thinks they can use heroine (sic) as a medicine because um, duh, it doesn’t work. Drug withdrawal is everything you’ve ever heard.”
There are some lighter moments in “Journals” that every Nirvana fan can enjoy: There’s the unsent letter to “Empty TV” in which Kurt chastises the network for being “the entity of all corporate gods”.
And then there is Cobain’s sarcastic marketing plan for “In Utero,” in which he urges Geffen to release the album as “I Hate Myself and Want to Die,” available only on vinyl and eight track.
“Journals” was released after Cobain’s widow, Courtney Love, told an author who was writing a biography on Cobain about the diaries.
Newsweek reported that Love recieved about $4 million for the rights to publish the journals.
The cover of the book is designed so it looks like a hardcover red Mead notebook, and on the front of it, scrawled in black ink is, “If you read, you’ll judge.” Fans are way past judging Cobain; we all just want some insight to one of the most important musical figures of the past 20 years. “Journals” is the best way to do so. Highly recommended.
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