Kurt Cobain - Journals

No editing, no footnotes: The Nirvana singer's JOURNALS is the year's most fascinating, heartbreaking rock book. 'I would only wear a tie died t-shirt if it were made from the Blood of Gerry [sic] Garcia and the urine of Phil Collins,' Kurt Cobain proclaims in one of his rants in JOURNALS , a fascinating, exhausting, illuminating, and ultimately heartbreaking tour of his private world.nbsp; it's unlike any rock book ever.nbsp; the text consists of facsimiles of pages from Cobain's private notebooks, with hardly any footnotes, dates or editorial comments.nbsp; You just dive right into a pile of raw diary entries, political screeds, track listings for mix tapes, letters, doodles, lyric sheets, a cartoon of Iron Maiden's mascot, a 1988 resume, notes for his driving test, all written in his tiny scrawl.nbsp; He describes the night he heard punk rock for the first time, at a Melvins gig in a parking lot, in words that could make you cry.nbsp; He confesses, 'I would love to be those kids on the back of Kiss Alive, the ones holding the banner.nbsp; Kiss.nbsp; I don't even like Kiss.'nbsp; And he gives the grisly details of his fatal descent into the drug he consistently misspells as 'heroine.' To make any sense of JOURNALS , you have to already know his story: the youthful indie days, his struggle with sudden fame, his marriage to Courtney Love, the drugs, the guns.nbsp; But what comes across most vividly is the humane, tolerant rock & roll passion that made him an icon in the first place and that makes him still so badly missed today.nbsp; When he casually scribbles lines such as 'I like the comfort in knowing that women are the only future in rock and roll' or 'god is a woman and she's Back in Black,' it's even more shocking to read now than it would have been in 1994.nbsp; Try to imagine any famous person talking this way today--any rock star, actor, athlete, politician, anybody.nbsp; Reading Cobain's JOURNALS , you don't just mourn him; you mourn the open musical and cultural possibilities of the era he embodied. 'Punk rock means freedom,' Kurt Cobain writes, and his journals are a sad reminder of what those freedoms were once, and how far away they seem.