Journals
(Book)

Includes bibliographical references.

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.