The Rock Dose

Posted: 26 Jan 2009 02:00 AM PST

Remember when you were in school and you used to write things down in a notebook but would often rip out the pages in fear that someone might find this notebook and judge you? You might have written songs or letters to someone but it wouldn’t make it to them? Doodles and drawings, random words and stupidness? Remember that? Imagine if you didn’t tear them out and just kept saving them as life went on, sort of like a journal. Kurt Cobain kept dozens of notebooks with this kind of stuff in it.

Kurt may not have been the greatest guitar player, but he was a very unique song writer. In the early 90’s I was kind of diggin’ Nirvana. Then suddenly the grunge scene exploded and I started to grow tired of Nirvana and grunge music. People seemed to forget that there was still other rock genres out there. Metal was still mainly underground and under-appreciated and glam rock was finally dying off. In April of 1994 I had just got out of school and was parking my car outside of the restaurant I worked at. I was getting ready to turn of my car when I heard on the radio that Kurt Cobain was found dead of an “apparent suicide” This didn’t surprise nor sadden me.

It wasn’t until some years later that I started to get back in to Nirvana. The grunge scene had died and you didn’t hear as much on the radio. As time went on I got in to them some more. Not a huge fan, but a fan of the music and songwriting. To this day I still enjoy listening to Nirvana and seeing Rockumentaries about Cobain. I still think he was murdered, but that’s one of those mysteries that will probably never be solved.

I was at a discount bargain store last week when I came across the Kurt Cobain Journals. This book is about the size of a notebook and over an inch thick with 298 pages. The outer cover is simply black with the words “Kurt Cobain Journals on the outside. If you remove the black outer cover, the hard cover of the book is an actual photocopy of a Mead spiral notebook cover with the words “If you read, you’ll judge” written in pen on the front cover and some random stuff written with NIRVANA in marker across the back. It’s filled with copies and photographs of some of the pages of many of Kurt Cobain’s journals. It’s an interesting journey in to the mind of Cobain through his life as an up and coming rock musician, through his addiction and the pain that drove him to addiction and possibly his “suicide”. Published in 2002 by Riverhead books, sold for $29.95 for the hard cover and . These days you can find it for a lot less. I found a hard cover copy for $3.98. If you ever come across a copy of this book, I highly recommend it.

Image: Booksamillion.com