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Cross, Charles R., and Ángeles Leiva Morales. Heavier than Heaven. Reservoir Books, 2020.

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Kurt Cobain was born on February 20th in 1967, in Aberdeen Washington. (Page 5)

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Kurt began seventh grade at Montesano Junior High. He began music classes in his fifth grade year. By seventh grade he was playing drums with the school band. (Page 29)

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Kurt spent several months living with his Uncle Chuck, where he began to take his first official guitar lessons. Chuck recalls him taking lessons for moths along with hours of practice. He finally had to end lessons when Kurt's grades started getting bad in result of the obsession with learning guitar. (Page 41)

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Kurt moved out of his fathers house and spent a few years bouncing around Grays Harbor. Within a span of four years he had lived in ten different houses, with ten different families. (Page 39)

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"One a rainy night in early March 1987, the band finally drove out of Aberdeen in a panel van packed with gear, headed toward their first show." (Page 84)

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Kurt left Aberdeen, his home and where he was born, forever, to pursue music with his new band Nirvana.

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Nirvana had finally made it. On October 20th, they arrived in London for a show. (Page 144)

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"Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love first locked eyes on each other at eleven in the evening on Friday, January 12, 1990." Within days the two of them were inseparable. (Page 185)

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"When Kelly asked if the couple would consider having a baby. Kurt answered: "I just want to be situated and secure. I want to make sure we have a house, and make sure we have money saved up in the bank." He didn't know Courtney was already carrying a child." (Page 229)

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On the same day that Nirvana starred on Saturday Night Live, the bands first album hit No. 1. Kurt didn't find this pleasing. With his escalating drug addiction, he decided to use far more than his body could take. When his girlfriend, Courtney Love, awoke, she saw Kurt's body and somehow brought him back to life. (Page 3-4) "In the course of one day, Kurt had been born in the public eye, died in the privacy of his own darkness, and was resurrected by a force of love." (End of page 4)

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On August 18th Frances Bean Cobain was born at 7:48 a.m in Los Angeles. (Page 243)

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Two days after Frances was born, a social worker appeared at the hospital and accused Kurt and Courtney of now being "fit parents" due to Kurt's open abuse of drugs. Because of this they weren't allowed to take Frances home from the hospital and had to leave her there when they went home. August 24th the first court was held, and the final judge was neither of them were allowed to see Frances without supervision and drug tested 30 days prior to visiting her.

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Kurt tried rehab, as it was required to see Frances even with supervision. It didn't work very well and he fell right back into his bad habits. "There were many overdoses and near-death situations, as many as a dozen in 1993 alone." Many say while he was on drugs he was happier. Without them, he was depressed, impossible to deal with, and moody.

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Kurt and Courtney moved into their first house together. They paid $1,130,000 for it. It was one Lake Washington, close to Seattle.

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"At six in the morning, she awoke and found him on the floor, pale as a ghost, with blood coming out of one nostril. HE was fully dressed wearing his brown corduroy coat, and there was a wad of $1,000 in cash in his right hand. Courtney had seen Kurt close to death from heroin overdoses, but this wasn't a heroin overdose. Instead she found a three-page note clutched in the tight, clod ball of his left hand." (Page 323)

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Kurt was brought back to life, he left the hospital on March 8th and a few days after he flew back to Seattle to continue his life.

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"On March 12th Seattle police were dispatched to the Lake Washington house after someone called 911 but hung up," (Page 328) Kurt claims there was a fight between Courtney and him but things were fine once the police arrived.

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On April 7th Kurt had written three different goodbyes with a red pen and a white piece of lined paper. This time he was gone forever.

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Kurt's mother organized the last service for her son. Frances spread his ashes in McLane creek behind Kurt's mothers house. "Five years after Kurt's suicide, on May 31, 1999, Memorial Day, Wendy organized a final service for her son" (Page 364)

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Kurt lived to be 27 years old. In that 27 years he changed the world of music. His music was pure and wasn't faked for the appeal. He used his heart to write his songs as well as preform them.

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https://www.today.com/popculture/kurt-cobain-20-years-gone-still-just-click-away-2D79484681

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Twenty years after the death of Kurt Cobain, a spotlight still manages to shine brightly on the Nirvana frontman, thanks in part to technology and an Internet audience that didn't exist in 1994.

Certainly the music Cobain made and the impact Nirvana had on rock music in the early 1990s is why we remember the singer. But the Internet, and social media in particular, have changed how we remember, whether an idolized rock star has been dead for 20 years or 20 minutes.

Growing up in the age of Nirvana and grunge music meant getting yourself to a live show or sitting in front of MTV if you wanted to see the band perform. Today, there's a sizable collection of videos on YouTube, including stylized mainstays such as "Smells Like Teen Spirit" or "Heart Shaped Box" and raw live versions of "Breed" and "Negative Creep." There are also numerous songs from the ever-popular, cover-filled "Unplugged" session.

Twitter is another place to go a for a hashtagged remedy to fill your Nirvana void. Media outlets around the world are publishing varying forms of remembrances, and SPIN magazine tweeted out a link to its 1994 cover story on Cobain's death. KEXP in Seattle paid tribute to the singer on Friday and tweeted a blog post featuring videos of Nirvana covering other people's songs. The Grammys' feed pointed us to a unique collection of 10 songs in which Cobain was name-dropped by other artists.

Seattle photographer Charles Peterson, who made a career out of capturing Nirvana and the music scene that spawned a worldwide phenomenon, shared 10 rare and unseen Cobain images with Billboard. In a Q&A with the mag, Peterson explained why he thought Cobain and Nirvana had remained so important. "I think that grunge and Nirvana was this last big musical movement before everything was virtually connected in real time all the time. Now things just move so quickly that there's really no ability for something to bubble up organically and be meaningful, not for an entire generation or world."

At least a new generation is still reacting positively to Cobain's lasting legacy. A viral video posted last month by TheFineBros Youtube site offered a glimpse at what teens today think when they hear Nirvana. "I've heard this song before" and "Who doesn't love Nirvana?" should be sweet music to the ears of anyone who worries about whether the music holds up among the Miley generation.

A post on the photo app Trover aims to give viewers a virtual tour of Seattle's grunge landmarks with the "spaces and places critical to this era" in the history of music.

Cobain's hometown of Aberdeen, Wash., paid tribute to him on his Feb. 20 birthday with the unveiling of an awkward crying statue. The town already has a Kurt Cobain Park, and some would like to turn his childhood home into a museum. A video which surfaced on YouTube last month offered a look inside.

The nearby town of Hoquiam, Wash., where Cobain lived briefly, will hold its Nirvana Day on April 10, the same day the band is set to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

And finally, cartoonist Ward Sutton, in a piece for the Village Voice, preferred to imagine what Cobain's life would have been like if he'd chosen not to kill himself. "In Bloom: The Alternate History of Kurt Cobain" draws on the years Cobain has missed and how his presence might have humorously impacted them.

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Kurt Cobain: 20 years gone, still just a click away

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Twenty years after the death of Kurt Cobain, a spotlight still manages to shine brightly on the Nirvana frontman, thanks in part to technology and an Internet audience that didn't exist in 1994.Certainly the music Cobain made and the impact Nirvana had on rock music in the early 1990s is why we remember the singer.

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https://www.wionews.com/life-fun/kurt-cobains-50th-birth-anniversary-his-impact-on-music-12525

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Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, who defined grunge and the rise of alternative rock, would have turned 50 on Monday. He remains an enduring cultural presence even for many young people -- but what would he be doing if he were alive?

The 27-year-old shot himself at his home in Seattle on April 5, 1994, ending his life, his suffering and, at least symbolically, the grunge movement. Rock has kept evolving since his suicide yet "Nevermind," Nirvana's brutal 1991 masterpiece, is still widely considered one of the most influential albums in history.

"He remains the most important musician of the last two decades in music, with an album that is still one of the last great rock records," said Charles R. Cross, who has written three books on the artist including "Here We Are Now: The Lasting Impact of Kurt Cobain."

To Cross, Cobain's key contribution is opening the way for songwriters to tackle a wider emotional range. Nirvana's songs included "Lithium," a frank exploration of Cobain's manic depression, and the searing "Rape Me."

"His impact on songwriting was that he made it okay for songs to be about painful emotions, angst, depression -- even something as awful as rape," Cross said.

Nirvana was at the forefront of a boom in alternative rock, as mainstream audiences increasingly listened to Seattle grunge bands who also included Pearl Jam and Soundgarden -- as well as hard-edged groups from elsewhere in the United States such as Green Day and Smashing Pumpkins.

Nirvana's influence can be heard in more recent bands such as Cloud Nothings, Cage the Elephant and Fall Out Boy -- but also in more unexpected areas. Rap superstar Jay Z quoted Nirvana's breakthrough hit "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in his track "Holy Grail," which featured Justin Timberlake.

Stan Cuesta, a French music journalist who has written a book on Nirvana, said the group's fan base remains surprisingly young. "Smells Like Teen Spirit" has enjoyed a recent resurgence with nearly 500 million views on YouTube.

"Nirvana's audience today isn't the people who listened to the group at the time. It's young people. It's funny as some of them weren't born when Kurt Cobain died 23 years ago," Cuesta said.
How would Cobain fare in the internet age
But Cobain -- with his ragged cardigan and thick blonde locks -- may be better known for some younger fans for his look rather than Nirvana's music, Cuesta said.

"Kurt's poster is in everyone's bedroom like Che Guevara's poster used to be, even if people don't necessarily know much about Che's political activities or Nirvana's music," he said.

Cobain -- whose suicide note quoted Neil Young's line that "it's better to burn out than to fade away" -- may have hated his contemporary image.

But what would Cobain have been like as a 50-year-old in 2017, an era when most artists feel obliged to promote themselves constantly on the internet and many make their music on laptops instead of in garages?

"I don't think Nirvana would have been around long to begin with," Cuesta said. "He said so at the time. His success was weighing heavily on him. He would have pursued a solo career different than what he was doing at the beginning."

A possible sign of what Cobain would have become could be seen in "MTV Unplugged in New York," the last recording of Nirvana which was released months after his death.

Recorded for the MTV series of the time, Cobain went mellow with an acoustic guitar. In addition to Nirvana songs, the session featured multiple covers including of David Bowie's "The Man Who Sold the World" and the folk standard "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?"

"He would have done something softer, more acoustic. He always had this blend of pop and punk," Cuesta said.

"He might have gone more experimental. One of the things that was most gratifying for him was his recording with William Burroughs," the legendary beat poet whom Cobain accompanied on guitar as he recited "The 'Priest' They Called Him."

Some of Cobain's early recordings, made on cassette as he grew up in the lumber town of Aberdeen, Washington, were released in 2015 to accompany "Montage of Heck," a documentary that had the cooperation of the rocker's widow Courtney Love.

Cuesta said it was possible to imagine a 50-year-old Cobain with a diverse solo discography that, much like Neil Young's, goes in both electric and acoustic directions.

"It's a bit of a fantasy, but I would imagine him aging well."

(AFP)

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Kurt Cobain's 50th birth anniversary: His impact on music

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Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, who defined grunge and the rise of alternative rock, would have turned 50 on Monday. He remains an enduring cultural presence even for many young people -- but what would he be doing if he were alive?

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https://www.theedgesusu.co.uk/records/2021/04/05/27-years-later-nirvana-and-kurt-cobains-legacy/

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On this date 27 years ago, Kurt Cobain passed away at the age of just 27, becoming one of many artists memorialised in the '27 Club'. As the guitarist, primary songwriter, and frontman of Nirvana, he was adored by many. Although his death was a tragedy that essentially ended the grunge scene in 1994, his legacy continues to go on through Nirvana's music as the band still remains popular amongst original fans and younger generations.

From the yellow wiggly smiley face you see everywhere to their infamous naked baby 1991 album Nevermind still seen in music shops, there is no denying that Nirvana is the most influential grunge band of all time. As of 31st March 2021, the band has just over 17,255,000 monthly listeners and their most well-known song 'Smells Like Teen Spirit', has just over 933,525,000 plays on Spotify! They are certainly not going away any time soon.

While the hot debate surrounding what can be defined as grunge has been going on since the mid-80s, Nirvana embraced it for what they assumed it to be. Musically, grunge is an underground genre that borrows from punk, metal, rock and to a certain extent, pop. Under the talent of Cobain, Nirvana surprised the world with their second album, Nevermind breaking tradition by having huge success on radio, MTV, CD, and tape recordings, thus launching the genre into the mainstream. They were raw and unpolished; that's what was needed then.

Furthermore, their iconic Nirvana MTV Unplugged 1993/1994 set reminded viewers and listeners that they were more than your average Joe. Although the infamous 1992 MTV Awards (when Nirvana performed) may lead many to question why the band would agree to perform for MTV Unplugged, it came at a time where the TV station's popularity was dipping. Cobain's motives will never be clear, but one thing is for sure - they rocked the roof off! Viewership for this much-anticipated release did wonders for MTV and showed the entire world that Nirvana were not just some shouty, rowdy men who turned the volume up to 100. This was their time to shine and show their talent off. From 'All Apologies' to 'About A Girl', they were stripping back and showing off the incredible vocal skills and writings of Cobain. Oh, and the band were willing to take risks by performing covers of David Bowie, who, according to The Independent, was 'regarded as a sort of super-naff crazy uncle to Phil Collins. It is hard to convey just how uncool he still was in the early Nineties.' They made it their own.

In a short span of time, the band went supernova, known worldwide for their down-tuning, strange chord progressions, their punk rock essence and their peculiar lyrics about Courtney Love's vagina ('Heart-Shaped Box') and the smell of teenage angst ('Smells Like Teen Spirit'). Despite their strange lyrics and edgy music, the band spoke to the disillusioned Gen X youth. As someone who was lucky enough to catch Nirvana at Reading Festival, Jasper Ward, 40, still continues to listen to the band:

'I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing, the first time I heard Nirvana. I grew up during the 80s, so that decade of decadence as a response to political upheaval and dark tension of punk - that characterised the end of the 70s - meant nothing to me.

For me, the 80s was merely a torrent of increasingly manufactured plastic pop acts dominating the musical landscape. Then I heard something completely different that blew away that decade of shallow pop. That twisted fuzz guitar and seething rage simply didn't give a fuck about the zeitgeist. It wasn't rebellion. It was a refusal to play somebody else's game that called to the disenfranchised.

Their pied piper was a stunningly beautiful, unassuming poet whose refusal to play the anti-hero made his music only more alluring to me and we all flocked to his clarion call. Simply put, there was everything before... and then there was Nirvana.'

What Jasper says speaks the truth for many. Creating anthems about alienation continues to resonate with each new generation. When speaking to 21-year-old Eva Richards about what Cobain means to her, she stated 'I just really like the genre and how he puts his emotion into his music, even though the lyrics are sometimes nonsensical. You can tell the emotion and stuff is there and he definitely had that kinda raw passion that kina raw passion that you don't often come by at all.' The fascination with Nirvana lives on; there is even a Rock-A-Bye version of Nirvana songs to help send your children to sleep!

Cobain became an icon himself. With his clothing style, unphased attitude and his refusal to be inauthentic - many idolised him, and still do. He was ahead of his time; he was even arrested for spray-painting 'God is Gay' on police cars in Washington state. He was also modest about his own talent, saying that 'We're from the learn-as-you-play school. We're still in it.' Cobain came from a small town and dreamed of making it big time. That's what he did; he never gave up.

Ultimately, without Cobain and Nirvana, there would be no Lana Del Rey, You Me At Six, Foo Fighters, Machine Gun Kelly, Biffy Clyro, 30 Seconds to Mars - the list goes on. If it was not for the genius of Kurt Cobain, who knows where your favourite band would be today. Cobain may no longer be with us, but he lives on through Nirvana's music and inspires many day-in and day-out to be unapologetically themselves.

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27 Years Later: Nirvana and Kurt Cobain's Legacy

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On this date 27 years ago, Kurt Cobain passed away at the age of just 27, becoming one of many artists memorialised in the '27 Club'. As the guitarist, primary songwriter, and frontman of Nirvana, he was adored by many.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTWKbfoikeg

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Nirvana - Smells Like Teen Spirit (Official Music Video)

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https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2014/04/03/kurt-cobain-legacy

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It's been 20 years since Kurt Cobain, leader of the rock band Nirvana, committed suicide. It was April 5, 1994, and his death left a legion of fans grieving his loss. But according to a new book, Cobain lives on in Nirvana's music, and you can still see his spirit in culture and fashion. So with Nirvana about to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame next week, Cobain biographer Charles Cross joins Here & Now's Robin Young to talk about the Nirvana frontman's legacy. Producer Alex Ashlock shares some of his thoughts below.
April 8, 1994 was a Friday. I was working at WILL, the public radio station at the University of Illinois. We still had typewriters in the newsroom, I think, along with an old Associated Press teletype machine. The paper spooled through on big yellow rolls. A bulletin clicked over. It said that the body of Nirvana's Kurt Cobain had been found at his home in Seattle. Then more clicking. Eventually the AP copy told me Cobain it appeared to be a suicide.

I had seen the band in concert just a few months before.

Kurt Cobain was born in Aberdeen, Washington on February 20, 1967. He would have turned 47 in February.

Charles Cross, who wrote the definitive biography of the Nirvana leader, " Heavier Than Heaven," has written a new reflection on Cobain that's called " Here We Are Now: The Lasting Impact Of Kurt Cobain" (excerpt below). Cross says he wrote the second book because in some ways Cobain is still alive. You can see his influence in music of course, especially hip-hop, but also in culture and fashion. Think the grunge look, which wasn't really a look; it was actually what Cobain really wore.

But Cross says Cobain's true and lasting impact is his incredibly personal and powerful music. "Those songs have such meaning to so many people. And when we talk about Kurt and why he mattered, that is by far and away the reason he mattered - is that that body of songs that he created and wrote still speak to listeners today, both listeners that heard it in the '90s and people that are just discovering it now. It's the reason that we still talk about him.

"When we talk about his legacy, it's also to some degree our legacy, our youth. It was the one time where it suddenly felt to everybody here that the world could go on its end."

I know it seems silly, but I still have a Kurt Cobain scrapbook of stuff I collected about him and Nirvana.

His death really bothered me, still does.

But something I heard yesterday made me feel a little better. Robin was interviewing Rhett Miller about the Old 97's new record, "Most Messed Up," which is a knockout by the way. Robin asked Rhett whether Nirvana had any influence on him and his band.

Here's what he said. He mentions his band mate Murry Hammond.
By Charles R. Cross

Prologue: The Horrible Secret
On the morning of April 8, 1994, I was working in my office at the Seattle magazine The Rocket when I received a series of phone calls that would prove unforgettable. Two decades have passed since that day, but those moments still remain vivid and haunting. Sometimes they seem like part of a dream I can't escape, or forget. History was happening around me, but I didn't realize it in the moment. I can still remember my finger pressing the flashing Line One button on my office phone, but I had no clue, at the time, that this little red light would announce a sea change in both music and culture. Like all nightmares, I want it to end differently, but it doesn't. It can't; it's not a dream.

The first call to my desk that day came from radio station KXRX-FM. I occasionally did segments for them promoting local bands on the rise as the editor in chief of The Rocket, a Seattle music and entertainment magazine with a circulation of one hundred thousand. We championed Northwest bands and were the first publication to do cover stories on Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, and other Seattle groups. Even though I had a bird's-eye view of the Grunge explosion, I was as surprised as everyone else in town when our locals-many of them old friends who'd been playing around for years-became international superstars.

I expected this phone call to be about my next radio segment, but the tone of the DJ's voice wasn't that typical fast-talking cadence I was used to. Instead it was somber, deliberate, slightly alarmed.

"Do you think," the DJ asked, "there's a chance Kurt Cobain is dead?"

At that point, early on April 8, 1994, no one else had uttered those words. The radio station had received a phone call just moments before from a dispatcher at an electrician's office, tipping them off that one of their employees had found a body at Kurt's house. The caller had told the station, "You guys are going to owe me some pretty good Pink Floyd tickets for this." The police had just been summoned. The DJ thought that perhaps I might have more information on the identity of the body. "We haven't gone on the air with it yet," he said, "but do you think there's any chance it's Kurt?"

I said no. "It can't be him," I said. "It's got to be one of his drug buddies, who probably overdosed. It can't be Kurt. It just can't." My words were from a place of denial, of course, and felt false even as I said them. I was doing the kind of psychological bargaining that happens when you initially hear bad news. It was the same bargaining millions of Nirvana fans worldwide would be carrying out in a few hours. But at this moment in time, this news-this horrible secret-belonged only to the radio station, the electrical contractor, the police, and me.

It couldn't be Kurt, I repeated in my head. While his struggles with drugs were well known within the tight circle of Seattle music, some of his friends were in far deeper. Kurt had been arrested a few times the previous year, and his ongoing battle with heroin was no secret. But that body . . . it couldn't be his, because he couldn't be gone.

But he was.

Not long after that phone call, KXRX went on the air with a report that a body had been found at the Cobain mansion. All at once, all six of our phone lines at The Rocket lit up. Members of the media were calling to ask for comment, friends of Kurt's were calling to ask if we knew any details, and our own staff of freelancers was calling in to see if what they'd heard was true. The KXRX DJ later told me the horrible story of how Kurt's sister had phoned the station to say the body couldn't possibly be Kurt's because this was the first she was hearing about it, and news like that couldn't leak out before the family was notified. But that is exactly what happened. Kurt's family found out he was dead from a report on a radio station.

I was busy making phone calls to Nirvana's publicist, mutual friends, contacts at Geffen Records and Sub Pop, anyone I knew who might have more information. Frustratingly, nobody knew anything more than I did. I was doing what any magazine editor would have done, investigating leads. But this felt personal, too, because everyone in Seattle felt a connection to Kurt. It was even more personal at our magazine because not only had The Rocket given Nirvana their first press and covered everything they did from first single to stardom, but the band had advertised in our pages several times, looking for drummers. One of my regrets is that I cashed a check Kurt wrote The Rocket for twenty bucks to pay for a classified ad when it was already clear that he was destined for fame. At The Rocket, there was a principle that we couldn't treat the bands we covered as stars and still retain the respect they had for us-journalists didn't ask for autographs or keep signed checks. Another connection with the band our magazine had was that Nirvana's logo-in the Century Condensed font-had been set on The Rocket 's typesetting machine. That original logo, which had already been slapped on millions of albums, first came out of a giant old type machine a few feet from my desk.

But back on that morning, April 8, 1994, there was no time for nostalgia. I needed immediate answers because I also had a job to do, and that job had become a lot more complicated in the last few hours. The Rocket was set to go to press that night, and we'd been waiting all week for an interview we'd been promised with a certain rock star, one Courtney Love. Hole was poised to release Live Through This the following week, and her publicist had set up numerous interviews for us, all of which had been postponed. And, as luck would have it, we had a phone interview with Courtney scheduled for the very day Kurt's body was found. A paste-up of our next cover of The Rocket, complete with a photo of Courtney and Hole, was sitting on our art director's desk. It was only later that I'd discover the reason Courtney kept missing our scheduled interviews; she was out searching for Kurt, who had escaped rehab. When the news came that the body at the Cobain house had in fact been identified as Kurt's, I had the surreal task of directing our art staff to take Courtney Love off the cover of The Rocket and put her now-deceased husband on.

Amid that deadline drama in my office, the phones never stopped ringing. I tried to juggle the calls while, with my staff, I chose an iconic Charles Peterson photo of Kurt for the cover. It showed him jumping high in the air, almost as if he was already no longer of this earth; it was perfect. Our first cover story on Nirvana had run with the headline nirvana invades berlin. That had been an easy headline to write. Nirvana was on the rise back then. But this time around, no string of words could sum up the loss. It was too big to put into words, really.

In the end, we used the airborne photo with no type other than our logo and the date.

And the phones just kept ringing and ringing. Many of the calls were from media who had never even covered Nirvana before, or had maybe mentioned "Grunge" in one article, and were now trying to create a story where there was nothing to report other than an obituary. The barrage of phone calls began to rattle our office receptionist. This was a woman who was usually so sure of herself that she once had the nerve to demand Courtney Love put out a cigarette when Courtney walked into our office smoking (Courtney dropped it on the carpet and rubbed it out with her shoe). But that April day, the endless phone calls had unnerved the receptionist, and I could hear that strain in her voice when she buzzed me for the thousandth time with another call. She didn't say who was waiting. She told me flatly, "Pick up line one." When I did, I heard a raspy sound I recognized immediately, but that didn't make it any less bizarre.

"This is Larry King, and you're on the radio live," said the voice on the line. "What is this thing called Grunge music?" I was speechless. His show was so desperate to get someone in Seattle to take their calls that they'd bypassed the normal protocols of putting in a request for an on-air interview first. I wasn't given a chance to say no. I had been cold-called, and now I was live on the radio with Larry King.

Only a few weeks before, I'd read a column from James Wolcott about Larry King and his constant seizing on celebrity death. One quote read, "Who elected Larry King America's grief counselor? We, the viewing public, did, by driving up his ratings whenever somebody famous passes." Now I was a pawn in Larry King's indelicate dance between legitimate news and ratings-driven scandal.

King kept on, undeterred by my silence, moving forward in his typical style of asking a series of questions without waiting for answers. "Tell us, just who was Kurt Cobain? Why Seattle? Why should we care? What about drugs?"

I muttered something; I don't recall what. Larry continued: "Why Kurt? Why Grunge music? Who was he? Why do people care?" This nightmare of a day was spiraling out of control and Larry King, of all people, was interrogating me.

And then, uncharacteristically, Larry King paused for a moment, and asked the one question that had significance. It was more to the point, and it had the kind of clarity that you find when the simplest question is asked instead of a more complicated one. It was the way that Larry King sometimes could end up being brilliant, finding the one truth amid the clutter.

"Tell me, Mr. Cross," Larry King said, "why did Kurt Cobain matter?"

I don't recall what I said to Larry King. Given that day's madness, and the fact that Kurt's body lay under a coroner's drape just a few miles away, I'm sure I didn't properly answer the question. In some small way, this book is my attempt, twenty years later, to do so. The impact of any person's life is difficult to fully see on the day a life ends, but the long view offers a wider and more accurate vista.

My goal with these pages is to examine how in the long view Kurt's work and life affected music, fashion, gender roles, the way we treat suicide and drug addiction, the way his hometown views itself, and the very idea of Seattle in culture. In some of these arenas, his impact has been tremendous; in others, it's been subtle. Still, his twenty-seven years on this earth had ramifications. His legacy continues to evolve and to change. The reality is that in twenty years we haven't stopped talking about Kurt Cobain. He still matters to me, and, I would argue, he still matters to an entire generation.

Larry King never would have put it this way, but what I'm seeking to address is the eternal question of history: how do we measure the life of a man?

This is not a biography of Kurt Cobain. I've already done that with Heavier Than Heaven in 2001. That book was a third-person narrative of the events of Kurt's life. Here We Are Now, in contrast, is my first-person analysis of what that life meant, and how that meaning can be quantified-when it can be at all. There were many places in Heavier Than Heaven where I could have inserted myself as a narrator because I witnessed events, or because I was part of them in some slight way. Doing so would have broken the reader's trance of experiencing history, though. Here We Are Now is not objective, and it brings forth my own intersections with this tale, before and after Kurt's death, my analysis of that history, and, in some places, the voices of a few other select experts.

I know there are some critics who have already suggested, and certainly will say of this book, that as a society we have talked enough about Kurt Cobain. Maybe. I don't seek to canonize Kurt, glorify him, or portray him as if he were some kind of God of Rock. Doing that is to take away his humanity, and to sketch him as he would never have wanted. As a human being, he often showed incredibly bad judgment and made choices that hurt many people who cared for him, his suicide being the most obvious example. But even Kurt's demons have had an impact on the larger culture over the past two decades; his suicide, for example, has been studied and written about extensively. It is without any doubt the most famous suicide of the last two decades. That suicide, as horrible as it was, had an impact on who "we"-as a culture-"are now."

At the very least, Nirvana's music touched the generation it was made for. The world has changed much since 1991 when Nevermind was released, but the influence of that album has only grown as the years pass. Technology has since turned the music industry upside down, fractionalized genres into smaller slices, and diminished the possibility of any rock act dominating the way Nirvana did. I would argue that no rock star since Kurt has had that same combination of talent, voice, lyric-writing skill, and charisma-another reason he is so significant, two decades after his death. The rarity of that magic combo is also part of the reason Kurt's impact still looms so large over music. There are many reasons for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to include Nirvana, but the catalog of songs Kurt wrote is central to that recognition. Many bands never even get nominated, but Nirvana were nominated the first year they qualified, and they deserve their place on that hallowed ground.

Kurt has become a touchstone as Nirvana's music continues to find an audience with a new crop of teenagers every year. I think some of his enduring popularity is similar to the way every teen I know ends up reading The Catcher in the Rye at some point. Kurt and Nirvana are now part of a rite of passage through adolescence, the true "teen spirit."

I was well past adolescence when Nirvana came on the scene, but their music made me feel young again, alive, full of possibility, and helped me understand some of my own adult angst. The greatest gift Kurt Cobain gave listeners was putting his honest pain into his lyrics. J. D. Salinger did the same thing with his prose in The Catcher in the Rye. Both men had demons of different sorts, and they also shared an uncomfortable relationship with fame. And both could proclaim, as Kurt sang on "Serve the Servants" off In Utero, "Teenage angst has paid off well."

"Smells Like Teen Spirit" often comes on my car radio, and during those few minutes I'm a teenager again. Suddenly my Volvo wagon-the same car Kurt drove-turns into a hot rod and I'm screaming, "With the lights out, it's less dangerous." The two speeding tickets I've gotten over the past twenty years are solely the fault of Kurt Cobain.

The lyrics to "Smells Like Teen Spirit," Nirvana's biggest hit, were difficult to comprehend and were debated by fans long before the official lyric sheet was finally published. To see how important those lyrics still are, type "s-m-e-l" into Google and you'll see that the most common search in the world for those four letters is " 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' lyrics." Music fans in the UK recently ranked the line "Here we are now, entertain us," as the third-greatest song lyric in music history. The Here We Are Now book you hold in your hands seeks to reinterpret that lyric into a statement of where we, as a collected body of fans, are now after Kurt's death. He's gone, dead for two decades, but here we are now. And in that space and time, how do we measure his significance?

Or, in the words of the philosopher, wise man, and sage sometimes known as Larry King, "Why did Kurt Cobain matter?"
Excerpted from the book HERE WE ARE NOW by Charles R. Cross. Copyright © 2014 by Charles R. Cross. Reprinted with permission of It Books, HarperCollins Publishers.
Charles R. Cross, Seattle-based author and journalist. His latest book is "Here We Are Now: The Lasting Impact Of Kurt Cobain." He tweets @charlesrcross.

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It's been 20 years since Kurt Cobain, leader of the rock band Nirvana, committed suicide. It was April 5, 1994, and his death left a legion of fans grieving his loss. But according to a new book, Cobain lives on in Nirvana's music, and you can still see his spirit in culture and fashion.