Notes from a reluctant rock star

The first page of the book is an invitation. The young artist’s handwriting is a relaxed scrawl framed by the modest blue lines of a spiral notebook. “When you wake up this morning, please read my diary,” it says. “Look through my things and figure me out.”

The last page is a screed. It mocks celebrity and blunt thinking. The last sentence is about rednecks wading through fish entrails in sunless Alaska. This time, the words are written by a miserable millionaire and drift across the unlined stationary of the Hotel Excelsior in Rome.

Those two captured moments in the writing life of rock star Kurt Cobain are presented as the terminals of his ill-fated artistic voyage in a new book in stores titled, simply, “Journals” (Riverhead Press), which reverentially duplicates 274 pages of his personal writings from the late 1980s through 1994. In the beginning, he is a troubled but ambitious singer in a baby rock band. In the last, he is a 27-year-old celebrity just weeks ahead of a shotgun suicide. In between are his words on music and politics, friends, rivals and lovers, and, most memorably, his addictions and pain. “I remember someone saying if you try heroine [sic] once you’ll become hooked,” he writes in one entry. “Of course I laughed and scoffed but now I believe this to be very true.”

Released Monday, the book presents intact doodles, lyric fragments, redundancies and grammatical misadventures, all put to page in the handwriting of the late author. Like the Nirvana singer’s music and life, “Journals” is laced with humor and horror and often wrenchingly candid.

“I made about 5 million dollars last year ... ill [sic] be able to sell my untalented, very ungenious ass for years based on my cult status,” he writes. In another section he defines his dashed dreams in the wake of the grunge movement: “We simply wanted to give those dumb heavy metal kids (the kids we used to be) an introduction to a different way of thinking ... all we got was flack, backstabbing and Pearl Jam.”

The publication of the diaries has stirred a minor debate among fans and in the media: Is it a service to Cobain’s legacy, or an unseemly auctioning of his personal thoughts?

“From the moment of acquisition there were many words written about the trespass, and the scandal and the violation of this,” says the book’s editor, Julie Grau of Riverhead Books.

That acquisition was made from the Cobain estate last year for a reported $4 million, ending a bidding war for access to 27 notebooks and folders jammed with letters, sketches and notes penned by the late singer-songwriter. Cobain’s widow, singer-actress Courtney Love, has endured abuse from some Nirvana fans who view her as a profiteer, and the decision to publish the journals (along with a recently settled court battle to enhance her share of control over Nirvana’s recordings) has likely not changed that. Other observers, though, will hail Love’s decision to share the writings.

“Whoever put it together did a lovely job,” former Nirvana manager Danny Goldberg, now chief of Artemis Records, said after thumbing through the hardcover. “I’m glad it exists.”

Newsweek found the book so valuable as a document that the magazine devoted its Oct. 28 cover story to “Journals,” with lengthy excerpts inside. Juxtapose that reverence with the scathing review published last week in the New York Daily News: “How would you like to spend several hours,” the reviewer asks, “with a humorless, enraged, paranoid, contemptuous, suicidal heroin addict?”

Another early review, this one published in England in the Observer, comes from a famous rock star who is himself mentioned in “The Journals” -- Pete Townshend of the Who. Cobain writes, “I hope I die before I become Pete Townshend” in one of his entries, an attack on aging baby boomer rebels settling in as elder statesmen. Townshend’s review, though, is not so much a rebuttal as an analysis of Cobain’s familiar life trajectory.

“Read this book to see that the human spirit, even at its most sublime, can effect monumental damage on itself and its fellow souls if addiction enters the story,” Townshend writes. “I mourn for Kurt. A once beautiful, then pathetic, lost and heroically stupid boy. Hard rock indeed.”

The book arrives at a time when Nirvana is still percolating in pop culture. The release last week of “Nirvana,” a single-disc survey of the band’s music, included “You Know You’re Right,” an unreleased song that put Cobain’s plaintive voice back on the radio in recent weeks.

Also, last year marked 10 years since the release of “Nevermind,” the band’s breakthrough masterpiece. Among the anniversary tie-ins was the publication of “Heavier Than Heaven,” a biography of Cobain by Christopher R. Cross. That book was informed by Cross’ unprecedented access to the same writings that would be culled for “Journals.”

The author said last week that “Journals” very much captures the tone of the original mass of writings, although, he notes, the representation of Love in the book does not match that of the unfiltered journals. “Clearly,” the writer said, “there was a decision to not put in as much stuff about Courtney as Kurt had written.”

Cross said his first encounter with Cobain’s writings while preparing for “Heavier than Heaven” was an emotionally wringing experience and he suspects readers of “Journals” will be likewise moved, pained and amused by its contents. As for critics who assail the publication of the new book, Cross answers that in Cobain’s home, the journals were more like a piece of public art than a diary secreted away in a drawer.

“These were not things he kept as precious gems locked away,” Cross said. “They literally were on his coffee table and he kept them open. Frequently when his friends came by, he pointed to his friends and said, ‘Here read this, what do you think?’ Many people have seen these through the years, just not all of them.”

“Journals” editor Grau says the writings themselves seem to have been written with an audience in mind, an important nuance to her mind.

“They were very declarative and they were written outward,” Grau said. “As opposed to a diary that is a private confessional and a receptacle for the innermost thoughts, these were more workbooks.... It’s very hard for me to find something in here that isn’t written to somebody, even if its an imaginary reader.”

The two most relevant figures in distilling Cobain’s journals were Grau and Love’s manager, Jim Barber. Grau, 38, came to the project with a varied resume, ranging from novels such as “An Instance of the Fingerpost” by Iain Pears to the books by financial guru Suze Orman.

Barber, meanwhile, has been linked romantically with Love in the press, making his presence perhaps nettlesome to the anti-Love contingent of Nirvana fans.

“He was a friend, and only a friend, to the material,” Grau said. “In the editorial handling of this material, the only interest he served was that of Kurt’s. The only pages he said he wanted out were pages that did not reflect well on Kurt, the juvenilia. Jim is not an anonymous person and his affiliations are known, but he also has a deep respect for music and artists.”

Grau came to the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles in late April to huddle with Barber for three marathon sessions to review the mass of pages, which they sorted through three times. Grau and Barber quickly agreed “on about 95%” of the final product, which Grau said represents about a quarter of the entire trove.

And what would Cobain think of his innermost thoughts being perched on the new release rack? Fittingly, the artist of so many contradictions gives us two conflicting answers.

In one section of “Journals,” he laments the theft of his journal pages from hotel rooms. “You have raped me harder than you will ever know,” he tells the guilty parties.

But on the front cover of one of his notebooks, he offers a different message: “If You Read You’ll Judge.”