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Cross, Charles R. Heavier than heaven: a biography of Kurt Cobain, New York : Hyperion, 2002.The book is an official biography of Nirvana's frontman, Kurt Cobain. Cross, the writer, conducted 400-plus interviews—he was granted exclusive interviews and access to Cobain's private journals, lyrics, photos, even suicide notes by Cobain's widow Courtney Love. This book reveals Cobain's private life, how lies helped him die, how his family and love life entwined his art, yet what Nirvana's most famous tune "Smells Like Teen Spirit" really means.
As a teen, Cobain said he had "suicide genes": one of his suicidal relatives stabbed his own belly in front of his family, then ripped apart the wound in the hospital, while Cobain was contradictory: a sweet, popular athlete and sinister berserker, would rescue injured pigeons and laughingly killed a cat.
Written in a code as obscure as T.S. Eliot's, Cross gives fullest account yet what it was like to be, or love, Kurt Cobain. This is the deepest book about pop's darkest falling star.
Check out also Cobain's phenomenal breakthrough video with his band, Nirvana, via "Smells Like Teen Spirit":
Trivia
•Fame: Founding member, lead singer, guitarist and songwriter for Nirvana
•Date of death: 5 April 1994 c.
•Official cause of death: Suicide by gunshot
•Age: 27 years, 44 days c.
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Hopkins, Jerry & Sugerman, Danny. No one here gets out alive: the biography of Jim Morrison, New York : Grand Central Publishing, 2006.Here is Jim Morrison in all his complexity-singer, philosopher, poet, delinquent-the brilliant, charismatic, and obsessed seeker who rejected authority in any form, the explorer who probed "the bounds of reality to see what would happen..." Seven years in the writing, this definitive biography is the work of two men whose empathy and experience with Jim Morrison uniquely prepared them to recount this modern tragedy: Jerry Hopkins, whose famous Presley biography, Elvis, was inspired by Morrison's suggestion, and Danny Sugerman, confidant of and aide to the Doors. With an afterword by Michael McClure.
Check out Morrison with his band, The Doors, performing their legendary tune, "Light My Fire", at Hollywood Bowl, 1968:
•Fame: Lead singer, lyricist and video director for The Doors, and poet
•Date of death: 3 July 1971
•Official cause of death: Reported as heart failure
•Age: 27 years, 207 days
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Janis Joplin was the skyrocket chick of the sixties, the woman who broke into the boys' club of rock and out of the stifling good-girl femininity of postwar America. With her incredible wall-of-sound vocals, Joplin was the voice of a generation, and when she OD'd on heroin in October 1970, a generation's dreams crashed and burned with her. Alice Echols pushes past the legary Joplin-the red-hot mama of her own invention-as well as the familiar portrait of the screwed-up star victimized by the era she symbolized, to examine the roots of Joplin's muscianship and explore a generation's experiment with high-risk living and the terrible price it exacted. A deeply affecting biography of one of America's most brilliant and tormented stars, Scars of Sweet Paradise is also a vivid and incisive cultural history of an era that changed the world for us all.
•Fame: Lead vocalist and songwriter for Big Brother and the Holding Company, The Kozmic Blues Band and Full Tilt Boogie Band
•Date of death: 4 October 1970
•Official cause of death: Probable heroin overdose
•Age: 27 years, 258 days
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Shapiro, Harry & Glebbeek, Caesar. Jimi Hendrix: electric gypsy, New York : St. Martin's Griffin, 1995.Sympathetic and comprehensive, this biography of left-handed guitar wizard Jimi Hendrix (1942-1970) features an exhaustive Hendrix discography, a list of his equipment and a file of film and photo appearances. Shapiro ( Waiting for the Man: Drugs and Popular Music ) and Glebbeek, founder of the Hendrix Information Centre in Ireland, regale the reader with quotes, anecdotes, song analyses and mini-bios of Hendrix colleagues, including the Jimi Hendrix Experience's drummer Mitch Mitchell and bassist Noel Redding. The musician is portrayed as a perfectionist, brilliant composer whose imaginative sound effects were limited only by equipment; a black artist under pressure from radical black groups because his audience was predominantly white; a dedicated guitarist overwhelmed by his lifestyle. Hendrix's drug abuse and death from a probable barbiturate overdose are not sensationalized as the authors concentrate on his formidable music legacy, flamboyant individualism and sense of humor.
Watch Hendrix performing his brilliant composition, "Purple Haze", at Monterey Pop Festival, 1967:
•Fame: Pioneering electric guitarist, singer and songwriter for The Jimi Hendrix Experience and Band of Gypsys
•Date of death: 18 September 1970
•Official cause of death: Asphyxiation
•Age: 27 years, 295 days
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Jackson, Laura. Brian Jones: The untold life and mysterious death of a rock legend, London : Piatkus Books, 2009.In this definitive biography of Brian Jones, Laura Jackson rejects the stereotype of a narcissistic rock star who was doomed to self-destruct In the author's quest to get to the truth behind Brian Jones' life and death, she spoke to the people who knew him best: his family and friends, girlfriends and confidantes, and the musicians and friends who lived and worked with him right up until the end in 1969. Jones emerges as a man of immense talent, energy, and humor, but crippled by insecurities and shyness—a portrayal greatly at odds with the sordid rumors that plagued him throughout his life. Jackson provides new testimony on the rivalries within the Rolling Stones and the bitter final split, together with telling details from the pathology and coroner’s reports, to tell the story behind the headlines and get to the heart of the mysterious death of Brian Jones.
Watch Jones with his band, The Rolling Stones, performing one of their most well-known songs, "Satisfaction" in 1965:
•Fame: Rolling Stones founder, guitarist, and multi-instrumentalist
•Date of death: 3 July 1969
•Official cause of death: Drowning
•Age: 27 years, 125 days
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