Review: 'Kurt Cobain: The Last Interview'

There's something exploitative and ghoulish about naming your anthologies of interviews with dead celebrities The Last Interview, especially when the last interview with Kurt Cobain in Kurt Cobain: The Last Interview is a pretty insubstantial four-page talk with a guitar mag. Yet even when doing his press obligations with something like Fender Frontline, Cobain couldn't help but move beyond the superficial to discuss his family, coming to terms with his audience, and his desire to move beyond grunge cliches. When he ends it by imagining himself fronting Nirvana as an old man opening for the Temps and Tops, you don't know whether to laugh because the image is so absurd or cry because he was clearly expressing his frustration with the limitations of fame that may have contributed to his fatal depression. Either way, that is a bill I would have paid good money to see.

Beyond questions of intent and taste, Kurt Cobain: The Last Interview is an interesting little collection of interviews from a pre-fame chat between CD Now and the whole Nirvana gang (Chad Channing even gets in a few words and teaches Cobain about calzones) through that last talk in 1994. The few interviews with the band are more jocular because Krist Novoselic can't seem to take anything seriously, but the frontman still dominates. When interviewed on his own, Cobain proves himself consistently thoughtful, if occasionally given to slacker wiseassery. Although he says he doesn't respect the media even before Vanity Fair's infamous hit-piece against him and wife Courtney Love in 1992, he is consistently courteous with his interviewers and always seems to steer the conversation back to topics he is personally invested in. Novelist Dana Spiotta's (Eat the Document) introductory chapter is inappropriately insightful and elegant for a book with a creepy title like Kurt Cobain: The Last Interview.