Review: 'The Amplified Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana'

In late 1993, Nirvana was just two years into their global fame and had just three albums under their belts, but they'd already done and experienced enough for young journalist Michael Azerrad to fill a full and eventful biography. Ads for Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana were all over MTV, and for rock geeks of my generation, it became an immediate must read, especially after Kurt Cobain took his own life just a few months after publication. I guess we were a bit desperate to make some sense of what had happened.

After the author added an extra chapter acknowledging what had happened, my friend Phil bought the revised edition and loaned it to me. I devoured it in a couple of days and have not forgotten much of what was in there. Nevertheless, when I saw a copy of it at my local library about six months ago, I snatched it up and reread it for the first time since '94.

Soon after, when I discovered that Azerrad was once again expanding his book with additional material and insights to be republished as The Amplified Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana for its thirtieth anniversary, I almost didn't request a review copy since I'd reread the original text so recently. But since that edition was published so long ago and at such a crucial crossroads in Nirvana's career and Cobain's life, I was very curious to see what Azerrad had added, so I went ahead and submitted my request to HarperOne.

I'm very glad I did, because there is literally another complete book in The Amplified Come As You Are. Azerrad has nearly doubled the original's 335 pages to a whopping 609. There is additional material on every single page of this new edition. Occasionally it's no more than a short sentence, but more often, it's a block of text that outweighs the old passage it illuminates. 

Some of it involves facts and figures Azerrad has gleaned over the past 30 years, but mostly we get additional insights into the band's personalities; little details about their routines and behavior that might have been awkward to slip into a traditional rock-bio narrative but work well as annotations; personal stories about the writer's interactions with Cobain, Krist Noveselic, Dave Grohl, Courtney Love, Chad Channing, and the book's other major players; and revised attitudes and regrets. 

One thing is very clear in the original book: Azerrad takes much of what Cobain says at face value, which is not something a biographer should do with any subject, especially not when that subject is a heroin addict, like Cobain was, or a guy who wanted nothing more than to remodel his past, as Cobain did. Azerrad expresses regret for mirroring Cobain's disdain for his own hometown of Aberdeen, Washington, and his own father, who apparently wasn't as bad as Kurt always made him out to be. Azerrad clears up some of Cobain's tall tales, such as his claims that the things he sings about in "Something in the Way" were directly autobiographical. Essentially, Azerrad vastly improves Come As You Are by bringing a middle-aged man's perspective to a story written by a guy in his early thirties. One can't help but wonder how Cobain might have similarly reconsidered his own story if he were still with us today.