In a move that seems both predictable and brilliant, Pete Towshend reviews the Kurt Cobain diaries.

Why he died before he got old

Kurt Cobain was adored, addicted and angry - the rest of the rock myth followed from there. Pete Townshend suffers as he plumbs the depths of Cobain's despair in his Journals

Sunday November 3, 2002
The Observer

Journals
by Kurt Cobain
Viking £20, pp288

'I hope I die before I become Pete Townshend,' wrote Kurt Cobain in his journal in the middle of one of his rants against the rock press establishment. Why? Because I had become a bore? Because I had failed to die young? Because I had become conventional? Or, simply because I had become old? In fact, in the early Nineties, when Kurt was struggling with himself over whether or not to do an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, I was not boring, neither old nor young, and I was not dead. I was, unlike Cobain, hardened. Tempered, beaten and subjugated by all that rock had delivered to me and via me over 30 years. Rock is, I think, particularly hard. And in this statement Cobain appears to be hard on me. But perhaps he is sad for me?

Nirvana, and their principal creative architect Kurt Cobain, are considered by many in the UK to be the most important band in the history of rock. The publication of Cobain's journals is considered, then, to be a major event and has been anticipated with a mixture of trepidation, curiosity and excitement.

As a songwriter and rock architect, I was interested to look behind the creative process of Kurt Cobain. Nirvana's second album, Nevermind was a breath of 'punk' fresh air in the musically stale early Nineties. So I picked up this book searching for connections. Where might a particular lyric idea have begun? What, for example, is behind the smart, striking and ironic wit of 'Smells Like Teen Spirit'? If this sounds rather professorial, that's me, the first proprietor of the rock academy of lyric analysis.

Now here I have before me a sober and distinguished hardback. The word 'Journals' is quietly inscribed under the author's name. The inner jacket is deep purple. The first facsimile page is like a piece of pop art. It is an expensively and reverently reproduced photo of a page from a spiral book, the cheap kind sold in American drugstores. There are 11 marks on the torn sheet. 'Booze' - the first mark - is recorded in ballpoint, a light blue. On the same line, in a darker pen, is the second mark, the number '30'. Another mark is 'Records/watch', followed again by a number - obviously the cost - '50'. 'Food' and 'ticket' follow. The total sum is '200'.

What follows appear to be the scribblings of a crazed and depressed drug-addict in the midst of what those of us who have been through drug rehab describe as 'stinking thinking'. That is, the resentful, childish, petulant and selfish desire to accuse, blame and berate the world for all its wrongs, to wish to escape, or overcome and, finally, to take no responsibility for any part of the ultimate downfall. Me? An expert? Of course. Been there, done that. Back to the academy.

If the first draft words for 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' are here somewhere, I'm not sure I could find them without help. I believe that there are actually three drafts in this book. But the song on the CD is clear, outstanding, dark, ironic, amusing and disturbing at once. It occurs to me that somewhere along the way, in the business that passed between his first infantile scribblings and the rehearsals and recording studio sessions with his band members, Kurt Cobain had a lot of help to reorganise, focus and realise his ideas.

Most of these pages are facsimiles from what appears to be four or five other notebooks. The tatty front covers are sometimes themselves displayed. Apparently, there were actually 20 notebooks. It's a pity the entries are not dated, and that no attempt has been made to provide a chronology. The entries are not uninteresting. It is simply that they are devastatingly hard to contemplate. They actually hurt. These are the scribblings of a once beautiful, angry, petulant, spoiled, drug-addled middle-class white boy from a divorced family who just happened, with the help of two of his slightly more stable peers, to make an album hailed as one of the best rock records ever. I sometimes get letters from people who write and draw like Cobain. I put them in a file marked 'Loonies', just in case they try to sue me in the future for stealing their ideas.

Incidentally, Kurt was obviously a very good graphic artist. He drew artwork for early posters for his band. But what is reproduced here is gothic in its grossness. What is obscured behind the striking but puerile, classroom-brat drawings here is the ambition and excitement, the sheer energetic drive that was behind Cobain's youthful desire to become a rock star, to change the music, to sweep away the old and replace it with the new. That this should be muddled with his resentments, his political naivety and his extraordinary self-obsession (he worried at one time that he was lactating because his nipples were always sore) is simply sad.

There is some insider interest generated by some of the images. On page 139, there is a small cartoon of a baby swimming underwater, obviously the inspiration for the cover of Nevermind . But that art was redeemed because the face of the child was happy and free. Cobain's cartoon is captioned: 'Sell the kids for food'. No irony here. In a world plagued by the abuse of children, it is depressing, because what troubles Kurt was and is still real.

It is terrible that someone so obviously sick, so mentally deranged, so angry and unstable, should not have been helped further and beyond his wonderful work with his band. It might be that those around him will maintain that these scribblings were private and that at other times he kept such strange outpourings to himself. But if that is the case, I wonder at the result of publishing them now. It has the effect of unfairly accusing everyone around him of ostrich-like denial or ignorance.

When Cobain was in deep trouble with heroin addiction in 1993, I was visiting New York regularly in connection with my own child-abuse story, Tommy , which had hit Broadway. I met Michael Azerrad who had written Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana. Azerrad asked if I would contact Cobain, who was in constant danger of overdosing. I had chosen this year to give booze another gentle try after 11 years. When Azerrad approached me, I was not drunk, nor unsympathetic, but I did not make the necessary judgment I would make today that an immediate 'intervention' was required to save his life.

It is desperately sad for me to sit here, 57 years old, and contemplate how often wasteful are the deaths of those in the rock industry. We find it so hard to save our own, but must take responsibility for the fact that the message such deaths as Cobain's sends to his fans is that it is in some way heroic to scream at the world, thrash a guitar, smash it up and then overdose.

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. I mourn for Kurt. A once beautiful, then pathetic, lost and heroically stupid boy. Hard rock indeed.