"Nirvana: the Biography" (DaCapo, $19.95), published today — the 13th anniversary of Kurt Cobain's suicide — is an inside account by Everett True, the British rock journalist who performed with Nirvana onstage many times, introduced Cobain to future bride Courtney Love and is "Uncle Everett" to Frances Bean Cobain, their daughter, now 14.
True formerly took credit for coining the word "grunge" to describe the explosion of punk-rock that came out of the Northwest in the late 1980s and early '90s, but he admits in the book that Lester Bangs, the late rock critic, should get credit for applying it to punk. True confesses to first using the word as a writer for New Musical Express, or NME, the British rock weekly for which he wrote under the name The Legend! (his real name is Jerry Thackray; he adopted his current nom de plume when he went from NME to its rival, Melody Maker). Still, the book's cover touts True as "the man who invented grunge." True first came to Seattle in 1989, shortly after joining Melody Maker. SubPop, the local record label that was the first home to grunge, paid for the trip. And, while journalistically questionable at best, and outright unethical at worst, it was a wise investment, eventually making SubPop's owners millionaires.
But True was more interested in Olympia than Seattle, and the overarching theme of the book is that laidback Olympia was the true source of grunge. It all started to go wrong, according to True, when grunge — essentially Northwest because of its wild, crazy edge, going back to the Sonics, the Wailers and the Kingsmen in the '50s, and its heavy beat — migrated to the big city of Seattle.
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