In July 1993, Nirvana was the biggest band in the world, and Kurt Cobain was subject to an intense level of celebrity and public scrutiny.

In New York City to play the famed Roseland Ballroom and promote their new album In Utero, Cobain and Nirvana were photographed by Jesse Frohman and Cobain gave a candid interview to Jon Savage for an article in the Observer.

Only nine months later, Cobain killed himself. It was the last formal photo shoot Nirvana ever did, and one of the last major interviews Cobain ever gave. Twenty years after his death, they are published here together for the first time since the Observer article, including previously unpublished material, and accompanied by new commentary from Frohman and Savage about that day, and an essay by pop culture maven Glenn OBrien on what it all might have meant.

Frohman's 100-plus photographs, including contact sheets, get to the heart of one of the most beloved bands of all time, at the height of their success and the moment when everything was starting to unravel. We see Cobain as he was just months before his death, by turns feral and refined, posing on his own, goofing around with his band mates, engrossed in his music and always ambivalent about the spotlight. Savages interview reveals an optimistic side of Cobain seemingly at odds with his public image, and particularly poignant as we look back on his life.

This book offers a powerful, moving portrait of Kurt Cobain and will be an important contribution to the literature of rock and roll.

More than a decade after his death, alienated, awkward, heavily eye-lined Kurt Cobain continues to sit front and center in the arena of popular culture, as the subject of books, music, fashion, gossip, and inspiration for major motion pictures and documentaries. Together with flannelsporting, music-obsessed communities emerging (in the late 1980s and early 1990s) from the chilly Pacific Northwest, Nirvana, Sound Garden, and Pearl Jam changed the scene with wild aggressive sounds and truly alternative records.
Author Thurston Moore (of Sonic Youth) - who introduced Kurt Cobain t David Geffen (Geffen Records), a meeting that resulted in Nirvana’s first major debut, Nevermind, in September 1991, which by December was selling 400,000 copies a week - writes about the discovery of Seattle punk youth, the seminal bands that defined the movement, the exploitation of the subculture, and the backlash of grunge, as well as the death of his longtime collaborator and intimate Cobain.