Heaven knows they're Miserable now

Seth Lichtenstein, this is your intro. Could I ever find a name more heaven-sent as proof that it isn't only Thomas Pynchon's fantasy that Californian attorneys are (sur)named after Europe's postage-stamp principalities?

But Seth Lichtenstein is far more than a pretty name for a frivolous intro. Working for L.A. lawyers, Cooper, Epstein and Hurewitz, Lichtenstein represents Nirvana and Courtney Love in their campaign to oppose, censor - and it would now appear successfully suppress an authorized biography on the band by writers, Victoria Clarke and Britt Collins.

From one angle, this spat might seem just the latest unsurprising skirmish in the constant war between stars and prying hacks. The Morrissey/Johnny Rogan double-act continues to divert and entertain while Van Morrison - who'd also been an unwilling and unhappy subject of a Rogan tome - recently offered to buy up the full print-run of Steve Turner's unauthorized bio.

But Nirvana and Love vs. Clarke and Collins has exceeded all other battles in its vengeful nastiness. Not only does it signal Nirvana's rapid decline from their self-proclaimed punk values, it also reveals a band setting a frightening precedent in using corporate rock's powerful legal machinery to suppress free speech.

Of course, the Nirvana/Love camp parade their justifications. They accuse the C+C company of muck-raking and hostile interference regarding their private lives. Furthermore, they charge Clarke and Collins of false pretences, telling interviewees that their book had the sanction of the band when they well knew otherwise.

In response, the pair deny those accusations and counter-charge that the Nirvana camp used sledgehammer legal tactics, more typical of the late Robert Maxwell than a purportedly right-on rock band. In their eyes, Nirvana or more accurately, the hyper-sensitive couple of Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, have set a world speed record in moving from punk anarchy and irreverence to humourless rock star paranoia, pomposity, preciousness and power games.

This is a feud of maximum, uncut loathing. Since Clarke and Collins were, Goddess help them, GIRLS, Nirvana released a press statement, characterizing them as "two aspiring groupies". Then last autumn, Love and Cobain notoriously unloaded their bile on Clarke's ansaphone.

Here, I will quote only samples from this hail of misogynist dog's abuse: "At this point I don't give a flying fuck if I have this recorded that I'm threatening you. I suppose I could throw out a few hundred thousand dollars to have you snuffed out but maybe I'll try the legal way first (Cobain)" and " I'm sorry that when you were little girls, you got told that marrying a rockstar was the biggest coup you could pull, you fuckin' tired, ugly ass dumb groupies" (Love).

But this soap-opera of everyday L.A. punk rock people gets even more bizarre once you compare the Collins/Clarke manuscript with Rolling Stone writer, Michael Azerrad's authorized book, Come As You Are, written with Kurt and Courtney's full co-operation.

Collins/Clarke often teases the band but it's most mild, compared to N.M.E. and M.M. at their most vitriolic and unforgiving. There's few dirty secrets to embarass any adult and one can only presume the Nirvana Lit. Crit. Hit squad don't appreciate or even begin to understand the pair's arch if sometimes heavy-handed sense of humour.

Improbably, it's Azerrad's account that exposes Cobain and Love's heroin use and discloses how Cobain hazarded the break-up of the band when he outmanoevred Krist Novolselic and Dave Grohl to capture the lion's share of Nirvana's royalties. Indeed to add a further tweak to the ironies of this surreal affair, the income Kurt Cobain gained from this coup, have certainly been eaten into to fund all the legal battles that derive from his own imprudent embrace of heroin.)

If this really is the new American punk, it's time to reprise the Stranglers' "No More Heroes". Dragging all in the band and its court in their wake, Cobain and Love seem in the grip of a blind, senseless vendetta.

So this is how punk capitulates so easily and collapses into the arms of corporate America, and the champions of a movement to renew American rock end up as all too shabbily human. Well for starters, one might begin with what Clarke and Collins did and question what America punk means, "Nirvana did not create a social movement. A social movement created Nirvana," claims L.A. rock scribe, Scott Hochman and he's broadly correct.

Of course, prophets with hindsight are always infallible but both industry and cultural conditions in the fall of '91 probably favoured any new band of melodic malcontents with hard guitars and hummable tunes.

There was a gap in the white rock market. Little matched the fury, agony and creativity of rap; the U.K. was ceasing to fulfill its quota of new ideas and heroes and corporate hard rock had bleached and beached out. As Azerrad insists, the Nirvana combination of "happy songs with sad lyrics" was primed to detonate. Even if they backtracked with In Utero, the populist style of Nevermind was calculated, consciously or not, to hoover up a new audience.

Unlike many of their contemporaries in the North-West or elsewhere, Nirvana weren't handicapped by fastidious collegiate notions of good taste. And if English indie music spurned heavy metal, only rocking out as far as glam and Mick Ronson, many Americans lacked those condescending inhibitions. Or as Azerrad notes:

"People are now quietly admitting that, yes, the Seventies dinosaurs like Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin and Kiss and Alice Cooper really did rock. But it wasn't like punk rock never happened either. A new tide of musicians began synthesizing the hard rock they were raised on in the Seventies and the American indie punk rock they had embraced in the Eighties."

0r moving closer to Nirvana's own Seattle origins, Azerrad approves their Sub Pop debut, Bleach because confessing "to liking working man's hard rock was an act of uncommon honesty in a world where arty poses were the norm."

But a populist style that sold records could contradict Nirvana's self-professed punk ethic. Azerrad again: this "attracted a slightly different audience from the one they had expected - a relatively mainstream hard rock audience - a problem which dogs them to this day."

DGC, the band's label, claim surprise at the swift rise of Nevermind but industry conditions favoured Nirvana. The Billboard charts had changed to the new "Soundscan" system which logged real record sales and gave less weight to radio plays, a system more charitable to new acts than the previous method which favoured the old reliables preferred by conservative radio programmers.

Nevermind was also delivered at the start of the college year when college radio was looking to promote new records and students to buy them. Also the earlier college radio mafia of the Eighties had graduated to influential rungs on the business and media ladders and could be usefully sympathetic to talent that confirmed their private tastes.

Another point goes unmentioned. Once Nevermind took off, DGC had a special incentive to maximize its sales: the record business knows that fresh blood, signed at lower royalty rates, will always be spectacularly more profitable than the Michael Jacksons. According to Azerrad while Nevermind cost $500,000, DGC grossed over $50 million. With such a beauteous bottomline, these "punks" could expect every executive indulgence . . .

Still, you can endeavour to feel sorry for Nirvana. According to Azerrad and Cobain's constant complaints, they had it rough. Kurt and Krist Novoselic were reared in Aberdeen, a declining loggers' town that was the butt-end of American humanity.

If we're to believe them, Aberdeen, a hundred miles from Seattle with a population of about 16,000, was replete with all the mind-numbing and spirit-sapping attributes of small-town America. Before the Second World War, Aberdeen might have been a bawdy, boisterous logging port with its retinue of sailors and whores but it had become a sad and sorry victim of technology, as the timber companies chopped jobs as well as trees and machinery replaced manpower.

According to that version, Aberdeen had a surplus of jocks with nowhere to run and nothing to do except get livid drunk - which in turn meant there was nowhere to hide for a sensitive, poetic soul like the adolescent Cobain. If Victoria Clarke's version of Aberdeen is less harsh - probably due to her own Irish rural background - it's not necessarily relevant . Rock stars with a hunger to escape into the great lumnious beyond will always place the maximum distance between themselves and their unglamourous origins.

Still Cobain's family must have given him emotional scars. His parents separated rancorously when he was 9 and, shunted like the runt of the litter from father to mother to relatives, he never experienced a stable family background thereafter. One doesn't need the diagnostic skills of Anthony Clare to appreciate that such a wounded son might later fight ferociously for the love of his life and the mother of his child, using every weapon to defend his own nuclear family.

So he became a rebel. There's the usual tales of vandalism and he even spent time in late '85, sleeping under a bridge that probably has already acquired its own special aura in Nirvana hagiography, and which doubtless will eventually receive its own official plaque as part of Aberdeen's future equivalent of the Harp Rock'n'Stroll tour.

Did he receive illumination under the Bodhi Tree of his bridge? Already he'd met up with Novoselic and received his initiation into the secret lore of punk from Buzz Osborne, leader of Aberdeen's kings of constipated grunge, The Melvins. One starts to detect the pattern of the bohemian outsider beginning to magnify.

Small-town outsiders frequently believe more intensely in rock myths. Swallowing dreams whole, they can lack the worldliness, agnosticism and chameleon habits of Big City scenemakers. Kurt Cobain's version of punk could be nothing but fundamentalist.

And also surprisingly learned since 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' opens with a distortion of the 'Louie Louie' riff, the holy anthem of American punk which originally had been a hit for another North-Western band, The Kingsmen. None of the books really inquire as to how self-conscious Nirvana and the others on the Seattle scene were of their ancient predecessors.

Still, there are clues. Clarke/Collins quote Sub Pop's Bruce Pavitt on the Wipers as "part of a northwest garage band tradition that goes back to The Wailers, The Sonics, The Kingsmen and Paul Revere and The Raiders." Perhaps more tellingly, Michael Azerrad excavates a prophetic quip from Nirvana's original self-penned bio: "Soon we will do encores of 'Gloria' and 'Louie Louie' with all our celebrity friends."

Or as Gina Arnold notes in Route 666, the third book on the Nirvana phenomenon : "Be careful what you dream, for it might come true."

It's convenient but also partially misleading to see punk as the sole creation of the Seventies London and New York scenes. In fact, its derivations go back further, to when the first sketches of the punk ideology were typed out in the pages of Creem and other U.S. publications by writers like Lester Bangs and Lenny Kaye.

They championed America's loser bands, the one-hit wonders from nowhere like ? and the Mysterions, The Seeds and Mouse and the Traps, primitives usually from the sticks whose careers, unlike the Bransonoid hippies of the Seventies, were catastrophes of mismanagement, broken contracts and drug and alcohol abuse.

Punks were always beautiful losers, never born to win. They might lose ludicrously but always mythically, going down to defeat in an all-consuming supernova of glory. As these ideas got popularized, they also got vulgarized in the underground. Punk didn't just disrespect careerism, it detested it. Defeat was forever inscripted in its gene and so, in one blackly delicious irony, a very early tour manager of U2 would found his own business fortunes on a postcard of London's tourist-trap, and the panhandling Mohicans who congregated there.

So punk's problem of limits was that it always lacked a benchmark for success or maturity. However this was immaterial if and when it functioned as a fantasy and masquerade for college-goers who could always afford to shock their next-door neighbours in the system before getting down to serious business in the next style game. Unfortunately, though, nobody seems to have given Kurt Cobain the full message.

Or maybe they did so by originally treating Nirvana like ill-fed, ill-trained security mastiffs. Nirvana's first tour of Europe with Tad found 11 frantic males cramped into a dingy and increasingly unhygienic van, they were expected to play 36 dates in 42 days while suffering all the unfamiliar cultural and language barriers of the Continent. Sure Sub Pop was gambling when its funds were low but this is not how self-professed rock idealists should treat musicians who, strange as it may seem, are also fellow human beings, sometimes capable of a modicum of self-respect.

And if one believes Azerrad, matters hadn't much improved later when Nirvana had signed to both DGC and the corporate management of Gold Mountain and Nevermind was obviously hurtling up the U.S. charts. Transport was still economy class and nobody seems to have devoted much care to the trio's psychic and physical health till it was blindingly obvious they were megastars.

If I were Kurt Cobain, I might very definitely have started nurturing a vicious, vengeful streak. The picture is one of isolation. Back in Seattle, their sudden success encouraged back-biting. Nirvana had forfeited their community but found few new friends to replace them save corporate allies, not necessarily the same thing. Or as Gina Arnold quotes Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder: "As the crowds grow bigger, I grow smaller."

Now Nirvana's manifesto a become a thing of pathos. America might Christmas party to their anthem but for Nirvana it was no longer fun to lose and to pretend; or load up with drugs and bring their friends. Kurt Cobain sought the immunisation of smack.

Reading between Michael Azerrad's lines, it's obvious Cobain was no virgin junkie. 'Bleach' refers to the fluid that cleans a junkie's works, while he admitted to Azerrad, he'd flirted with heroin during his Aberdeen adolescence. Laudable candour but it still leaves the simmering question: can you ever truly believe a junkie?

But Cobain also wins marks for his protection of Courtney Love. His motive for his lurid, unflattering revelation lies in his insistence that he introduced her to smack, not the reverse. And strange as it might seem, the feud with Clarke and Collins is driven by his desire to defend Love.

Still they made their own bed and don't seem to understand the consequences. Junk and parenthood don't mix. And while Love quickly kicked her own habit, Cobain only started detoxing as late as last August when their daughter was born. They really can't complain since they made themselves such obvious targets.

But it was Love who provoked the media feeding frenzy by volunteering to be interviewed for Vanity Fair by Lynn Hirschberg. Azerrad pleads she was naive, a woman too long accustomed "to an adoring U.K. music press that understood her sardonic, sarcastic sense of humour, didn't ask hard questions, didn't do much investigation, and kept secrets in exchange for the favour of a hip musician".

His excuses don't entirely convince. Courtney Love was pushing 30, an experienced L.A. power-broker who must have understood the media game. Her fault was hubris, her mistake her belief she could control and manipulate a veteran reporter like Hirschberg.

So Victoria Clarke and Britt Collins got Love-bugged. Courtney Love seethed because the pair actually interviewed Lynn Hirschberg. On Victoria Clarke's ansaphone, she hectored "Going out and interviewing Lynn Hirschberg is called rape. That's called rape, you fuckin' bitch."

No female solidarity here, this is one woman screaming at a second woman about her fucked-up relationship with a third, a woman who, despite her professed feminist views, will - apparently - use every weapon to destroy the careers and poison the reputations of two other women. Worse, when women rock journalists are still often treated as second-class citizens, Courtney Love is still prepared to perpetuate the stereotype that women hacks are closet groupies.

Still she wasn't incorrect in her fears. If Azerrad's book largely exonerates Courtney Love as Kurt Cobain shifts the burden of blame onto himself, the Clarke/Collins manuscript devotes its

longest chapter, over 50 pages to her. Unsurprisingly, Seth Lichtenstein demanded it be completly deleted.

And yet there's a further sub-text to the story. Victoria Clarke is Shane MacGowan's partner and before she came on the scene, Courtney Love had her own Pogues' associations through a role in Alex Cox's cheapo spagetthi western, Straight To Hell. Indeed the curious Irish connections proliferate since Love's father, Hank Harrison, an early manager and biographer of the Grateful Dead, once briefly lived in Ireland while Love herself allegedly spent some months here in the later Eighties.

Still the funniest parts of Lichtenstein's 34-page submission concern Courtney Love. Lichtenstein's dossier poker-facedly submits that "Ms. Love is not a 'voracious Camille Paglia reader' and does not ascribe to any notion of sexual aggresion."

Furthermore, don't ever believe that Courtney Love is some rock'n'roll anarchist guerilla. Instead Lichtenstein's letter insists that the Clarke/Collins statement that "'Courtney Love thinks she can give corporate rock incurable syphilis and change the rock world' is both unintelligible and gibberish. Are the authors implying that Ms. Love is afflicted with a venereal disease?"

No just turning what Michael Azerrad describes as Courtney Love's "sardonic, sarcastic sense of humour" back on her. Furthermore Love is alert to any hazard of a rift with her U.K. media friends . For according to the Lichtenstein dossier, "Courtney Love does not believe Everett True (Sub Pop and Hole's earliest and most loyal champion in the Melody Maker: B.G. ) is a 'wanker' (a uniquely British term)."

Well, we're glad to be able to put that on the record.

All of this notwithstanding Victoria Clarke and Britt Collins insist that they didn't set out to slash and burn Nirvana's reputation. As Victoria Clarke tells it, the project derived from conversations from Nirvana's U.K. publicist, Anton Brookes. Both worked for London magazine, Lime Lizard, Collins as its editor, Clarke as a contributor, which had sturdily supported Nirvana and the other Seattle bands.

This was late '91 when Nevermind was accelerating up the U.K.charts. According to Clarke, their original intentions were pure: " We wanted to do a book that would cover all the bands coming out of the Seattle scene. For instance, Britt was especially keen on Mudhoney. But we figured we should focus on Nirvana since Britt thought they were going to be very successful and she was right . . . we were just interested in the music side. We didn't know much about them personally."

Through Brookes and the band's manager at Gold Mountain, John Silva, the necessary permissions were arranged. Clarke states the pair weren't interested in an authorized book, ironically 'because we figured that if we did that, they would censor the book'. But they were allowed to join Nirvana on tour and quiz them as well they could.

Clarke caught up with them in Dublin, last July. Both Azerrad and Arnold confirm that the atmosphere surrounding Nirvana through that short summer European tour was tense. In Madrid, Arnold sensed "something faintly spoiled, going rotten in the Spanish sun . . . something hidden somewhere, the emotional equivalent of some really bad meat." Elsewhere in Route 666, she writes: "I love Nirvana and sympathize with their problems but I could not stand being around them any longer."

Cobain and Love were aloof. Gina Arnold testifies she "felt like an emissary from the planet Earth, sending Kurt and Courtney greetings from The People." Love was already being vilified as "the groupie from Hell." But in fairness, in late pregnancy, "in full hormonal swing" as Azerrad puts it - and with a junkie spouse, any hypersensitivity is easily excused.

Clarke eked out her modest advance, following the band to Belfast, Paris and Copenhagen. But her contact with Nirvana's first couple was tenuous and in Copenhagen, she was asked to leave the tour.

At this point, there is a total conflict of testimony. Lichtenstein's letter alleges that Clarke then skived off to Seattle and misrepresented Nirvana's support of the project to dupe her prospective interviewees. For her part, Victoria Clarke utterly rejects these charges.

Her Copenhagen interpretation is that the band's managerial assistant, Janet Billig informed her that the band "felt under a lot of pressure and they don't feel comfortable with having a journalist around all the time. And they also think that writing a book about them at this stage is a bit premature." So she continues: "I explained to her that we had to do the book because we'd already spent the advance money . . . and she agreed to co-operate with Britt over press cuttings and stuff . So after that I went to Seattle."

Now the two versions totally diverge: "As far as we were concerned, there was no animosity between us and the band. We knew a lot of their friends and I was actually staying with their photographer, Charles Peterson. And I actually interviewed Krist Novoselic. I met him a couple of times in Seattle and spent a day at his house." So how does she explain the charges against her?

"I think that a lot of people, when they heard Kurt opposed the book, they probably freaked out and said 'shit, well I've done an interview with these people, Kurt's going to be furious.' And Kurt indeed was furious, I know this for a fact. So they would have said 'well, she told me it was authorized'."

Clarke insists she never did, conceding only that she "might have said I've been on the road with them, I've spoken with them, yes, I like them or whatever. But I never would have said it was authorized and I didn't - although I suppose I can see why people might have got that impression."

Well, if Krist Novoselic gives an interview, that would have convinced me of Nirvana's benevolence towards the project. Meanwhile, Courtney Love was in the last weeks of her pregnancy while Kurt Cobain had gone into hospital to detox. Not surprisingly, Kurt's aunt, another Clarke source, was unable to phone him to learn his views on the book.

Novoselic's involvement is his to explain. Still since the band was then split by both Cobain's addiction and his ploy to grab back publishing royalties, one can but speculate that he might have wished to assert both his independence and more humane values.

Further investigation irreperably widened the rift. First, they interviewed Lynn Hirschberg, whose Vanity Fair feature had provoked L.A. social services to take temporary custody of the couple's daughter, a traumatizing experience for any family to suffer.

Clarke:"I imagine they felt that the stuff we had could potentially add to this and back up the case for the social welfare people and possibly make things even worse and get the baby taken away completely. That would have been a big worry for them and when we interviewed Lynn Hirschberg, they probably assumed we were on her side."

Further scratching their sore spot, Britt Collins then interviewed Falling James, from L.A. band The Leaving Trains, who was once briefly and tempestuously Courtney Love's first husband. He threatened not Love's daughter but her image.

"A couple of things in what he said she probably considered most damaging," Clarke believes. "Like, he says she didn't like punk rock and she wouldn't let him play his punk rock records in the house. Now she's like the Queen of Punk Rock so it's really important for her that nobody suggests that she didn't like punk rock two years ago."

Then came the hail of ansaphone threats and a fight between Love and Clarke in an L.A. club that Clarke claims the singer engineered. Love also claimed that the intrepid pair had sought to bribe officials to get her abortion medical records, a charge Clarke dismisses.

So Cobain and Love took the legal route. The custody battle provoked by Hirschberg's article cost them $240,000; one source suspects the costs of their campaign against Clarke and Collins may verge on $100,000.

Thus did they use the traditional tactics of the powerful against the weak, ensnaring the two authors and their publishers in litigation they just couldn't afford. In the process, they have set a precedent for any other wealthy, paranoid rock act who wants to stub out unwelcome criticism and definitely merit the first Robert Maxwell Award for services to rock journalism.

English publishers, Boxtree, were their first target. According to Clarke, the company "were threatened with being sued in California . . . what they were saying was that Boxtree had business interests in California, so they could be sued there. Maybe that's true, I don't know . . . But they were sueing for a ridiculous amount of money for damages and emotional distress and all that stuff. And Boxtree weren't prepared to take that risk."

Their American publishers, Hyperion, part of the Walt Disney corporation, were tougher opponents. Clarke and Collins' New York lawyer, Michael Guido sent Nirvana's attorneys a copy of the manuscript; the authors agreed to some changes and deletions, principally in reference to Love but the campaign of legal attrition continued.

Victoria Clarke is still bemused, especially when she compares their book to the Azerrad bio. Their manuscript hardly mentions heroin and she insists that aspect is essentially unchanged from the draft originally given to Nirvana's lawyers. She quotes other journalists who've told her: "They're mad. Every time they open their mouths about this book, it only gets more attention."

But you can't buck the system. While Hyperion stood by them up to a point, someone at Geffen called a senior figure in Walt Disney and the book was conveniently dropped.

Meanwhile Victoria Clarke strikes a defiant pose: "if we have to photocopy it and hand it out on the street, we will."

So crank up the CD. It's time to hear yet again Pete Townshend's wizened laugh as we play 'Won't Get Fooled Again' for the latest generation. And while it refreshes our consciences, read Victoria Clarke and Britt Cllins' own conclusions on the whole ridiculous affair.

For them this parody version of punk had become "a statement of desperate resignation, translating into elitism and contempt by attacking weak and easy targets and spouting hypocritical intentions of destroying heavy metal and corporate rock but insidiously embracing its ideology."

Their book isn't perfect. At points, it's repetitious and needs a sharp editing knife. Its real sin in Nirvana's eyes may be its refusal to take them seriously and genuflect to their collecive Godhead. But then, as Victoria Clarke implicitly admits, their book itself is now less significant than the story of its suppression.

Meanwhile don't penalize them by ignoring the other two books. Arnold's book is an essential, loving and often perceptive history of American alternative rock through the Eighties written from the perspective of a fan who deserves better than Nirvana's betrayal.

Azerrad, who nobly chastizes Cobain and Love for their telephone terrorism, somehow manages to strike the most delicate balance between loving Nirvana's music and investigating and not ducking the issues.

You may still be moved by Nirvana but I can't stomach his mistreatment of their temporary guitarist, Jason Everman, who loaned the band $600 to record Bleach and was then fired without repayment.

I also hope Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love were joking when, in their junk period, they played Sid'n'Nancy, checking into hotels as John Ritchie (Sid's baptismal name ) and Nancy Spungen. But then I always believed punk was about Johnny Rotten not Sid Vicious, a fashion accessory for fools doomed to be postcard Mohicans . . .

Once upon a time, the rock adage was that to live outside the law, you had to be honest. Not now. This sad, surreal tale demonstrates merely that to live outside the law, you must have lawyers.

Seth Lichtenstein, this is your intro. Could I ever find a name more heaven-sent as proof that it isn't only Thomas Pynchon's fantasy that Californian attorneys are (sur)named after Europe's postage-stamp principalities?

But Seth Lichtenstein is far more than a pretty name for a frivolous intro. Working for L.A. lawyers, Cooper, Epstein and Hurewitz, Lichtenstein represents Nirvana and Courtney Love in their campaign to oppose, censor - and it would now appear successfully suppress an authorized biography on the band by writers, Victoria Clarke and Britt Collins.

From one angle, this spat might seem just the latest unsurprising skirmish in the constant war between stars and prying hacks. The Morrissey/Johnny Rogan double-act continues to divert and entertain while Van Morrison - who'd also been an unwilling and unhappy subject of a Rogan tome - recently offered to buy up the full print-run of Steve Turner's unauthorized bio.

But Nirvana and Love vs. Clarke and Collins has exceeded all other battles in its vengeful nastiness. Not only does it signal Nirvana's rapid decline from their self-proclaimed punk values, it also reveals a band setting a frightening precedent in using corporate rock's powerful legal machinery to suppress free speech.

Of course, the Nirvana/Love camp parade their justifications. They accuse the C+C company of muck-raking and hostile interference regarding their private lives. Furthermore, they charge Clarke and Collins of false pretences, tellling interviewees that their book had the sanction of the band when they well knew otherwise.

In response, the pair deny those accusations and counter-charge that the Nirvana camp used sledgehammer legal tactics, more typical of the late Robert Maxwell than a purportedly right-on rock band. In their eyes, Nirvana or more accurately, the hyper-sensitive couple of Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, have set a world speed record in moving from punk anarchy and irreverence to humourless rock star paranoia, pomposity, preciousness and power games.

This is a feud of maximum, uncut loathing. Since Clarke and Collins were, Goddess help them, GIRLS, Nirvana released a press statement, characterizing them as "two aspiring groupies". Then last autumn, Love and Cobain notoriously unloaded their bile on Clarke's ansaphone.

Here, I will quote only samples from this hail of misogynist dog's abuse: "At this point I don't give a flying fuck if I have this recorded that I'm threatening you. I suppose I could throw out a few hundred thousand dollars to have you snuffed out but maybe I'll try the legal way first (Cobain)" and " I'm sorry that when you were little girls, you got told that marrying a rockstar was the biggest coup you could pull, you fuckin' tired, ugly ass dumb groupies" (Love).

But this soap-opera of everyday L.A. punk rock people gets even more bizarre once you compare the Collins/Clarke manuscript with Rolling Stone writer, Michael Azerrad's authorized book, Come As You Are, written with Kurt and Courtney's full co-operation.

Collins/Clarke often teases the band but it's most mild, compared to N.M.E. and M.M. at their most vitriolic and unforgiving. There's few dirty secrets to embarass any adult and one can only presume the Nirvana Lit. Crit. Hit squad don't appreciate or even begin to understand the pair's arch if sometimes heavy-handed sense of humour.

Improbably, it's Azerrad's account that exposes Cobain and Love's heroin use and discloses how Cobain hazarded the break-up of the band when he outmanoevred Krist Novolselic and Dave Grohl to capture the lion's share of Nirvana's royalties. Indeed to add a further tweak to the ironies of this surreal affair, the income Kurt Cobain gained from this coup, have certainly been eaten into to fund all the legal battles that derive from his own imprudent embrace of heroin.)

If this really is the new American punk, it's time to reprise the Stranglers' "No More Heroes". Dragging all in the band and its court in their wake, Cobain and Love seem in the grip of a blind, senseless vendetta.

So this is how punk capitulates so easily and collapses into the arms of corporate America, and the champions of a movement to renew American rock end up as all too shabbily human. Well for starters, one might begin with what Clarke and Collins did and question what America punk means, "Nirvana did not create a social movement. A social movement created Nirvana," claims L.A. rock scribe, Scott Hochman and he's broadly correct.

Of course, prophets with hindsight are always infallible but both industry and cultural conditions in the fall of '91 probably favoured any new band of melodic malcontents with hard guitars and hummable tunes.

There was a gap in the white rock market. Little matched the fury, agony and creativity of rap; the U.K. was ceasing to fulfill its quota of new ideas and heroes and corporate hard rock had bleached and beached out. As Azerrad insists, the Nirvana combination of "happy songs with sad lyrics" was primed to detonate. Even if they backtracked with In Utero, the populist style of Nevermind was calculated, consciously or not, to hoover up a new audience.

Unlike many of their contemporaries in the North-West or elsewhere, Nirvana weren't handicapped by fastidious collegiate notions of good taste. And if English indie music spurned heavy metal, only rocking out as far as glam and Mick Ronson, many Americans lacked those condescending inhibitions. Or as Azerrad notes:

"People are now quietly admitting that, yes, the Seventies dinosaurs like Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin and Kiss and Alice Cooper really did rock. But it wasn't like punk rock never happened either. A new tide of musicians began synthesizing the hard rock they were raised on in the Seventies and the American indie punk rock they had embraced in the Eighties."

0r moving closer to Nirvana's own Seattle origins, Azerrad approves their Sub Pop debut, Bleach because confessing "to liking working man's hard rock was an act of uncommon honesty in a world where arty poses were the norm."

But a populist style that sold records could contradict Nirvana's self-professed punk ethic. Azerrad again: this "attracted a slightly different audience from the one they had expected - a relatively mainstream hard rock audience - a problem which dogs them to this day."

DGC, the band's label, claim surprise at the swift rise of Nevermind but industry conditions favoured Nirvana. The Billboard charts had changed to the new "Soundscan" system which logged real record sales and gave less weight to radio plays, a system more charitable to new acts than the previous method which favoured the old reliables preferred by conservative radio programmers.

Nevermind was also delivered at the start of the college year when college radio was looking to promote new records and students to buy them. Also the earlier college radio mafia of the Eighties had graduated to influential rungs on the business and media ladders and could be usefully sympathetic to talent that confirmed their private tastes.

Another point goes unmentioned. Once Nevermind took off, DGC had a special incentive to maximize its sales: the record business knows that fresh blood, signed at lower royalty rates, will always be spectacularly more profitable than the Michael Jacksons. According to Azerrad while Nevermind cost $500,000, DGC grossed over $50 million. With such a beauteous bottomline, these "punks" could expect every executive indulgence . . .

Still, you can endeavour to feel sorry for Nirvana. According to Azerrad and Cobain's constant complaints, they had it rough. Kurt and Krist Novoselic were reared in Aberdeen, a declining loggers' town that was the butt-end of American humanity.

If we're to believe them, Aberdeen, a hundred miles from Seattle with a population of about 16,000, was replete with all the mind-numbing and spirit-sapping attributes of small-town America. Before the Second World War, Aberdeen might have been a bawdy, boisterous logging port with its retinue of sailors and whores but it had become a sad and sorry victim of technology, as the timber companies chopped jobs as well as trees and machinery replaced manpower.

According to that version, Aberdeen had a surplus of jocks with nowhere to run and nothing to do except get livid drunk - which in turn meant there was nowhere to hide for a sensitive, poetic soul like the adolescent Cobain. If Victoria Clarke's version of Aberdeen is less harsh - probably due to her own Irish rural background - it's not necessarily relevant . Rock stars with a hunger to escape into the great lumnious beyond will always place the maximum distance between themselves and their unglamourous origins.

Still Cobain's family must have given him emotional scars. His parents seperated rancorously when he was 9 and, shunted like the runt of the litter from father to mother to relatives, he never experienced a stable family background thereafter. One doesn't need the diagnostic skills of Anthony Clare to appreciate that such a wounded son might later fight ferociously for the love of his life and the mother of his child, using every weapon to defend his own nuclear family.

So he became a rebel. There's the usual tales of vandalism and he even spent time in late '85, sleeping under a bridge that probably has already acquired its own special aura in Nirvana hagiography, and which doubtless will eventually receive its own official plaque as part of Aberdeen's future equivalent of the Harp Rock'n'Stroll tour.

Did he receive illumination under the Bodhi Tree of his bridge? Already he'd met up with Novoselic and received his initiation into the secret lore of punk from Buzz Osborne, leader of Aberdeen's kings of constipated grunge, The Melvins. One starts to detect the pattern of the bohemian outsider beginning to magnify.

Small-town outsiders frequently believe more intensely in rock myths. Swallowing dreams whole, they can lack the worldliness, agnosticism and chameleon habits of Big City scenemakers. Kurt Cobain's version of punk could be nothing but fundamentalist.

And also surprisingly learned since 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' opens with a distortion of the 'Louie Louie' riff, the holy anthem of American punk which originally had been a hit for another North-Western band, The Kingsmen. None of the books really inquire as to how self-conscious Nirvana and the others on the Seattle scene were of their ancient predecessors.

Still, there are clues. Clarke/Collins quote Sub Pop's Bruce Pavitt on the Wipers as "part of a northwest garage band tradition that goes back to The Wailers, The Sonics, The Kingsmen and Paul Revere and The Raiders." Perhaps more tellingly, Michael Azerrad excavates a prophetic quip from Nirvana's original self-penned bio: "Soon we will do encores of 'Gloria' and 'Louie Louie' with all our celebrity friends."

Or as Gina Arnold notes in Route 666, the third book on the Nirvana phenomenon : "Be careful what you dream, for it might come true."

It's convenient but also partially misleading to see punk as the sole creation of the Seventies London and New York scenes. In fact, its derivations go back further, to when the first sketches of the punk ideology were typed out in the pages of Creem and other U.S. publications by writers like Lester Bangs and Lenny Kaye.

They championed America's loser bands, the one-hit wonders from nowhere like ? and the Mysterions, The Seeds and Mouse and the Traps, primitives usually from the sticks whose careers, unlike the Bransonoid hippies of the Seventies, were catastrophes of mismanagement, broken contracts and drug and alcohol abuse.

Punks were always beautiful losers, never born to win. They might lose ludicrously but always mythically, going down to defeat in an all-consuming supernova of glory. As these ideas got popularized, they also got vulgarized in the underground. Punk didn't just disrespect careerism, it detested it. Defeat was forever inscripted in its gene and so, in one blackly delicious irony, a very early tour manager of U2 would found his own business fortunes on a postcard of London's tourist-trap, and the panhandling Mohicans who congregated there.

So punk's problem of limits was that it always lacked a benchmark for success or maturity. However this was immaterial if and when it functioned as a fantasy and masquerade for college-goers who could always afford to shock their next-door neighbours in the system before getting down to serious business in the next style game. Unfortunately, though, nobody seems to have given Kurt Cobain the full message.

Or maybe they did so by originally treating Nirvana like ill-fed,ill-trained security mastiffs. Nirvana's first tour of Europe with Tad found 11 frantic males cramped into a dingy and increasingly unhygenic van, they were expected to play 36 dates in 42 days while suffering all the unfamiliar cultural and language barriers of the Continent. Sure Sub Pop was gambling when its funds were low but this is not how self-professed rock idealists should treat musicians who, strange as it may seem, are also fellow human beings, sometimes capable of a modicum of self-respect.

And if one believes Azerrad, matters hadn't much improved later when Nirvana had signed to both DGC and the corporate management of Gold Mountain and Nevermind was obviously hurtling up the U.S. charts. Transport was still economy class and nobody seems to have devoted much care to the trio's psychic and physical health till it was blindingly obvious they were megastars.

If I were Kurt Cobain, I might very definitely have started nurturing a vicious, vengeful streak. The picture is one of isolation. Back in Seattle, their sudden success encouraged back-biting. Nirvana had forfeited their community but found few new friends to replace them save corporate allies, not necessarily the same thing. Or as Gina Arnold quotes Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder: "As the crowds grow bigger, I grow smaller."

Now Nirvana's manifesto a become a thing of pathos . America might Christmas party to their anthem but for Nirvana it was no longer fun to lose and to pretend; or load up with drugs and bring their friends. Kurt Cobain sought the immunization of smack.

Reading between Michael Azerrad's lines, it's obvious Cobain was no virgin junkie. 'Bleach' refers to the fluid that cleans a junkie's works, while he admitted to Azerrad, he'd flirted with heroin during his Aberdeen adolescence. Laudable candour but it still leaves the simmering question: can you ever truly believe a junkie?

But Cobain also wins marks for his protection of Courtney Love. His motive for his lurid, unflattering revelation lies in his insistence that he introduced her to smack, not the reverse. And strange as it might seem, the feud with Clarke and Collins is driven by his desire to defend Love.

Still they made their own bed and don't seem to understand the consequences. Junk and parenthood don't mix. And while Love quickly kicked her own habit, Cobain only started detoxing as late as last August when their daughter was born. They really can't complain since they made themselves such obvious targets.

But it was Love who provoked the media feeding frenzy by volunteering to be interviewed for Vanity Fair by Lynn Hirschberg. Azerrad pleads she was naive, a woman too long accustomed " to an adoring U.K. music press that understood her sardonic, sarcastic sense of humour, didn't ask hard questions, didn't do much investigation, and kept secrets in exchange for the favour of a hip musician"

His excuses don't entirely convince. Courtney Love was pushing 30, an experienced L.A. power-broker who must have understood the media game. Her fault was hubris, her mistake her belief she could control and manipulate a veteran reporter like Hirschberg.

So Victoria Clarke and Britt Collins got Love-bugged. Courtney Love seethed because the pair actually interviewed Lynn Hirschberg. On Victoria Clarke's ansaphone, she hectored "Going out and interviewing Lynn Hirschberg is called rape. That's called rape, you fuckin' bitch."

No female solidarity here, this is one woman screaming at a second woman about her fucked-up relationship with a third, a woman who, despite her professed feminist views, will - apparently - use every weapon to destroy the careers and poison the reputations of two other women. Worse, when women rock journalists are still often treated as second-class citizens, Courtney Love is still prepared to perpetuate the stereotype that women hacks are closet groupies.

Still she wasn't incorrect in her fears. If Azerrad's book largely exonerates Courtney Love as Kurt Cobain shifts the burden of blame onto himself, the Clarke/Collins manuscript devotes its

longest chapter, over 50 pages to her. Unsurprisingly, Seth Lichtenstein demanded it be completly deleted.

And yet there's a further sub-text to the story. Victoria Clarke is Shane McGowan's partner and before she came on the scene, Courtney Love had her own Pogues' associations through a role in Alex Cox's cheapo spagetthi western, Straight To Hell. Indeed the curious Irish connections proliferate since Love's father, Hank Harrison, an early manager and biographer of the Grateful Dead, once briefly lived in Ireland while Love herself allegedly spent some months here in the later Eighties .

Still the funniest parts of Lichtenstein's 34-page submission concern Courtney Love. Lichtenstein's dossier poker-facedly submits that "Ms. Love is not a ' voracious Camille Paglia reader ' and does not ascribe to any notion of sexual aggresion."

Furthermore, don't ever believe that Courtney Love is some rock'n'roll anarchist guerilla. Instead Lichtenstein's letter insists that the Clarke/Collins statement that "'Courtney Love thinks she can give corporate rock incurable syphilis and change the rock world' is both unintelligible and gibberish. Are the authors implying that Ms. Love is afflicted with a venereal disease?"

No just turning what Michael Azerrad describes as Courtney Love's "sardonic, sarcastic sense of humour" back on her . Furthermore Love is alert to any hazard of a rift with her U.K. media friends . For according to the Lichtenstein dossier, " Courtney Love does not believe Everett True (Sub Pop and Hole's earliest and most loyal champion in the Melody Maker: B.G. ) is a 'wanker' (an uniquely British term)."

Well, we're glad to be able to put that on the record.

All of this notwithstanding Victoria Clarke and Britt Collins insist that they didn't set out to slash and burn Nirvana's reputation. As Victoria Clarke tells it, the project derived from conversations from Nirvana's U.K. publicist, Anton Brookes. Both worked for London magazine, Lime Lizard, Collins as its editor, Clarke as a contributor, which had sturdily supported Nirvana and the other Seattle bands.

This was late '91 when Nevermind was accelerating up the U.K.charts . According to Clarke, their original intentions were pure : " We wanted to do a book that would cover all the bands coming out of the Seattle scene. For instance, Britt was especially keen on Mudhoney. But we figured we should focus on Nirvana since Britt thought they were going to be very successful and she was right . . . we were just interested in the music side. We didn't know much about them personally."

Through Brookes and the band's manager at Gold Mountain, John Silva, the necessary permissions were arranged. Clarke states the pair weren't interested in an authorized book, ironically 'because we figured that if we did that, they would censor the book " But they were allowed to join Nirvana on tour and quiz them as well they could.

Clarke caught up with them in Dublin, last July. Both Azerrad and Arnold confirm that the atmosphere surrounding Nirvana through that short summer European tour was tense. In Madrid, Arnold sensed " something faintly spoiled, going rotten in the Spanish sun . . . something hidden somewhere, the emotional equivalent of some really bad meat." Elsewhere in Route 666, she writes : "I love Nirvana and sympathize with their problems but I could not stand being around them any longer."

Cobain and Love were aloof. Gina Arnold testifies she " felt like an emissary from the planet Earth, sending Kurt and Courtney greetings from The People ." Love was already being vilified as " the groupie from Hell ." But in fairness, in late pregnancy, "in full hormonal swing" as Azerrad puts it - and with a junkie spouse, any hypersensitivity is easily excused.

Clarke eked out her modest advance, following the band to Belfast, Paris and Copenhagen. But her contact with Nirvana's first couple was tenuous and in Copenhagen, she was asked to leave the tour.

At this point, there is a total conflict of testimony. Lichtenstein's letter alleges that Clarke then skived off to Seattle and misrepresented Nirvana's support of the project to dupe her prospective interviewees. For her part, Victoria Clarke utterly rejects these charges.

Her Copenhagen interpretation is that the band's managerial assistant, Janet Billig informed her that the band "felt under a lot of pressure and they don't feel comfortable with having a journalist around all the time. And they also think that writing a book about them at this stage is a bit premature." So she continues : "I explained to her that we had to do the book because we'd already spent the advance money . . . and she agreed to co-operate with Britt over press cuttings and stuff . So after that I went to Seattle."

Now the two versions totally diverge: "As far as we were concerned, there was no animosity between us and the band. We knew a lot of their friends and I was actually staying with their photographer, Charles Peterson. And I actually interviewed Krist Novoselic. I met him a couple of times in Seattle and spent a day at his house." So how does she explain the charges against her?

" I think that a lot of people, when they heard Kurt opposed the book, they probably freaked out and said 'shit, well I've done an interview with these people, Kurt's going to be furious.' And Kurt indeed was furious, I know this for a fact . So they would have said ' well, she told me it was authorized'."

Clarke insists she never did, conceding only that she "might have said I've been on the road with them, I've spoken with them, yes, I like them or whatever. But I never would have said it was authorized and I didn't - although I suppose I can see why people might have got that impression."

Well, if Krist Novoselic gives an interview, that would have convinced me of Nirvana's benevolence towards the project. Meanwhile, Courtney Love was in the last weeks of her pregnancy while Kurt Cobain had gone into hospital to detox. Not surprisingly, Kurt's aunt, another Clarke source, was unable to phone him to learn his views on the book .

Novoselic's involvement is his to explain. Still since the band was then split by both Cobain's addiction and his ploy to grab back publishing royalties, one can but speculate that he might have wished to assert both his independence and more humane values .

Further investigation irreperably widened the rift. First, they interviewed Lynn Hirschberg, whose Vanity Fair feature had provoked L.A. social services to take temporary custody of the couple's daughter, a traumatizing experience for any family to suffer.

Clarke:"I imagine they felt that the stuff we had could potentially add to this and back up the case for the social welfare people and possibly make things even worse and get the baby taken away completely. That would have been a big worry for them and when we interviewed Lynn Hirschberg, they probably assumed we were on her side."

Further scratching their sore spot, Britt Collins then interviewed Falling James, from L.A. band The Leaving Trains, who was once briefly and tempestuously Courtney Love's first husband. He threatened not Love's daughter but her image.

"A couple of things in what he said she probably considered most damaging," Clarke believes. "Like, he says she didn't like punk rock and she wouldn't let him play his punk rock records in the house. Now she's like the Queen of Punk Rock so it's really important for her that nobody suggests that she didn't like punk rock two years ago."

Then came the hail of ansaphone threats and a fight between Love and Clarke in an L.A. club that Clarke claims the singer engineered. Love also claimed that the intrepid pair had sought to bribe officials to get her abortion medical records, a charge Clarke dismisses.

So Cobain and Love took the legal route .The custody battle provoked by Hirschberg's article cost them $240,000; one source suspects the costs of their campaign against Clarke and Collins may verge on $100,000.

Thus did they use the traditional tactics of the powerful against the weak, ensnaring the two authors and their publishers in litigation they just couldn't afford. In the process, they have set a precedent for any other wealthy, paranoid rock act who wants to stub out unwelcome criticism and definitely merit the first Robert Maxwell Award for services to rock journalism.

English publishers, Boxtree, were their first target. According to Clarke, the company "were threathened with being sued in California . . . what they were saying was that Boxtree had business interests in California, so they could be sued there. Maybe that's true, I don't know . . . But they were sueing for a ridiculous amount of money for damages and emotional distress and all that stuff. And Boxtree weren't prepared to take that risk."

Their American publishers, Hyperion, part of the Walt Disney corporation, were tougher opponents. Clarke and Collins' New York lawyer, Michael Guido sent Nirvana's attorneys a copy of the manuscript; the authors agreed to some changes and deletions, principally in reference to Love but the campaign of legal attrition continued.

Victoria Clarke is still bemused, especially when she compares their book to the Azerrad bio. Their manuscript hardly mentions heroin and she insists that aspect is essentially unchanged from the draft originally given to Nirvana's lawyers. She quotes other journalists who've told her: "They're mad. Every time they open

their mouths about this book, it only gets more attention."

But you can't buck the system. While Hyperion stood by them up to a point, someone at Geffen called a senior figure in Walt Disney and the book was conveniently dropped.

Meanwhile Victoria Clarke strikes a defiant pose : "if we have to photocopy it and hand it out on the street, we will."

So crank up the CD. It's time to hear yet again Pete Townshend's wizened laugh as we play 'Won't Get Fooled Again' for the latest generation. And while it refreshes our consciences, read Victoria Clarke and Britt Cllins' own conclusions on the whole ridiculous affair.

For them this parody version of punk had become "a statement of desperate resignation, translating into elitism and contempt by attacking weak and easy targets and spouting hypocritical intentions of destroying heavy metal and corporate rock but insidiously embracing its ideology."

Their book isn't perfect. At points, it's repetitious and needs a sharp editing knife. Its real sin in Nirvana's eyes may be its refusal to take them seriously and genuflect to their collecive Godhead. But then, as Victoria Clarke implicitly admits, their book itself is now less significant than the story of its suppression.

Meanwhile don't penalize them by ignoring the other two books. Arnold's book is an essential, loving and often perceptive history of American alternative rock through the Eighties written from the perspective of a fan who deserves better than Nirvana's betrayal.

Azerrad, who nobly chastizes Cobain and Love for their telephone terrorism, somehow manages to strike the most delicate balence between loving Nirvana's music and investigating and not ducking the issues.

You may still be moved by Nirvana but I can't stomach his mistreatment of their temporary guitarist, Jason Everman, who loaned the band $600 to record Bleach and was then fired without repayment.

I also hope Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love were joking when, in their junk period, they played Sid'n'Nancy, checking into hotels as John Ritchie (Sid's baptismal name ) and Nancy Spungen. But then I always believed punk was about Johnny Rotten not Sid Vicious, a fashion accessory for fools doomed to be postcard Mohicans . . .

Once upon a time, the rock adage was that to live outside the law, you had to be honest. Not now. This sad, surreal tale demonstrates merely that to live outside the law, you must have lawyers.