I Found My Friends: The Oral History of Nirvana

Rating: 2.5 Stars

Review:

...because calling it "I Found My Friends: The Oral History of Bands from the Pacific Northwest in the Early 90s with a Major Emphasis on Nirvana" would have bordered on ridiculous.

I love Nirvana, always will. I don't like giving a poor rating to a book about a band I love. Kurt's death is beyond infuriating, there was so much more to come I believe. So, I read anything and everything published that I can get my hands on - except Kurt's Journals. I own the book, but can not and will not bring myself to actually read it.

The problem with this book for me though is that there is so much, "I didn't know Kurt well, but he seemed..." for this performance or that show. The author interviewed something like 200 people for the book, but that did not help me know Nirvana any better than I already do. There were some handfuls of people who knew the band, and then a bunch of people from other bands who played with them a few times. Not exactly authorities on the subject. I get that the music community was tight-knit and that comes through from some of the interviewees, but so many other people contradict one another in the same section, addressing the same time frame.

In between interviews, the author inserted these brief synopses and more and more, I found myself skimming the actual interviews and reading his summaries of what happened in a given period.

I'd recommend this for serious Nirvana fans, perhaps you will get more out of it than I did. For the casual fan, you can probably pass on this one.