Never Fade Away

1994 mass-market paperback biography of Kurt Cobain, published months after his death.

Category: Curated

File-Under: #Grunge, #MusicBiography, #1990s, #PrintCulture, #MassMarket

Description

Never Fade Away is a mass-market paperback biography of Kurt Cobain written by Dave Thompson and published in 1994 by St. Martin’s Paperbacks. The book was produced and released during the immediate aftermath of Cobain’s death, while the cultural meaning of Nirvana and grunge was still unresolved and actively forming.

Rather than a retrospective account, the text reflects an early stage of documentation: assembling interviews, press material, and narrative framing in near real time. Its tone and structure align with commercial trade publishing of the period, where biography functioned as both record and response to rapidly unfolding events.

The book includes sixteen pages of black-and-white press photographs depicting public gatherings, media presence, and official activity following Cobain’s death. These images situate the publication alongside newspapers, magazines, and broadcast media that collectively shaped the first written record of the early-1990s alternative music shift.

Within Clearance Archive, the book is positioned not as a definitive account, but as a first-wave artifact — a document produced before distance, canonization, or critical consensus had settled.