Cobain Journals Reveal the Musician

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Late Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain's private notes, lyrics and even insignificant doodles are about to make their way to the local bookstore -- thanks to his widow Courtney Love and a $4 million publishing deal.

The musician, who committed suicide in 1994 at the age of 27, wrote some 23 journals as he was gaining fame in the late '80s early '90s. The topics he covered ranged from his heroin addiction, to his love for Love, the firing of his Seattle-based grunge band's first drummer and his being a father to daughter Frances Bean Cobain.

"Kurt Cobain: The Journals" will be published Nov. 11 by Riverhead Books. On Nov. 12, "Nirvana" -- a greatest-hits album featuring "You Know You're Right," a previously unreleased Cobain song that has been getting wide radio play in recent weeks -- will go on sale.

"I hope I die before I turn into Pete Townshend," Cobain scrawled in one entry. Excerpts from Cobain's 800 pages have been published by Newsweek.

In one diary excerpt from the late '80s, after he formed Nirvana with his friend Krist Novoselic, Cobain writes: "I like punk rock. I like girls with weird eyes. I like drugs. (But my body and mind won't allow me to take them). I like passion. I like playing my cards wrong. ... I like to taunt small, barking dogs in parked cars."

In a letter he writes: "As you may have guessed by now, I've been taking to a lot of drugs lately. It might be time for the Betty Ford Clinic or the Richard Nixon Library to save me from abusing my enemic (sic), rodent-like body any longer."

And of his wife: "Courtney, when I say I love you, I am not ashamed, nor will anyone ever, ever come close to intimidating, persuading, etc., me into thinking otherwise. I wear you on my sleeve. I spread you out wide open with the wing span of a peacock, yet all too often with the attention span of a bullet to the head."