Live! From City Lights

On Thursday, April 26, 2012, City Lights Bookstore hosted Eric Erlandson in conversation with Andi Mudd, managing editor of The Believer. Eric’s new book, Letters to Kurt (Akashic Books) is a poetic elegy for Kurt Cobain from the man who created the band Hole with Cobain’s wife Courtney Love.

Letters To Kurt is an anguished, angry, tender meditation on the octane and ether of rock and roll and its many moons: sex, drugs, suicide, fame, and rage. It’s part Berryman’s Dream Songs, part Bukowski, Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, and the Clash. Rants and reflections fill these fifty-two prose poems. They are raw, funny, sad, and searching. This will make a beautiful book for anyone who loved Nirvana and Hole and the time and place when their music changed everything. Ultimately, it’s an elegy for Kurt and the “suicide idols” who tragically fail to find salvation in their amazing music.

What has been said about Letters to Kurt:

“Eric was the spirit-boy in the Nirvana/Hole dynamic. Quiet, bemused, intelligent, and curiously intuitive to the power of hugging the devil, to say we will all be okay. The early 1990s were an explosive and defining period of creativity and excitement for the underground punk/post-punk scene, particularly with the manifest poetry of Kurt, who we were so proud to have as a light in our shared time and space. Eric expresses how enchanting Kurt was, how the whole scene was, with his thoughtful, radical adult/prose love. Bring on the future, darling.”
–Thurston Moore, musician

“Eric. He was always there: supportive, observing, in the thick of it. Hidden in plain sight . . . Without him, I can’t imagine Seattle or L.A. or a dozen other places. This book is beautiful, brutal, brief. Happy-sad eloquence. Boy Scouts playing with the complimentary cologne in the heart of the ghost town. Listen to the man. He knows.”
–Everett True, author of Nirvana: The Biography

Eric Erlandson is a musician best known as the cofounder (with Courtney Love), songwriter, and lead guitarist of alternative rock band Hole. In 1991, Hole released its debut album, Pretty on the Inside, and quickly achieved underground success in the U.S., United Kingdom, and Europe. Erlandson and Love then signed a contract with Geffen/DGC, and with new band members they wrote and recorded their major label debut, Live Through This. The album, ranked by Time magazine as one of the top 100 albums of all time, received tremendous critical acclaim and sold over a million copies. Following the deaths of Love’s husband Kurt Cobain and Hole bassist Kristen Pfaff, the band toured the world in support of Live Through This. In 1998, Hole released the album Celebrity Skin, which also received rave reviews. In 2002, Erlandson and Love officially disbanded Hole. Since then, Erlandson has been involved in a number of musical projects including producing, touring, and songwriting. He has studied creative writing and occasionally reads at various poetry events in Los Angeles, where he lives.

Andi Mudd is the managing editor of The Believer magazine and an editor at McSweeney’s. She was born and raised in Olympia, Washington

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