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I liked your write up, and have to agree. This is what I had cookin', and props to J.D. for pulling it off. Catcher sold 65 million copies. Staggering!



If you read some of the books written in the past few years about Kurt Cobain and period when Nirvana was getting recognized and then burst into the spotlight, it is very similar to what Salinger seems to have experienced. Cobain and his band were literally starving, living in squalor in rural apartments in Washington state without enough money, while supposedly signed to their record label and being the next big thing. He is supposedly wearing four or five layers of clothing in the "Smells Like Teen Spirit" music video to cover how skinny they had all become from living that way. Then, once they were fully in the spotlight of their success and the cheques were rolling in, the public / media didn't want to let them go.

Cobain actually quit music after the Nevermind tours, and took up painting at home, turning out tons of these huge canvasses. Based on what I have read, so many people with a vested interest in another album/tour/etc started hounding him into writing songs again, doing another album, etc. That period where he is painting sounds like one of the truly happiest times in his life, and he eventually ended up stepping away from it because of other people who were dependent on him.

There is a quote from him in one of the books about how when you are surrounded with people who depend on you for their livelihoods, you will never be able to get an unbiased opinion from them with regards to anything that may affect their incomes, especially if it could affect them negatively.

Everything else (his marriage, later suicide, etc) aside, some of the interviews with him and the band from before they really hit it big, to the period immediately after, really strike a chord about what it must be like to get everything you thought you ever wanted.