Post by KnowledgeIsPower on Jun 5, 2008 20:53:28 GMT -5
UPDATE NOVEMBER 23 1999
Thanks to Trent Reznor for The Fragile, Just Like You Imagined, Even Deeper, The Wretched, The Great Below, and the rest, they are totally amazing, exquisite and powerful.
FUTURE DATE:
I’ll love you forever,
I’m gonna be your wife.
I’m gonna keep you around
for the rest of my life.
I finally got all these flies off of me,
and now I can see a future date right over the horizon
A future date right on the tip of your tongue. (“Which is a reference to LSD, I think”: Hank Harrison’s comment.)
I’ll destroy anyone in my way,
I’ll kill everyone, every lousy lay.
’Cos I got my eye on a future date.
Poem by Courtney Love, 1980.
Hank Harrison made the following comments on this poem:
“It didn’t make sense to me when I read it years ago. But after Kurt died I read it again and often wondered if she didn’t have that extraordinary sense of commitment and determination -that nothing was going to stand in her way under any circumstances, and nobody is ever going to put her down, and she felt, I guess, that she had to have that kind of determination to make a success in the rock world or in the movie industry. But putting this in context with a number of other elements you start to see an almost deranged thinking process underline a lot of this obsession that she has. It’s almost a compulsion to succeed no matter what. The means justify the end”.
The only disagreement I have with Harrison (here) is his reference to LSD. I think Courtney was referring to the words “I do”, which tripped off Kurt’s tongue on Feb 24th 1992. Her “future date” was achieving money and fame, and she would accept these through marriage.
“Courtney always has an agenda”. (Vanity Fair article, 1992).
Courtney’s pathological need to control any given situation is well documented. Her inability to control her temper when she feels control of certain situations slipping away from her is also well documented.
She verbally threatened Victoria Clarke and later assaulted her. She verbally threatened Lynn Hirschberg who refused to take part in Broomfield’s film, because she feared Courtney. Courtney threatened Kurt after the Rome incident, telling Select that he couldn’t get away from her that easily and that she would follow him through hell. Kurt died. Courtney threatened Kristen Pfaff, telling her, “don’t f**k with me, or you will regret it forever”. Kristen died.
I believe that the only context within which Courtney functions is that of control, anger and self interest. These qualities are her dominant traits. She may attempt to cover them up, but she has never managed to transmute them. The above poem was written when Courtney was just 16 years old, so from that early an age she was already displaying strong negative controlling and violent traits.
In Broomfield’s film Rozz Rezabek said the following:
(To Courtney) “You stole my career, you made me run away from it”.
Broomfield said: “Rozz blamed Courtney’s ambitions for him as the reasons he gave up his career. She wanted him to be what Kurt later became”.
Rezabek said: “She, at that time, thought that it was a male dominated world. She thought the only way she could achieve stardom was through a man. She had all the ideas, she started dressing me in Julian Cope’s clothes. And finally I got her to agree to like, “You’ll lay off, you’ll let me do my band and become famous on my own”. She had an agenda for me. She wanted to make me into a rock star to the point where I stopped wanting to be a rock star. I wanted to get away from it, because I would have ended up like Kurt”.
Trent Reznor said that Courtney hounded him to the extent that his only hope was that Courtney would fixate on someone else, and thereby lose interest in him. I think Kurt was relieved Courtney was having an affair with Corgan in Feb/March 1994 because in theory it meant he was free of her.
Courtney trapped Kurt into marriage, it wasn’t a difficult task, she got pregnant by him and he had certain values, he wanted commitment, he wasn’t afraid of this. She also used heroin and encouraged Kurt to use it.
“(Being pregnant) was what gave her the security she wanted with Kurt. She knew it would only be a matter of time before Kurt left her, so she needed something to put a stranglehold on him”. (Hank Harrison, WKKC? p 64).
“She encouraged him to do heroin. Actually Courtney’s very smart. She knew that the more drugs Kurt did the less chance he’d be in a state to get up and leave her”. (Dylan Carlson, WKKC? p 62).
“Being from Aberdeen and raised with some sense of family values, Kurt thought he had no choice but to marry Courtney. I know he liked her a lot, but he would say many times that he was not sure if he was in love. But Kurt said he was convinced that you didn’t have to be in love to get married. Later, I think he really loved her”. (Dylan Carlson, WKKC? p 65)
When Courtney first set her sights on Kurt, she managed, briefly, to tone down her obnoxious traits:
“She tried to ingratiate herself to everybody and at first they fell for it. But I was just getting out of another relationship that I didn’t even want to be in, and I found Courtney was becoming too possessive”. (Kurt).
After they were married, Courtney soon changed her tune. Even as early as November 1992,Courtney was grooming Melissa Rossi as a media chum. On pages 136- 148 of Rossi’s book the following events occurred:
In Nov 1992, Courtney called Rossi and suggested they got together, due to the fact Rossi was a writer for Newsweek. Whilst on the phone, Courtney railed about the bad publicity she had received in Vanity Fair. Then she arranged for Rossi to meet her at the Four Seasons Olympic Hotel in Seattle, where Courtney was staying.
Courtney, Rossi and the nanny Jackie went out for a meal and got to talking about Portland and Rozz Rezabek who Rossi knew, Courtney started crying over him. When Rossi asked why she was crying, Courtney said that she had never got over Rozz. Rossi thought to herself:
“I was thinking about her odd reaction to the mention of an old boyfriend. She was married to Kurt Cobain, for crying out loud, but she was crying about Rozz Rezabek...But Kurt Cobain was...well, Kurt Cobain. Brilliant, beautiful, talented, sexy and rich too--not to mention the father of Frances Bean.”
Courtney was crying over Rezabek just three months after she had Frances. Later that evening Courtney suggested Rossi write a biography on her, but first she wanted Rossi to write a favourable article, to combat the negative publicity of the Vanity Fair article. She informed Rossi that both she and Kurt were now off smack.
During this interview which was arranged by Courtney and took place in the hotel Courtney was staying in, the phone went and apparently it was Dave Grohl who informed Courtney that Kurt had fallen off the wagon, he’d taken some smack. Later the phone went again, this time Courtney told Rossi that Kurt was now completely smashed on it. The phone went yet again, and at this point, Courtney called a halt to the interview and informed Rossi:
“Tonight I lost my husband. I lost my husband to drugs”.
Ever get the feeling you were set up, Melissa? This occurred just after Kurt and Courtney had been subjected to routine drug tests in order to regain custody of Frances, after the fiasco of the Vanity Fair article.
I would not be surprised if Courtney had instructed someone to call, in the full knowledge that Rossi would be there to witness and believe this story. Even if these calls were genuine, and I doubt it, how could Courtney inform a journalist as to what was going on? She had only recently regained custody of Frances and here she was telling another journalist that Kurt was back on smack. How could she invite the possibility of losing Frances again?
She also did this after Kurt had told Robert Hilburn of The LA Times on September 21:
“The biggest thing that affected me was all the insane rumours, the heroin rumours....all this speculation going on. I felt totally violated. I never realised that my private life would be such an issue.” (CAYA, p 282).
According to Rossi (p 133) Lynn Hirschberg called Hilburn after this interview with Kurt and informed him that Kurt had not told him the full story. Well, maybe Kurt didn’t know the full story. I’m sure that if Kurt had known about the above Courtney/Rossi conversation, he would have been shocked, because such behaviour on Courtney’s part just as they got back custody of Frances is unforgivable.
No one would do what Courtney did here unless they had an ulterior motive.
She can’t claim naiveté for the above because the Nirvana camp were rallying around arranging interviews with Melody Maker, Michael Azerrad and Spin in an effort to control the serious damage resulting from the Vanity Fair article.
In the December 1992 issue of Spin, Kurt and Courtney did a joint interview conducted by Jonathan Poneman. She was simultaneously telling Rossi that she had lost Kurt to drugs and Poneman that Kurt was “glowing”, and “Even though I did get married once before and it was annulled. I don’t know. For myself, I just want to have kids by the same person and stay with the same person”, and “to me, a mom and dad is a really important thing to have”.
Around the time the photos below of Kurt and Frances were taken, Courtney told Melissa Rossi that Kurt was “lost to drugs” shortly after they regained custody of Frances:
Considering the Poneman and Rossi interviews were held roughly at the same time, and supposedly for the same reasons, what the hell was Courtney playing at? It looks like the same thing that she did after Kurt’s death when she told everyone Kurt had tried to commit suicide in Rome. She couldn’t get away with saying it before Kurt died, because Kurt denied being suicidal. And she couldn’t get away with trying to make out that Kurt was using heroin in the Poneman interview, because Kurt was there. But she could give out false information when Kurt was not there to deny it, hence all the untrue rumours, and don’t underestimate her, if she could tell Rossi, she could tell others, rumours spread.
There is the same definitive line between the truth and lies whilst Kurt was alive, as there was after he died. And when you trace back the misinformation to its source, you find Courtney, and you find Melissa Rossi being used as an “information conduit”. When you read what Rossi had to say on the summer of 1993 you find the same discrepancies between named and unnamed sources. Rossi reported:
By the end of the summer, into the fall, and on into winter, Kurt and Courtney fought worse than ever. About everything. The mounting bills, including thousands of dollars she owed to psychics....
The couple fought about the upcoming Nirvana tour of Europe, which Kurt didn’t want to go on; as every junkie knows, being overseas makes it more difficult to score.....
Besides, by that time she felt like Kurt was having an affair with a mistress who wasn’t human. The competing love of his life was one that Courtney couldn’t beat up or tell off or get rid of. Heroin was consuming more and more of his time. By then it was more than just something that dulled the pain of his stomach; it was his life.....
The Cobains sometimes talked of divorcing, but Kurt hated the thought.....
Starting late that summer Hole was on the road almost as much as Nirvana had once been. (Rossi p 174).
Who told you this Melissa? Maybe it was Jackie, or DeWitt, or maybe it was someone that they had told and who believed them.
Rossi's above reporting directly contradicted Dylan Carlson, various named sources, and the recollections of Gavin Edwards in the article further on in this section.
Melissa Rossi was living in Seattle and was a useful card. She was around to pick up on rumours throughout. Where Rossi elaborated on the information supplied by unnamed sources after Kurt’s death, she was also being fed similar misinformation long before Kurt died. Which has serious implications.
The Nov 1992 meetings with Rossi which were intended to produce an article never even came to anything because Courtney moved hotels after that meeting and although Rossi tried to contact Courtney she had no luck. So it seems odd that these meetings should have occurred.
The nanny who met Rossi in Nov 1992 was Jackie so she therefore knew what Rossi looked like. It is much easier to provide false information to someone when you know exactly who they are and what they look like.
Courtney Love is a disturbing person. She isn’t really very complex, but you have to be able to recognise that such manipulative, cold and calculating people really do exist.
We know Kurt used heroin and we know why he used it. Kurt never glamorised his drug use, this is what he said to journalist Gavin Edwards about it:
Kurt claims to have been off heroin for over a year -but he’s aware that people doubt him...he jokes about his junkie reputation and is keenly aware of its news value. Asked why he began using heroin, Kurt sighs, “I know this sounds like a cop-out or a lame excuse, but I’ve been suffering from chronic stomach pain everyday of my life for 6 years now...I’ve had ten or eleven endoscopes, where they stick a fibreoptic tube with a camera down your throat, and they always find a red, inflamed piece of tissue in my stomach. Kurt used heroin on and off for about 8 months...
“It’s not my f**king fault that anyone knows that I did heroin. I never talked about it. When I’m high it’s really obvious. That’s why I’ve never gone out in public on it. I tried as hard as I could to keep it from everyone...It’s a really evil drug”. I look Kurt in the eye as he says this. He is serious.” (Gavin Edwards, Details magazine, Nov 1993. This interview dates to July 1993).
“So there was an element of just wanting to get high”? (in early 1992). “There might have been in her eyes”, says Kurt, who still maintains that he basically did heroin for its analgesic properties. “Every time that I wasn’t doing drugs, they suspected that I was. They still do”. (Kurt talking to Michael Azerrad, Musician Oct 1993).
They became inseparable, except when Kurt insisted on hanging out with some of his junkie friends. “Sometimes it was really an excuse for him to get away from his wife. Kurt would hang around a lot of heroin dealers and junkies but he wasn’t always doing drugs”. (Dylan Carlson, WKKC? p 65).
And this from an article by Keith Cameron for NME dated August 29th 1992:
...when Anton walks in with a woman I recognise as Susan Silver, manager of Soundgarden. She waves at Kurt, says, “I just wanna say goodnight,” then sits down next to him. Anton tells me to turn the tape off.
“Why”?
“Just turn it off!”
As well as being a sweet guy, Anton’s a useful Thai boxer and he’s got these dogs, see...So off it goes. Susan talks intently to Kurt, looking directly into his eyes, the gist of it being just call me if there’s anything you want, then she and Anton leave.
Erm, Kurt, what was that you were saying... ‘See! She thinks I’m on heroin! He whispers excitedly. “She does! Didn’t you see it in her eyes? And I’ve heard it from a whole bunch of people, she says stuff, she actually tells people I’m on heroin all the time. That’s Soundgarden’s manager, it goes from the f**king highest level of people in the music industry down to the street punk kids.”
At the time of this interview, June 92 in Spain, Kurt was using methadone. He was using it to control his stomach pain. Susan Silver was also contributing to the rumours. It is known that Kurt disliked her and believed her to be one of the unnamed, inside sources for the Vanity Fair article. But why was she doing this? I don’t know, maybe Courtney was telling her it was true in the same way she did to Melissa Rossi.
Kurt used heroin for his stomach ailment. When you look at interviews where Kurt was asked about his drug use, you always get answers like this:
“Everybody was tired of me doing drugs even though I wasn’t doing drugs. I was on methadone...they’ve all bought the same drug hysteria propaganda..”(Come As You Are p 260).
And:
“I had methadone. I was fine. I had absolutely no desire to do drugs...I was more miserable during all the tours that I was vomiting every night, and not eating and being totally straight...I was just looking straight ahead and concentrating on not puking all the time. But when I started doing drugs I was fine”.
The above relate to the European tour in June 1992. When Kurt was in Europe he used methadone. When he was in the States he used heroin, but always for his stomach pain.
Then there was the time he was touring in Australia and he went to a doctor for his stomach pains:
“I think I’m going to get some kind of stomach medicine and the doctor just assumes that I’d recently gotten off of heroin and I’m going through detox and I’m on tour, so I’d better do what Keith Richards would have done and take methadone. It’s called Physeptone in Australia, so I thought they were just stomach pills”. The Physeptone miraculously took away the stomach pain. Kurt couldn’t wait to tell his doctor about these great new pills.(Come As You Are, p 249).
Kurt was disappointed to find out Physeptone was just methadone. He thought he had found a cure for his stomach problem. If Kurt was happy to just go along with using methadone and heroin, why would he even care about whether he found a cure or not? Kurt wanted a cure because he didn’t want to be reliant on heroin and methadone.
And then you find this in ‘Come As You Are’, published while Kurt was alive in 1993, p 268:
Meanwhile, Kurt was detoxing and, once again in enormous pain. Unable to eat, he was placed on an IV and got weaker and weaker for a time, then rallied. His rehabilitation was slowed by the fact he was occasionally given morphine to kill the stomach pain. He saw a battalion of gastrointestinal specialists who took X-rays upper GI’s, lower GI’s, CAT scans etc. He was weak.
This was just before Frances was born. Which became this in Rossi’s book, p 129:
Kurt went on a binge, then reluctantly checked into rehab, in a different wing of the hospital. But his determination to quit heroin was not particularly strong; Courtney later said that while he was in detox unit he had dealers actually shooting heroin into his IV bag. One dealer told her that at one point Kurt appeared dead.
Melissa, you believe what Courtney said? Do you still believe her?
Courtney had a long history of drug use, from pills through to heroin before she ever met Kurt. Inger Lorre knew Courtney before she met Kurt and she said:
“I was f**ked up on drugs and Courtney thought it was cool, so she started doing it”.
Courtney thought drugs were cool. Courtney thought drugs were good for her image. Kurt didn’t.
In The High Times April 1996 edition, Hank Harrison mentioned Courtney’s drug and heroin use dating back to the time before she had ever met Kurt.
Courtney was using drugs while Kurt was “missing” because when she was arrested on 7th April 1994, the detective who attended the arrest reported that they searched Courtney’s room at the Peninsula Hotel and described it as “vomit and blood spattered” they also found a syringe, prescription pad and packet containing a substance they believed to be heroin. Apparently these turned out to be Hindu good luck ashes. What kind of high do you get from those? Do you really inject those? Or did you have other substances there as well?
Courtney told David Fricke: “I take Valiums. Percodan. Don’t like heroin. It turns me into a thingy. Makes me ugly. Never liked it. Hate needles...I have used heroin -after Kurt died.” (Rolling Stone December 15th 1994).
Courtney, we know you were a regular user of heroin for years. You used it before and after Kurt died and that is how a syringe came to be found in your vomit and blood spattered hotel room on April 7th 1994.
You forgot to mention to Fricke that you liked Rohypnol. You even had a packet of Rohypnol waiting for you at 171 Lake Washington Blvd, in April 1994, because Grant found it, Kurt didn’t use it, and contrary to what Brite reported, you didn’t flush it down the toilet.
Courtney was the recreational drug user, not Kurt.
Kurt’s heroin use was blown up out of all proportion by the media, who got to hear of it on occasions directly from Courtney, or by her planting such stories.
In November 1992 Courtney told Melissa Rossi that Kurt was using heroin.
On at least one occasion a call was made to a drug dealer. “You’ve got to come over,” one eavesdropping operator supposedly heard Courtney say. “We’re hurting.” (Rossi, p 150.) This looks contrived. If you are buying drugs, you do it discreetly.
I am totally cynical of anything Courtney does or says, and I don’t underestimate her lust for publicity and her ability to manipulate situations to her own ends. At The Glastonbury Rock Festival June 1999, Courtney said:
“Come on you British people, stop being so cynical, no one gives a f**k”.
What were you referring to Courtney? It would suit you very well if people weren’t cynical. We’ll leave that to Select Magazine and their criminally inept journalist Caitlin Moran.
Cynicism is an absolute necessity where you are concerned.
Courtney boasted about drugs during the Vanity Fair article, and much fuss was made about the inside/unnamed sources who embellished the drug references in this article. Who were these unnamed sources? Probably Courtney herself, she isn’t beyond such tactics, and Susan Silver. This was in 1992. Courtney continued throughout to mention drugs, in 1993 for an article for Melody Maker August 28th, the journalists (The Stud Bros) wrote:
Courtney Love appears....First, she talks about some heavy drug dealers she once knew and their aborted attempt to smuggle something illegal into somewhere heavy. From this she leaps with head-spinning speed to her favourite subject -herself- and the treatment that she and her husband have suffered at the hands of a callous, endlessly intrusive media. ...Kurt describes Courtney as media literate. She isn’t. Often she’s media hungry. More often overly image conscious. An hour ago, in the hotel foyer, she approached us, and unsolicited, offered us tales of drug smuggling and, when it came to that book (Clarke and Collins) bitter refutations of things we had no idea she’d been accused of... Kurt, haven’t you and your wife both contributed to the press you’ve had, both good and bad? “Yes, I think both Courtney and I have said too many things at times, or said some unnecessary things. We’re just learning like everyone else. But I think it is unhealthy to read all this negative stuff and I do try to ignore it as much as I can. There’s a lot of times Courtney’ll say, “OK, here’s another one”, and start reading it, and I’ll just walk out of the room. It affects me only because it affects her more”.
Kurt didn’t realise Courtney supplied journalists with misleading information concerning his drug use. I would prefer to believe Kurt and Dylan and several journalists who stated at various times that Kurt was clean.
Just because Kurt was hanging around friends who happened to be dealers/ junkies, doesn’t mean he was using all the time. For too long people have been willing to accept information supplied by Courtney/unnamed sources, and disbelieve what Kurt had to say on the matter. It’s time people started to believe what Kurt was saying with regards to his drug use. Time that Courtney was put under the microscope and the whole story was reevaluated.
The fact that she was doing this while Kurt was alive has serious implications. There is an intentionally constructed web of lies surrounding Kurt in life and death.
These lies made it extremely difficult to distinguish fact from fiction, to the point I sometimes felt like giving up in despair, which is obviously why they are there in the first place. To create an impenetrable mess. If finding the truth means that Courtney is torn asunder in the process, then so be it.
Thanks to Rossi and her book the lies and manipulation are actually quite easy to see. If ever there was d**ning evidence it’s Rossi’s book. No wonder Courtney wanted Brite to rewrite history, no wonder Rossi’s book became obsolete so quickly. I bet Courtney is cursing the day it was ever published, and thousands of copies exist Courtney, isn’t that great!
Here’s some more information from Rossi’s book p 235-236: in Dec 1994 Courtney turned up on Rezabek’s door and talked about him maybe writing a book on her, and that if he did, she wanted to make sure he wrote some nice things about her. She even mentioned bankrolling it. This coincided with Grant’s first radio interview on his belief that Courtney Love played a part in Kurt Cobain’s murder. It’s a sign of guilt,when you need to manipulate and bankroll the writing of such a book.
Rezabek and Rossi were both part of this cover up scheme, even though they didn’t realise it.
When I look at joint interviews, it’s always Courtney who elaborates and boasts about drugs. She also brought up the subject of her and Kurt almost killing themselves just after Frances was born, a story that has grown grander in scale now Kurt isn’t around to dispute it. In Azerrad’s ‘Come As You Are’ it briefly mentions that while Kurt and Courtney were coming to terms with the extent of the damage caused by the Vanity Fair article, they were feeling suicidal, and Kurt had a gun, and briefly they contemplated using it.
But I don’t think this was serious because the day after this happened, Kurt was performing at the Reading Rock Festival, England. I have video footage of this, and Kurt looks clean, healthy and in control. He didn’t look like he’d seriously been contemplating joint suicide to me. The performance was brilliant, and just before All Apologies Kurt said:
“This song is dedicated to my twelve day old daughter and my wife. And there’s been some pretty extreme things written about us, especially my wife and she thinks everybody hates her now. So this is being recorded so why don’t you give her a message and say “Courtney we love you? OK?” Ready, on the count of three; one, two, three” The crowd did what Kurt asked, and he said “Thanks”.
What a difference in the way Kurt tried to defend Courtney, to Courtney’s constant demolition job on Kurt. Picture of Kurt at the Reading 1992 festival to the left.
Right from the start Courtney saw Kurt as her meal ticket. She got him to marry her. She isolated him from his friends by way of punching them out or by embarrassing behaviour. She actively encouraged misinformation about Kurt with regards to his drug use, before and after his death. She lost interest in him pretty quickly, she held a torch for Rezabek and Corgan, and possibly Dando, and who knows what was going on with Michael Dewitt? I expect he was occasionally throwing her around the room.
Kurt was in a vulnerable position -he was having to cope with massive and instant fame and an excruciating stomach problem. He used methadone and heroin as a last resort. This is understandable. He never boasted about his drug use, he tried to keep it quiet. Courtney didn’t, she elaborated on it, leaked it to the media.
Vanity Fair came out, and we all know what effect that had. I feel overwhelmingly sad for Kurt, who now had the added problems of trying to get custody of Frances and being shackled to a wife who was encouraging bad publicity and directly told Rossi Kurt was using when he wasn’t. Courtney could not keep her mouth shut with regards to drugs in general and Kurt’s use in particular. This makes Courtney either:
1 Stupid, or
2 Manipulative.
You do not boast of using heroin whilst you are pregnant and then feign surprise when the media comes down on you like a ton of bricks. It was said at the time that Hirschberg just didn’t understand Courtney’s sardonic humour. But too often Courtney falls back on her sarcasm, irony, and love for double entendres as her line of defence. You cannot use these as a defence, because if you could then any serial killer/criminal could use these tactics and walk free.
Also, you do not tell journalists that your husband is using heroin just after you have regained custody of your daughter who was initially taken away on the grounds that her parents were multiple substance abusers and therefore incapable of looking after their own child.
Why did she say and do these things? She didn’t do it because she was stupid. She did it for the publicity. She isn’t stupid, she knew what she was doing, and she was perfectly prepared to crucify Kurt in the process.
She gloried in her notoriety and fame. Kurt was constantly driven to emotional despair and trying to defend her from the bad press which she knowingly invited. At the end of the Vanity Fair interview Courtney said:
“Things are really good. It’s all coming true, although it could f**k up at any time. You never know.”
Courtney knew it was going to f**k up, she planned it that way. That is why there is a web of lies surrounding Kurt. That is why Kurt became isolated from his friends, but was allowed to become increasingly involved with Michael DeWitt. Courtney created a bloody mess of lies, misinformation and chaos in the hope that no one would be able to find the truth.
When you listen to the tapes of Courtney threatening Victoria Clarke you can hear the enjoyment in her voice. When you listen to Kurt you can hear the despair. That is the difference. It was a game to Courtney. It was desperation to Kurt.
Whilst he was trying to defend her and his family, she was underhandedly trying to destroy it. Kurt got pissed off about the persistent and incorrect rumours of his drug use. He didn’t realise that it was his own wife who encouraged these rumours. She did it to him when he was alive, and she did it to him after she murdered him. Kurt and the whole world was deceived by one evil pregnant dog. She didn’t give a d**n.
At the age of sixteen Courtney had already decided to trap, use and destroy any man necessary in her quest for fame and fortune, she wrote a poem about it. Unfortunately it was Kurt who was her victim.
Just like her previous husband James Moreland said when recalling Courtney’s previous drug use whilst pregnant, which eventually forced her to have an abortion:
“It was a nightmare, I’ll never forgive her for that”.
And just like Lynn Hirschberg said:
“Courtney is a train-wreck personality who is not interested in the consequences of her actions”.
And by around July 1993, I believe Kurt was coming to the same conclusion, because when you are married and you love someone, and you have a child, you do not act in that way unless you are stupid or are acting out of self interest. Which, unforgivably, is what DeWitt had the gall to accuse Kurt of when he left the note on the stairs of 171 Lke Wash Blvd on April 7th 1994.
Michael DeWitt is a murderer.
From July 1993 Kurt was making tentative statements that all was not well within their relationship. This coincided with his stomach treatment. At this time he was beginning to feel more optimistic, see Dylan Carlson quote on Kurt’s successful stomach treatment, see previously mentioned November 1993 edition of Details Magazine article, and this article from the June 1994 edition of Details, by Gavin Edwards:
When I first heard the news of Kurt’s suicide, I couldn’t believe he was dead.....a suicide barely seemed plausible -the Kurt I knew took pleasure in too many things. It’s not like he hadn’t told me about feeling suicidal from stomach pain and wanting to blow his head off. It’s just that I had assumed -hoped- that he’d got those urges out of his system by taking his medicine.... if Kurt was using heroin while he was around me, he hid it well. In Seattle last summer, he was alert and happy --which is how I am going to remember him.
The treatment of his stomach problem made Kurt more able to focus on sorting out other parts of his life and he wasn’t happy with Courtney. But he never once uttered a derogatory word about her in public. It wasn’t in his nature to demean the mother of his child, no matter what he might have felt privately, but there were signs all the same. Grant said that Kurt hoped that by publicly supporting Courtney, even after divorce, Kurt hoped this would be enough to satisfy her. Grant then said that this wasn’t enough for Courtney, and what unfolded were the events as we know them today.
But just think, it is pretty much known (now) that Kurt wrote ‘Live Through This‘. Courtney wouldn't want that to be openly admitted by Kurt. Even if they divorced, if she didn’t act in a civil way to Kurt, he could retaliate by admitting he wrote it. If she tried to use Frances against him, he had that secret as a counter defence, (When Courtney sang, “And when you take your next breath think about a lovely death you want so bad. Your mouth is shut. Your secret’s safe, I’m all shut up”, at Reading she was probably referring to this very fact.)
Kurt had the upper hand when it came to a divorce, he was clean, he didn’t have a history of violent assault, the chances are that he would get custody of Frances. He could control what happened, and this wasn’t acceptable to Courtney.
So, whilst Kurt was considering a divorce, and re arranging his life to reflect what he wanted, Michael DeWitt appeared on the scene:
“I enjoy the wealth because it means we can afford a nanny, which is extremely helpful. Especially the nanny we’ve found, this guy from California who was a friend of Courtney’s and has become one of my best friends”. (Kurt, Melody Maker, 21st August 1993).
If Hank Harrison had not saved that poem, none of us would have been aware of the frame of mind Courtney was displaying at the age of 16. Harrison has the original, in Courtney’s own writing, so it isn’t hearsay, it’s fact.
But for buying a bootleg video, with some reluctance at the time, but I’m glad now that I did, of her performance at the Reading Rock Festival, I would never have known that she was singing such disturbing words and performing in such a lowly manner.
These so called songs reveal an evil mind. Neither Rossi or Brite mentioned this, they both came across as admiring Love’s courage. Of Love’s 1994 appearance at Lollapalooza, Rossi commented that Love:
“tilted her head to the sky and sent a message to her husband, “Kurt! Kurt!” (Rossi p 224).
And of Love’s Feb 1995 performance on Hole: Unplugged that Love was:
“looking soulful, eyes raised as though searching the heavens for her late husband” (Rossi p 240).
Rossi even seemed to think that Courtney’s onstage and offstage antics were amusing.
Brite reported on some of Love’s lyric changes during the winter of 1994:
“I want him/He’s all gone” (Brite p 195).
But neither Rossi nor Brite told us the rest.
The Vanity Fair article in June 1995* never mentioned this behaviour either. Why? I was shocked by what I saw, and I have it on film, and this was going on at a time when Courtney was beating up concert goers, attacking Kathleen Hanna, chasing Mary Lou Lord and facing Grant’s allegations. How has she managed to get away with it? I am stunned.
Harrison and the bootleggers did us a favour, they have provided documented facts and valuable insights into the mind of Courtney Love.
I’ll love you forever,
I’m gonna be your wife,
I’m gonna keep you around
for the rest of my life.
The only way Courtney could keep Kurt around was by murder, because he was going to divorce her. By getting away with murder she became his widow. If Kurt had been allowed to live, all Courtney would have been was a reject who had to conform.
At The Reading Rock Festival August 25 1995 she sang:
“Like a reptile under your skin,
don’t mess with it, I will always win.
Like a snake I am under your skin.
Don’t mess with it, baby, I will always win”.
This is a reference to using drugs to murder. See Section One of my September 11 2000 update for more on this subject.
And:
“We are poison, we both killed him”.
Like Courtney said in her poem:
“I’ll destroy everyone in my way,
I’ll kill everyone, every lousy lay.
Cos I got my eye on a future date”. (Fame and fortune. This is her context and it is obvious).
Kurt was a nice guy. He wasn’t a saint, but he was sweet, funny, caring, honest, talented and beautiful. He wasn’t a liar or manipulative or malicious. He loved Frances Bean. He didn’t want to die.
He got caught up with an evil and manipulative woman and he isn’t here anymore, he was murdered. His life was stolen from him.
Inger Lorre said:
“I just want to open people’s eyes to the relationship between her and Kurt. He was a child like genius. It was no fairy tale, she just wasn’t a friend to him. I mean, plastic surgery and movie stars? Come on! I’ve seen that Hollywood life, and it’s empty.”
The media refuse to put matters straight, they constantly insult Kurt by their misreporting of the facts.
I can’t understand why the people who claim to have cared for and loved Kurt, mainly Krist, Dave and Kurt's parents aren’t asking themselves why Courtney Love deliberately set out to destroy Kurt right from the start by planting all her lies and encouraging the drug rumours which lost them custody of their child.
I can’t understand how Kurt’s mother can ignore the initial concerns of a private investigator and Kurt’s own lawyer had over her son’s death. But ignore them she has. She never bothered to enquire about Kurt’s happiness and safety for the whole 8 months he was staying in the Schillinger household when he was a kid, see Broomfield’s film. I guess this disinterest is the same.
If I had a son who was found dead and a private investigator was concerned over his death I’d d**n well want to hear everything that investigator had to say and I’d insist the police investigated the death properly.
These people should be asking all these questions on Kurt’s behalf. Why have they sat back and let Courtney Love destroy, denigrate and degrade Kurt’s life and name and work? It’s unforgivable.
It makes me feel sick to see these continuous lies about Kurt being printed in books and magazines, lies deliberately planted by Courtney. Kurt deserves far better than this.
It is obvious to me and thousands of others that Kurt was murdered.
Here are 3 songs from a Hole bootleg CD which are all listed as unreleased. These are the same songs as those mentioned at the Reading Festival 1995, but the recording quality is better and therefore I have managed to make out more of what she was singing, she has changed some of the words.
Also on this CD is a song called “You’ve Got No Right” which is attributed to Kurt. There are a couple of songs attributed to Hole which are extremely similar to unreleased Nirvana songs and they sound like rip offs.
I have to say, purely on the merit of performance alone, they make me cringe with embarrassment. I could do an equally bad rendition -but I wouldn’t impose that on anyone.
SUGAR COMA:
Do what you want,
‘cos I’ll do anything, yeah.
I’ll take the blame baby you’re dying.
Look in your eyes,
thought I saw everything yeah.
I’ll take (?) baby you’re lying.
He said he’d never ever ever go away.
He said that I will always, I will always stay.
They said that they would never ever ever go away,
They said that they would always, they would always stay.
What’s yours is mine, there just is carcasses,
you feel the guilt, Baby you’re dying.
We both did it, we both did it didn’t we, yeah.
We killed him dead. Now I am dying.
He said he’d never ever ever go away,
He said that he would always, he would always stay.
They said they’d never ever ever go away,
they said that they would always, they would always stay.
Oh I was right (Then it gets unintelligible.)
BEST SUNDAY DRESS:
This is about a jerk.
I put on my best Sunday dress.
They walk straight into this mess of mine,
and I put on my best Sunday dress,
Baby walk straight into this mess,
he watches you burn, he watches you burn (keeps repeating this.)
I put on my best Sunday dress,
and baby walks straight into this mess of mine,
I put on my best Sunday dress,
and baby walks straight into this mess of mine,
he watches you burn (repeats.)
I put on my best Sunday dress.
TIME TO KILL, AKA KILLER:
Just do it baby,
or I f**kin will,
you have nothing left but time,
time left to kill.
Just do it baby,
You’ve got nothing left.
There is nothing left of you that I don’t possess.
(unintelligible)
He wanted everything, every drop of my blood.
Just do it baby, it feels so good.
You know nothing of possession,
and I don’t think you could.
Yeah, yeah, no, no (Repeats.)
Just do it baby.
Just do it pregnant dog.
No, no, no, no (repeats.)
Another version of this song, as performed at the Reading Festival August 25 1995:
Just do it baby, ’cos no-one cares,
you are nothing but a waste of space,
and a waste of f**kin air.
Just do it baby, or I f**kin will,
you have nothing left but time,
time left to kill.Yeah, yes, No, No.
Just do it baby (unintelligible.) or I f**kin will.
You have nothing left but time and you're the one I killed
NO, NO, NO, No, (keeps shouting this.)
God no. God Knows the truth. The truth is you.
It isn’t really surprising that Courtney has said that it would have been better if someone had locked her in a room for a year after Kurt died, because of her behaviour. She now needs an army of minders when she does interviews. Someone to watch over her and keep track of what she says and who will step in if they think the interview is going along unfavourable lines.
Courtney said she wasn’t prepared to hang for anything she might say. So now when she does interviews she has a whole list of topics which the interviewer is banned from mentioning.
*Vanity Fair published an article on Courtney in their June 1995 edition. This was a complete turnaround to the Lynn Hirschberg article of September 1992 in which Courtney boasted of using heroin after she had found out she was pregnant, the result of which lost them custody of Frances and did permanent damage**
The 1995 Vanity Fair article was written by Kevin Sessums:
Geffen soon helped (Courtney Love) get another, far more flattering profile in Vanity Fair, one written by Kevin Sessums, a journalist who was a friend of his.(From The Operator, Tom King’s biography of David Geffen published by Broadway Books, p 508).
David Geffen should have been asking himself why it was that Courtney had been publicly accused of conspiring to murder Kurt.
Rather than arranging for a journalist friend of his to write such a glowing article on her for Vanity Fair, Geffen should have been using his influence with the media to help get quality coverage of this case.
Melody Maker’s Feb 25 1995 edition reported on the above 1995 Vanity Fair cover story on Courtney Love:
Meanwhile, US glossy magazine Vanity Fair has apparently contacted Courtney Love and asked her for another interview.
Two and a half years ago Vanity Fair printed an interview with Courtney containing revelations that she had used drugs while pregnant with her daughter, Frances Bean. The article resulted in a bitter media slanging match by Love and Kurt Cobain, claiming she’d been misquoted. There were even threats of legal action from the pair. The original spread featured a photo of a very pregnant Courtney Love in a flimsy black negligee. Editor Tina Brown instructed the art department to airbrush out the cigarette Love was holding in the picture. Love’s American publicist, Pat Kingsley, says that most of the people involved in the 1992 article have now left the magazine. Tina Brown is the editor of the New Yorker and the writer, Lynn Hirschberg, writes for New York magazine.
Hirschberg says she thinks it would be a mistake for Courtney Love to appear in Vanity Fair – a mistake for the magazine.
“My biggest frustration about Courtney Love is that no one writes the truth about her,” Hirschberg said.
“They write the myth according to Courtney, and I understand that, because the myth according to Courtney is very interesting. But so is the truth.” (Melody Maker’s Feb 25 1995 edition).
**
The results of the Vanity Fair 1992 article were far reaching, journalists were influenced by it and this was reflected in their work and comments on Kurt:
There have been few more humorous spectacles in rock….than the sight of this publicity-hungry couple, diligently on the promotional stump for Geffen Records for so long, suddenly hoist up their own petard. That splendid Vanity Fair piece, in which Courtney Love admitted taking smack while pregnant, rebounded so amusingly in their faces, yet it was difficult to feel any sympathy for them, so assiduously had the couple courted plastic-outrage stories, whoring themselves shamelessly around the media in frantic need of just one more shock- horror gossip-column inch, just one more hit of publicity. Then, all of a sudden –bang!- an avalanche of recrimination cascades around their bleached blonde heads, and they learn the real meaning of shame. (Andy Gill, MOJO November 1993).
It wasn’t Kurt who was “whoring” himself “shamelessly” for the “plastic-outrage” stories they were receiving from the press, it was Courtney.
However, it transpires that she of Hole and he of Nirvana aren’t fearless, you know. They left a message on our own ET’s answerphone that went something like this, “Aw, pleeeeeze, we beg you, Everett! Tell True Stories not to print any more gossip about us....We want some privacy! nuts, we didn’t bother climbing to the top so some d**n badass mofo of a gossip page could ruin it all for us. Keep out!” Everett just happens to be in LA right this very minute and he would have liked to have nipped in for a cuppa and a chat but unfortunately, Kurt has banned him from the house. But he did catch Hole “in concert” t’other night and heard Courtney stop the show and tell the panting crowd, “Half an hour ago I was on the phone to Madonna.("True Stories" Melody Maker’s February 22 1992 edition).
The above is one of the first signs of Kurt’s annoyance at Jerry Thackray aka Everett True’s rumour mongering/gossip style of reporting, supported by the following:
Cake: There were rumors in the English press that Kurt had OD’d.
Courtney: No, that wasn’t a rumor. The rumor was that we had both OD’d.
Cake:…and that you were shacked up in a hotel room for two weeks.
Courtney: Well, we were. It’s Everett True’s gossip column and he’s not allowed to write about us anymore. He’s written about us in his column for the past month and a half and makes nuts up…
(Flipside March/April 1992 (# 77) interview with Courtney dated Feb 12 1992.)
According to Michael Azerrad, NME’S Keith Cameron “admits that he was influenced by the Vanity Fair interview”. (CAYA p 276).
In December 2001 (2 years after this update), Grant released a recorded conversation of Courtney Love admitting to her, in her own word “unethical” practice of paying people to plant a false story in the press. This taped admission of Courtney directing people to put out false information didn’t surprise me at all, it’s exactly the kind of tactic I would expect from her, as made clear in this update.
Back to Frances Barnett In Defence MAIN
Thanks to Trent Reznor for The Fragile, Just Like You Imagined, Even Deeper, The Wretched, The Great Below, and the rest, they are totally amazing, exquisite and powerful.
FUTURE DATE:
I’ll love you forever,
I’m gonna be your wife.
I’m gonna keep you around
for the rest of my life.
I finally got all these flies off of me,
and now I can see a future date right over the horizon
A future date right on the tip of your tongue. (“Which is a reference to LSD, I think”: Hank Harrison’s comment.)
I’ll destroy anyone in my way,
I’ll kill everyone, every lousy lay.
’Cos I got my eye on a future date.
Poem by Courtney Love, 1980.
Hank Harrison made the following comments on this poem:
“It didn’t make sense to me when I read it years ago. But after Kurt died I read it again and often wondered if she didn’t have that extraordinary sense of commitment and determination -that nothing was going to stand in her way under any circumstances, and nobody is ever going to put her down, and she felt, I guess, that she had to have that kind of determination to make a success in the rock world or in the movie industry. But putting this in context with a number of other elements you start to see an almost deranged thinking process underline a lot of this obsession that she has. It’s almost a compulsion to succeed no matter what. The means justify the end”.
The only disagreement I have with Harrison (here) is his reference to LSD. I think Courtney was referring to the words “I do”, which tripped off Kurt’s tongue on Feb 24th 1992. Her “future date” was achieving money and fame, and she would accept these through marriage.
“Courtney always has an agenda”. (Vanity Fair article, 1992).
Courtney’s pathological need to control any given situation is well documented. Her inability to control her temper when she feels control of certain situations slipping away from her is also well documented.
She verbally threatened Victoria Clarke and later assaulted her. She verbally threatened Lynn Hirschberg who refused to take part in Broomfield’s film, because she feared Courtney. Courtney threatened Kurt after the Rome incident, telling Select that he couldn’t get away from her that easily and that she would follow him through hell. Kurt died. Courtney threatened Kristen Pfaff, telling her, “don’t f**k with me, or you will regret it forever”. Kristen died.
I believe that the only context within which Courtney functions is that of control, anger and self interest. These qualities are her dominant traits. She may attempt to cover them up, but she has never managed to transmute them. The above poem was written when Courtney was just 16 years old, so from that early an age she was already displaying strong negative controlling and violent traits.
In Broomfield’s film Rozz Rezabek said the following:
(To Courtney) “You stole my career, you made me run away from it”.
Broomfield said: “Rozz blamed Courtney’s ambitions for him as the reasons he gave up his career. She wanted him to be what Kurt later became”.
Rezabek said: “She, at that time, thought that it was a male dominated world. She thought the only way she could achieve stardom was through a man. She had all the ideas, she started dressing me in Julian Cope’s clothes. And finally I got her to agree to like, “You’ll lay off, you’ll let me do my band and become famous on my own”. She had an agenda for me. She wanted to make me into a rock star to the point where I stopped wanting to be a rock star. I wanted to get away from it, because I would have ended up like Kurt”.
Trent Reznor said that Courtney hounded him to the extent that his only hope was that Courtney would fixate on someone else, and thereby lose interest in him. I think Kurt was relieved Courtney was having an affair with Corgan in Feb/March 1994 because in theory it meant he was free of her.
Courtney trapped Kurt into marriage, it wasn’t a difficult task, she got pregnant by him and he had certain values, he wanted commitment, he wasn’t afraid of this. She also used heroin and encouraged Kurt to use it.
“(Being pregnant) was what gave her the security she wanted with Kurt. She knew it would only be a matter of time before Kurt left her, so she needed something to put a stranglehold on him”. (Hank Harrison, WKKC? p 64).
“She encouraged him to do heroin. Actually Courtney’s very smart. She knew that the more drugs Kurt did the less chance he’d be in a state to get up and leave her”. (Dylan Carlson, WKKC? p 62).
“Being from Aberdeen and raised with some sense of family values, Kurt thought he had no choice but to marry Courtney. I know he liked her a lot, but he would say many times that he was not sure if he was in love. But Kurt said he was convinced that you didn’t have to be in love to get married. Later, I think he really loved her”. (Dylan Carlson, WKKC? p 65)
When Courtney first set her sights on Kurt, she managed, briefly, to tone down her obnoxious traits:
“She tried to ingratiate herself to everybody and at first they fell for it. But I was just getting out of another relationship that I didn’t even want to be in, and I found Courtney was becoming too possessive”. (Kurt).
After they were married, Courtney soon changed her tune. Even as early as November 1992,Courtney was grooming Melissa Rossi as a media chum. On pages 136- 148 of Rossi’s book the following events occurred:
In Nov 1992, Courtney called Rossi and suggested they got together, due to the fact Rossi was a writer for Newsweek. Whilst on the phone, Courtney railed about the bad publicity she had received in Vanity Fair. Then she arranged for Rossi to meet her at the Four Seasons Olympic Hotel in Seattle, where Courtney was staying.
Courtney, Rossi and the nanny Jackie went out for a meal and got to talking about Portland and Rozz Rezabek who Rossi knew, Courtney started crying over him. When Rossi asked why she was crying, Courtney said that she had never got over Rozz. Rossi thought to herself:
“I was thinking about her odd reaction to the mention of an old boyfriend. She was married to Kurt Cobain, for crying out loud, but she was crying about Rozz Rezabek...But Kurt Cobain was...well, Kurt Cobain. Brilliant, beautiful, talented, sexy and rich too--not to mention the father of Frances Bean.”
Courtney was crying over Rezabek just three months after she had Frances. Later that evening Courtney suggested Rossi write a biography on her, but first she wanted Rossi to write a favourable article, to combat the negative publicity of the Vanity Fair article. She informed Rossi that both she and Kurt were now off smack.
During this interview which was arranged by Courtney and took place in the hotel Courtney was staying in, the phone went and apparently it was Dave Grohl who informed Courtney that Kurt had fallen off the wagon, he’d taken some smack. Later the phone went again, this time Courtney told Rossi that Kurt was now completely smashed on it. The phone went yet again, and at this point, Courtney called a halt to the interview and informed Rossi:
“Tonight I lost my husband. I lost my husband to drugs”.
Ever get the feeling you were set up, Melissa? This occurred just after Kurt and Courtney had been subjected to routine drug tests in order to regain custody of Frances, after the fiasco of the Vanity Fair article.
I would not be surprised if Courtney had instructed someone to call, in the full knowledge that Rossi would be there to witness and believe this story. Even if these calls were genuine, and I doubt it, how could Courtney inform a journalist as to what was going on? She had only recently regained custody of Frances and here she was telling another journalist that Kurt was back on smack. How could she invite the possibility of losing Frances again?
She also did this after Kurt had told Robert Hilburn of The LA Times on September 21:
“The biggest thing that affected me was all the insane rumours, the heroin rumours....all this speculation going on. I felt totally violated. I never realised that my private life would be such an issue.” (CAYA, p 282).
According to Rossi (p 133) Lynn Hirschberg called Hilburn after this interview with Kurt and informed him that Kurt had not told him the full story. Well, maybe Kurt didn’t know the full story. I’m sure that if Kurt had known about the above Courtney/Rossi conversation, he would have been shocked, because such behaviour on Courtney’s part just as they got back custody of Frances is unforgivable.
No one would do what Courtney did here unless they had an ulterior motive.
She can’t claim naiveté for the above because the Nirvana camp were rallying around arranging interviews with Melody Maker, Michael Azerrad and Spin in an effort to control the serious damage resulting from the Vanity Fair article.
In the December 1992 issue of Spin, Kurt and Courtney did a joint interview conducted by Jonathan Poneman. She was simultaneously telling Rossi that she had lost Kurt to drugs and Poneman that Kurt was “glowing”, and “Even though I did get married once before and it was annulled. I don’t know. For myself, I just want to have kids by the same person and stay with the same person”, and “to me, a mom and dad is a really important thing to have”.
Around the time the photos below of Kurt and Frances were taken, Courtney told Melissa Rossi that Kurt was “lost to drugs” shortly after they regained custody of Frances:
Considering the Poneman and Rossi interviews were held roughly at the same time, and supposedly for the same reasons, what the hell was Courtney playing at? It looks like the same thing that she did after Kurt’s death when she told everyone Kurt had tried to commit suicide in Rome. She couldn’t get away with saying it before Kurt died, because Kurt denied being suicidal. And she couldn’t get away with trying to make out that Kurt was using heroin in the Poneman interview, because Kurt was there. But she could give out false information when Kurt was not there to deny it, hence all the untrue rumours, and don’t underestimate her, if she could tell Rossi, she could tell others, rumours spread.
There is the same definitive line between the truth and lies whilst Kurt was alive, as there was after he died. And when you trace back the misinformation to its source, you find Courtney, and you find Melissa Rossi being used as an “information conduit”. When you read what Rossi had to say on the summer of 1993 you find the same discrepancies between named and unnamed sources. Rossi reported:
By the end of the summer, into the fall, and on into winter, Kurt and Courtney fought worse than ever. About everything. The mounting bills, including thousands of dollars she owed to psychics....
The couple fought about the upcoming Nirvana tour of Europe, which Kurt didn’t want to go on; as every junkie knows, being overseas makes it more difficult to score.....
Besides, by that time she felt like Kurt was having an affair with a mistress who wasn’t human. The competing love of his life was one that Courtney couldn’t beat up or tell off or get rid of. Heroin was consuming more and more of his time. By then it was more than just something that dulled the pain of his stomach; it was his life.....
The Cobains sometimes talked of divorcing, but Kurt hated the thought.....
Starting late that summer Hole was on the road almost as much as Nirvana had once been. (Rossi p 174).
Who told you this Melissa? Maybe it was Jackie, or DeWitt, or maybe it was someone that they had told and who believed them.
Rossi's above reporting directly contradicted Dylan Carlson, various named sources, and the recollections of Gavin Edwards in the article further on in this section.
Melissa Rossi was living in Seattle and was a useful card. She was around to pick up on rumours throughout. Where Rossi elaborated on the information supplied by unnamed sources after Kurt’s death, she was also being fed similar misinformation long before Kurt died. Which has serious implications.
The Nov 1992 meetings with Rossi which were intended to produce an article never even came to anything because Courtney moved hotels after that meeting and although Rossi tried to contact Courtney she had no luck. So it seems odd that these meetings should have occurred.
The nanny who met Rossi in Nov 1992 was Jackie so she therefore knew what Rossi looked like. It is much easier to provide false information to someone when you know exactly who they are and what they look like.
Courtney Love is a disturbing person. She isn’t really very complex, but you have to be able to recognise that such manipulative, cold and calculating people really do exist.
We know Kurt used heroin and we know why he used it. Kurt never glamorised his drug use, this is what he said to journalist Gavin Edwards about it:
Kurt claims to have been off heroin for over a year -but he’s aware that people doubt him...he jokes about his junkie reputation and is keenly aware of its news value. Asked why he began using heroin, Kurt sighs, “I know this sounds like a cop-out or a lame excuse, but I’ve been suffering from chronic stomach pain everyday of my life for 6 years now...I’ve had ten or eleven endoscopes, where they stick a fibreoptic tube with a camera down your throat, and they always find a red, inflamed piece of tissue in my stomach. Kurt used heroin on and off for about 8 months...
“It’s not my f**king fault that anyone knows that I did heroin. I never talked about it. When I’m high it’s really obvious. That’s why I’ve never gone out in public on it. I tried as hard as I could to keep it from everyone...It’s a really evil drug”. I look Kurt in the eye as he says this. He is serious.” (Gavin Edwards, Details magazine, Nov 1993. This interview dates to July 1993).
“So there was an element of just wanting to get high”? (in early 1992). “There might have been in her eyes”, says Kurt, who still maintains that he basically did heroin for its analgesic properties. “Every time that I wasn’t doing drugs, they suspected that I was. They still do”. (Kurt talking to Michael Azerrad, Musician Oct 1993).
They became inseparable, except when Kurt insisted on hanging out with some of his junkie friends. “Sometimes it was really an excuse for him to get away from his wife. Kurt would hang around a lot of heroin dealers and junkies but he wasn’t always doing drugs”. (Dylan Carlson, WKKC? p 65).
And this from an article by Keith Cameron for NME dated August 29th 1992:
...when Anton walks in with a woman I recognise as Susan Silver, manager of Soundgarden. She waves at Kurt, says, “I just wanna say goodnight,” then sits down next to him. Anton tells me to turn the tape off.
“Why”?
“Just turn it off!”
As well as being a sweet guy, Anton’s a useful Thai boxer and he’s got these dogs, see...So off it goes. Susan talks intently to Kurt, looking directly into his eyes, the gist of it being just call me if there’s anything you want, then she and Anton leave.
Erm, Kurt, what was that you were saying... ‘See! She thinks I’m on heroin! He whispers excitedly. “She does! Didn’t you see it in her eyes? And I’ve heard it from a whole bunch of people, she says stuff, she actually tells people I’m on heroin all the time. That’s Soundgarden’s manager, it goes from the f**king highest level of people in the music industry down to the street punk kids.”
At the time of this interview, June 92 in Spain, Kurt was using methadone. He was using it to control his stomach pain. Susan Silver was also contributing to the rumours. It is known that Kurt disliked her and believed her to be one of the unnamed, inside sources for the Vanity Fair article. But why was she doing this? I don’t know, maybe Courtney was telling her it was true in the same way she did to Melissa Rossi.
Kurt used heroin for his stomach ailment. When you look at interviews where Kurt was asked about his drug use, you always get answers like this:
“Everybody was tired of me doing drugs even though I wasn’t doing drugs. I was on methadone...they’ve all bought the same drug hysteria propaganda..”(Come As You Are p 260).
And:
“I had methadone. I was fine. I had absolutely no desire to do drugs...I was more miserable during all the tours that I was vomiting every night, and not eating and being totally straight...I was just looking straight ahead and concentrating on not puking all the time. But when I started doing drugs I was fine”.
The above relate to the European tour in June 1992. When Kurt was in Europe he used methadone. When he was in the States he used heroin, but always for his stomach pain.
Then there was the time he was touring in Australia and he went to a doctor for his stomach pains:
“I think I’m going to get some kind of stomach medicine and the doctor just assumes that I’d recently gotten off of heroin and I’m going through detox and I’m on tour, so I’d better do what Keith Richards would have done and take methadone. It’s called Physeptone in Australia, so I thought they were just stomach pills”. The Physeptone miraculously took away the stomach pain. Kurt couldn’t wait to tell his doctor about these great new pills.(Come As You Are, p 249).
Kurt was disappointed to find out Physeptone was just methadone. He thought he had found a cure for his stomach problem. If Kurt was happy to just go along with using methadone and heroin, why would he even care about whether he found a cure or not? Kurt wanted a cure because he didn’t want to be reliant on heroin and methadone.
And then you find this in ‘Come As You Are’, published while Kurt was alive in 1993, p 268:
Meanwhile, Kurt was detoxing and, once again in enormous pain. Unable to eat, he was placed on an IV and got weaker and weaker for a time, then rallied. His rehabilitation was slowed by the fact he was occasionally given morphine to kill the stomach pain. He saw a battalion of gastrointestinal specialists who took X-rays upper GI’s, lower GI’s, CAT scans etc. He was weak.
This was just before Frances was born. Which became this in Rossi’s book, p 129:
Kurt went on a binge, then reluctantly checked into rehab, in a different wing of the hospital. But his determination to quit heroin was not particularly strong; Courtney later said that while he was in detox unit he had dealers actually shooting heroin into his IV bag. One dealer told her that at one point Kurt appeared dead.
Melissa, you believe what Courtney said? Do you still believe her?
Courtney had a long history of drug use, from pills through to heroin before she ever met Kurt. Inger Lorre knew Courtney before she met Kurt and she said:
“I was f**ked up on drugs and Courtney thought it was cool, so she started doing it”.
Courtney thought drugs were cool. Courtney thought drugs were good for her image. Kurt didn’t.
In The High Times April 1996 edition, Hank Harrison mentioned Courtney’s drug and heroin use dating back to the time before she had ever met Kurt.
Courtney was using drugs while Kurt was “missing” because when she was arrested on 7th April 1994, the detective who attended the arrest reported that they searched Courtney’s room at the Peninsula Hotel and described it as “vomit and blood spattered” they also found a syringe, prescription pad and packet containing a substance they believed to be heroin. Apparently these turned out to be Hindu good luck ashes. What kind of high do you get from those? Do you really inject those? Or did you have other substances there as well?
Courtney told David Fricke: “I take Valiums. Percodan. Don’t like heroin. It turns me into a thingy. Makes me ugly. Never liked it. Hate needles...I have used heroin -after Kurt died.” (Rolling Stone December 15th 1994).
Courtney, we know you were a regular user of heroin for years. You used it before and after Kurt died and that is how a syringe came to be found in your vomit and blood spattered hotel room on April 7th 1994.
You forgot to mention to Fricke that you liked Rohypnol. You even had a packet of Rohypnol waiting for you at 171 Lake Washington Blvd, in April 1994, because Grant found it, Kurt didn’t use it, and contrary to what Brite reported, you didn’t flush it down the toilet.
Courtney was the recreational drug user, not Kurt.
Kurt’s heroin use was blown up out of all proportion by the media, who got to hear of it on occasions directly from Courtney, or by her planting such stories.
In November 1992 Courtney told Melissa Rossi that Kurt was using heroin.
On at least one occasion a call was made to a drug dealer. “You’ve got to come over,” one eavesdropping operator supposedly heard Courtney say. “We’re hurting.” (Rossi, p 150.) This looks contrived. If you are buying drugs, you do it discreetly.
I am totally cynical of anything Courtney does or says, and I don’t underestimate her lust for publicity and her ability to manipulate situations to her own ends. At The Glastonbury Rock Festival June 1999, Courtney said:
“Come on you British people, stop being so cynical, no one gives a f**k”.
What were you referring to Courtney? It would suit you very well if people weren’t cynical. We’ll leave that to Select Magazine and their criminally inept journalist Caitlin Moran.
Cynicism is an absolute necessity where you are concerned.
Courtney boasted about drugs during the Vanity Fair article, and much fuss was made about the inside/unnamed sources who embellished the drug references in this article. Who were these unnamed sources? Probably Courtney herself, she isn’t beyond such tactics, and Susan Silver. This was in 1992. Courtney continued throughout to mention drugs, in 1993 for an article for Melody Maker August 28th, the journalists (The Stud Bros) wrote:
Courtney Love appears....First, she talks about some heavy drug dealers she once knew and their aborted attempt to smuggle something illegal into somewhere heavy. From this she leaps with head-spinning speed to her favourite subject -herself- and the treatment that she and her husband have suffered at the hands of a callous, endlessly intrusive media. ...Kurt describes Courtney as media literate. She isn’t. Often she’s media hungry. More often overly image conscious. An hour ago, in the hotel foyer, she approached us, and unsolicited, offered us tales of drug smuggling and, when it came to that book (Clarke and Collins) bitter refutations of things we had no idea she’d been accused of... Kurt, haven’t you and your wife both contributed to the press you’ve had, both good and bad? “Yes, I think both Courtney and I have said too many things at times, or said some unnecessary things. We’re just learning like everyone else. But I think it is unhealthy to read all this negative stuff and I do try to ignore it as much as I can. There’s a lot of times Courtney’ll say, “OK, here’s another one”, and start reading it, and I’ll just walk out of the room. It affects me only because it affects her more”.
Kurt didn’t realise Courtney supplied journalists with misleading information concerning his drug use. I would prefer to believe Kurt and Dylan and several journalists who stated at various times that Kurt was clean.
Just because Kurt was hanging around friends who happened to be dealers/ junkies, doesn’t mean he was using all the time. For too long people have been willing to accept information supplied by Courtney/unnamed sources, and disbelieve what Kurt had to say on the matter. It’s time people started to believe what Kurt was saying with regards to his drug use. Time that Courtney was put under the microscope and the whole story was reevaluated.
The fact that she was doing this while Kurt was alive has serious implications. There is an intentionally constructed web of lies surrounding Kurt in life and death.
These lies made it extremely difficult to distinguish fact from fiction, to the point I sometimes felt like giving up in despair, which is obviously why they are there in the first place. To create an impenetrable mess. If finding the truth means that Courtney is torn asunder in the process, then so be it.
Thanks to Rossi and her book the lies and manipulation are actually quite easy to see. If ever there was d**ning evidence it’s Rossi’s book. No wonder Courtney wanted Brite to rewrite history, no wonder Rossi’s book became obsolete so quickly. I bet Courtney is cursing the day it was ever published, and thousands of copies exist Courtney, isn’t that great!
Here’s some more information from Rossi’s book p 235-236: in Dec 1994 Courtney turned up on Rezabek’s door and talked about him maybe writing a book on her, and that if he did, she wanted to make sure he wrote some nice things about her. She even mentioned bankrolling it. This coincided with Grant’s first radio interview on his belief that Courtney Love played a part in Kurt Cobain’s murder. It’s a sign of guilt,when you need to manipulate and bankroll the writing of such a book.
Rezabek and Rossi were both part of this cover up scheme, even though they didn’t realise it.
When I look at joint interviews, it’s always Courtney who elaborates and boasts about drugs. She also brought up the subject of her and Kurt almost killing themselves just after Frances was born, a story that has grown grander in scale now Kurt isn’t around to dispute it. In Azerrad’s ‘Come As You Are’ it briefly mentions that while Kurt and Courtney were coming to terms with the extent of the damage caused by the Vanity Fair article, they were feeling suicidal, and Kurt had a gun, and briefly they contemplated using it.
But I don’t think this was serious because the day after this happened, Kurt was performing at the Reading Rock Festival, England. I have video footage of this, and Kurt looks clean, healthy and in control. He didn’t look like he’d seriously been contemplating joint suicide to me. The performance was brilliant, and just before All Apologies Kurt said:
“This song is dedicated to my twelve day old daughter and my wife. And there’s been some pretty extreme things written about us, especially my wife and she thinks everybody hates her now. So this is being recorded so why don’t you give her a message and say “Courtney we love you? OK?” Ready, on the count of three; one, two, three” The crowd did what Kurt asked, and he said “Thanks”.
What a difference in the way Kurt tried to defend Courtney, to Courtney’s constant demolition job on Kurt. Picture of Kurt at the Reading 1992 festival to the left.
Right from the start Courtney saw Kurt as her meal ticket. She got him to marry her. She isolated him from his friends by way of punching them out or by embarrassing behaviour. She actively encouraged misinformation about Kurt with regards to his drug use, before and after his death. She lost interest in him pretty quickly, she held a torch for Rezabek and Corgan, and possibly Dando, and who knows what was going on with Michael Dewitt? I expect he was occasionally throwing her around the room.
Kurt was in a vulnerable position -he was having to cope with massive and instant fame and an excruciating stomach problem. He used methadone and heroin as a last resort. This is understandable. He never boasted about his drug use, he tried to keep it quiet. Courtney didn’t, she elaborated on it, leaked it to the media.
Vanity Fair came out, and we all know what effect that had. I feel overwhelmingly sad for Kurt, who now had the added problems of trying to get custody of Frances and being shackled to a wife who was encouraging bad publicity and directly told Rossi Kurt was using when he wasn’t. Courtney could not keep her mouth shut with regards to drugs in general and Kurt’s use in particular. This makes Courtney either:
1 Stupid, or
2 Manipulative.
You do not boast of using heroin whilst you are pregnant and then feign surprise when the media comes down on you like a ton of bricks. It was said at the time that Hirschberg just didn’t understand Courtney’s sardonic humour. But too often Courtney falls back on her sarcasm, irony, and love for double entendres as her line of defence. You cannot use these as a defence, because if you could then any serial killer/criminal could use these tactics and walk free.
Also, you do not tell journalists that your husband is using heroin just after you have regained custody of your daughter who was initially taken away on the grounds that her parents were multiple substance abusers and therefore incapable of looking after their own child.
Why did she say and do these things? She didn’t do it because she was stupid. She did it for the publicity. She isn’t stupid, she knew what she was doing, and she was perfectly prepared to crucify Kurt in the process.
She gloried in her notoriety and fame. Kurt was constantly driven to emotional despair and trying to defend her from the bad press which she knowingly invited. At the end of the Vanity Fair interview Courtney said:
“Things are really good. It’s all coming true, although it could f**k up at any time. You never know.”
Courtney knew it was going to f**k up, she planned it that way. That is why there is a web of lies surrounding Kurt. That is why Kurt became isolated from his friends, but was allowed to become increasingly involved with Michael DeWitt. Courtney created a bloody mess of lies, misinformation and chaos in the hope that no one would be able to find the truth.
When you listen to the tapes of Courtney threatening Victoria Clarke you can hear the enjoyment in her voice. When you listen to Kurt you can hear the despair. That is the difference. It was a game to Courtney. It was desperation to Kurt.
Whilst he was trying to defend her and his family, she was underhandedly trying to destroy it. Kurt got pissed off about the persistent and incorrect rumours of his drug use. He didn’t realise that it was his own wife who encouraged these rumours. She did it to him when he was alive, and she did it to him after she murdered him. Kurt and the whole world was deceived by one evil pregnant dog. She didn’t give a d**n.
At the age of sixteen Courtney had already decided to trap, use and destroy any man necessary in her quest for fame and fortune, she wrote a poem about it. Unfortunately it was Kurt who was her victim.
Just like her previous husband James Moreland said when recalling Courtney’s previous drug use whilst pregnant, which eventually forced her to have an abortion:
“It was a nightmare, I’ll never forgive her for that”.
And just like Lynn Hirschberg said:
“Courtney is a train-wreck personality who is not interested in the consequences of her actions”.
And by around July 1993, I believe Kurt was coming to the same conclusion, because when you are married and you love someone, and you have a child, you do not act in that way unless you are stupid or are acting out of self interest. Which, unforgivably, is what DeWitt had the gall to accuse Kurt of when he left the note on the stairs of 171 Lke Wash Blvd on April 7th 1994.
Michael DeWitt is a murderer.
From July 1993 Kurt was making tentative statements that all was not well within their relationship. This coincided with his stomach treatment. At this time he was beginning to feel more optimistic, see Dylan Carlson quote on Kurt’s successful stomach treatment, see previously mentioned November 1993 edition of Details Magazine article, and this article from the June 1994 edition of Details, by Gavin Edwards:
When I first heard the news of Kurt’s suicide, I couldn’t believe he was dead.....a suicide barely seemed plausible -the Kurt I knew took pleasure in too many things. It’s not like he hadn’t told me about feeling suicidal from stomach pain and wanting to blow his head off. It’s just that I had assumed -hoped- that he’d got those urges out of his system by taking his medicine.... if Kurt was using heroin while he was around me, he hid it well. In Seattle last summer, he was alert and happy --which is how I am going to remember him.
The treatment of his stomach problem made Kurt more able to focus on sorting out other parts of his life and he wasn’t happy with Courtney. But he never once uttered a derogatory word about her in public. It wasn’t in his nature to demean the mother of his child, no matter what he might have felt privately, but there were signs all the same. Grant said that Kurt hoped that by publicly supporting Courtney, even after divorce, Kurt hoped this would be enough to satisfy her. Grant then said that this wasn’t enough for Courtney, and what unfolded were the events as we know them today.
But just think, it is pretty much known (now) that Kurt wrote ‘Live Through This‘. Courtney wouldn't want that to be openly admitted by Kurt. Even if they divorced, if she didn’t act in a civil way to Kurt, he could retaliate by admitting he wrote it. If she tried to use Frances against him, he had that secret as a counter defence, (When Courtney sang, “And when you take your next breath think about a lovely death you want so bad. Your mouth is shut. Your secret’s safe, I’m all shut up”, at Reading she was probably referring to this very fact.)
Kurt had the upper hand when it came to a divorce, he was clean, he didn’t have a history of violent assault, the chances are that he would get custody of Frances. He could control what happened, and this wasn’t acceptable to Courtney.
So, whilst Kurt was considering a divorce, and re arranging his life to reflect what he wanted, Michael DeWitt appeared on the scene:
“I enjoy the wealth because it means we can afford a nanny, which is extremely helpful. Especially the nanny we’ve found, this guy from California who was a friend of Courtney’s and has become one of my best friends”. (Kurt, Melody Maker, 21st August 1993).
If Hank Harrison had not saved that poem, none of us would have been aware of the frame of mind Courtney was displaying at the age of 16. Harrison has the original, in Courtney’s own writing, so it isn’t hearsay, it’s fact.
But for buying a bootleg video, with some reluctance at the time, but I’m glad now that I did, of her performance at the Reading Rock Festival, I would never have known that she was singing such disturbing words and performing in such a lowly manner.
These so called songs reveal an evil mind. Neither Rossi or Brite mentioned this, they both came across as admiring Love’s courage. Of Love’s 1994 appearance at Lollapalooza, Rossi commented that Love:
“tilted her head to the sky and sent a message to her husband, “Kurt! Kurt!” (Rossi p 224).
And of Love’s Feb 1995 performance on Hole: Unplugged that Love was:
“looking soulful, eyes raised as though searching the heavens for her late husband” (Rossi p 240).
Rossi even seemed to think that Courtney’s onstage and offstage antics were amusing.
Brite reported on some of Love’s lyric changes during the winter of 1994:
“I want him/He’s all gone” (Brite p 195).
But neither Rossi nor Brite told us the rest.
The Vanity Fair article in June 1995* never mentioned this behaviour either. Why? I was shocked by what I saw, and I have it on film, and this was going on at a time when Courtney was beating up concert goers, attacking Kathleen Hanna, chasing Mary Lou Lord and facing Grant’s allegations. How has she managed to get away with it? I am stunned.
Harrison and the bootleggers did us a favour, they have provided documented facts and valuable insights into the mind of Courtney Love.
I’ll love you forever,
I’m gonna be your wife,
I’m gonna keep you around
for the rest of my life.
The only way Courtney could keep Kurt around was by murder, because he was going to divorce her. By getting away with murder she became his widow. If Kurt had been allowed to live, all Courtney would have been was a reject who had to conform.
At The Reading Rock Festival August 25 1995 she sang:
“Like a reptile under your skin,
don’t mess with it, I will always win.
Like a snake I am under your skin.
Don’t mess with it, baby, I will always win”.
This is a reference to using drugs to murder. See Section One of my September 11 2000 update for more on this subject.
And:
“We are poison, we both killed him”.
Like Courtney said in her poem:
“I’ll destroy everyone in my way,
I’ll kill everyone, every lousy lay.
Cos I got my eye on a future date”. (Fame and fortune. This is her context and it is obvious).
Kurt was a nice guy. He wasn’t a saint, but he was sweet, funny, caring, honest, talented and beautiful. He wasn’t a liar or manipulative or malicious. He loved Frances Bean. He didn’t want to die.
He got caught up with an evil and manipulative woman and he isn’t here anymore, he was murdered. His life was stolen from him.
Inger Lorre said:
“I just want to open people’s eyes to the relationship between her and Kurt. He was a child like genius. It was no fairy tale, she just wasn’t a friend to him. I mean, plastic surgery and movie stars? Come on! I’ve seen that Hollywood life, and it’s empty.”
The media refuse to put matters straight, they constantly insult Kurt by their misreporting of the facts.
I can’t understand why the people who claim to have cared for and loved Kurt, mainly Krist, Dave and Kurt's parents aren’t asking themselves why Courtney Love deliberately set out to destroy Kurt right from the start by planting all her lies and encouraging the drug rumours which lost them custody of their child.
I can’t understand how Kurt’s mother can ignore the initial concerns of a private investigator and Kurt’s own lawyer had over her son’s death. But ignore them she has. She never bothered to enquire about Kurt’s happiness and safety for the whole 8 months he was staying in the Schillinger household when he was a kid, see Broomfield’s film. I guess this disinterest is the same.
If I had a son who was found dead and a private investigator was concerned over his death I’d d**n well want to hear everything that investigator had to say and I’d insist the police investigated the death properly.
These people should be asking all these questions on Kurt’s behalf. Why have they sat back and let Courtney Love destroy, denigrate and degrade Kurt’s life and name and work? It’s unforgivable.
It makes me feel sick to see these continuous lies about Kurt being printed in books and magazines, lies deliberately planted by Courtney. Kurt deserves far better than this.
It is obvious to me and thousands of others that Kurt was murdered.
Here are 3 songs from a Hole bootleg CD which are all listed as unreleased. These are the same songs as those mentioned at the Reading Festival 1995, but the recording quality is better and therefore I have managed to make out more of what she was singing, she has changed some of the words.
Also on this CD is a song called “You’ve Got No Right” which is attributed to Kurt. There are a couple of songs attributed to Hole which are extremely similar to unreleased Nirvana songs and they sound like rip offs.
I have to say, purely on the merit of performance alone, they make me cringe with embarrassment. I could do an equally bad rendition -but I wouldn’t impose that on anyone.
SUGAR COMA:
Do what you want,
‘cos I’ll do anything, yeah.
I’ll take the blame baby you’re dying.
Look in your eyes,
thought I saw everything yeah.
I’ll take (?) baby you’re lying.
He said he’d never ever ever go away.
He said that I will always, I will always stay.
They said that they would never ever ever go away,
They said that they would always, they would always stay.
What’s yours is mine, there just is carcasses,
you feel the guilt, Baby you’re dying.
We both did it, we both did it didn’t we, yeah.
We killed him dead. Now I am dying.
He said he’d never ever ever go away,
He said that he would always, he would always stay.
They said they’d never ever ever go away,
they said that they would always, they would always stay.
Oh I was right (Then it gets unintelligible.)
BEST SUNDAY DRESS:
This is about a jerk.
I put on my best Sunday dress.
They walk straight into this mess of mine,
and I put on my best Sunday dress,
Baby walk straight into this mess,
he watches you burn, he watches you burn (keeps repeating this.)
I put on my best Sunday dress,
and baby walks straight into this mess of mine,
I put on my best Sunday dress,
and baby walks straight into this mess of mine,
he watches you burn (repeats.)
I put on my best Sunday dress.
TIME TO KILL, AKA KILLER:
Just do it baby,
or I f**kin will,
you have nothing left but time,
time left to kill.
Just do it baby,
You’ve got nothing left.
There is nothing left of you that I don’t possess.
(unintelligible)
He wanted everything, every drop of my blood.
Just do it baby, it feels so good.
You know nothing of possession,
and I don’t think you could.
Yeah, yeah, no, no (Repeats.)
Just do it baby.
Just do it pregnant dog.
No, no, no, no (repeats.)
Another version of this song, as performed at the Reading Festival August 25 1995:
Just do it baby, ’cos no-one cares,
you are nothing but a waste of space,
and a waste of f**kin air.
Just do it baby, or I f**kin will,
you have nothing left but time,
time left to kill.Yeah, yes, No, No.
Just do it baby (unintelligible.) or I f**kin will.
You have nothing left but time and you're the one I killed
NO, NO, NO, No, (keeps shouting this.)
God no. God Knows the truth. The truth is you.
It isn’t really surprising that Courtney has said that it would have been better if someone had locked her in a room for a year after Kurt died, because of her behaviour. She now needs an army of minders when she does interviews. Someone to watch over her and keep track of what she says and who will step in if they think the interview is going along unfavourable lines.
Courtney said she wasn’t prepared to hang for anything she might say. So now when she does interviews she has a whole list of topics which the interviewer is banned from mentioning.
*Vanity Fair published an article on Courtney in their June 1995 edition. This was a complete turnaround to the Lynn Hirschberg article of September 1992 in which Courtney boasted of using heroin after she had found out she was pregnant, the result of which lost them custody of Frances and did permanent damage**
The 1995 Vanity Fair article was written by Kevin Sessums:
Geffen soon helped (Courtney Love) get another, far more flattering profile in Vanity Fair, one written by Kevin Sessums, a journalist who was a friend of his.(From The Operator, Tom King’s biography of David Geffen published by Broadway Books, p 508).
David Geffen should have been asking himself why it was that Courtney had been publicly accused of conspiring to murder Kurt.
Rather than arranging for a journalist friend of his to write such a glowing article on her for Vanity Fair, Geffen should have been using his influence with the media to help get quality coverage of this case.
Melody Maker’s Feb 25 1995 edition reported on the above 1995 Vanity Fair cover story on Courtney Love:
Meanwhile, US glossy magazine Vanity Fair has apparently contacted Courtney Love and asked her for another interview.
Two and a half years ago Vanity Fair printed an interview with Courtney containing revelations that she had used drugs while pregnant with her daughter, Frances Bean. The article resulted in a bitter media slanging match by Love and Kurt Cobain, claiming she’d been misquoted. There were even threats of legal action from the pair. The original spread featured a photo of a very pregnant Courtney Love in a flimsy black negligee. Editor Tina Brown instructed the art department to airbrush out the cigarette Love was holding in the picture. Love’s American publicist, Pat Kingsley, says that most of the people involved in the 1992 article have now left the magazine. Tina Brown is the editor of the New Yorker and the writer, Lynn Hirschberg, writes for New York magazine.
Hirschberg says she thinks it would be a mistake for Courtney Love to appear in Vanity Fair – a mistake for the magazine.
“My biggest frustration about Courtney Love is that no one writes the truth about her,” Hirschberg said.
“They write the myth according to Courtney, and I understand that, because the myth according to Courtney is very interesting. But so is the truth.” (Melody Maker’s Feb 25 1995 edition).
**
The results of the Vanity Fair 1992 article were far reaching, journalists were influenced by it and this was reflected in their work and comments on Kurt:
There have been few more humorous spectacles in rock….than the sight of this publicity-hungry couple, diligently on the promotional stump for Geffen Records for so long, suddenly hoist up their own petard. That splendid Vanity Fair piece, in which Courtney Love admitted taking smack while pregnant, rebounded so amusingly in their faces, yet it was difficult to feel any sympathy for them, so assiduously had the couple courted plastic-outrage stories, whoring themselves shamelessly around the media in frantic need of just one more shock- horror gossip-column inch, just one more hit of publicity. Then, all of a sudden –bang!- an avalanche of recrimination cascades around their bleached blonde heads, and they learn the real meaning of shame. (Andy Gill, MOJO November 1993).
It wasn’t Kurt who was “whoring” himself “shamelessly” for the “plastic-outrage” stories they were receiving from the press, it was Courtney.
However, it transpires that she of Hole and he of Nirvana aren’t fearless, you know. They left a message on our own ET’s answerphone that went something like this, “Aw, pleeeeeze, we beg you, Everett! Tell True Stories not to print any more gossip about us....We want some privacy! nuts, we didn’t bother climbing to the top so some d**n badass mofo of a gossip page could ruin it all for us. Keep out!” Everett just happens to be in LA right this very minute and he would have liked to have nipped in for a cuppa and a chat but unfortunately, Kurt has banned him from the house. But he did catch Hole “in concert” t’other night and heard Courtney stop the show and tell the panting crowd, “Half an hour ago I was on the phone to Madonna.("True Stories" Melody Maker’s February 22 1992 edition).
The above is one of the first signs of Kurt’s annoyance at Jerry Thackray aka Everett True’s rumour mongering/gossip style of reporting, supported by the following:
Cake: There were rumors in the English press that Kurt had OD’d.
Courtney: No, that wasn’t a rumor. The rumor was that we had both OD’d.
Cake:…and that you were shacked up in a hotel room for two weeks.
Courtney: Well, we were. It’s Everett True’s gossip column and he’s not allowed to write about us anymore. He’s written about us in his column for the past month and a half and makes nuts up…
(Flipside March/April 1992 (# 77) interview with Courtney dated Feb 12 1992.)
According to Michael Azerrad, NME’S Keith Cameron “admits that he was influenced by the Vanity Fair interview”. (CAYA p 276).
In December 2001 (2 years after this update), Grant released a recorded conversation of Courtney Love admitting to her, in her own word “unethical” practice of paying people to plant a false story in the press. This taped admission of Courtney directing people to put out false information didn’t surprise me at all, it’s exactly the kind of tactic I would expect from her, as made clear in this update.
Back to Frances Barnett In Defence MAIN
