ER - the cool side of music and pop culture: Courtney Love didn't kill Kurt Cobain... Kurt Cobain did

Kurtcobain_glasses When I was younger than today, I fell for the whole Nirvana thing. I never though Kurt Cobain was a mouthpiece for my generation, but I dug the fact that he had a certain attitude when it came to promoting smaller, independent bands and, hell, I really liked the records. I can still go back to some. 'In Utero', even though it's the achingly hip choice these days, is a fine LP.

So, when he got with Courtney Love, I didn't mind none. Why should I? I mean, it's got squat to do with me, right? Well, the rest of the world didn't... and still doesn't... agree. In a mass outpouring of 'He's changed since he got shacked up with her... he hardly comes down the pub anymore... he's gone really sad... but I ain't jealous, I just care, y'know?' not seen since Lennon married Ono, everyone almost immediately despised Courtney Love. Since his death, everyone started pointing in her direction like she pulled the trigger.

Of course, there's been a Nick Broomfield film about it where he got loads of hearsay and did that magical tabloid thing of adding 2+2 and getting a 'gunshot wound to the head probably by murder' or something. Fact is, we all know who killed Cock Robin. Kurt Cobain did.

Now, some guy called Danny Goldberg (he was Nirvana’s former manager) has started making darty eyes toward Love again in a book called 'Bumping Into Geniuses: My Life Inside the Rock and Roll Business'. Danny Goldberg says that “Courtney's very presence was a metaphor for the end of one era in the band's life and the beginning of another.” Apparently, Cobain wasn't the super intelligent and sensitive soul we all thought he was as he could be duped by the fanciest bit of snatch, after he was initially “charmed by Courtney's self-effacing affect” and how Love had “numerous personae she could call up at will, and this would be the last time I would ever see Courtney as an underdog."

“The weekend in January 1992 that Nirvana did 'Saturday Night Live' for the first time was a turning point that put into focus the heroin problem that was to haunt Kurt for the rest of his life. Courtney called me at home the morning the show aired,” Goldberg continues in the excerpt, reproduced at Spinner.com, “and asked me to get Kurt $5,000 in cash so they could do some ‘shopping’. I felt pretty uncomfortable as I delivered the package of $100 bills to her at the hotel. Abruptly, the dark cloud of drug excess had entered the band's life. I was confronted by the baroque facade of lies and the awful glassy-eyed deadness that regular heroin use provides.”

But, like, does anyone mind pointing out that, if you know someone is a smack head, being the person who draws out the cash at the ATM ain't exactly helping things? Sure 'nuff, Courtney Love may not have been a good influence, but who is? We've all got people in trouble with their boyf/girlf for getting them to stay down the pub for another 'one' which turns into an all dayer. Fact is, if you were clean and some smackhead asked you for a sub, you'd tell 'em to sling it right? Right.

So anyway, the Courtney Killed Kurt thing rumbles on because, maybe the myth that surrounds Kurt Cobain is simply too seductive to pick to bits. Scratch the surface on Cobain's life and it's pretty clear that...

a) He was a deadbeat
b) He was the kinda deadbeat who would willingly get into heroin

It's a real fuggin' shame that he died... sure it is... I don't wish-a-dyin' on anyone. However, this little scrote wrote some great tunes and as such, everyone is far too sentimental to see what really happened. Two junkies got together and one died. It's pretty simple. So, Nirvana fans, next time you see a smackhead, make sure you treat them with some Exotic Reverence and pander to the 'misunderstood' because if you don't, WWKD?* Just face it, Kurt pulled the trigger because he was hopeless. He wasn't pushed... he jumped.

[Roman Clef]

(WWJD - What Would Jesus Do?)