Come As You Are 1

What Else Should I be?

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 00:26:49 -0500

What Else Should I be?

Introduction or p.1

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 00:26:01 -0500

Introduction/Kurt Cobain Was Murdered p.1
My introduction to punk and harder music was more in conjunction with the D.C. and surrounding areas east coast scene. I was definitely a kid who was outcast and on the outside of most social circles in high school. We moved around a lot. By 1989, and through most of the 80s, I was into mostly gothic type of music like the Cure and Siouxsie and the Banshees and Joy Division. I loved the flamboyant styles and clothing and the gender bender vibe a lot of the men could get away with, being different was something I could identify with. Being a girl, I was continually frustrated at being told how I was supposed to be, look like, behave. I was angry. I had nightmares a lot waking in tears and memory of mass destruction. Nuclear winter. I always felt hopeless, so out of control, I had no direction in my life. Making plans for some sort of future just seemed so futile. So boring really. What were my choices? Everyone always said “you can be anything you want to be”, but they were clearly not talking about me. It used to be so bad I couldn’t sleep, we lived in the middle of bum-fuck Iowa, we had moved there from Northern Cali. It was such a tiny little town. With no direction out. I would stay awake and begin to catch around 2 or 3am this show called Night Flight. My only real source of any sort of musical enlightenment. I remember it was a couple years at that point and there was still no MTV (back when MTV used to play videos haha) in that little town in Iowa, so I was obsessed with catching this show so I could finally watch some music videos and feel connected somehow with this whole other world I identified with, didn’t know what it was, but desperately wanted to be a part of. Back in those days, when there was no internet or cell phones, it wasn’t like you could go call someone or look it up. I remember the “videos” they were playing were always in black and white and looked hungry and sounded dangerous and raw. It was mostly live, not at all like a real music video format. There were no “song titles” or TV logo that we now take for granted imprinted on the screen. It was just a bunch of raw footage and often no explanation for what bands were playing or what songs. There were no VJs. There was also fanzines. Fanzines were a major source of music knowledge. Oftentimes, moving across country somewhere else, I was allowed to buy a magazine at a convenience store. In the back would be ads for fan operated ‘zines. You could write to people and have a rock n roll pen pal and you could send each other pictures, drawings and if you were lucky, you could find out about shows. Being in the middle of nowhere as I was, I didn’t really get involved so much in going to live shows, but in 1990, we moved again, and my life as I knew it changed again, for good.   PA 1990 That was the year that punk and harder music really took over my life. My mom had finally kicked out my step dad after 13 years. I was ecstatic but still fuming. Our family was in pieces but we were free. I guess we were finally old enough for my mom to throw off the shackles. There was also another show I could stay up late to watch my beloved other music world—as a latchkey kid, and a kid of the Mtv generation, TV was my where I lived my other life. I stayed up late night to catch 120 minutes and see some “alternative” music. Back in the day, it wasn’t really very popular, and of course, there was no outright punk, it was more like NIN first album over and over with a couple of Toad the Wet Sprockets and Peter Murphy’s “Cut You Up”. My real exposure to punk came from new friends. I started getting handed tapes of stuff I’d never heard before, with my hippie upbringing and background of classic and goth rock. The top three bands of nay influence to me were Fugazi, Jane’s Addiction and Soundgarden (before Badmotorfinger people, in the early raw form of Screaming Life and Louder Than Love). I can go more and more into music and punk influences and where that journey took me, but for now, I am only going to reference the bands that changed my early taste and direction. We all had a heady glorious year and a half reveling in this totally different than anything I had ever felt before scene of hardcore music and being part of something amazing and underground when punk and hardcore seemed to break to the mainstream. Everyone loves to pinpoint Nevermind and Nirvana as the album and the artist that single-handedly broke punk, but I think it was getting ready piece by piece, and Nirvana was just the stem that broke the tide. There really was a lot of angry disaffected youth that couldn’t see a future or any promise of the American Dream. People look at punks like they are just loud disturbances or wastes, or what my town called us, “grubs”, but really punk can be quite political, anti-big government, pro gay rights, pro women, and pro DIY and that’s what I love about it so much. Especially what I was exposed to, and I was in that scene before it ever went totally mainstream, there was a general mass movement, where the protest and the rebellion seemed to heighten and there were more and more “freaks” like us, and then the shit we were taping and passing around was suddenly on the radio and suddenly what we were doing and wearing became “in fashion” and people with multicolored hair and multiple tattoos and piercings became a common sight. Man, I remember when my friend Ashley went out and got her nose pierced before anyone, the people in town wouldn’t fucking serve her a piece of pie and her mom almost shit a bird. Nowadays, its taken for granted, its just fashion, but back then, we were anathema. Yes, we were automatically judged by what we looked like and yes we were arrested and pulled over by police with nothing better to do than harass us. Punks always were and always have been a middle finger in the face of police and that’s why I think that most definitely from 1991 on through the 90s police were not very happy about the advent of punk into the mainstream and they looked at us with scorn and judgement. Some of us who really were political found it to be suppression. They didn’t know what to do with us and they did judge and fear us.
I am sure they did look at the crime scene and at Kurt and just thought, “another junkie”. I don’t think they EVER gave this case the attention it deserves. I do not think they did a thorough investigation into events that occurred. And I not convinced that this was a suicide. I think it’s pretty easy to look at anything labeled “conspiracy theory” and roll your eyes. Especially if there is a particularly good spin doctor at work making the victim appear weak, foolish and unstable and cramming the very nauseating suicide suicide suicide down your throat, one wants to look away from that sort of sinister, dark violence toward the self. I remember when we first heard he had committed suicide and how much we looked down on him after that. He had really let us down. Who was he that he thought he had it so bad? But what if he weren’t suicidal. Wouldn’t it be pretty easy for someone to “off” a junkie? Especially a junkie as high profile as Kurt Cobain? Especially if there was so very much for someone to gain.
It’s been about 10 years since I discovered that the evidence for Kurt committing suicide was actually quite thin. That the inconsistencies surrounding the case, point more toward murder. I have been reading, watching, and listening to everything I can get my hands on ever since. I have found the information to be circular in nature and often, difficult to find. I cannot sit here with a clear conscience anymore and do nothing, so I am writing as clearly as I can, from multiple sources, only the factual information surrounding this case, in a clear and articulate timeline, as well as a study of each inconsistency surrounding the murder. I will stick to facts and keep personal observations to a minimum, and I will provide links. For example, I first came across this murder theory on www.justiceforkurt.com, a really great and comprehensive source for material.
My hope is that if more and more young people and fans can become aware of the probable fact that Kurt did not kill himself.
And pray that someday they REOPEN the case and look more closely into the circumstances surrounding his tragic death.

Soaked in Bleach

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 00:24:06 -0500

Soaked in Bleach

Kurt Was Not Suicidal or p.2

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 00:14:59 -0500

Because Kurt had a very revolutionary attitude and defiant presence in the face of “authority”, I believe it was easy for the authorities at the Seattle Police Department to treat his murder with ridicule and even scorn. In the same manner that he was treated while he was still alive. He had a hand in painting the target right on his own back and even participating in the continuation of the image that was being constantly forced upon him by voracious media attention. Attention that he despised, but his wife did not. This was a man who was very real and open about who he was and what he felt. He was not a fake. When he was unhappy or depressed or felt like dying, or when he was doing drugs, he never tried to hide any of his actions or manipulate what people thought of him. As a role model he was not perfect, and he presented a terrifying figure of freedom and rebellion to what is traditionally considered to be a “normal” and traditional man in “acceptable” society. Kurt was not a sheep. He was not a sheep and he had power (even power that is bestowed unwittingly) and influence. He was not easily controlled. If he were easy to control, he would probably be alive today.

There are many videos and articles that showcase exactly what he was feeling and going through in the year prior to his death. Articles and interviews in which he talks openly about his drug use and feelings that he has had toward suicide in the PAST. This was a troubled man with a troubled past. He was not perfect and it is easy to point toward the very things he said himself prior to his death to showcase his “intention to commit suicide”. When it happened, the police were not surprised. The problem is that most of the people who were close to Kurt at that time were VERY surprised. Everyone in Kurt’s immediate circle without default voiced that Kurt was not suicidal. In fact, beginning in 1992, with the birth of Francis and through 1993 and the months in 1994 leading up to his death, many of the people close to him saw a marked change in his attitude and behavior toward his life and his success. Most of this had to do with the birth of Francis, but there was also finally the diagnoses of a stomach ailment, pinched abdominal nerves due to scoliosis, that was the deep-rooted cause of his physical pain, for which he had sought out the drugs to numb the constant pain and resulting depression from being in chronic pain. Anyone who has ever suffered from chronic, inescapable pain, knows how debilitating and depressing this day in day out exhaustive suffering can be. Notice the use of past tense in this MTV interview when he talks about being suicidal:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIlbaHAzen4

January 27th, 1994 issue of Rolling Stone, two months before his death he announced his chronic pain was gone in an interview with David Fricke: “It’s just that my stomach isn’t bothering me anymore, I’m eating. I ate a huge pizza last night. It was so nice being able to do that. And it just raises my spirits. I have never been happier in my life.” Fricke admits that he was expecting the “media version” of Cobain as a “pissy, complaining, freaked-out schizophrenic” and found instead a healthy happy and thoughtful man with no signs of the despair that was so widely reported in the media. (L&D)

“He wasn’t suicidal, Tom. Kurt wasn’t suicidal!” Rosemary (Carroll) blurted with a deep sigh. (TG case files) Rosemary Carroll was actually quite prescient with this belief. Tom Grant was not convinced at first, but due to the continuing doubts and evidence brought up by Rosemary, and the incredibly strange behavior of Kurt’s “widow”, Tom Grant’s opinion began to change.

Mark Lanegan, another friend and musician in the band Screaming Trees told Rolling Stone: “I never knew [Kurt] to be suicidal, I just knew he was going through a really tough time.”

Another friend Charles Peterson ran into Kurt on the street about a week and a half before he died: “He seemed really happy to me, happier than I had seen him in a long time: not that he was usually unhappy, but he was often pretty sickly, and he looked like he was doing a lot better. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong as far as I could tell.”

Dylan Carlson, Cobain’s best friend, told P.I. Tom Grant that Kurt was not suicidal. He also told a reporter for the Seattle Times the same thing. In fact, if he thought his best friend was suicidal, would he have bought him the shotgun? It makes no sense. In Love and Death, Carlson says, “A year earlier, i would have believed it because of the pain, but he wasn’t talking like that anymore. He was making all kinds of plans for when he got back from rehab.”

Leland Cobain, Kurt’s grandfather (his grandparents were closer to Kurt than his own parents with whom he had a very troubled relationship with, especially his mother.) maintains “Kurt did not commit suicide, he was murdered. I’m sure of it.” In cases of suicide studies show that people intending to commit suicide do not make any long term plans, which is what Kurt did when he planned on going fishing with his Grandfather a couple weeks later. Then his body was found. (Love and Death by Wallace and Halperin p.4)

Artist and friend Joe “Mama” Nitzburg told Rolling Stone: “I was ready to see him looking like shit and depressed. He looked so fucking great.” during his visit to him at Exodus on April 1st 1994 just days before his death.

In the time leading up to his death, many of his friends, family, associates and even the mental health practitioners involved in his care did not believe that he was suicidal. Even C.L. tells Tom Grant “People with Ph.D.s saw him the day he left [rehab] and nobody, nobody expected he would leave, let alone that he would be suicidal, and I don’t think that he was really suicidal when he came home. But whoever he was with drove him to it.”

While he was alive and able to dispel rumors, she cannot say that he was suicidal. After he was found dead however, the media spin immediately began and suddenly at the man who was never considered to be suicidal, became someone who had a death wish the entire time.

There has only been one person who publicly and constantly after his death, promoted the idea that Kurt was a suicidal person, and that person was his wife. The person who had everything to gain in the death of her famous husband. If you take away the media hype that has surrounded this case and just look at any crime history of spousal murders, the first thing most people look at is: Who had something to gain by this death? Was there anyone who could have had a motive? In most cases, the spouse would be the first suspect on the list with motive. I’d like to ask an obvious question: who benefited the most from the death of Kurt Cobain?

It was not just that she widely spread false information and twisted versions of the truth constantly in the media. Oftentimes, completely contradicting herself when she cannot remember the lies she spun before. It was not just the lies. It was the glaringly obvious plan she was formulating and putting into action. Several “Suicide Setups” or perhaps even previous attempts at murder, were put into place leading up to his death. Suicide setups that pointed the minds and eye of the public, the press and the authorities into believing that Kurt was gearing up to end his life. When he was murdered and the scene was staged, no one bothered to look any deeper into the surface. The police went to investigate, what was already in their minds, a suicide. The suicide setups will be covered extensively in the next section, but I will end with an excerpt from Tom Grant’s case manual:

Does Courtney Love really care about privacy? Courtney consistently exploits the death of her husband. During interviews, she often points out that she’s wearing some article of Kurt’s clothing, while telling tall tales about the events surrounding her husband’s death and his “suicidal” personality. She also promotes false visual images by planting inaccurate and horrific details in the minds of already confused fans. Responding to a question about lyric writing during an interview in the December 1994 issue. of Rolling Stone, Courtney comments, “When you’ve had your husband’s blood on your face, how can you write about it? When you walk around in the coat that he shot his head off in, how can you write?”
During another interview, Courtney cries hysterically as she talks about the prospect of Frances ever seeing “a picture of him with his f**kin’ head blown off”
Courtney has known from the beginning that her husband’s head was not “shot off” and any photos of a man with his head “blown off” are not photos of Kurt Cobain! So why all the drama? Why all the hype? Why does Courtney insist on promoting the ugliest, most violent image of the man she claims to have loved - an image she knows to be untrue?
Because… it makes for good press!
No one has spread more “suicide” hype than Courtney Love.
No one has capitalized on Kurt’s death more than Courtney Love.
No one has exploited Kurt’s daughter more than Courtney Love.
And when it comes to the “privacy” of the family, no one has violated the dignity of Kurt Cobain more than his “professional widow.” (Tom Grant Case Files) www.cobaincase.com