27

by Howard Sounes

  Kurt’s death was a shock, but not necessarily a surprise to those who knew him. Still, friends asked themselves if they could have done anything to avoid this outcome. Some of those involved in the recent intervention decided that it had been a mistake – ‘a disaster … a huge mess’, in the opinion of Eric Erlandson. Danny Goldberg, who organised the intervention, regrets it. ‘I always torture myself. Could I have said something differently? Could I have done something differently? … Obviously, if I could do it again I would try something different, since what we did ended up with him dead a week later … I made a decision to be a very strong proponent of going to rehab, and stop taking drugs, to be the so-called grown-up, because I really was persuaded that, without that, any other thing he could do would be subsumed by this issue. If I could do it over again, what I would try is, “Look, man, why don’t you come and stay with me for the weekend, just to get out of the house?” Maybe that would have put him in a different environment and a different head space … That would have been the other way to go. But to do that would have been against the dogma of the intervention, and that was a dogma I believed in, because so many people I know had been helped by that.’

  The interventionist David Burr says the softly-softly approach Goldberg suggests would not have worked. ‘Frankly, he [Goldberg] should have done that about three years before.’ Personally, Burr was not surprised that Kurt killed himself.

  Kurt’s counsellor at Exodus remembered how worried the musician had been about losing his home in a lawsuit. ‘Suicidal people tend to want to make a statement,’ says Nial Stimson. ‘I just kind of felt he killed himself in his house [as if to say], “You’re not going to take my house, no matter what …”’ Stimson also reflected on the fact that Kurt downplayed his heroin problem at Exodus. ‘Who knows what went through his mind when he left? But certainly the first thing he did was score drugs. Maybe he got that shame and guilt. No, I’m not a drug addict. But then why is [it that] the first thing I went and did is got heroin? Maybe I am a drug addict. And all this mental-illness stuff starts. I’m no good. I’m no good to anybody. It’s all part of the mental disease, the self-loathing.’

  Chuck Fradenburg blamed heroin. ‘I attribute his suicide directly to the use of heroin. He knew he couldn’t get off. He didn’t like that dependency.’ But Kurt’s heroin addiction, as with drinking and drug-taking in the other 27s, was a symptom rather than a cause, something he did to cope with life rather than his root problem. As with the others, that root problem seems to lie in childhood.

  As we have seen, Kurt Cobain’s mother coined the term ‘27 Club’ in a doorstep interview as news of her son’s death broke. The coincidence of a series of stars dying at that age was referenced heavily in coverage of the story as journalists tried to make sense of something that, to those with a casual knowledge of Kurt’s history, seemed nonsensical.

  Nirvana fans gathered in their thousands near the Space Needle at the Seattle Center on Sunday, 10 April, for a public memorial. The Reverend Stephen Towles said a few words and Courtney Love addressed the crowd via a pre-recorded audio message made with her husband’s suicide note to hand. Like David Burr, Courtney wasn’t surprised that Kurt had killed himself. ‘I mean, it was gonna happen. But it could have happened when he was forty.’ She nevertheless sounded distraught as she read from and commented on his strangely impersonal suicide note – ‘it’s more like a letter to the fuckin’ editor’ – telling Kurt with anger and fondness that he was ‘such an asshole’ and ordering the crowd to repeat the word after her. They did so in unison.

  ‘ASSHOLE!’

  Courtney went on to tell the audience, with her characteristic vulgarity and common sense, that they should remember his note was bullshit. If Kurt didn’t want to be a rock star, he could have stopped. ‘Just tell him he’s a fucker, OK? Just say, “Fucker, you’re a fucker …” [crying] And that you love him.’

  The public memorial was organised partly to divert the crowd from a private service held almost simultaneously on the other side of Aurora Avenue at the Unity Church of Truth at which Stephen Towles also officiated. It was an unusual ceremony. Kurt had already been cremated, so there was no body, and some of the mourners brought alcohol to the church and had a drink beforehand. Instead of flowers, two small trees were carried into the sanctuary and photographs of Kurt as a child were distributed.

  Courtney had chosen the Unity Church because it embraced all faiths, including Buddhism. ‘All are welcomed,’ is the church motto. Indeed, Towles and his co-minister Karen Lindvig were open to all sorts of ideas, including astrology. One of the more eccentric theories to have emerged in explanation of the 27 Club is that the entertainers were destroyed by the Saturn Return. This is the idea that the celestial movement of Saturn causes upheavals in human lives, the first occurring in our late twenties, sometimes with disastrous consequences. ‘I’ve seen it over and over and over,’ says Karen Lindvig, who believes the Saturn Return can be a positive force for change. ‘[But] if you are on the wrong path, you can get knocked off [course].’ However, when one plots Kurt’s Saturn Return from his date of birth the astrology shows that he, in common with all the main 27s, died before his Saturn Return, which in his case fell in 1996. And scientists say that astrology is bunk.

  Copycat suicides are a real phenomenon, however, and there was a spate after Kurt’s death, starting with that of a 28-year-old man who attended the Seattle Center memorial. He went home and shot himself. Over the next two years sixty suicides were linked to Kurt’s. In such cases it seems that people who already have trouble in their lives associate so strongly with a celebrity that they want to emulate their death. It is a sort of madness.

  One of the mourners at Kurt’s memorial was Kristen Pfaff, a member of Courtney Love’s band, Hole, and a former girlfriend of fellow member Eric Erlandson. Two months after Kurt’s memorial, Pfaff died of a heroin overdose in the bath at her Seattle apartment, just like Jim Morrison. She was also 27, the third member of the Seattle music community to die at that age within a year. Although Eric and Kristen had broken up, they had remained friends, and in retrospect Erlandson says he wishes he had done more to help her deal with her drug problem, as he wishes he had taken a more active stance with Kurt. ‘I should have been more aware what was happening with these people, and been more active. Now, if somebody starts talking that way to me, and they’re drinking or having some substance problem, I [get] in their face. I’m not passive, you know. I was passive then …’ he says, from the perspective of his forties, looking back on two friends who died before they had had time to mature. ‘That’s the part that I really regret, because that’s not the right solution, and that’s what everybody did. Everyone got [complacent].’

  It would be difficult to find a clearer case of suicide than Kurt Cobain. He talked about suicide obsessively. He threatened suicide. He made an attempt. And when he determined to try again he wrote a note and chose a method that was unambiguous and sure. Furthermore, friends saw it coming. Kurt ‘reeked of suicide’, according to producer Jack Endino. Yet, as with so many 27s, there are those who refuse to believe the plain facts, with a number of theorists arguing that Kurt was murdered, as others argue of Brian Jones.

  The chief theorist is Tom Grant, the private detective Courtney Love hired to find her husband. Grant failed in that task. When he visited the Lake Washington house he did not look in the room above the garage, where he would have found Kurt dead. Grant later became vociferous in his claim that Kurt hadn’t killed himself, that this was a story fabricated to cover up a murder conspiracy, at the heart of which was Courtney, who had seemingly ordered her husband’s assassination for fear he would divorce her and deprive her of his fortune. Grant’s theory was based on discrepancies and anomalies he identified in the case: principally that someone apparently tried to use Kurt’s credit card after he had died; the lack of legible fingerprints on the shotgun; and the contention that Kurt could not have operated his gun after having taken such a large o
verdose. Grant also interpreted the letter found in Kurt’s pocket as having been addressed to fans, explaining why he was quitting the music business, rather than as a suicide note. There are satisfactory replies to all these points. Keeping flaky company as Kurt did, it would not be surprising if somebody had got hold of his credit-card details and tried to use them fraudulently after he had died; fingerprints are not always clear; if Kurt acted swiftly he would have had time to pull the trigger after shooting up; and the suicide note is self-evidently that. Yet theorists cling to the thinnest reeds.

  Grant published his theories online, and aired them in interviews, including the 2002 documentary Kurt & Courtney, and an episode of the NBC show Dateline, broadcast to coincide with the tenth anniversary of Kurt’s death. His theories also informed a book by two journalists titled Who Killed Kurt Cobain? Courtney’s estranged father Hank Harrison agrees with the conspiracists, and implies that his daughter may have been involved in ‘the assassination of Kurt Cobain’, though he doesn’t know for sure. ‘She is a psychopath. She has a sociopathic personality like I do,’ he told NBC in 2004, a wild statement he says he stands by. ‘I don’t know who killed him. I know who benefited from his death – my daughter being one.’

  Kurt’s grandfather is another conspiracist. ‘I believe that Kurt was murdered; he didn’t commit suicide,’ Leland Cobain said, in an interview for this book at his trailer home in Washington state, where he lives surrounded by pictures and other reminders of his famous grandson. (‘Kurt was here,’ reads a sticker in the window.) Why does he believe Kurt was murdered?

  ‘Shit, there’s so many things. Like the shotgun was still on his chest, and there was no fingerprints on the shotgun whatsoever, not even on the bullet that killed him …There was no fingerprints on it. I think they did find one fingerprint, but it was so smeared they couldn’t tell what it was, and just all kinds of crap that way. And Courtney knew all of ’em – Courtney knew the detectives who were in charge, and she also knew the coroner. I couldn’t figure out how in the hell they’d cremate him so fast. Usually damn near a week or so passes before they cremate ’em … It was done [fast]. He was cremated just a couple of days afterwards, so somebody else couldn’t come in and do an autopsy on him.’

  ‘Who do you think killed him?’

  ‘I don’t know. I figure it was probably one of his best friends …’

  ‘And why?’

  ‘For money, from Courtney. [Kurt] was going to file for divorce … They had a prenuptial agreement. What was his, when they got married, was his. What was hers was hers. [But] if he died first she got all of his stuff. And by rights it should have gone to Frances.’

  Courtney Love has always denied these allegations, which seem to be motivated by animosity rather than reason, revealing how dysfunctional the family is – father denouncing daughter, grandfather calling his grandson’s widow a bitch – rather than providing evidence of a murder conspiracy. Indeed, there is no evidence that Courtney was involved in any such thing.

  The answer to the question posed by the authors of Who Killed Kurt Cobain? is simple: Kurt Cobain killed himself. He did so with sudden, self-inflicted violence, leaving written evidence of his state of mind, factors that are missing from the other five main 27 Club deaths. But the downward trajectory of all these lives was remarkably similar.

  * The writers of suicide notes often invoke love, in contrast to the violence and anger involved in the action they take, as if to plead that they were essentially good and pure of heart. Notice how frequently Kurt uses the word ‘love’ in his note.

  Twelve

  ONE LITTLE DRINK, THEN ANOTHER

  Hasten to be drunk, the business of the day.

  Dryden

  1

  After her spectral appearance at the Berkeley Square Ball in 2008, Amy Winehouse’s friends feared for her life. Her condition worsened over the next couple of months. She went in and out of hospital, like a cuckoo, and when she wasn’t in hospital she was often in the pub, not necessarily just to drink. ‘You were talking to her and her eyes were all over the place,’ says Sarah Hurley, landlady of the Good Mixer in Camden Town. ‘And there was this geezer she’d come in with sometimes you knew was a dealer … He was a scumbag just sitting there, like a leech, sucking all the life out of her, whilst taking her money.’ Publican friends hoped that Amy would respect them enough not to score and get high on their premises, but she was caught doing drugs in the toilet of one Camden pub (not the Mixer). Still, she was forgiven. ‘Because she was fun!’ says Sarah Hurley.

  The party continued after hours at Amy’s townhouse in Prowse Place. ‘I stepped into that madness,’ says friend and publican Doug Charles-Ridler, landlord of the Hawley Arms. ‘I used to go round the house, and used to go to the parties.’ At some point in the night he would have to leave, along with others who had jobs in the morning. ‘Whenever we left, we always left parties that were in full swing, then come home and get to sleep and then work, when I know [Amy and other friends] would just party all night, and then they would party all day, and then all night. And when you’re getting to that [stage], where you’re constantly either drinking to get pissed, or drinking coffee to stay awake, then you start searching for other things, don’t you?’

  Amy also liked having people around; she had a horror of being alone. If she found herself home alone she would reach out to friends in any way she could, becoming an early and frequent user of Skype, dialling up girlfriends online, people she had been to school with, or worked with years before, anybody to chat to. She sometimes sounded desperate, even paranoid, during these communications. ‘Many times she was really scared, scared of all the people outside her house,’ says her producer friend Stefan Skarbek, referring to the paparazzi who staked out Amy’s home. ‘She thought there were ghosts [in the house]. All sorts of things. I felt like I talked her off the ledge a couple of times, not off the ledge literally, but she was crying out for somebody … In hindsight she probably was very, very tortured.’

  When she was in the mood Amy would banter with the paparazzi who waited in the cobbled lane outside her house – young self-employed photographers hoping for a picture of crazy Amy to sell to the tabloids. Amy would joke with them, teasing them and sending them on errands to the shops, sometimes posing for pictures, even creating photo opportunities, such as the night when she came to the door dressed as a charlady. But the relationship was not always amicable. The paparazzi could appear aggressive and Amy could lose her temper. ‘They are not good people. There’s something odd about [them],’ says neighbour Bryan Johnson, who lived next door to Amy. ‘I hate to stereotype the whole profession, [but] they were scary … They’d get right in her face, and they were really intimidating men. She was a small person. They would rush her in a taxi. It was scary [for her]. It would be terrifying, actually: ten big grown men with cameras.’

  One afternoon in November 2008 Amy emerged from her house in a rage and attacked the photographers. ‘Who’s first? Who wants some?’ she yelled, as she beat the men with her fists. This incident coincided with a development in the ongoing melodrama of Amy and Blake Fielder-Civil. Despite the initial intensity of her love for Blake, the couple’s marriage had crumbled during his imprisonment for GBH and perverting the course of justice, with Amy seeing other men, and Blake talking about getting a divorce. When he was released briefly from prison to a private rehabilitation clinic in November, there was a row about whether Amy would pay his rehab bill, which, with the prospect of divorce, pushed her over the edge. The result was that she lashed out at the paparazzi.

  Despite such problems it was at this time in her life that Amy found the resolve to quit hard drugs, starting this difficult process by checking into the London Clinic in November 2008. Although there were relapses in the months ahead, she ultimately succeeded in getting clean of heroin and crack cocaine, which was a considerable achievement. Unfortunately, like many addicts, she did so by substituting alcohol for drugs. The story of the last two and
a half years of Amy’s life is that of a woman battling alcoholism, to put the matter euphemistically, though it is more realistic to imagine a raging drunkard, a woman who gulped neat vodka until she was insensible. There were moments of self-realisation and disgust, when Amy stopped drinking briefly. But she always went back to the bottle.

  Two weeks before Christmas Amy gathered together friends and minders and caught a flight to St Lucia where she spent the next few months on a drunken sunshine vacation. Family members and her protégée Dionne Bromfield joined her for Christmas at a resort hotel where Amy met a young actor with whom she dallied and was photographed. When Blake saw the pictures in the British newspapers, in his prison cell, he filed for divorce. Amy drank more than ever at her hotel. Fellow guests complained to the management, and the British tabloids published pictures of Amy crawling about the hotel restaurant on her hands and knees, giving their readers to understand that she was begging guests for drinks after bar staff refused to serve her.

  For privacy Amy moved into a private villa on the beach, and for the next few months she lived the life of a beach bum in St Lucia. When she showed no sign of returning home, her management arranged for recording equipment to be shipped out. An adjacent villa was set up as a studio at considerable expense, and Amy’s producer Salaam Remi and her band flew out to work with her in the hope that she would take this opportunity to record songs for her overdue third album. Amy had ideas for songs, even a tentative album title (Kill You Wiv Kindness), but she made little progress. She had become inhibited by the success of Back to Black, which had achieved the status of a modern classic – ‘Rehab’ and the other songs from the album were heard everywhere, on the radio, on TV, in bars and clubs the world over – and the fact that she was half drunk, or spaced out on medication, wasn’t conducive to work. There were moments of clarity, as there were patches of sobriety, the two usually coinciding. Amy gave an impressive performance of ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ at a rehearsal for the St Lucia Jazz Festival in May. ‘[A] couple of us were almost in tears, because it sounded so beautiful,’ says her drummer, Troy Miller. But her appearance at the festival was a disappointment. She had been drinking, there were technical problems, and the audience booed.