Kurt Cobain

Kurt Donald Cobain, February 20, 1967 - circa April 5, 1994.

Career: grunge rocker. Cause of death: self-inflicted shotgun wound, possibly other-inflicted shotgun wound.

I am fine.

Cobain's attempt to commit suicide by overdosing on champagne & Rohypnol in early 1994 was the first turn of a downward spiral precipitated by a debilitating bronchitic and laryngitic condition. Following an intervention by friends and record company execs, Cobain agreed to detox at the Exodus Recovery Center in LA. Cobain promptly vaulted the fence, hopped on a plane with nemesis-band Guns N' Roses' Duff McKagan, and hid out in Seattle.

Cobain was found by an electrician who had come to install a security system at Cobain's Lake Washington home. The electrician thought Cobain was asleep until he saw a shotgun pointing at his chin. At this point the electrician did not think Cobain was asleep. The electrician can perhaps be forgiven for his lack of observational skills considering that only a small amount of blood had dribbled from Cobain's ear. This is not consistent with the massive trauma inflicted by a shotgun blast at point-blank range, but is perhaps consistent with severe hearing damage that can be inflicted by the rock'n'roll side of the sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll triangle.

The classic triangle is, however, not so relevant here. Rather, just as the electrician eventually connected the dots like so many breadboard circuit components, drugs and guns are like a massive but only two-pieced jigsaw puzzle in this, and so many other, rock star deathtales in which drugs and guns are underlined in bold but where the adjuncts of sex and rock'n'roll are indexed by little superscripted numerals that refer to footnotes or worse endnotes in a book whose rear sections have become water-damaged due to careless storage against a damp wall or on a messy coffee table most often used to support wobbly bongs and easily upset drinking vessels such as long stemmed wine-glasses not to mention hairline-cracked mugs of beer and cheap mixed drinks not coffee mostly.

The similarly rambling, scrawled suicide note found at the scene was addressed to Cobain's childhood imaginary friend Boddah, and related his years-long experience of no longer enjoying listening to or creating music. It is thus faint praise to note that Cobain killed himself after listening to R.E.M.'s Automatic For The People. A great album. Not so great was the high concentration of heroin and traces of Valium found in his body, which had been lying there for days. This, besides an inability to tap into the affirmative message of Automatic People, was fatally juxtaposed with a shotgun, one of many he owned. This particular one was bought for him by drone-metal group Earth's Dylan Carlson, who also introduced Cobain to heroin. Heroin in the heart, heart crossed by boomstick. Bad geometry.

Perhaps this whole drugcluster suicide mess is mostly irrelevant too, if we are to believe that Cobain was murdered. The private investigator hired to track down Cobain in his Last Days alleges that the amount of heroin in Cobain's body was far too much for him to have pulled the trigger. There suicide note has spawned a body of conflicting textual analysis, interpretation, and attribution. Fingerprints were and were not found on the shotgun. The police report is dubious. Passing a polygraph test, the Mentors' El Duce claimed that Courtney Love offered him $50,000 to kill Cobain. This last contributes to the classic Sid (Vicious) & Nancy (Spungen) mirror often held up to the Cobain/Courtney affair.

The murder theory is doubtful, however. There was a history of mental illness and gun suicide in the Cobain family, and his sister claimed that as a kid Cobain said he wanted to join the 27 Club. More plausibly, why didn't Cobain, in offing himself, simply syringe up, fire & forget into the eternal fog? Then again, if we are to retain the murder theory, why write a note, pull the trigger and arrange the scene when you can simply slip in an overdose of heroin?

Then again.