Doomed to Fail - Ep 11 - Part 2: Flannels and Fairy Tales - Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love

Episode Date: December 22, 2023

Today we are re-releasing the tragedy of Kurt Cobain & Courtney Love. Farz will take us into the murky depths of the American North West to tell the tale of an entirely new genre of music that defined a generation. Wrap your flannel around your waist and grab a cup of coffee, we're going from the beginning of Grunge and the end of an icon. Pics via the CC and AI.  Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

Hi friends, happy holidays. Today we are re-releasing episode 11, part two on Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love. It is a classic, doomed to fail relationship. It was never going to work, but they were happy for a little bit. And we talk about that in the show, and we talk a little bit about what happened to Kurt and how sad every preteen in America was for a while. If you have any ideas or questions or things you want to tell us, please reach out. We love it.

to fail pod at gmail.com and on all the socials at doom to fail pod please enjoy this episode in the matter of the people of the state of california versus horthall james simpson case number b a0190 and so my fellow americans ask not what your country can do for you ask what you can do for your country so okay well i'll make you transition over to the ever-shifting premise of the show, which should be true crime, but in my case, is actually not true crime. So, we'll mix it up. We'll mix it up this week.

Oh, no. Episode 11, new show. Exactly. Well, I started out researching, uh, I was going to do Michael Allig. Do you know who that is? No. I don't look it up, so you can do it later or tell me. Yeah, no, I'll, I'll love to tell you.

I don't think I'm going to do it now, but I started doing that because, so Michael Alec is part of the club kid scene that was. part of this new york club you recognize this i take it from your place the mcculley culkin in the party monster yeah yeah that's exactly it's it's it's party monster is the dramatized version of michael aleg the only really famous one that people would recognize now is ruPaul was part of them um and michael aleg ended up killing somebody and going to jail for a long time he got released and he died actually recently um but whatever i have um i have been to limelight that club what's it like it's it was cool I mean, I think it's closed a long time ago, but it's in an old church, which is cool, you know.

Yeah, I think our former employer threw a party there actually for a book release. Yeah. So I started watching Party Monster this week because I was like, I'm going to do Michael Allig, and so I should probably reference the movie. And in the movie, Marilyn Manson's in him. And he basically plays Courtney Love is the only way I can describe it. just like this like totally insane druggy junkie whatever and I was like you know what I got a better idea for this week so again the story this week is not going to be true crime in nature but it's going to definitely hit on the red flaggy parts of the show's premise so I've already

given enough to indicate what I'm going to be talking about but I'm still going to pretend like I haven't and just read the outline so I'll start by saying that this is a rock and roll story obviously and because it's a rock and roll story there's going to be a lot of legacy building and so because of that people are going to have a ton of feelings and passion about like what i'm going to be discussing here today but because there's a lot of legacy building there's a lot of conflicting stories out there in terms of when things happened who was there when it happened everybody wants to be a part of the story which is i think a common human phenomenon when certain famous people pass outside of like pure facts there's a bit of speculation here and my people

Pure Facts, I mean, location, manner, time of death, things like that. Things that can be, like, scientifically proven by objective third parties. Outside of that, it's like a lot of just junkies telling stories to each other, basically. You're a rock and roll guy, so I feel like you're the guy to tell this story. Am I a rock and roll guy? No, I'm just kidding. Thank you. So, obviously, today we're talking grunge, which means we're talking Nirvana and Kirk Cobain and Courtney Love,

which is like one of the most probably red flaggy relationship. ships that's ever existed in human history when nirvana was at its peak and kurt ultimately died i was not of an age where i cared about these things like i think he died when i was around nine years old so i was i don't know i was doing what nine-year-olds do i don't know exactly what that would be probably you know caring about dinosaurs power rangers things like that not hardcore grunge rock my brother was though my brother would have been 14 so i remember going to whatever store probably version version stores and like him buying the uh never mind album CD in like the one was like in like the tall CD boxes yeah yeah I remember my mom asking the guy at the store like

what's Nirvana and he was like something that happens when you get like your tooth pulled or something he just like something weird to her was he trying to be funny I think so I think so I guess yeah I guess they gas you so yeah so at that time I'd never really like I didn't understand the ramification of this I was just not of that age group, but it's weird. I got so much more exposure to it. And you accidentally got some exposure to it as well. So Kurt was raised in Aberdeen, which I've, yeah, I've been through there because my, my ex's father's family was from hoquium.

And so we'd go there and visit quite a bit. And because you came to my wedding, you've also been through Aberdeen, Taylor. I think I have. And I remember being there and being like, this place is so fucking depressing. I can absolutely see why you would create grunge music here. Yeah, like, that's, yeah, I actually put down here. I'm like, I doubt any of your stroll through Aberdeen was actually memorable. But it sounds like it was because it is exactly what you described it as.

I knew, I knew where I was, you know, I think I was like, you know, it was like trailer parks and. Yeah, yeah. It's wet, rained. It rains there. Yeah, yeah. it's a so it's on a it's on a bay it had to be because it was actually a logging town so ships would come in collect the timber and then put them on boats and go wherever they're going so it's no coincidence that in the late 80s and early 90s exactly when kurt's coming up logging had become a much less viable

industry in the area simply because they tapped that resource completely there there was nothing left to mine for there essentially so the town geographically is lovely because it is on this bay, it is the Pacific Northwest, it's lush, it's green. Look, Olympic National Forest is like maybe 20 minutes from here. I mean, I, you know, and that is one of the most beautiful, tranquil places that exists in the United States. And Aberdeen's like right outside of that. But given the fact that they tap this mining resource completely, this timber resource

completely, the area is just economically depressed. Like, to your point, it's just like a blown out town. like you just you know i when i would be there i didn't want to like talk badly about it obviously yeah because of like family connections but i was yeah i just i was like everybody here has to be doing meth like you you look at that town and you're like of course everybody hears on drugs like what else is there to do there's nothing else here yeah so that's where kurt was raised so one thing that i actually found really really lovely about aberdeen despite everything i literally just said about it is that one of my favorite nirvana songs like everybody's favorite nirvana songs is

come as you are and there's a welcome sign when you get into aberdeen that says welcome to aberdeen come as you are which i thought was really lovely so going back to the main character kurt was born in 1967 and i would describe his childhood is accurately reflected in his music not that he wrote about his childhood at all but then when i think about nirvana i think of teenage angst really like it's just angsty music. That was what it sounds like his childhood was. His parents were divorced. He was a mad kid. He was aimless. The parents remarried. The stepparents sucked. There's domestic violence and there's substance abuse. It sounds like the divorce was a huge triggering factor for him. Like he talks about it over and over and over again later later in his life. Like he thought he

had this idyllic family or he would have this idyllic family and that divorce really seemed to have like the thing that put him in this heads the mind space of just being like an angsty teenager essentially so all the factors basically existed that would produce a guy like kurt would eventually become some of the stories i read about him seemed like just great indicators of his eventual personality his parents would sign him up for little league and he would intentionally strike out so he just wouldn't have to play he was apparently like a pretty good wrestler and he hated it. He hated it being good at wrestling.

He just wanted to, like, rebel against everything. Totally. When he was in high school, he befriended, like, the gay kid in school because when everyone thought he was gay, they would leave him alone because they didn't want to, I mean, you remember what that was like back when we were in, and, like, that was a whole thing. He would spray paint God is gay on cars. Like, he was just, yeah, he was just, like, very anti-establishment. Mm-hmm.

I found this picture of him when he was 14. he was in some school band and the other kids around him he's like sitting on these risers and these other kids are so happy and they're having fun and then it's like the kids having a good time he looks like he wants to strangle the drum that it's in front of him like he hates it so much because it's just anything that has to do with normalcy yeah it seemed like at least yeah so he'd eventually drop out of school and live this like vagabond lifestyle just sleeping on friends couches he started doing his own myth building saying he like slept under this bridge everybody said you couldn't sleep under that bridge because

the water would just keep coming and it would just wash you away he was occasionally homeless he would yeah he would meet girls and just shack up with them for a while and it sounds like he mostly just carried on these relationships for the sake of just having a place to stay um and then these women telling him to like get a job and he just would refuse to do so he forms one band early on called the fecal matter which was very short-lived and then he went on to form nirvana in 1987 one of the things i learned here had to do with dave grull who i didn't know this but he was not the original drummer of nirvana he wasn't who was so it's this guy named chad channing so their first album ever released so the big the big one was never mind

but the first album was called bleach and that was recorded with a drummer named chad channing And I really hate what happened to this guy because, yeah, band people move around and people get fired all the time, but he was so briefly tied to one of the most influential bands in the world. And at that time, he wouldn't obviously know that. And now really nobody knows who he is. Like, you literally just ask me, like, who is he? Everybody knows Dave Grohl, but nobody knows Chad. Mm-hmm. One thing.

There wasn't there, like, a beetle, too, like a guy who was in the Beatles that got left before they became famous? I don't know that. It's like that always happens. There's definitely a guy, a guy who was supposed to be in BTS and then like got kicked out at the very end and he was like, he's just like, now he's just like a regular guy and he's like, I miss my friends, but like, yeah, like it's got a, it's got a, it's got a, well, I mean, I don't know how BTS's history. Maybe they he knew was going to be really big at that time. But like in this case, like nobody knew Nirvana was going to do what it is. It's like you missed out, you miss that show. Apparently in 2013, Nirvana, that was the year Normana got inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. This guy chatted. thought he would be in that group, but apparently they only included Kurt, the guitarist, this guy named Chris and Dave Grohl. And like, listen, I actually, like, I'm going to go into a little bit of a rant about Dave Grohl here. I love him so much. And he's even cooler than I thought. He made a point to shout out Dave in 2013 for his contribution to Nirvana

and to bleach. He, like, referenced how he wrote some of the later riffs that they used. And he really wanted to make sure that people knew that this guy was a part of the band, even though he wasn't called out in the Rock and Roll so my sign note about Dave Grohl so obviously he went on to found food fighters which became a phenomenally successful band in its own right he apparently is also a pit master these days and regularly feeds the homeless of LA with his barbecue I saw a picture of doing that recently yeah yeah he did that recently but he does it regularly apparently I also watched an interview he did with Howard Stern and I wanted to reach through my monitor and punch Howard Stern for just how

shitty he is to Dave Grohl. Like, he, Dave Grohl handled this with such class, but at one point, because to us, Kirk Cobain is just like this, what he killed himself. It is what it is, right? Like, we don't like, I have no emotional attachment to the guy, but Dave Grohl was like his childhood friend and like band, and like, they traveled the world together

and like they were very, very closely tied. And Howard Stern would just say stuff about Kurt's death and just like flippant manner to Dave. that was just really really often like he was like he was like oh so wasn't it kind of great that he killed himself because they gave you this opportunity to move on and do food fighters it was just like yeah like Dave just like um no that's not a good thing like you know he just handled it very class in a classy way which was really cool to see so anyways side rants about Dave Grohl so in 1991 that was like I said before that was

kind of their breakout year that was the year that they released never mind And I didn't know this, but apparently Nirvana pushing Seattle Grunge is partially the reason why bands like Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Allison Chains, Rose in popularity as well. They invented this genre and then everybody's like addicted to it now. So Kurt, by extension, basically becomes the ambassador of this genre that also happens to be the most popular genre of music at the time. It sounds like he would hate that. Okay, exactly. So I put this down. Think about this in modern terms.

I don't actually know who this guy is now. I wrote down maybe it's Drake, maybe it's Justin Bieber, maybe it's Beyonce. I don't really know. Like, who is it? Do you know? I mean, I don't know. I can't think of anyone who like started a new genre of music. I mean, I don't know what I'm talking about music, but like I feel like there's people who are really popular, but like all the people you just named their pop stars, you know?

Like I don't know. Like I haven't, I don't know anything new, but. I'm also not like in the no, but, but Grunters, like, new. So this is even bigger than that, then. So it's even bigger than like a Drake. Yeah. It's, yeah, it's all new. So imagine that.

So imagine, like, imagine a guy like Kurt who wants to rebel against everything establishment. And now he is this figurehead in corporate America. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to actually get into this, like, a lot when I get to like the suicide note. but like he does not handle this well in his own mind i will say that if kurt didn't have this self-destruct component to him he actually would have been the exact right guy for this i watched an interview with him and his lack of caring about anything is so quintessentially rock star-ish

you should see you should watch like i mean even like the way he was you watch like rock stars now I think like I don't really know rock stars whatever like is Bono rock star sure I mean he's like really old but yes sure like but even like younger Bono like you look at like how he presents himself you look at how Kurt presents himself doesn't give a fuck like he's wearing like shoes that the souls are falling off of his jeans are just shredded and tattered like not because he's trying to look cool he literally just does not care his bandmates had reported this is this this this is like a self-reflection on how little he cares his bandmates had reported his bandmates had reported that the melody mattered way more to Kurt than the lyrics. So he'd always come up with the melody and then attach lyrics to it. So it's funny because people would dissect every word he said. And in one interview, someone asked if it's hard coming up with ideas. And he goes, this is a quote. He goes, at one point, I was just using poetry and just like garbage that would spew out of me.

And a lot of times when I write lyrics, it's in the last minute because I'm really lazy. and then i find myself having to come up with an explanation for it like he just didn't care like he was just like okay i guess this fits that lyric or that that melody but i think i think i feel like your original question was like how his personality a different personality like would have enjoyed the fame but then i feel like then the music would have been different like you couldn't have been a different person yeah you can't have one with you know yeah that's good point so kurt was quoted as saying when you're in the public eye okay he's he's he's a little melodramatic. He's a little bit melodramatic. I think we can agree on that. We can agree on that.

So this is a quote. When you're in the public eye, you have no choice but to get raped over and over again. They'll take every ounce of blood out of you until you're exhausted. I'm looking forward to the future. It will only be another year. And then everyone will have forgotten about it. He's talking about nevermind at this point. How wrong was that timeline? No, I know. That's hilarious. Yeah. I've actually now have two versions. of smells like, smell like teen spirit on my Spotify playlist. It's the original. And then I have this other one that's like it's a revamped like all rock version of it.

It's just, it sounds fantastic. I've definitely gone through phases where I just like listened and never mind over and over again. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. I actually went down a pretty deep music rabbit hole research in this,

especially because we know a lot about the bands that influenced Kurt in particular. So like the Melvins, if you've never heard of them, like, that's basically where like the guitar influence kind of comes from the pixies is where that kind of disjointed lyrics that you hear in nirvana songs come from sex pistols that's a lot of that anti-establishment stuff that like he was he was a musical connoisseur like he his music taste was fantastic i actually like started i'll send you a list of these bands that i listen to as i was yeah researching this it goes out saying the melodrama piece of it he just never thought that anybody was actually hardcore enough he actually resented his fans in some ways like he thought

that if you like nirvana for the music then you had to also like it for the social and political message which is just very anti-establishment anti-fitting in and he would he's watching kids wearing polos and attending church listener to nirvana and that just like i think that's a big part of why he um basically turned into what he turned into all this kind of gets us to who he is his general state of mind and why things are going to eventually derail. So on the one hand, you have Kurt, who has become basically music royalty, who at his core is basically just this lost kid with a ton of animosity towards being popular. And on the other hand, you have the other main character of our story, which is Courtney Love.

Okay. This is the doomed to fail piece of this. So Courtney has always been portrayed as kind of an afterthought to the story of Kurt and Courtney except to the extent that she's demonized and villainized in it like everybody thinks that corny's essentially like this hangar on and i'm kind of going to do a bit of like revisionism on her history as well mostly because curt is the main character of the story and if i went into courtney's life and the details of what she did this would just drag off like 12 hours because she's done a lot she's done a ton of stuff she's not just kurt's wife she had her own trauma growing up

she had her own impactful musical career and all the stuff that she did with that by some account she was more famous than kurt when they initially met yeah hole is really good whole is great i listened to whole too yeah yeah did you uh have you ever seen 200 cigarettes no it's it's like it's like a very 90s movie about a new year's eve party and she's in it and she's great she's great the the hustler movie she was on i don't remember the name of it but that she was great in that too She's great and a lot of stuff she does. So, yeah, there's some debate on when they met. Some say it was before Nevermind's release.

Some say it was after Nevermind's release. But if it was before, then Corny was definitely more famous than Kurt was because Bleach wasn't a big album by all accounts. Yeah, and I wrote here, yeah, her music's fantastic. And there's a lot of stuff that I learned about like according to I didn't know. So if you remember like my apartment back in L.A. in Hollywood, which was like, I guess it was relatively close to where you. you guys lived back then but i was right down the street from jumbo's clown room and so she used

to work at jumbo's clown room like that was one of her first things that she did while she was trying to get hole up and running it's very cool so however they met they got married in 1992 they got married in hawaii and like i actually this point don't even know if curts was stoned out of his mind or if he was actually genuinely happy he looked really happy in the pictures though i feel like i can picture those let me find them yeah it was it was weirdly like a like a cute wedding for two incredibly grungy people. Mm-hmm. Oh, he does look very happy.

Yeah. So it's worth noting that Kurt was in chronic pain for most of his life due to some stomach issues he had. There's some conflict, again, like, there's no facts here. Like, there's some conflict about he tells people he's in chronic pain to justify his heroin use or was he in chronic pain and that's why he started using heroin? Like, we don't know. It's up in the air.

Wait, did you hear like the stuff that like it was because he played his guitar with the wrong hand? No. So I feel like, okay, this might be totally wrong. But I feel like I saw something that the way that he held his guitar was like not the natural way that someone should hold their guitar in this and especially with like his like dexterity like he shouldn't know with the other hand. But because of that, he was like putting weird pressure on his stomach and that was like part of the problem he was having. Oh, well, yeah, that could be that could be a component of this for sure. Yeah. So we don't know. We don't know if one came before the other. But we do know obviously that Kurt dabbled in a lot of. drugs and alcohol. He was not a stickler about the drugs that he used. He basically used

everything. Like whatever was there and available at the time he would use. Like I'm going to get into a lot of his ODs and like some of his ODs. A lot of his ODs, Jesus. Yeah. So some of his ODs didn't involve heroin. He was just fine whatever he could find just take it. He's numb. Like totally wanted to numb himself out. He would start using heroin in particular off and on starting in 1986, which I think is the year he formed Nirvana, if I remember what I said correctly earlier. So of all the drugs out there, it seemed like heroin is the last one you'd want to, like, be using and still be functional on. I've obviously never done it, but I read up a ton on what just opiates in general do. And it seems like it most just numbs you to everything.

Some symptoms of opiate intoxication are nodding off suddenly. It slows down your breathing. There's itching, tremor, slurred speech, impaired coordination, clouded thinking, disorientation, impaired memory. Basically, all the things that are counterproductive to maintaining a career. in a family life. I mean, look, obviously, I feel like it just goes without Sam to harbored on this a little bit too much, but Kurt was like an incredibly reckless user because they literally just stayed. I'm going to get into his ODs and I use plural in that. It almost felt like he knew that his story arc would be more romantic if he died tragically, which like contributed to his

heroin usage. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, like this is the part where I stand up for Courtney Love, which I don't know how many people have said that before in the history Courtney really tried to keep him somewhat on the stray narrow which she's a tragic character in her own right like she would also be doing heroin with him and also be doing all kinds of different drugs and there's like a whole history of her

she got Francis being got taken away from them because she said in a Vanity Fair article that she done did heroin when she was pregnant with like she's not like a he's not like a terribly sympathetic character but in the context of these two she actually did try so she was kind of

by the time nevermind came out and he blew up and became who became she almost became like his manager and whenever he'd have to go places and she wasn't with him she would always tell drivers that they were not allowed to detour anywhere because oftentimes he would detour and go to a drug dealer and go buy heroin yeah I think part of the public perception of her

was kind of rooted in this thing where Kurt is like this free-spirited dude just woo-woo whatever whatever and she's like a taskmaster but she's not really like all she's trying to do is make sure her husband doesn't just like die yeah yeah and like yeah the stories i was reading was like he really he actually really really did love her like when he would disappoint her he would just turn to this like sheepish child and when people saw that they're like oh she's being mean to current it's like no he's just like feels bad that he disappointed his wife in that moment

I read one story in The New Yorker, which was an article by Michael Azarad called My Time with Kurt Cobain. And Michael actually wrote a biography with Kurt and became pretty close to him throughout his life. To the point where Kurt would ask him to attend business meetings with him just so he wasn't surrounded by business people alone. And one of these meetings, he talks about how Kurt got up to go to the bathroom. He thought Kurt had probably just left because he just took so long to come back. and Kirk came back and was obviously just high as shit on heroin and everybody just kind of ignored it because he's with these business people and like who cares like he's a genius let him do his genius thing which is like let him get fucked up as much as he wants we're going to make money off many ways apparently Michael walks him back to the hotel that he's staying out with Courtney and again like Courtney's just like disappointed in him and that night he ODs yeah at this point yeah at this point they have Francis Peene. So, like, again, think about this from Courtney's perspective. Like, you're raising a child, you're trying to manage this insane career that you have on your

own, that your husband has. And also this guy just constantly out of his mind doing heroin. So in my opinion, Courtney's the one who's, like, she's the one who got fucked in this situation, more than her did. Chris drug use accelerates quite a bit. And at this point, so I counted three ODs at this point, where Courtney herself had to be the one to inject him with Narcan. to bring him back. Oh, God. Yeah. So it was a tour stop, which is apparently the last one they did. This was in Munich. And Kurt gets actually sick from bronchitis and laryngitis. So he goes to Rome to pursue medical treatment and Courtney meets up with him there. This is March 3rd that Courtney meets him in Rome for medical treatment. March 4th, he ODs again. And this OD actually wasn't heroin. He, he, from what I

recall, I didn't write this down, but when I recall, it was like, it was alcohol and, um, and rohypnol that he ODs on this time. Yeah, yeah, I don't know why that is. Yeah, I would assume as an addict, you just get whatever you can get, right? Yeah, he's just trying to numb everything. I mean, yeah, you're right. Yeah, I wrote down this just obviously keeps happening a lot. So later on, Courtney would, again, we don't know the facts.

Later on, Courtney stated that this was a suicide attempt. We don't know. Because earlier on, they said it's just an OD because part of this is also couching as like, he's a genius like geniuses do heroin like right normal totally that's so dumb yeah then they're like it's better if we just say that he odied on heroin then that we say he took pro-hypnal and alcohol to try and kill himself basically yeah so after this incident Courtney the bandmates friends they all staged intervention this is on march 25th of 1994 Kurt loses his mind because he is the guy like he's who are you to tell me what to do like I'm the I'm Kurt Cobain eventually he

He agrees to go to rehab. He went to a rehab clinic on March 30th. So five days after this intervention, he goes to rehab clinic. He lasts three days before he scales the fence, takes a cap to LAX, and flies back to Seattle. At this point, nobody knows where Kurt is. So Courtney ends up hiring a private investigator around April 3rd to try and find him again. He just disappears. Again, we publicly demonize her.

But look at what this woman had to do. No, totally. To find her husband who's like a big guy. abandoning his family to do drugs. Yeah, yeah. So on April 8th, an electrician came to Curt and Courtney's house to install a security system. And at that point, that is when they discover Kurt's body.

He's the one who finds the body. He shot himself under the neck or the chin. And he left a suicide note. He was also, not surprisingly, super, super high on heroin when they did the autopsy. There is some debate as to whether he would have died anyways because of the heroin. I learned so much about heroin researching this. So the reason it is debated is because we don't know if the amount of heroin in a system that they measured was called free morphine or whether it was total morphine. Free morphine is what you inject at that time.

Total morphine is what is in your system always because you're a habitual user. Yeah. If the amount they found that a system was free morphine, then yeah, he would have OD'd. He would have died anyways. Whether he would have shot himself or not, he would have died. if not then probably not he the gunshots would have had to have taken him out during the autopsy is assumed that he died on april 5th so again he flees the uh place whatever the recovery place on the third gets to seattle he sneaks up into this greenhouse that is a two-story greenhouse

apparently and he just kind of chills there doing drugs and whatever he's doing at that time nobody finds them like apparently there's a bunch of people coming in and out of the house but But nobody finds them because I looked at pictures of the house. The greenhouse was separate from the main house. And they're all jockeys. And nobody's going to plant flowers. I've seen that. I've seen that too.

And like, yeah, like I think like the private investigator missed it too. Like he didn't even see the house, the green house. Yeah. Yeah. If you want, because I know you want to Zillow everything, Taylor. The house is 171. Lake Washington Boulevard in Seattle. The estimate is $7.8 million, which given the fact that his,

guitar alone sold for six million dollars that's a bargain yeah oh it's nice it has a nice view of like some water it's weird i actually don't find the house creepy even though somebody died in it it does have a it's a sad this well in the zillow picture it has like a smidge of like amnativeville lights you know that is fun um it's huge 8000 square feet yeah it's huge there's only four bedrooms I feel like there should be more bedrooms you don't find it creepy do you like when I think about the tote family

and like moving living in that house that scares me but living like that house Kurt Cobain killed himself and that actually doesn't scare me no not really when did he die this one in 94 so when in 94

April they think it's April 5th which I really should have waited three weeks to do this episode and it would have been on this anniversary and I totally botched it boo um so he bought it in i love zello god bless it um they bought it in in january 1994 for one point four million dollars yeah and then they sold it she sold it in 1997 for 2.8 and then

it sold in 2020 for seven yeah cool okay um now your your zillow slew thing is unrivaled i just want i want to everything it's it's worth noting that there were other moments that were building up to this again going back to corny's life being a living hell so the gun kurt used actually wasn't his own because his guns had been confiscated multiple times by the police because there are multiple reports of courting call on the cops saying curt has locked himself in a bathroom highest shit on heroin with a loaded gun and threatening to kill himself so this is reported yeah they show up be like okay we'll just we're just gonna go ahead and take your guns away from you um but yeah what a living hell so on the conspiracy side of this there's a ton of conspiracy surrounding kurt's death most of them revolve around Courtney having killed Kurt which these people are generally pretty awful so the people who are saying this stuff for the most part are at best tangentially connected to Kurt and Courtney they're basically just like these hangers on and losers so this includes the private investigator who Courtney initially hired to find Kurt he also yeah that Courtney must have killed him

which is like what a loser like you you want to become famous like there were two documentaries at the same time about this in yeah there's a time ago there's so many documentaries about this i watched one of them last night actually uh also cordy's father came out saying that courtney probably killed kurt like how the fuck do you know yeah i wrote this down because apparently during the divorce or Courtney's divorce proceeding or during Courtney's parents divorce proceeding there were several people that came out and testified

that her dad the one who said that she killed Kurt also used to dose her with LSD when she was a toddler oh yeah like there was a ton of other allegations against him

no matter what he had full custody revoked forever like seeing her when she was a when she was a kid so that I was trying to be in the news like yeah like I'm I'm relevant I'm important I know Courtney Love I'm her dad I should probably talk about the suicide note

for for a bit so it's it's kind of long um it's at least it's at least a full page and length may a little bit longer than that and it starts out really just talking about his career about how he knows he should be enjoying this more than he really is he references freddie mercury in it and he says that he really paid attention to how much freddie mercury enjoyed like the adoration of crowds and he was like i wish i could be like him and like enjoy it he enjoys it so he has the wherewithal to be really self-reflective in this moment despite probably at this point being super super high um and he has he totally understands the nature of what he's doing and what like what he's leaving behind by doing this i'll read a little bit of the i mean this this sounds like

it's going to be a lot but this is actually a really small subset of the suicide note itself so this is a this is i'm quoting this exactly there's good in all of us and i think i simply love people too much so much that it makes me feel too fucking sad the sad little sensitive of unappreciated Pisces. Jesus, man. Why don't you just enjoy it? I don't know. I have a goddess of a wife who sweats ambition, empathy, and a daughter who reminds me too much of what I used to be, full of love and joy. And that terrifies me to the point where I can barely function. I can't stand the thought of Francis becoming the miserable, self-destructive death rocker that I've become. I have it good, very good, and I'm grateful. But since the age of seven, I become

hateful towards all humans in general, only because it seems so easy for people to get a long that have empathy only because I love and feel sorry for people too much I guess thank you all from the pit of my burning nauseous stomach for your letters and concerns during the past years I'm too much of an erratic moody baby I don't have the passion anymore and so remember it's better to burn out than to fade out peace love empathy Kirk Cobain Francis and Courtney I'll be at your altar please keep Courtney sorry please keep going Courtney for Francis for her life which will be so much happier without me i love you i love you i love you i think he could have used some therapy and some

other grants for drugs yeah he's depressed he's antidepressants yeah and yeah i wonder i wonder like what would have happened if he like didn't do that like who he'd be right now because i look at like dave grroll like they're so different like dave grull and chris novelcheck like they were not junkies at all like they like they never did drugs like they did not go down that path and you look at them now and you're like they're just like groovy 50 year old people like doing cool shit feeding to the home let's say i don't know i don't know what would have happened occurred but um well how did taylor hawkins he did so taylor hawkins was the drummer of the food fighters he just died he died last year about a year ago and he died of a drug overdose really it is he died in

Columbia while they were on tour I think and it says that his toxicology so that he had opioids antidepressants THC like a bunch of drugs in a system geez something about that lifestyle so yeah

I wrote down that line better to burn out than to fade out I really want to just if I have the wherewithal I'm going to scream that for my deathbed but it's such a good line so legacy wise like he basically died rock and roll royalty. He's now part of

this 27 club, which we all know what that is. I mean, look, he's on that list with Joplin, Morrison, Hendricks. Like, that's the caliber of person that he became. And Amy Whitehouse died at 27, too. I forgot about that. That's crazy. Yeah. Quney would go on. She'd create

more music, more movies. She never remarried. There's some, like, she kind of seemed like, she kept being like kind of a junkie in a lot of ways. But again, I'm not going to fault her. She's going through a lot of shit and a lot of trauma. Francis inherited a huge chunk of Kurt's estate and now owns the rights to his name and images. Yeah, she is, like, she's loaded. Like, Kurt's estate, like, his likeness is worth so much money.

I forgot what the exact number was, but it was somewhere in, like, the $400 million range. It's like what that value of, like, just having access, having the licensing rights to that is what the aspects are worth. She married a musician that everybody compared to Kurt in 24. They divorced and now she's basically just living her life doing her thing. She looks exactly like Curtin Courtney's child. It's amazing. She's so pretty. Yeah, no, she looks exactly like both of them.

Yeah. But wait, I have a question. You don't think it's weird the way that the gun was and how he could have killed himself? Because I know that's part of the conspiracy is like he would have had to like, like it was like a rifle under his chin. Yeah, yeah. He would have had to pull it with like his thumb or something like or his foot. Like, yeah, I've ever heard those rumors, too.

My thing is, I'm just saying about it from a human nature perspective. He's, like, the biggest thing, he's, like, the biggest artist, biggest, like, celebrity in the world. Like, if somebody had done that, what do we have figured that out? Like, that's fair. We have Courtney actually, and also, you read the suicide now. There's nothing suspicious about the suicide now. Like, I mean, people have claimed that maybe that's not his handwriting, but it was.

And he definitely states that, like, I'm doing that, like, it doesn't, it's not ambiguous. as maybe not a suicide note and also he would have probably died anyways because the heroin overdose yeah i mean he was probably with like whatever he said like the the morphine that was like in his body kind of like permanently he was probably like rehab was probably physically fucking terrible because he probably was like doing a bunch of like withdrawals and stuff you know i can't believe he made three days that's insane yeah that's terrible um so that's them and like i said i kind of framed this as courtney was the one that kind of got the rough end of this because

yeah curse the bigger celebrity and we all loved Kurt and then yeah and then people are like mad at her when she was just like trying to keep her family together and then also

yeah I'm like terrible pictures of her like holding Francis and crying outside their house and stuff that like like people like wouldn't leave her alone and all of that so yeah that's awful yeah so that's

rock stars man yeah just god like so much heroin Like I just wall like I cut out so much of this story because I literally just would have said heroin 500 more times. Yeah. So yeah, that's why we had coffee. So yeah, that's fair.

Seattle's story. But yeah, that's my story. And now I'm going to once I wrap this up, go look at Tulips at Home Depot. Nice. I want to listen to some Nirvana at the Airbnb saying at the fridge plays music. It's like has a whole screen on it. So I'm going to put some Nirvana on it. It's been playing pit bull.

I'll put the Nirvana. Mr. Worldwide. It's 305. I watched, so HBO, if you have HBO Max, they have a great documentary about Nirvana in general, but specifically Curtin Courtney, called the montage of heck,

which is like a lot of just live footage of recordings of them, just hanging out together. And, I mean, it is grungy. Yeah. Yeah. So it's hard to watch, but it gives you really good insight

into like their lives. but anyways totally what a time what a time crazy shout out to everyone who all those grunge girls who were all black for like a year afterwards seriously it's still hot

it's still hot I don't know like I'm still drawn to that but um no yeah oh yeah what's wrong with that but they did it specifically because Kirk Cobain died and they were so sad I was this one podcast where this guy

was talking about the word that was talking about his death and they were like he was like yeah I wasn't into this music I didn't really know. But then later, I became, when I was like a late teenager, I got into his music. And for one day, I wore a black band around my arm. Because I was so, like, distraught over his death. He died like 10 years earlier. And everyone was like, I don't understand, like a firefighter die. Or like, why are you wearing this black band? I just remembered. That's fair. We can still, you can still like discover the music and be sad about it. Yeah. You know, yeah. do you want to call out do you want to be the one that calls out please rate and review us yeah so thanks everyone for taking through this episode

I feel like I learned a lot about about rock and roll relationships hopefully my tulip story makes sense in the context of whatever we're building here but thank you everyone please continue to rate us on Apple podcasts thank you everyone who's left a review

even if you don't listen to podcasts please just like like subscribe on something that everything's free um we also just went on youtube i am uploading our episodes they're not like actual videos yet it's just like our logo and then our voices but if that's how you listen we're there now too and we're everywhere on on facebook and instagram at doom to fail pod and that's our email address doom to fill at gmail very well said whatever um set us message sweet awesome thank you i will go ahead and wrap up then thank you taylor thanks far as Recording is