Napalm Beach, Snow Bud and the Flower People, Divining Rods, Boo Frog
Why would the FBI listen to anything Courtney Love has to say? Are they not familiar with her reputation?
What about her record?
I don’t even have a record, except for the false one that she and her crew created on my behalf.
My patience is really thin. I think that if the FBI has no reason to be fearful for their own existence for what they’ve been doing to people, and at who’s behest, and totally outside of the law, there’s something seriously wrong.
So now I know Courtney did Kurt Cobain dirty (though not in the way that’s been presented by other sources) and she did Chris Newman dirty, she probably did Naomi Levich dirty, and she’s been doing me dirty too. So I’m not worried anymore about hurting her feelings by dragging out everything else. I’m also not quite as concerned about “protecting” Rozz Rezabek as I’ve been in the past. It’s not that I want anything bad to happen to him, because I don’t. I genuinely like Rozz. But I don’t think that my keeping the diary story quiet is going to be that helpful to him. His life is in danger because of this.
Courtney Love tended to distribute Kurt Cobain’s belongings to other people. Rozz apparently ended up with a lot of them. He said that an ex-girlfriend absconded with a bunch of items, but he still had some when I knew him (2008-2014). Chris Newman often told the story about when Courtney lived in the Napalm Beach band house (first half of 1981), and had left a journal on her bed, maybe even open, and he peeked into it, and read an entry about how she had a crush on him, he was a genius guitar player, but she didn’t know what her friends would say, because he was “fat.” She was just 16 and he was 27. This of course did double duty of making him feel both admired and belittled. His “fatness” as being a deal breaker came up again and again – the same month that Chris and I became a couple – March 2009 – Chris had been out at a bar and run into Courtney Taylor Taylor of the Dandy Warhols who told Chris that the reason he never got anywhere musically is because he “got fat.”
Anyway, make no mistake, Chris was supposed to find that journal. Soon they were making out and Courtney told him she was a virgin and she wanted him to be “her first.” That didn’t happen. However, not long after that, the band drove to Seattle to play a show at the University of Washington Hub, where they made a decent amount of money. On the way back, Chris said, Courtney begged Chris to ride in back with her. He wouldn’t. The other guitar player they had at the time, Mark Nelson, rode in the back with her, and later bragged to Chris that he had “devirginized” Courtney. Chris didn’t know whether or not that was a lie or the truth.
Courtney Love also had a tendency to leave journals behind. I suspect there was something strategic in this. One day, probably around 2010 or 2011, Rozz Rezabek called me up and said something along the lines of “I have a couple of journals of Courtney’s and in them she says she’s going to fuck Chris Newman, the guitar god. Want to see?” So I thought, yeah, I want to see. I went to his house and he handed me two journals, one from the latter half of 1981 as I recall, and one from 1982. This would have been after she was no longer living in the Napalm Beach house. And I looked through each journal and the writing was straight and neat and perfectly spelled and there was nothing about Chris at all in either journal. Rozz didn’t really have a comment about that. What I remember were things about other people in music (not so much musicians as people around the scene), a page with the word “Rozz” written over and over, and a to-do list that included getting Poison Idea into the Berkeley-based punk zine, Maximum Rock n’ Roll. Which apparently she did shortly afterward. I couldn’t find Chris’ name anywhere. Later I asked to see the diaries again and Rozz got real cagey about it, so I never saw them again. But I think that the hidden point was the double meaning of the word “fuck.” It wasn’t romantic.
And by the way, I think that’s how Kurt Cobain also intended to use the word “fuck,” at least in part, when he announced on live TV whenever it was that Courtney was the “best fuck in the world.” And/or it had to do with sex as a metaphor for gaining juice in the music business. Whatever Courtney Love had pulled off in the Napalm Beach band house, and probably in other activities, had gained her access to something powerful. Also, I now believe that the entire reason I was introduced to Rozz was to give her even more power. A lot of this is in the 2010 song “Pacific Coast Highway” – The first line is “I knew a boy who came from the sea” – Rozz grew up in Bandon, Oregon where the sign at the edge of town reads “Bandon by the sea.” With regards to that song, who exactly is the boy who “left me so damaged”? Is she insinuating that it was Chris? Or Mark Nelson? It’s pretty clever to drop hints of this type and allow people to draw their own conclusions.
Chris Newman’s history with Courtney was exaggerated by Flying Heart Records’ Jan Celt. Courtney wrote Chris letters from Europe but it’s not clear that they were literally “love letters” as Celt told the local music press. The were part of Chris’ belongings that were thrown out in 1996 by his landlord and brother in law. Chris said she wrote to him that he should go to Europe. Links between Chris and Courtney were further exaggerated by Eric Danielson in his essay and self-published book/s about Chris, insinuating the two of them had some ongoing romance, or that she had an ongoing crush on him that she only “dropped” when she met Kurt Cobain. As I’ve said before, Danielson has overtly refused to correct “errors” in his writing. That, I allege, is sign of a larger agenda, either to make Chris look self-aggrandizing (which he wasn’t) or to feed the rumor that they had been sexually involved, or to give Courtney even more power by making their relationship seem to have been more, and different, than what it was. I can’t think of a good reason to lie about this.
Courtney herself fed this idea in ways that made Chris feel special. For example, when she saw him with his girlfriend Nancy Loeffler in the late 1980s she said loudly “I would have married you Chris Newman!” and when he saw her play at La Luna in 1994 right after she’d appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone for Live Through This, she greeted him from the stage. That was a nice gesture, but it was always bait and switch after that, and who knows what she was saying or doing behind the scenes. In all honesty, by 1994, he should have had a lot more going for him than having Courtney Love greet him from stage. He had the talent, the tenacity and the catalog. He had done the work.
This show keeps coming back to me, with more and more unusual details. I notice it’s the date (32 years earlier) of the insurrection at the US capitol. It is the first show that Nirvana played outside of Washington state, although the following month they would play San Francisco and then San José.
The show took place on a Friday night. There are posters circulating, with Nirvana’s name misspelled. However, it was only this year that I saw that there was a third band listed for that night, Inner Anger. If you look at the Satyricon calendar, Inner Anger is mentioned, but Nirvana is not.
True to the pattern I described, Napalm Beach plays the following Friday night. The Friday after that is the Dharma Bums. In some versions of the “when Kurt met Courtney” story, it takes place at a Dharma Bums show at Satyricon (not sure what year). In the Charles Cross version of the story it happens in January 1990 at a Nirvana show at Satyricon, and in the Everett True version, it’s the following year, 1991, in Los Angeles. But I’m starting to think the entire “controversy” over this is a shaggy dog story intended to distract from the real issue: that Courtney Love was a honey trap, and that her mission always included the demise of Kurt Cobain, Chris Newman and anyone else who might stand in the way (Erika Meyer, for example – thus, Op Anne Boleyn) of the continuation of a crime which has been illegally and inappropriately sustaining a number of people and financial entities.
Back to January 1989. David Ackerman and I were pals for a while. I ultimately stopped interacting with people because they couldn’t or wouldn’t be honest with me. When Ackerman and I were pals, I made him a photo website with the intent of helping him license his photos and/or sell them as fine art prints. To this end, I posted some photos from this show, but they were relatively small, with the idea that if they were swiped, as tends to happen online, they’d be to small to do much with. I tried to make sure he’d get credit so that people could trace the images back to him. However, it looks like since that time, someone under the user name “braunnoser” posted a much higher resolution version of the photo to reddit. David had these images on negatives which, when we were working together, he had scanned and put on CD. He gave me the CD so I could use it for his website, and he may have also kept a copy of the CD. There’s only two ways, that I know of, that this high resolution image could have gotten onto reddit: either David gave “braunnoser” a copy of the CD or the image from the CD (and I could totally see him doing this. He was a lot less protective of his work than I was) or, it was swiped from the CD I had stored, because in fact my stuff gets swiped all the time, and the CD of images from that show has “mysteriously” gone missing and been replaced in different areas probably more than once. Also, one of the admins of the Pacific Northwest Music Archives site from which I was booted is named Karl Braun.
To me, it looks like the photo was taken between sets, where one band was breaking down and another setting up. The set list belongs to Inner Anger who would release an album that year called My Head Hurts.
Silent
Life Out
Don’t Leave
Cob Webs
The Tide
Divorce
Tears
Chance
Murders
Reality
Days’d
There’s more – there are newer versions of the posters associated with this show that are much clearer than what I’ve seen in years past. Here are two I found today:
Clearly, the version of the poster which includes Inner Anger is closer to the original. A question is, why Inner Anger appears one version and not the other – and is there a reason why the version with Inner Anger was not posted online anywhere until, as far as I can tell, this year. Also, now that I can see the poster with more detail, a few things stand out – there are not one, but two women on this poster, one black, one white, in this kind of occult twins formation. Also, they appear to have what looks like nipples over their butts. There was a band in Portland called Sweaty Nipples that seemed to play a lot of these same clubs. You can see them on this same January 1989 calendar, twice – once – on January 12 – opening for Burdyshaw’s Cat Butt. This looks to me like a link to the Mudhoney poster (nipples on a butt). January 12 is also the date, the following year, that Courtney would claim to first meet Kurt Cobain. Weird, right?
Also, and this I find particularly interesting – the style of the female figure on this poster is very close to art that Courtney Love would make. I think it’s even possible that it is her artwork. Even to this day she tends to draw these female figures with blonde bobbed hair, full lips, big eyes.
Finally, what is that stuff at the top of the flyer about THE WET SCENE? I googled the phrase and came up with a scene from he 1984 movie “Gremlins” on YouTube where water is spilled on a gremlin (Gizmo) and several more gremlins pop out, seemingly from its butt. This seems to contradict what happens, for example, to the witch in Wizard of Oz, when water is spilled on her. Rather than melting away, the Gremlins multiply. On this video someone commented “Gizmo knew from the start how this would end….” a phrase from the Hole song “Asking For It”
Do you see what I mean by “set ups”?
Other thoughts about the calendar – in addition to Kurtz Project (Trés Shannon of Voodoo Doughnut) – there’s what appears to be a band called Heart of Darkness playing on Tuesday the 17th. Drawing a parallel to my own life – Courtney had recently been in Minneapolis. It seems like she must have left Minnesota almost the same time as my honey trap boyfriend Mike Payne – he left in November 1988. I now wonder if maybe part of the reason he was there at all was to connect with Courtney Love in some way, because they both knew my friend Erika Schlaeger – in this situation, honey traps aren’t always romantic partners – they can be, and are, trusted friends too. That’s what Erika Schaeger was.
Around this period of time I’d been reading Heart of Darkness and Moby Dick for my college classes. The idea of Heart of Darkness links with Napalm Beach (Apocalypse Now being based on Heart of Darkness) and with what I was doing, as well as what this crew was up to. I feel like many of the bands on this particular calendar may have been linked in a web or net of sorts. I know that Courtney Love was plotting promotion strategies of various local bands going back to 1981 (because I saw a couple of her diaries) – and that the things she plotted out, she generally achieved. Satyricon owner George Touhouliotis seemed to be fairly close to her, so it makes me wonder if this entire January 1989 calendar involved her in some way.
Sept 19, 2022 update: I re-edited this entry today to correct mistakes around the band name Inner Anger. Also, found a set list for Nirvana:
School
Love Buzz
Floyd the Barber
Mr Mustache
Paper Cuts
Mexican Seafood
Spank Thru
Aerozeppelin
Sifting
Hairspray Queen
Big Cheese
BLEW
Pinking out the black, dreaming in a crack
Sonic Youth, Dirty Boots (1990)
Satan got her tongue, now it’s undone
Every time that I stare into the sun
Hole, Asking for It (1994)
Angel dust and my dress just comes undone
“Good come in pink boxes”
The magic is in the hole
Voodoo Doughnut Slogans (2003-present)
When did Kurt Cobain meet Courtney Love? I’ve looked into this, and I don’t have an answer. Honestly, I’m not even sure when Chris and I first met, and that is because when you are into music and/or are a musician, and you are in a scene with other people who are into music and/or are musicians, you tend to know about people, especially performers, before personally meeting them. You might be in a room with the person, maybe be introduced briefly, or in someone’s orbit, part of a group conversation, etc. Then later on down the road, maybe you have the opportunity to have a longer conversation, but often it’s in a social setting with lots of other people. That’s how it was with Chris and me, and likely it was that way for Kurt and Courtney, but with the added twist of Courtney likely always had a mission and knew she had a mission. I say this because it seems clear to me now that when Courtney arrived in Portland in 1980, she was apparently on a mission to frame Chris Newman as a child rapist. It also seems clear that her father was part of that plan. Supposedly it was her father who provided her with the Owsley barrel acid she brought with her.
If it is true that Courtney had a mission with regards to Kurt Cobain, say by the mid-1980s, then it stands to reason she would have known when she first met Kurt, because she would have been paying attention, and it would have been a set up. By now I see that set ups are the rule, not the exception for people under this much surveillance and control – including Chris, me, my daughter, Kurt Cobain. This is unacceptable, by the way.
When I was running this Satyricon fan page on MySpace, as I said before, I received this at the time unpublished photo of Kurt Cobain by email which I thought was really neat. It was from Monica Nelson’s friend David Ackerman, a photographer who liked to take photos at Satyricon, and it was a performance photo from January 6, 1989.
Over time I saw more and more photos from that set eventually having access to the full collection. In one photo, I thought I recognized Courtney Love’s face looking up at Mudhoney, and sent an inquiry to Everett True about it, whom I already had had some email exchanges with, and he said that it might be her, but even if she was at the show, she was probably there to see Mudhoney, and there’s no evidence she met Kurt Cobain there. Later I realized the blonde woman in another photo was Courtney, or David told me it was her. The thing about this show is there weren’t many people there. Also, Courtney is pretty dressed up and front and center. I don’t know where she was living in 1989, but I now know she had been around my circle in Minneapolis in 1988, and in April or May of 1989 I would run into some LSD that was likely Owsley LSD – in Minneapolis. That may be nothing to do with Courtney, and everything to do with the CIA. It seemed like in the 1980s (and probably to this day) Courtney was/is always on the move with stations in New York, London, Los Angeles, etc. In the old days it included Portland, Seattle, San Francisco.
Then there’s this whole thing going on where even the most cursory contact with a person somehow earns another the “right” to file defamatory reports with the FBI. And by “defamatory” make no mistake – I don’t mean “negative” I mean full of damaging lies. For example, if I sell something to someone through the mail – the person pays me some money, and I put something in the mail to that person – or if I go and sell some musical equipment at a store – these people who engage in this simple, single straightforward transaction somehow have now earned the right make reports about me to the FBI. How this works I don’t understand. It could even be untrue, because I have no corroborating evidence. But it does seem to be true that any contact with a person whatsoever earns people, especially certain people, the right to create FBI files. So as soon as Courtney had some contact with, for example, Kurt Cobain, she could have been filing reports on him, with an agenda behind it all. And I have reason to believe that Sub Pop as a business was linked into all of this. The reason I believe this is because of how Cobain’s (Nirvana) shows were scheduled in relation to Chris’ (Napalm Beach or Snow Bud) shows – there was a parallel going on, not just in Europe but in Seattle and Portland, too. By this I mean, they typically would play the same clubs within a week or two of each other. (“I’ve been in your heart shaped box for too (two?) many weeks…”) I haven’t really shown this yet because every time I start working on collecting the data, the isht hits the fan.
I would ask myself why there would be a parallel going on. Sometimes things like this happen because there’s an occult side to this. Because the crimes are CIA and FBI linked, and police and the press are locked down (or that’s how they behave), there’s far less than usual concern about being “caught.” So there is some flaunting, display of power, going on.
The dirty plans for Kurt Cobain were, as most of these larger and more coordinated crimes are, not so much secret but covered up. I say this because I’m starting to see suggestions of something come out in videos both before and after the death of Kurt Cobain. There is the Sonic Youth video for Dirty Boots from 1990 showing a boy in a plaid shirt and a girl in a Nirvana t-shirt dramatically leaping off a stage, falling through the air. The Nirvana t-shirt has a home-made screen print look, with the word Nirvana appearing above a concentric circle radiation/target design similar to that used by Courtney on her posters for Hole. Also interesting that the t-shirt screen is red, since Cobain’s wrote his suicide note ~3 years later in red pen.
The girl in the Dirty Boots video supposedly was chosen after being seen dancing in a club in New Jersey. I suspect that there is something deliberate in that, the New Jersey link. The boy in this video seems like he had some resemblance to me during this era. His hair is the same or similar color, length, style.
Is “boots” a play on bootleg? See poster with Babes In Toyland mentioning “bootleg” and “dirty, icky clothes!!” – Is that in turn a link to the Columbo coat? And later, the cat-piss leather jacket? Another possibility has to do with Chris getting back together with Valarie in San Francisco October of 1989, the weekend before the Loma Prieta earthquake. Jan Celt had been quoted in the local music press making a comment that Chris had found gross, about how their “boots would be knocking.” In fact, just as Chris was leaving San Francisco, the bridge-buckling earthquake hit.
Later, when Chris and Valarie were living homeless on the streets of San Francisco (and it sounds like running off to San Francisco was Valarie’s idea; she’d grown up in San José) – there’s a story that I heard from both of them which is that Valarie would go dumpster diving for clothing or fabric behind a high fashion store, and the police would call her “Courtney” – like, greet her, “Hi Courtney!” I don’t know if this was a one-off or a regular occurrence but it suggests a link or parallel between Valarie Caldwell Newman and Courtney Love Cobain and that the police in San Francisco were aware of it. And it’s also linked to dumpster diving and maybe “dirty clothes.” Is the world “clothes” linked to death? (clothes/close)
Then there’s the 1992 Radiohead song “Creep.” There are different ways to listen to this song. Like, to me, maybe he’s not singing “I’m a weirdo” but “I’m a widow.” And “running out the door” is by design a mirror – meaning – either escape for the prisoners, Chris and me, or escape for the crime gang. In this case, the meaning is the latter, escape for the crime gang. And a primary strategy in this is to run out the clock – to get enough time to attack with radiation weapons and kill with cancer. This is what they need time to do, and why they always find a reason to ask for or incentivize others to accept the idea of giving us more time in captivity. Now, we should never have been kept in captivity. It is illegal, immoral, unethical, and cruel. But brainwashing and cult-like control is a huge part of this. They can make people believe or accept almost anything (they hope), and all they need to do is to keep the loop running long enough to “escape” and that in turn will give them the ability to continue the crime indefinitely (they believe). Another aspect of Creep is that the idea of it being about Courtney is probably a back side to it being about portraying me as a creep, the idea that I’m someone no one notices, that I want to be special, etc. That’s been both the manipulation around me, and the set ups, and the portrayals. I may have wished to be noticed, etc, but I never thought that I was a creep. But it’s not really about what I think, it’s about what the actual creeps project. At the end of the song they sing “run, run, RUN!” like a warning, which is, I think, what they wanted to do. To warn me, to warn Chris, to warn Kurt Cobain.
I think knowing this now, other songs like this will come forward. For example, Tom Petty’s “Into The Great Wide Open” (1991) and possibly Peter Gabriel’s “Big Time” (1987). I definitely see it in music videos that came out after the death of Cobain, like Soundgarden’s Black Hole Sun which is another mirror type song.
Back in 2014 I thought that the concept of the “hole” and the “sun” were equivalent but now I realize they are opposite. The hole represents death and darkness, while the sun represents truth.
It’s also pretty obvious, looking at this, that there’s a link between Courtney Love and Voodoo “the magic is in the hole” Doughnut, the spiral on the voodoo doll style doughnut being a link. The spiral may be worth its own entry.
I do see that in the Dirty Boots video it’s less a spiral than concentric rings, and I suspect this has to do with the acid test I would be put through on June 8, 1991, on the Klamath River (one year to the day, as it turns out, before the release of Faith No More’s album Angel Dust). The target shape looks like a topographic map.
As it appears on the t-shirt, it could be a vinyl record, a mountain peak, or a hole.
This is just a follow up on the Jeffrey Ofelt comment made in the 2007 Stranger article (Beerly Deloved) about Courtney Love picking up a leather trench coat for Kurt Cobain in the early 1990s. Like I said, although it’s possible, I’d be surprised if Cobain ever wore a leather trench coat. But what I think is interesting about that comment is it links together the incident where Chris had his belongings taken in 1996 and I witnessed belongings thrown out into the yard of a rented home that had been temporarily abandoned around 2003. When I was reading through Charles Cross’ book on Kurt Cobain, it looked like Cobain too had something like that happen.
Among the belongings that were thrown out in 2003 were a little 1970s paperback (like, almost a zine), sort of small press book called something like How To Play Guitar Left Handed that I was told had belonged to Kurt Cobain. It included a version of “In The Pines.” I sort of wish I could have held onto that somehow, though it wasn’t mine, but it was lost in this incident. I have an old paperback Pete Seeger folksong book from the early 1960s that belonged to my dad, and it has the same song in it. Leadbelly was a popular folk artist for several decades. The other thing that Kenny had that supposedly had belonged to Kurt Cobain, and got thrown out, was a leather jacket, that supposedly a cat had peed on. How Kenny got these things, he said, was he was in a band where one of Cobain’s cousins played drums. No idea whether any of this is true. I didn’t think at first that Cobain had ever been seen wearing a leather jacket, but later I saw that in fact he did wear a leather jacket like the one Kenny had in The Year Punk Broke. So maybe it had been his jacket.
And then there was that thing where Courtney Love left a beige oversized trench coat in the back of the Napalm Beach van when she jetted off to Europe in 1981, and Chris picked it up and wore it onstage. So that Ofelt story looks to me like it combines two coats into one – the leather coat that had allegedly belonged to Cobain that showed up in my life, and the Columbo coat that had belonged to Courtney, that Chris later wore. If I’m correct – and that’s what Ofelt was doing, it shows the surveillance going on, and likely the manipulations as well. Also, it makes me think that Courtney may have actually been behind Kenny and the Kurt Cobain linked items he brought with him. She had a tendency to spread Cobain’s belongings around.
I have reason to believe that Cobain was under heavy surveillance. These kinds of things, getting all your belongings thrown out or destroyed are traumatic. Those of us who are under this kind of surveillance are treated this way for the benefit of pleasing and/or controlling and/or traumatizing the viewers. Other things, like leaving something for someone to find and seeing what they do for it, also seems to be a form of entertainment.
This. surveillance. must. end.
Sometimes I speak of Chris as being profoundly innocent. I suppose people who only see the most superficial parts of a person might find that confusing, though that’s a bit hard for me to swallow. I’ve come to learn, though, that people – at least people around us – pretend to believe a lot of things they don’t actually believe. They do this because they feel it benefits them in some way, and they don’t seem to care who it harms, or maybe harm is their intent. So Chris, me, others are framed however is convenient or profitable for them to frame us.
It is very clear to me that Chris’ creative works have been regularly and systematically sabotaged and stolen. This has been going on the whole time he and I were together, though it may have accelerated since we moved to this apartment in 2014. And it was going on before we met. Right before we got together in February 2009 to do the Cramps tribute, Chris had been recording an album with a short-lived project called Lost Acolytes. Sam Henry played keyboards with this band, Dave Minick played bass, and Paul Vega drums. The Lost Acolytes recording session was financed by a guy named Greg Kroell (or Kroll, or Krohl – not sure of the spelling of his name – he was born around 1960 and apparently ran a local magazine called Events) who then, as financier, absconded with the files or demanded the album not be released. I believe the Lost Acolytes recording was made at a place called Platonic Studios and the engineer who recorded it was the same who recorded Boo Frog’s first record in 2009, Gary Schroeder. I don’t know what happened to Schroeder. When we worked with him was I believe in his early 50s and clean and sober and very healthy. I heard he died of cancer.
For all intents and purposes that Lost Acolytes album has vanished.
The setups created by this character Kroell go back to the early 1980s and are worth their own entry.
Another thing worth looking at more closely is how Chris was able to have physical belongings stolen from him his entire life and never realize it was happening. Something similar, on a smaller scale, has been happening to me, so I can basically understand it, but it’s a unique kind of theft. Another examination worth its own entry. But the basic outline of it it that it’s a gradual erosion, and the things that are most often taken tend to be things you store but don’t often go back to, like letters and journals. You only notice they’re missing when you want to go back and find a particular journal or set of letters, and then you might second guess yourself about what happened to them, because why would someone come into your apartment and steal old journals?
On March 31, 1996 Gun Club frontman Jeffrey Lee Pierce died of a brain aneurism at age 37 (another biomedical assassination, same as the 1991 aneurism death of Pandoras frontwoman Paula Pierce). Jeffrey Lee Pierce had been influential on Chris’ music. When Chris found out about this several months later, he created a tribute show which took place on December 11, 1996. Days after the tribute show, Chris’ honeytrap wife Valarie created a scene in a 7-11, causing the cashier to call police who found evidence of heroin in their belongings and arrested Chris for possession. This was a string of traps that led to them becoming homeless, and Valarie to a life of prostitution.
Chris’ memoir over this time is fragmented, he jumps from time to time, so it’s not clear to me at this point how much time he initially spent in jail after this arrest. It may have been a couple of weeks. Here is what Chris wrote in his draft memoir about what happened when discovered when he got home, verbatim.
When I was released from jail our Kelso landlord and my well meaning brother in law, Tim had loaded up all our belongings and supposedly dumped most of it. I know that’s a lie because Val and I had collectesd alot of shit in the last six years we had been married. There were obvious sentimental valuables as well as art and books, rare vinyl records signed by Sky Saxon of the Seeds and Moby Grape’s autographed albums. My sister’s husband Tim was embarrased about My jail term and drug use. He honestly believed the landlord (who was a Kelso Assembly of God church member) was in his rights to confiscate all our belongs. I don’t know if Tim knew we were paid up on our rent. Valarie and I were suddenly homeless on the streets of Portland. The situation was extremely fucked up. I was angry as hell, but as usual a junky is all talk. We never quite got around to sueing the mother fucker, or even talking to the shithead.
I’m sure that Chris would have removed those last sentences if he were going to publish the memoir, but after seeing what happened to Chris, I myself am angry as hell.
US agencies like the FBI seems to have exploited the ignorance and sense of entitlement of people like this to allow them to do all kinds of horrible things to us, and they themselves have facilitated these crimes, and worse. Fraud, theft, trespass, kidnapping, and murder are crimes, regardless of who is behind them. Chris’ innocence or confusion is displayed in his writing, beginning with the adjective “well meaning” and ending with “shithead.” Was he well-meaning, or was he a shithead?
Chris, typically, failed to see where the true losses lay – at least from my perspective. It wasn’t in the vinyl signed by Sky Saxon but Chris’ letters and journals. He lost all his journals, including diaries kept while on his European Tours, and he lost letters, including “love letters” from Courtney Love when she was in England and Ireland in the early 1980s. Also, if my own journals are any indication, there would probably have been significant evidence of intellectual property theft in Chris’ journals.
This whole scenario, by the way, was played out in my life as well, in a honeytrap situation, in the early 2000s. It was something I witnessed, not something that happened to me, but in retrospect it was clearly a set up, because among the belongings that were taken were items that supposedly had once belonged to Kurt Cobain.