Tag: Kurt Cobain

Profound innocence, profound theft

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.

January 2010 Facebook message to Erika from Sam Henry

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.

Nirvana – Sappy – updated information from Gillian Gaar book

This 2018 video about Nirvana’s song Sappy is important for a few reasons. For one thing, it shows the skin on my face developing burns in real time, as I was being attacked with directed energy (microwave) weapons. For another, I’m talking about some real stuff – the idea that Cobain’s song Sappy was taken from my 1988 journal entry/poem called Caterpillar Jar. Possibly related, I was in Minneapolis/St Paul at the time, and unbeknownst to me, Courtney Love was also in Minneapolis, hanging out with, even possibly staying with, with a girl I considered a best friend. I now am pretty convinced that the “he” referenced in the Nirvana song “Sappy” is Mike Payne, my boyfriend at the time.

One of the things I said in that video (I think – I know I said it somewhere) was that according to the Wikipedia page on Sappy, the song “dates back to at least 1987.” It then goes on to describe the first home demo as going back to the “late 1980s.” Since my Caterpillar Jar poem was written in 1988 (March 88 IIRC) – compelling evidence that Sappy was written in 1987 would detract from my argument that it was a deliberate spin-off of my poem, Caterpillar Jar. Though as you seen in other entries it’s hardly the only 1980s journal entry of mine that made its way into a “grunge” song. Still, I wanted to find out whether there was real evidence to support the dating of the song back to “at least 1987.” The Wikipedia entry (footnote 3) referenced page 5 of a 2006 Gillian Baar book called 33 1/3: In Utero.

And today I received my copy of the book, which I eagerly opened to find out what kind of evidence there is to show that Sappy was from 1987 or earlier. Turns out, there’s nothing about that at all. The only thing on page five is a reference to the earliest recorded version of Sappy dating to the “late 80s.” I already knew that.

So that statement about Sappy dating to “at least 1987”? Has no source. It looks like it’s linked to the Gaar book, but it’s only because it’s right before another statement that is linked to the Gaar book, creating a false impression that there’s support for the statement. But there isn’t.

To me, this creates more support for my assertion: That Cobain’s lyrics for Sappy are directly and knowingly based on my March 1988 poem, Caterpillar Jar.

David Ackerman and Monica Nelson

Christmas 1975

With regards to my own background in music, I’ve written about it in an essay years ago called How I Learned To Play Guitar. Maybe I’ll consider republishing it, though I see it all a lot different now, since I’ve gotten a bit of a handle on the outside machinations that have been going on. That essay probably focused mostly on my early years and was an exploration of why I thought I stopped pursuing music and rock n’ roll in the mid 1980s.

In any case, when I moved to Portland in 2001, I started playing again, and teaching myself to write songs. This is the same year that I myself really discovered Nirvana. I’d ordered some CDs, pretty much randomly, from an online retailer that had some kind of special running, and one of the CDs was In Utero and that is what got me hooked. Eventually I was trying to get my hands on every album, every live performance I could, deconstruction how the songs were put together, where and how things were improvised live, trying to deconstruct the sound and the lyrics.

Something that is really important to keep in mind is that when you have the kind of science background that the CIA has, and when you are permitted to do the kind of surveillance on a person that’s been done to us by the CIA/FBI and others, and especially if the person is completely unsuspecting as we were, with that kind of covert access to information, you can really exact a lot of control and if desired, wreck a lot of havoc. The honeytraps that are set up are super-charged with inside information, psychological profiles, and instructions on sophisticated psychological manipulation techniques, and they’re handled and paid by outside interests with ill intent.

So in the early 2000s I was teaching myself to play guitar again, learning about songwriting, and listening to a lot of music I’d missed out on in recent years, with a lot of focus on Kurt Cobain both as guitar player and songwriter. With Cobain I felt an affinity, not of the type where I thought he was cute and imagined being his girlfriend (never really was my thing anyway) – but I felt like we came from the same place, which I now think, was a lot more prescient than I realized. Yes, we were the same age, and both came from little logging towns along highway 101, but more than that.

In 2006 during MySpace heyday I set up a fan page for Satyricon that quickly grew popular and seemed to turn into sort of a high school reunion kind of atmosphere. I really liked that, I liked hearing about the oldschool punk scene in Portland, and I liked feeling like I’d helped people reconnect with each other in a postive way.

In the midst of this, one night it seems like I’d come home late from somewhere, maybe I’d been out to see some music, to see an email addressed to me, and then this image appeared – a very large scan of a photo of Kurt Cobain I’d never seen before.

It was this photo of Cobain performing at Satyricon on January 6, 1989.

David Ackerman photo of Nirvana at Satyricon (opening for Mudhoney) – January 6, 1989

By this point I’d read enough about Nirvana to know this photo had never been published before. So I was pretty psyched. That’s how I got to know photographer David Ackerman. (The photo, and others from the set, has since been re-scanned and reproduced online in several places, and that’s where I got the copy posted here.)

David had taken lots of photos at Satyricon, especially between about 1986 and 1993, and his negatives were well-organized. When I started to play live sometimes he’d come and take photos of me. We were pals for a few years. He came to my performances, and I helped him publicize his work online. But it got weird after I started to go out with Chris, and once I had published the Introducing Napalm Beach article I began to lose touch with everyone, because it was clear that for whatever reason, they could not or would not be honest with me (or Chris). And how can you trust someone or really be friends with them once you realize they can’t even tell you the truth? I think it’s impossible. I never held the lack of honesty against anyone, because I believed that if everyone is lying to me, maybe they have a good reason – like maybe they’re afraid to tell the truth – maybe they’d be in danger if they told the truth. And it seems like this idea was encouraged by them. But I no longer think it’s quite that cut and dried. I think that a lot of this is about finance.

Obituaries first show Satyricon1986

Anyway, Monica Nelson was one of David Ackerman’s favorite subjects to photograph, and they were friends. Monica it seems had been living in New York City – maybe since around 1990, and between 2006 and 2007 was in the process of moving back to Portland. They re-released their 1987 album as I recall, and I liked it. I was impressed by Monica’s vocals. Being as her band went back to 1986, based on her onstage look and vocals I thought she must have been an influence on Courtney Love and Hole, though I’d never seen anything written about that. At that time, around 1986, Courtney Love was in and out of Portland, and there were a lot of female fronted bands in the Portland and Seattle scenes, including Kat Bjelland’s Venarays. Monica gave me advice like an elder sister. She was obviously more experienced as a performer though age-wise she’s only two years older than me.

Monica has described her music as “pre-grunge” but that doesn’t really make sense to me, being as most of the so-called “grunge” artists were older than her. Why a band was or was not called grunge, or what grunge is or is not is not so clear cut, but it probably less about the music and more about one’s social, political, and financial attitude and environment. I actually believe that this is part of the gatekeeping. Grunge was a marketing term. I don’t think that bands from Portland, generally speaking, were permitted to be “grunge.” That said, I had a flyer at one time, advertising Pat Baum’s 1986 movie about Chris, which described his music as grunge. But that was before it was a musical genre.

So what was going on, exactly, with David and Monica making contact with me in 2006? Based on the patterns that I’ve now identified and come to understand, I think someone else told them to make contact with me, and gave them information about how to reel me in. And I think it was part of a set up. I think they have something to do with fictionalized FBI files.

As to why Monica Nelson and the Obituaries would either falsely give the impression they’d played on a bill with Nirvana, I suspect there could be a number of reasons, from pumping up interest in their band reuniting to muddying what is starting to show through as far as patterns with Nirvana and Napalm Beach, to making sure that they were interesting specifically to me. I suspect that this was not Monica’s idea. If I had to guess I’d say there’s a good chance the idea came from Courtney Love.

Voodoo Doughnut Recordings single
Monica Nelson and the Highgates
Voodoo Save My Life b/w Love is Hell
released December 2014

Music Industry Issues (Part 2) Muzzling Kurt Cobain

The section of the article which I’d titled Chris Newman and the northwest fuzz-wah continuum states that the fuzz/wah combination was later associated with Mudhoney, and the chorus/distortion sound with Nirvana. The thing about this is, the fuzz/wah effect was used by Hendrix and other blues artists of the 60s and 70s, but I don’t know of any other musicians who were combining fuzz and chorus like Chris was. And as I noted, Chris started using the fuzz sound early on, and he added an Electro Harmonix Small Clone in 1980 which is about when that pedal was invented.

When I first published the article, this part of it included a footnote, in which I stated “Kurt Cobain’s signature effects were a Small Clone chorus and a Boss distortion pedal (DS-1) that sounds a lot like the (Dunlop) MXR distortion pedal which was an early Wipers sound.” That is basically true, but it’s not the entire story, and in fact in a sense, what I realized shortly after publishing the article there is some misdirection going on with that as well.

By way of background, by the time I’d met Chris Newman in 2009 I’d spent quite a bit of time studying the music of Nirvana and Kurt Cobain’s techniques of songwriting and improvisation. Some of this was from listening to albums and live recordings, some from watching videos, and some from reading books and articles. I was particularly interested in how Cobain put songs together, but I also really liked how he created improvisational soundscapes with feedback and effects not unlike Jimi Hendrix.

Once I began to work with Chris musically, early 2009, I became aware pretty quickly, that Chris was an originator of the “grunge” sound as elucidated by bands like Mudhoney and post-grunge acts like PJ Harvey, Scout Niblett, etc. It took longer for me to see the connection between Chris and Nirvana. That had a lot to do with the way Chris’ recorded music had been sabotaged.

Lots of books have been written about Nirvana, and since 2013, they continue to be written. The difference is, I’ve stopped reading them. So I don’t know what, if any, new information has come out. What I did realize is that with regards to artists like Kurt Cobain (and others), there appears to be what amounts to a scripted narrative, and what essentially amounts to anointed gatekeepers of the narrative. And the narratives contain lies. Even two conflicting stories, when told, may both be lies (or contain enough omissions to effectively be lies). There are a few reasons for the scripting, and it seems one of the reasons is to direct attention away from anything having to do with Chris. And it’s not just because Chris was emulated while paradoxically also being ignored; it’s because Chris was being used in a number ways.

I say this, because in all the reading I’d done about Cobain as a musician, and in the live performances, you see him pretty consistently using just two effects pedals – the Electro Harmonix Small Clone chorus pedal and the Boss DS-1 or DS-2 distortion pedal. And everything that is written about Cobain says that’s what he used. But – and I’m sorry I don’t have sources to cite right now, but we can get to it later as this is all stuff that was published in books prior to 2009 – my recollection is that on the Nevermind album, the recording of Lithium was said to use a Big Muff, and that engineer Butch Vig claimed it was his idea to use that effect. My recollection is that, again, at least prior to 2009, no other Nirvana recording was said to use the Big Muff. However, bizarrely – and this was not anything I was aware of at the time – it turns out I’d published that Napalm Beach article within days of the 20th anniversary of the release of Nirvana’s final album, In Utero. And with that, some new information was coming forward, for example, the director’s cut of the Heart Shaped Box video was published for the first time in August 2013.

Possibly because of this anniversary, I found myself listening back to In Utero and realizing that there was Big Muff – and small clone – used on several songs. Two that stand out to me are Heart Shaped Box and Pennyroyal Tea.

So why was it, I wondered, that I’d read all these books about Cobain as a songwriter, and they all mentioned the use of Big Muff on Lithium, but none of them mentioned that Big Muff was used throughout In Utero?

And having read all of those books and articles, I saw Cobain was credited – including by the Electro Harmonix company – as an innovator of this sound – and by now I know that everyone who did this had to know better. They had to know who the real innovator was – that it was Chris Newman. So a reasonable person would have to wonder why this would be kept covered up. And it gets even weirder when you get into pattern-based evidence, and by pattern based evidence I mean how Cobain generally was with regards to other musicians in his community. He was always giving shout outs. And because of his fame, a shout out from Cobain was like fairy dust – immediately the band he name checked would get increased attention, notoriety, maybe even a record deal.

By now it’s pretty clear to me that some of the answers to this are found in the songs themselves – Heart Shaped Box, which expresses the desire to “kill your cancer when you turn black” (Chris died of cancer last year) – Very Ape which as I’ve noted in the past lyrically evokes both a poem I wrote in the late 1980s called Atrophy and a song of Chris’ from the early 1980s called Into The Sky (which also used Big Muff and Small Clone and while never formally recorded, was apparently bootlegged from a Seattle performance) – and Pennyroyal Tea, in which Cobain laments “I’m a liar and a thief.”

Cobain seems to have been a warm, generous-hearted human being. It’s not that he didn’t want to explicitly recognize Chris’ contributions, but it’s that he felt he couldn’t.

Napalm Beach – Into The Sky – Golden Crown, Seattle 1982