Napalm Beach, Snow Bud and the Flower People, Divining Rods, Boo Frog
This is one of the many posters advertising for a show Chris would play that was secretly making Chris the butt of the joke (and of course later, when it was Boo Frog, we were both the butt of the joke. You can decide for yourself whether the Nirvana poster deliberately evokes it. Bound, endangered women were kind of a staple of 1980s punk rock posters. In this case she looks like a 1940s movie star… kind of like Francis Farmer.
I’ve shown how some of my journal entries seem to have made it into popular songs including Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun,” Smashing Pumpkins “Bullet With Butterfly Wings,” and Nirvana’s “Sappy,” but in fact there are many more instances. In some cases there are incidents that happened that may not have had associated journal entries, or it’s just a phrase taken from my journals, so that it’s harder to make the case. This would include Hole’s “Asking For It,” and Nirvana’s songs “Very Ape,” “Pennyroyal Tea,” and “Something In The Way” (this is just off the top of my head). With regards to Chris, there are links to Nirvana’s “Very Ape” and to “Heart Shaped Box.” And then there are things like Leonard Cohen’s “Famous Blue Raincoat” which doesn’t reference a journal entry, but is pretty clearly a reference to a photo that was stored in an album along with a lock of my hair. What do you do with that? I don’t know because I’m not a lawyer and so far, lawyers are all afraid to touch this.
There are things I know, but cannot prove, like John Lennon putting a lick of mine into the beginning of the song “Woman” – it’s the suspended riff used in the intro, behind the phrase “for the other half of the sky.” Even though I was a child, I was already playing guitar and I played this suspended lick over and over and over. It’s not that this is actionable in court or that I would want to take it to court, but that it’s like a hidden message. That said, looking at what’s happened to us, I think that some of the more obvious stuff should be under consideration for court cases.
Chris played a lot more guitar than I did over the years, performed and recorded, and his style was copied in a lot of ways, including, I would say, in the theme song of “Magnum P.I.” (possibly a sources of the Zoolander joke about “magnum”). But that’s just style – people copy styles all the time. The reason I bring it up is because the same people profiting from the copying Chris’ style will turn around and say Chris as an artist wasn’t worth a damn.
I’ll note here that I’ve seen hints that the guitar player for The Carpenters took inspiration from Chris’ guitar playing. This would have been in the early 1970s.
Music-wise, the feel of Nirvana’s “Lithium” seems to have been inspired by Chris’ song Pugsley, and this is repeated again in PJ Harvey’s “Meet Ze Monsta.” And if I could access Chris’ archival materials – journals and tapes and that sort of thing, I suspect I’d find a lot more. So the thefts that have happened over the years were just not property thefts, as well as intellectual property thefts, but evidence tampering. This idea that all this crime can somehow be justified with libelous stories collected and distributed by the FBI is beyond absurd. Theft is theft and libel is libel and the repeated pattern is of crimes (theft, libel, medical malfeasance, kidnapping, assassination) committed specifically in order to cover up other crimes (theft, sex trafficking, child trafficking, medical trafficking, nonconsensual human subjects research, malfeasance, graft, murder) along with various other tactics and techniques like control of focus. The depravity of all of this, not to mention the criminality, senseless waste, and stupidity, is honestly, for me, almost beyond comprehension. I think anyone in my position would want to see the perpetrators of this collection of crimes, regardless of who they are, held accountable under the criminal statutes of this nation, same as they themselves do to others. They should not be permitted to kidnap and murder their way out of everything.
With regards to intellectual property theft, a lot would probably be cleared up by access to what must be mountains of stolen journals and other creative materials from Chris’ lifetime. In some cases, Chris was performing songs for years before recording them. Someone recently uploaded a bootleg to YouTube of a Napalm Beach performance from New Years Eve 1985 at Satyricon in which they perform a song called My Master Calls, a song that would not be recorded until 1993’s Curiosities, eight years later. At first I thought that the performance couldn’t have been from 1985 because of the presence of that song, but it later became clear that for whatever reason, the song had not been recorded in the studio until years later. In addition, there seem to be songs that show up on live recordings and bootlegs that were never recorded including in 1982, “Into The Sky” (among the inspirations for Nirvana’s 1993 song “Very Ape”) and a 1986 performance of a song called “Mercury” that was uploaded by Mike Lastra. Chris for whatever reason was ambivalent about both these songs, though I think both of them are good songs. (In the case of “Into The Sky,” Chris said, ironically, that “They didn’t seem to like it in Seattle.”)
When I met Chris in 2009 he either had never heard the 1994 Mazzy Star song “Fade Into You” or he had just recently heard it for the first time. Something I noticed, that he never mentioned to me, was the similarity between the Mazzy Star song and his song Crippled Mind. I don’t know when Chris wrote Crippled Mind, and I didn’t think to ask, because this was before I knew anything about surveillance or intellectual property thefts – I’d seen things I thought were weird coincidences. He recorded Stoned and Alone in 1996 under what seems like almost desperate circumstances. Now of course I wonder how long he was playing the “Crippled Mind” chord progression at home or in performances, unaware he was under this kind of surveillance. But he wrote his lyrics in his journals, and that is one reason the journals are important to unravelling mysteries like this.
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.
Here’s their joke. By 1994, Monica Nelson was living in New York City. For subscribers, article is in this issue.
Sometimes I give sweeping broad overviews. Sometimes, not very often, I focus on the same thing, more and more, like a microscope drawing down to see that one detail. If you are genuinely interested in understanding the truth about something, both approaches can be useful. In this post, I’m going to focus in on three comments on the long Pacific Northwest Music Archives Facebook thread that was closed down.
Being as I’ve been blocked from the group, and the group is not viewable to me, this means that not only am I unable to post, I am unable to see what has been posted. I don’t think this is really a small matter. Yes, of course it’s within their rights. But there’s what you have a right to do, and what is the right thing to do – those may be different things.
I was never told that I was out of line and asked to modify my behavior in a particular way. Rather, some of my posts were deleted and then I was blocked. Why would that be? Was I harboring some passive aggressive attitude? Maybe some of it could have been interpreted in that way – but is this how fragile all these rock n’ rollers are? In honesty, I don’t think my “behavior” was the real problem. I think the real problem is that I don’t adhere to the script, and secondarily, there are a few other people in the group who may post things that I will see that give me clues about sources of malfeasance in the Seattle scene – malfeasance that affects me personally, malfeasance that led to Chris being homeless, and ultimately murdered.
This idea that the northwest music community is a big supportive family with healthy sporting competition and minor regional rivalries is a marketing scheme that both Chris and I bought into. It doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.
There are about three posts from the first thread that was shut down I want to look at a bit more closely.
A few comments. Pattern-wise, something I’m seeing increasingly are discussions that start out being about one thing, but then someone within the discussion sliding it into something else. When you’re involved in a discussion like this, that can be really disorienting. I think we’re talking about a certain topic, then suddenly it’s a different topic. In this case, the question was pretty simple: First, did Nirvana open for (or even play on a bill with) the Obituaries at Squid Row in Summer 1988 as was reported by Jerry Thackeray aka Everett True in 2006, based on an interview with James Burdyshaw of Catbutt, who said that he had seen Nirvana open for the Obituaries at Squid Row in Summer 1988. And secondarily, as a follow up, did Nirvana ever play on a bill with the Obituaries, as has been reported by several sources, and has been on the Obituaries Wikipedia page, I think since 2007 (that’s fifteen years if you’re counting). And I had done some follow up research and had by this point concluded that based on the available evidence, Nirvana never played on a bill with the Obituaries.
I had originally tagged Monica Nelson into this thread, not Burdyshaw, mainly because I “know” her. But she didn’t respond directly. Meanwhile, Burdyshaw comes back and says he spoke with her, “and she’s not certain when or where she saw them either.”
But this wasn’t about Monica and the Obituaries seeing Nirvana, it was about them playing on a bill with Nirvana. The topic has shifted.
There there’s a lot of lady doth protest too much stuff, but even within that, it looks like Burdyshaw is throwing out hints and suggestions about how the world works. The word “ultra.” The mention of the Beatles. The phrase “bloody show.” The reference to Hamburg and the Reeperbahn. 64 Spiders. The Rainbow Tavern. Xmas. Nobody.
Something I’ll add is that I believe that Chris Newman met Kurt Cobain in 1988, in Portland, backstage at Satyricon. If you think about this, even if you weren’t part of the community at the time – it starts to get pretty hard to believe the stories about Kurt Cobain first meeting Courtney Love anytime after 1990.
Matthew B. Ward seems to be the guy who deleted my posts, etc. I didn’t know any background about him, but when I look him up online, it gets interesting (to me) pretty quickly, because he has this weird kind of adjacent to me thing going on that certain people (including Courtney Love) have, by which I mean, they have a background that seems to cross paths with or run parallel to my background in different ways. Here are the things in Ward’s background that are adjacent to things in my background (or people who were close to me, like Mike Payne)
“A book written about your S.O.” – I was talking about the factual inaccuracies in Eric Danielson’s book, without referring to it or him directly. I have mixed feelings about Danielson’s work overall, because in some cases, he did some good work with archiving, for example, a discography (although it’s possible a lot of the work was done for him behind the scenes). But in the full scheme of things, there’s probably been more harm than good done because of all the inaccuracies and distortions, and because there is such a paucity of material available, and Chris is no longer around to personally interview, etc. Danielson’s book was self-published, however, while Everett True’s book, and the Willamette Week article, etc, were not. So publishers are not doing due diligence in checking basic facts – and this isn’t just happening with one book – it’s a pattern.
Back to Ward – look carefully at the language he chooses:
“I can totally understand that it must have been bizarre and disorienting…”
This is the way people talk to me. It is a pattern. “You are anxious.” “You are disoriented.” “You feel a loss of control.” It’s always always always focused on my emotional state, as if that’s what this entire thing is about. The language is patronizing while feigning concern. And this is always when I’m trying to discuss facts.
Mansplaining on steroids.
I responded that (Danielson) – who Ward called an “attempted journalist” – literally has (I thought) a Masters Degree in Journalism and I explained my background, and why I know what responsible referencing and source checking looks like and that is a post which was deleted. By the way, I didn’t use Danielson’s name at all in these posts. I should say I just re-checked his bio and possibly I made a mistake (I say possibly because there’s a lot of shifting around going on). Danielson’s current Amazon bio says that he studied journalism, but both his BA (from University of Washington) and is MA (from George Washington University) are in history. This is a minor issue, because my complaint about Danielson is specifically that 1. he gets facts wrong 2. he doesn’t cite sources, and I have to add a third one now, which is that 3. when mistakes are pointed out to him, with evidence, he refuses to correct them. Historians know how to do this kind of due diligence as well as if not better than journalists. This refusing to correct factual and even damaging mistakes is another pattern. In some cases, it’s libelous. (I may come back to this because Danielson just republished his book on Chris with a new title.)
“I also don’t think there is an agenda in that particular case” Ward writes of the Danielson situation – but how exactly would he know, being as I gave no specific details? I didn’t mention Chris, Danielson, or the book by name. The truth is, Ward does know. He knows there is a massive agenda around Chris. At risk of being a bit harsh – how stupid does Matthew Ward think I am? Or is he simply trying to make me look stupid (another pattern) while possibly triggering me with his patronizing attitude?
I saw this kind of thing done to Chris all the time, and how he tried to cope with it year after year after year. Sometimes he would get triggered. Most often he just kept trying to do his own thing, looking for appreciation where he could find it.
Ward finishes the post by saying he’s blocked in a group that he co-administers for pointing out something factual – I can’t even wrap my mind around how you would be blocked from a group that you administer so I’ll just let that one go.
What mystery, exactly, did Burdyshaw clear up? It looks to me more like he got caught in a lie, which he was then permitted to back out of, relatively gracefully.
Ward goes on to mansplain “we should not read too much into the fact that aspects of the past will probably never be established for sure, especially when talking about murky, alcohol-fueled adventures that happened over 30 decades ago.”
30 decades – ? a weird – typo? So let’s say he meant 3 decades or 30 years. It’s a valid point explaining how Burdyshaw may have made an error (even though I don’t think he did and I’ll spare you that scrutiny) – but it doesn’t explain the point that I made several times which is that the editor/publisher/fact-checkers of the book did not do their jobs.
All these words are potentially coded language linked to financed malfeasance: murky, alcohol, fuel.
Ward again displays a sign that he’s got a background meshed into a mind control agenda (CIA) – “aspects of the past will probably never be established for sure.” Look, you can get a pretty good handle on certain aspects, like did a band play a show at a particular location at a particular time, especially if the band was Nirvana.
The thing about Nirvana is they became so famous so quickly that it sent a shockwave through everything. If you saw Nirvana prior to them becoming famous, you didn’t have decades to forget about it before they became famous.
My current claim is this: the reason for muddying the water around Nirvana is because there was a plan for Kurt Cobain and the plan was murder by suicide. And it was conspiracy. And in order to cover it up, more murders. And I am a big target for these people and you can imagine why. That is why this crowd relentlessly patronizes me, libels me, and tells all these lies.
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.
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.
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.
