Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [224]
A few of us started to talk, and there certainly was a need for a public gathering and a private gathering. It occurred to me that it would be a good idea to have the private service at the same time as the public gathering so that the public didn’t try to find the private service. There was a church near downtown Seattle that I’d gone to a few times and I called and said this is what had happened in this community—the reverberations are international, there’s a real need for a safe place for a smallish group of people to come together and have a service—and they were really open.
MARCO COLLINS I spoke at the memorial at the Seattle Center. We played a tape from Courtney, and it was intense. At the end, when Kurt’s music was coming out of this fountain—the speakers were built in—there was this total chilling fuckin’ moment of anarchy, where all these kids, fully clothed, just start diving into this fountain. It was just super-fuckin’ beautiful.
ALICE WHEELER I met Danny Goldberg and all those people at the funeral. It was really odd, because there were all these guys in suits at the door and they knew who everyone was. They did not look on a piece of paper to see your name or anything, and I’d never met these people before. And then I realized when I got in that there were so few of the rock crowd there that that’s how they knew us. Half of the church was his extended family, and then there was a whole group of all the people from L.A., and then maybe 25 rock people. I was surprised ’cause I thought he was a lot more popular than that. I never really thought I was like his super-great friend or anything, but then after the fact it’s like, I guess so few people really connected with him.
LORI BARBERO We were pretty close. When Kurt was in Minneapolis, we hung out a lot. His coat got stolen one night, and I gave him that one sweater that he wore all the time, a greenish, brownish V-neck. When I gave it to him, it had thumb holes ’cause I’d been doing that since I was a little kid. When he put it on and put his thumbs through the holes, I go, “I do that to my sweaters,” and he goes, “So do I!” He goes, “I’ve done it since I was a little kid.” I go, “Me, too!” I also gave him the jeans with all the patches on them. It still really upsets me when I see pictures of him wearing the sweater and the jeans.
Courtney’s not the most complimentary person, but when I went to Seattle for the memorial, she told me, “Lori, Kurt really loved you. He talked about you all the time.” Courtney’s usually not like that. Thank you for saying that, you know?
ELIZABETH DAVIS-SIMPSON The thing that I remember most about the funeral was Courtney spoke and she quoted from the Bible from Job, and I was really blown away by her ability to speak so eloquently under duress.
JENNIFER FINCH There was a moment when Courtney was giving her eulogy and Frances was just like, “Mommy, where are you?” It was so sad.
SLIM MOON Danny Goldberg gave the most ill-conceived, offensive speech. I like Danny Goldberg. I don’t think he’s an evil man. Danny’s thing was really offensive because he wanted to talk about what a great guy, what a kindhearted, decent person Kurt was, and so he gave examples of something that Kurt hadn’t really wanted to do—that Kurt had really objected to on personal-belief-system grounds—that he had begged and cajoled and gotten Kurt to do. Then he gave another example of something that Kurt hadn’t wanted to do, that Kurt felt would violate his personal values, that Danny’s wife, Rosemary Carroll, had begged and cajoled until Kurt gave in. And then he gave a third story of Kurt really not wanting to do something. I can’t remember what they were, but they were all business decisions that some would call “selling out.”
It just cemented a lot of people’s belief that if you go into the major-label