Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [225]
DANNY GOLDBERG Courtney asked me to speak. I was thinking about Courtney and about Kurt’s mom and about John Silva; those were the people that were on my mind. Just trying to give some spiritual view of things about what he did while he was here and the immortality of the soul, which I believe in. There’s no way you can make people feel good about such a horrible, horrible thing, and there’s people that felt that Kurt’s success was a betrayal of his punk-rock roots, and that I was one of the collaborators in having him go from being a punk-rock artist to an international celebrity who killed himself. The truth is, if it hadn’t been me, he would have picked someone else. Kurt wanted to do that.
I’m glad I was the one to have been able to do it, because I loved him and I loved working with him. I don’t believe for a minute that Kurt’s ambitions were caused by me. I had a lot of visibility, and when you have that kind of visibility—which can be good for you, and it helped my career in many ways—the flip side is people want to be mad at somebody. I’m one of the visible people they can be mad at.
SUSAN SILVER At the end of the service, I went up to offer my condolences to Courtney, and she saw me coming and just turned her back to me and closed this circle of people she was talking with, so obviously she wasn’t interested in any sort of contact. Which is fine—it certainly wasn’t a day about our potential friendship.
NILS BERNSTEIN Take what you will from the fact that after Kurt’s funeral, two of the people closest to him had separate events for people to gather at. Courtney had a party and Krist had a party—they were wakes, I guess—at the exact same time. Krist and Shelli never got along well with Courtney. You chose which one you were gonna go to. Which did I go to? Both. (Laughs.) Courtney’s was more family, and more of the label and industry people from out of town. It had a much different vibe from Krist’s, which was more friends and musicians.
BOB WHITTAKER I didn’t go to the service because of the media and all that stuff. But I went to Novoselic’s house after, and Novoselic took me out on the porch and read me the eulogy that he had read. I burst into tears and left.
MARCO COLLINS That night, after the memorial, Courtney was with Kat from Babes in Toyland, and she was loaded as fuck, and I remember my radio station called me and said, “Courtney is downstairs in a limo. She wants to come up and all she’s saying on the phone is, ‘I want to come up there and make you guys stop playing fucking Pumpkins and play Kurt.’ ” We had been doing 24-hour Nirvana, and at that point we’d started playing other bands again.
The ratings on something like that would be monster—she wanted to use our station as a place to mourn on the air. She does everything in public, that’s for sure. I remember going, “Fuck, no, man. She’s gonna say a bunch of shit she’ll regret later.” I was like, “Just tell her to call me,” and she called me, but she was loaded, slurring. There’s no fuckin’ way I was going to let her go on the air at that point. It would have been a fuckin’ crime.
KAT BJELLAND I’d gotten a flight out there to go to the funeral and to hang out with Courtney and support her. In the funeral home, I saw him dead, which was more than disturbing. She made me hold his hand. Isn’t that gross? I just sat there, frozen. Paralyzed. It was icky, awful. I never told anybody that before, except my friends. I just feel like gettin’ it out of my system because I’m sick of holding secrets.
I had a nervous breakdown right after that, when I got home to Minneapolis.
MATT LUKIN Years later, Courtney started talking a lot of shit about Mudhoney not being at Kurt’s funeral. I’m like, Fuck that! We were busy! We were on the other coast! My then-wife was there—I guess I was somewhat represented by her. At one point, Courtney invited each of us to pick a guitar of