Weâll probably never really know the intent of the note that was found in Kurt Cobainâs wallet the day he killed himself 20 years ago and first made public this week â" the one that appears, at first read, to badly disparage his wife, Courtney Love.
"Do you Kurt Cobain take Courtney Michelle Love to be your lawful shredded wife," goes the scrawl (below), âeven when sheâs a bitch with zits and siphoning all yr money for doping and whoringâ¦"
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The note is written on stationery from the Phoenix Hotel, a hip and gritty rocker hideout in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. The last time Nirvana played in the Bay Area was New Yearâs Eve 1993 at the Oakland Coliseum, less than four months before Cobain wrote a page-long, heart-wrenching suicide note in red pen, pointed a shotgun at himself and took his own life.
Was this new note written during that weekend in the Bay? Hole had wrapped its â93 tour dates a month before, so itâs at least plausible that Love was in San Francisco with him.
Given their known troubles with drugs and stormy interaction, itâs conceivable that the note was every bit as vitriolic as it sounds, written in a moment of sardonic rage.
Given their dark senses of humor and penchant for mischief, itâs also conceivable that the note was some kind of inside joke between lovers and co-dependents; a tongue-in-cheek renewal of vows vis-Ã -vis their many shared flaws, scrawled on stationery in an intimate hotel-room moment and carried around for months as a keepsake.
And given that the note was found in Cobainâs wallet, it makes little sense that it was intended as some kind of addendum to his actual suicide note, wherein he calls Love a âgoddess of a wife who sweats ambition and empathy.â He had probably forgotten it was even there.
And yet the two sentiments are offered â" beneath headlines implying that the wallet note âmocksâ and âscornsâ their union â" as a sharp contrast. Which is really just an excuse to subtly speculate all over again that Love was responsible for Cobainâs misery and, by proxy, demise.
Ironically enough, it was investigatorsâ anticipation of just this sort of thing that brought the note â" along with more than 30 new photographs of the death scene â" to light in the first place. Knowing that the 20-year anniversary would crank up old conspiracy theories, detectives quietly reviewed the case, only to confirm without equivocation that Cobain committed suicide.
But during that review, they found a roll of film that was undeveloped because detectives at the time determined that they had all the prints and Polaroids they needed. The new photographs didnât reveal much; most were exteriors of the home, though one snapshot of a cigar box heroin kit intercepted a lot of pageviews last month.
That prompted CBS News to file a public records request, which turned up hundreds of pages of documents, including the wallet note.
The one whose meaning weâll never truly understand.
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