Taken from http://www.hightimes.com

                              HIGH TIMES
                          APRIL 96 VOL. 248
                             COVER STORY


                       WHO KILLED KURT COBAIN?
                   BY TIM KENNEALLY AND STEVE BLOOM

Two  years  after the death of Kurt Cobain, a number of people believe the
leader of Nirvana did not commit suicide and that his death was the result
of foul play. You'll be shocked by what they have to say.

TOM GRANT
PRIVATE EYE OF THE STORM

Beverly Hills, CA  private  investigator  Tom Grant,  a 49-year-old grand-
father of seven and seven-year veteran of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's
Department,  hardly falls into the demographic of the average Nirvana fan.
So  it's  not  surprising  that  when,  on  Easter Sunday,  April 3, 1994,
Courtney Love hired him  to  track  down her husband Kurt Cobain's missing
credit card,   he  initially  thought  little  of  the assignment. "I knew
vaguely who Nirvana was," says the PI.

Grant  was  about to embark on a road of deception, intrigue and cover-ups
that would lead him, nine months later, to a shocking conclusion regarding
the death of  Kurt Cobain,  who allegedly   committed  suicide on April 8,
1994.

Grant's  first  clues  that all was not right came during his meeting with
Love later that day at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills, where she was
staying.  "She told  me  on the phone that someone was using her husband's
credit card and she wanted to find out who it was," recounts Grant. "Then,
when  I  met  her at the hotel, she changed that immediately to, 'It's not
someone else using  his card,  it's him, and I'm trying to locate him.' It
just kind of spread from there."

Cobain,  at  the  time,  was AWOL from the Exodus Recovery Center, a drug-
rehab  clinic  in nearby Marina del Rey. Working on Love's suggestion that
Kurt  "may  have gone to Seattle," Grant sub-contraced local investigators
to  do  surveillance   on  Cobain's  known  haunts  in  Seattle. What Love
neglected  to  tell  Grant  was  that  Michael "Cali" DeWitt, the couple's
nanny,  had  seen  Cobain  at  their house on Lake Washington Boulevard on
April 2,  the  day  before  she hired the PI. Given Grant's assertion that
Cobain died  "late Sunday morning [April 3] or early Monday morning [April
4]," this omission may have caused a fatal--and possibly deliberate--delay
in his investigation.

Grant  arrived in Seattle 11:30 PM on Wednesday, April 6. Dylan Carlson, a
close friend of Cobain's who from all reports was the singer's drug buddy,
took him  to  the house. It was raining as they searched the house at 2:15
AM  on  April 7.   But the garage/greenhouse a stone's throw away from the
main  house  remained   unexplored;  Carlson  failed  to direct him to the
greenhouse, later telling Grant that "it's just a dirty little room."

The  greenhouse  was a 19-foot by 23-foot room above the garage. The scene
that unfolded there on the morning of April 8, when an electrician noticed
a  body lying on the floor at 8:30 AM, could hardly be viewed as arbitrary
to  the  outside  world.  Cobain, who had  a predisposition toward suicide
(with perhaps one attempt already under his belt--the overdose on Rohypnol
in  Rome  on March 4, 1994), was discovered with a Remington M-11 20-gauge
shotgun resting  on  his chest and a pool of blood seeping from his ear. A
single shell  had  entered through the roof of his mouth and lodged in his
head. A  kiss-off note  lay  nearby.  A neater example of suicide would be
hard to find.  It  appeared that Kurt Cobain had finally put an end to his
miserable, drug-plagued, multiplatinum life.

Exactly  a month later, on May 8, Grant wrote a letter to Love, who he was
still  working  for,  expressing his  doubts about  the generally accepted
suicide  theory.  "I'm sure you know by now that my investigation has been
somewhat  more  active  than you might have been aware of...I consider the
circumstances surrounding  your husband's  death  to be highly suspicious.
I've decided to continue working  on this case until I see its conclusion,
without additional charges."

Amazingly,  Love  continued  to  employ  Grant  for the next seven months,
during which time he was given unrelated and largely insubstantial matters
to  look  after.   Grant believes she kept him on the payroll so she could
keep  tabs  on  him and periodically "pick his brain" for what he knew and
didn't know about the Kurt case.

Disregarding  the  Seattle police department's report in the Seattle Times
on May 11 that stated "there's been no foul play--just an early death that
no  one  could  explain,"  Grant reached his own dramatic conclusion eight
months  later:   "Michael DeWitt  and  Courtney Love  were  involved  in a
conspiracy  that resulted  in  the  murder  of  Kurt Cobain, and there may
possibly be others involved."

The  scenario,  according  to  Grant, goes like this: Kurt was planning to
divorce  Courtney  and  simultaneously  leave  the  music business. He had
spoken to  Rosemary Carroll,  one  of the couple's attorneys, about having
Courtney  taken  out of his will. The note found with Cobain's body, Grant
asserts, was  a farewell  to  his  fans,  not  a suicide note. "It was not
addressed  to  Frances  [his daughter]  and Courtney, as the police report
claims, and it doesn't say anything in there about suicide," says Grant.

Of  course,  Cobain's  retirement  would  have  resulted  in untold future
revenue losses. His decision not to headline the Lollapalooza '94 tour had
already  cost  somewhere  in the vicinity of $9.5 million.  And, no matter
how  generous the  settlement,  a  divorce  would  have  led  to a further
depletion of Courtney's coffers, certainly amounting to less than what she
stood to gain from inheriting  the Cobain fortune. With that kind of money
at stake, Grant contends, the situation was ripe for murder

"There's  no  doubt  in  my mind that Kurt was hanging out up there in the
greenhouse  with  a shotgun,"  explains  Grant.  "That  was  like a little
lookout  tower  for  him  over his whole property, and I do firmly believe
that he was in fear of his life. He was going to be flying out of Seattle,
probably within hours, certainly within the next day or two.

"So he was up there, and whoever came in there with him was probably doing
drugs with  him  until  they got him loaded. He had three times the lethal
dose of heroin in his system [at the time of his death].  Now that doesn't
necessarily  mean  he  would  have  died from  that dose, but it certainly
would've put  him out.  It's highly unlikely that he would shot himself up
in  both  arms,  put  the  needle away in his little kit and then have the
mental  capacity  to   sit  there  and  manipulate  this shotgun and shoot
himself.  If  he wasn't unconscious, he was at least to the point where he
wasn't aware of what  was  going on. Anybody could have done anything with
him."

Grant  says  he  contacted the Seattle police immediately after the body's
discovery; not surprisingly, he received coolly. "There's a body there and
a shotgun and what they think is a suicide note, so it's real easy to jump
to  that conclusion,"  he  says. "It also makes their job a lot easier. In
fact,  they  were  upset that the homicide units even had to go out there.
The homicide guys told me, `You know, we wouldn't even be on this thing if
it  wasn't  Kurt Cobain.'  The   stuff  they  fed the press about how they
investigated  it  as a possible homicide is total bullshit. This was never
looked at as a possible homicide."

He attributes their reluctance to investigate further to both human nature
and  manipulation  on  Love's part. The missing-person report phoned in by
Love  (for  which she claimed  to  be Cobain's mother, Wendy O'Connor) was
ambiguously  worded  to suggest that Cobin had purchased the shotgun after
he  fled  the rehab center (although a receipt found at the scene confirms
that he bought the shotgun before he left Seattle for Marina del Rey). And
she continually  stressed to  the  police,  the public and anyone else who
would listen that her husband was suicidal.

Grant's  concern  about  the  "copycat"  suicides committed by misinformed
Nirvana fans  spurred  him  to  go  public with his claims on December 13,
1994, in an interview on the "The Gil Gross Show,"  which is syndicated to
175  stations  by  CBS Radio.  Love's lawyers learned of Grant's scheduled
appearance when Gross promoted the interview on the show a few days before
it took  place. "They called and warned us that we better not do it," says
the show's  producer, Greg Cockrell. "They made clear there would be legal
action. Gil said, 'Go ahead, we're doing it anyway.'"

Except for requesting a tape of the show, Gross never heard back from Camp
Courtney.   Her  lawyers, however, did succeed in gaining a public apology
from  "The Tom Leykis Show,"  a  radio  program  sydicated by Westwood One
Entertainment to  116 stations, after they  ran an interview with Grant on
January 5, 1995.

Love's attorneys  also filed a complaint with the California Department of
Consumer Affairs in an attempt to revoke  Grant's  investigator's license.
Grant recently applied for and received a renewal of it.

"They  are  making  an all-out effort to scare everybody away," say Grant.
"Of course, they're blowing smoke. Anything they would do would just bring
more attention to the case, and that's exactly what they want to avoid."

Conversely,  that's exactly what Grant is trying to encourage. Though he's
been  accused of being a profit-motivated publicity-monger, Grant says his
aim is true. He continues to compile information, hoping to build a strong
enough  argument  to  compel  the Seattle police to reopen the case. "They
need  to answer a lot of questions," he challenges. "But they won't unless
they're under  enough  pressure.  Until we  get some acknowledgment of the
facts  and   the   details   in  the   press -- the  inconsistencies,  the
misinformation--there's  nothing that can be done. We can't get past first
base."

When that happens, "additional information will be revealed that will lead
the investigators down  a  path  of discovery," promises the PI, "and this
house of cards will fall."

EL DUCE
GUNMAN FOR HIRE?

Watching  El Duce perform with his band, the Mentors, Hollywood's kings of
porn-metal, certain  images  come immediately  to mind. As the stocky lead
singer  growls  his  way  through salty tales of rape, revenge and general
debauchery, shirtless and wearing his trademark black hood, he resembles a
medieval  executioner.   T  make  the  picture complete, all he needs is a
headsman's ax.

The  resemblance apparently did not go unnoticed by Courtney Love, who met
El Duce in the late '80s through Hole's original drummer, Carolyn Rue (who
was  going  out with the Mentors' guitarist, Sickie Wifebeater). According
to  El Duce,  Love  showed up at the Rock Shop, a Hollywood recordstore at
1644  Wilcox   Avenue,  a   few   days  before New Year's Eve  in  1993 at
approximately 8:30 PM. As El Duce waited outside for a friend, a limousine
transporting Love pulled up in  front  of  the  store. Love then allegedly
made El Duce an offer he couldn't refuse.

"El, I really needa big favor of you," she said. "My old man's been a real
asshole lately. I need you to blow his fucking head off."

"Are you serious?" El Duce asked.

"Yeah, I'll give you fifty thousand dollars to blow his fucking head off,"
Love confirmed.

"I'm  serious  if  you  are,"  El Duce said. "I wasn't really sure she was
serious. And then she said, `Where can I reach you?' At the time, I didn't
have  a phone, but I got my messages at the Rock Shop, so I said, `You can
reach  me  here.'"  She   went into the store and he handed her a business
card.

Karush Sepedjian,  who  manages  the  Rock Shop, recalls Love's visit this
way:  "El  was  kicking  it out on the bench in front of the store and she
came up.  I  overheard  a little bit of it--I heard her saying, `Look, can
you handle doing this, can you get this done?   What  do you want for it?'
They  were  talking  about  knocking  off Kurt Cobain. Then El brought her
inside and said to me, quietly, `She offered me fifty grand.' She took the
card  and told me she would be calling me, looking for Ela few months down
the line."

In  March,  Love  called the Rock Shop looking for El Duce. Sepedjian took
the  call.   "I  said,  `He's  not  around,  he's on tour.'  She was like,
`What?!!?' She  was screaming. `That on of a bitch, we made an agreement!'
She was cursing, saying, `What am I gonna do?' I said, `I don't know, I've
got a business to run, you know? Good-bye.'"

Ten  days  later, Cobain's body was found. "I was like, `Whoa, I wonder if
she actually did pay some sucker to blow his head off!'" the gravel-voiced
El Duce ays. Sepedjian agrees: "Maybe she got somebody else."

"I  think  Kurt was getting ready to divorce her for adultery charges," El
Duce  theorizes.  "She had to have him whacked right away so she could get
the money."

Often--and  understandably--accused  of  misogyny, the unabashedly puerile
Mentors--dummer/vocalist  El Duce,  bassist Dr. Heathen Scum and guitarist
Sickie Wifebeater--have  been  delightng  their cultish cadre of followers
and  offending  everyone  else  since  1977. Authors of such controversial
songs  as  "On the Rag,"   "ClapTrap" and "Heterosexuals Have the Right to
Rock,"  the  band has  attained notoriety in underground music circles for
its bizarre live shows, which include go-go dance and various sex toys.

Perhaps  their  greatest  claim to fame occurred in 1985, when Tipper Gore
quoted their song  "Golden Showers"  at a Congressional hearing during the
Parents  Music  Resource  Center campaign against obscene lyrics. "Bend up
and  smell  my anal vapors,'  Tipper quoted El Duce, "Your face will be my
toilet paper."
               
El Duce may just be trying to cash in on the Cobain-death controversy: His
side-project band is suitably named Courtney Killed Kurt.

HANK HARRISON
DEADHEAD DADDY DEAREST

Hank Harrison, Courtney Love's father, doesn't get much respect. Generally
portrayed  by the  media as Love's deadbeat dad, Harrison wants to set the
record straight about his life with her.

While  most accounts contend Harrison has had little contact with Courtney
after his  marriage to  her mother,  Linda Carroll, broke  up when she was
five years old,  he  tells a different story. "I was with her from the day
she was  born  until  the time  she was six, either every weekend or every
day,"  he  explains from somewhere in Northern California. "Then they went
to Oregon and she was adopted out from under me. I didn't have any contact
with  her  until she was  fifteen, when I got her out of juvenile hall and
she  came to  live  with me.  I  had  complete custody ofher until she was
eighteen."

Courtney  had  been  sent  to  live  in  juvenile hall (reform school) for
shoplifting.  Harrison  believes that's where she picked up a particularly
bad  habit. "Juvenile hall taught her how to snitch," he says. "It took me
a  long  time  to  figure out  where she learned  to snitch. She got extra
favors in juvie by turning people in.  She  snitched  me  off  a couple of
times to the cops for having grass in the house."

Love's  words about her father are equally unkind. She claims that she was
conceived  on  a date rape, and was given LSD and beaten by her father. "I
don't  want  this  man near me ever,' she told the San Francisco Chronicle
last May.  Harrison--who went to  the  College of San Mateo with Phil Lesh
before  Lesh cofounded the Grateful Dead, managed the group when they were
known as the Warlocks and has written two books about his experiences with
the band (The Dead Book and The Dead)--is constantly characterized by Love
someone who  has  forever  milked his Grateful Dead affiliation. "He makes
his  living as a parasite off the Grateful Dead," she said in the February
issue  of Playboy.  "He scams  all these Deadheads who worship him because
they think he is close to the Dead."

"Phil changed  her  diapers!" Harrison responds, incredulous to Courtney's
barbs.  "Jerry's  first baby, Heather, and Courtney used to play together.
It  hurts  me so much that she doesn't realize how lucky she was to be one
of the chosen  children of that scene. Sure, I make a living off the Dead.
There's  a demand for the books. What does she want me to do, let my books
go out of print?"

Despite  these  jabs  at  her  dad,  Courtney has been known to flaunt her
Grateful Dead  credentials.  The Playboy article reported that Lesh is her
godfather (true),  and  she has often  stated  that she is pictured on the
back of the Dead's Aoxomoxoa album (false) and attended Woodstock when she
was five (also false).

Harrison's  next book, Beyond Nirvana: The Legacy of Kurt Cobain, won't do
much  to  patch up the feud between father and daughter. In it, he charges
her with complicity in the death of her husband.  "She  profited  from his
death  in  a  considerable  way,"  he says. "I know for a fact that he was
trying  to  divorce  her  and  she didn't want the divorce, so she had him
killed   or  knew  it  was going to happen. The timing was of the essence.
There is no doubt in my mind that Kurt Cobain was murdered."

Harrison,  who  never met his rock-star son-in-law and has yet to meet his
grand daughter, Frances Bean, knew something was wrong the minute he heard
Cobain was dead. "I suspected some foul play," he says.

Richard Le,  who  hosts  a  public-access  TV show in Seattle called "Kurt
Cobain Was Murdered,"  was the first to publicly reach the same conclusion
--at  Cobain  did  not commit suicide. Harrison read Lee's postings on the
Internet  and  called   him  up.   Lee "didn't have anything substantial,"
Harrison says, "but when I got a hold of [private investigator] Tom Grant,
I  started  thinking,  'Oh,  man,  do I feel good.' Now I know that sounds
weird,  but  I felt good for myself, because I wasn't psychotic anymore. I
wasn't   imagining   things.  I wasn't alone. I wasn't the only guy in the
world that thought that some foul play was going on."

Regardless  of  the  bad blood between Harrison and Love, he says, "It was
horribly  disappointing to find out that Grant thought my own daughter did
it.  It  took  me about six months of phone calls and talks and letters to
Grant,  and  complete  openness  to  Grant,  before  he'd  even  trust  me
sufficiently to talk to me, because when he found out who I was he figured
I was pulling  some kind of scam. He said, 'I know a lot about you, Hank.'
He  let  it be known that he had been checking me out. He couldn't believe
Courtney's own  father would be on his side." (Harrison contends, "I never
hit Courtney  or beat her or abused her or denied her anything. At no time
was Courtney ever given acid or anything like that.")

What evidence does Harrison have that Love was involved in Cobain's death?
First  and  foremost, he says, "Courtney has a dark side, a suppressed and
repressed  dark  side  to her personality that is extraordinarily violent.
She  tried  to  kill me twice, She's been extraordinarily violent with her
friends  and  was  kicked  out  of  every  band  she's been in for violent
outbursts.  It's  almost  like she has  multiple personalities. And one of
those personalities is really evil--really, really dark and sinister--more
so than you can imagine. I mean real sick. And I didn't make her that way.
I've  had  to  deal with this most of my adult life, after I lost her, and
then when I got her back and found out how screwed up she was."

Love, who  was  born  on  July 9, 1964 in San Francisco, reunited with her
father  in  1979  when  he  gained  custody  of her. Harrison had become a
technical  writer  at Lockheed and founded his own publishing imprint, The
Archives Press.  He  was  living on a houseboat in Sausalito, CA. "She was
really  impressed by the bohemian lifestyle," he recalls. "A lot of art, a
lot  of books. She was cool, but she was only fifteen. As she got more and
more  emancipated,  she  started  to  see  me  as  not  such  a successful
character.  She  wanted to have a bigger father who could do her some good
in terms of her showbiz fantasy.

"When  she  was  little--real,  real little--she really wanted to be a big
star. I  know  a  lot  of  girls say they want to be a movie star, but she
meant it. She'd just do a little dance for the party.  Anybody  who was in
the  house, she'd  do a dance for them. She'd always find some way to draw
attention to herself."

In  1980,  Courtney  moved to Ireland with her father, who took a two-year
sabbatical  there.  "She  lived  with  me for five months until the winter
snows melted. As soon as spring came along, she went to Liverpool. She was
boy-crazy. She was ballin' cats, turnin' tricks.  She  would dance and get
money  that  way  too.  Every  time I saw her, she had big bucks.She would
always  have money and clothes." This was Love's new-wave period, when she
groupied  around  England  with the  likes of Julian Cope and Echo and the
Bunnymen.

Harrison  returned  to the Bay Area in 1982, followed shortly by Courtney.
He  and  his  common-law  wife, Katrina, bought a Victorian house in Menlo
Park,  south of  the city, where Courtney would frequently visit. "We were
her  only  stable,  local Bay Area address," he says.  "She was itinerant,
going from crash pad to crash pad, punk scene to punk scene, junkie pad to
junkie  pad.   She was living in 'the Vats'--the abandoned Hamm's brewery.
People used to go down inside the vats and get drunk on the fumes. She was
a 'vat rat' for a while."

A cyberpioneer at the dawn of the Silicon Valley microcomputer revolution,
Harrison  took  the job as editor of Doctor Dobb's Journal and would go on
to hold positions at InfoWorld and A Plus magazines. These accomplishments
did  not  impress  Courtney.  She decorated her room in the 1870 Victorian
with  dozens of lit candles, lace and baby dolls, and replayed movies like
Frances,  Birdy  and Pretty in Pink. "She watched the Frances Farmer story
thirty-two times,"  Harrison says. "It worred me. I realized at that point
that Courtney was deeply troubled."

Courtney  would  spend the weekendsn San Francisco. One time she came back
"so  spaced  out  that we had to sit on her and give her Valium," says her
father, who was a veteran of bringing people down from bad acid trips. His
diagnosis  was that  Courtney  was on a highly dangerous mixture of heroin
and fentanyl. "This was  really severe. She was screaming at me and really
freaking out. She was psycho."

By the time Courtney turned 20 in 1984, she had developed friendships with
Portland,  Oregon  musicians Jennifer Finch (L7) and Kat Bjellad (Babes In
Toyland). Together  they  formed  Sugar Baby Doll before later splintering
into  three different groups. She toured around the country, from Portland
to  Minneapolis  to  Los Angeles   to  San Francisco.   In  L.A., Courtney
infiltrated  the  punk-rock scene: She was cast in two Alex Cox films, Sid
and  Nancy  and  Straight to Hell,  and  married  Leaving Trains' frontman
Falling James Morland. They lived together for eight months, then split up
one day after their wedding in 1989.

"I  think  the  main  problem was that I was on SST Records," Morland told
Nerve magazine in 1993. "She thought that was too small of a label for her
husband to be on. That wasn' very punk-rock  of her, was it?" He said they
did not maintain a "cordial or friendly relationship."

Harrison had lost contact with his only daughter in 1987. The falling out,
he  believes,  was  over heroin. "She called me on her birthday and wanted
money,"  he  says. "I  said,  'Why  don't  you fly up here? I'll get you a
ticket, we'll  sit down  and have a chat--or I'll fly down there and bring
you  some  money.'  She said she needed the money wired to her right away.
She was  strung  out.  I  told her that heroin is not my thing and I don't
want to support her doing heroin. She  promised  that she would never talk
to me again and she would have me killed."

During  the next six years--a period that saw Courtney start her own band,
Hole,  meet  Kurt Cobain,  the  meteoric   rise  of  his band Nirvana, the
marriage of Kurt and Courtneyand the birth of their daughter--Harrison was
out of the picture. All he knew was what he read in magazines. Finally, he
saw Courtney again at  a show featuring the Lemonheads, Fugazi and Hole in
San Francisco in the fall of 1993.

Harrison recalls: "I called first to make sure it was OK. She was happy to
see me, gave me big hugs.  She said she didn't want me to talk to anybody,
she  just  wanted  me to sit there, shut up and listen to he show. I had a
vodka  and  saw  the show. I was impressed with the band. I was just blown
away, really.

"The  next  day  I  met  her  at  the  hotel.  Courtney  was--and this I'm
absolutely   sure  of  because I saw it with my own eyes--having an affair
with Evan Dando. He and Courtney were sleeping together in the same bed. I
figured  Kurt  must be pretty liberal, because she's on the road with Evan
Dando, and  she's  constantly smooching all over him. They were very, very
chummy.  He  came up  to  me and shook my hand. He had read one of my Dead
books! He said, 'Let's go  to dinner. But Courtney yelled, 'No! Get out of
here!' She told him to go away.

"And then while we were in the room she called Kurt. She asked to speak to
Mr. Poup.  That's how  I  found  out what his secret name was. I never met
him, but I was in the room when she  talked to him on the other end of the
line. That was the closest I ever got to Kurt."

Harrison  ended  this  visit  by  asking Courtney if he could "come up [to
Seattle] and  see  the  baby over Christmas." She wrote down two addresses
and  phone  numbers that turned out to be bogus. Harrison now believes the
only reason Love "trotted me around" was because she wanted her bodyguards
to  "see  who I was, so that I could be taken care of at some future date.
That's  where  she's  at. She's way smarter than me. I've only got about a
130 IQ and a photographic memory, but I'm like a burned-out hippie kind of
guy.  I  don't  have  any  real guile  or bad karma. She's totally fucking
intellient. Like a surgeon or something. She thinks six or seven levels at
once, like her mother."

Hank Harrison has not had any contact with his now-infamous daughter since
then.   But  he's  convinced   she has been harassing him with "threats of
violence, hang-up calls and odd silences" on the phone." Last October, two
men tried to rough him up. "One guy started laying hands on me, pushing me
around," he says.  "I let the dogs out of the car and the dogs chased them
and they ran off. I don't know if that had anything to do with Courtney or
not, but I've been told that Courtney has a contract on me."

Are these  the deranged ramblings of a paranoid or the dead-on perceptions
of a truth-seeker?

"I am not trying to put my daughter in jail," Harrison expains. "It's just
that I  found myself  caught up in a web of bizarre events that affects my
life.  It  would  be very much like your child came home with plans for an
atom bomb in  his  briefcase  and you wanted to know where the fuck he got
them.  My  daughter  came home with a dead husband and I want to know what
the fuck happened!"

Did Courtney Love conspire to kill Kurt Cobain?

"Absolutely," contends her 55-year-old father. "I think he was drugged and
killed by people that Courtney had no control over.  They might have said,
'Look,  we're going to kill the guy--you have to go along with it.' Either
they told Courtney about it, or Courtney knew about it and was in on it in
some way, and kept her mouth shut.

"She tore Kurt apart. Even though he was a big rock star, he couldn't make
his old  lady happy. Nothing Kurt Cobain could do could make Courtney Love
happy. And so the guy got more and more and more depressed. If he did kill
himself, I know why!"

DAVID WOODARD
DREAM MACHINE WEAVER

No living American writer has influenced rock'n'roll songwriters more than
William Burroughs. Of stars who have paid homage to Burroughs,  none  made
as strong an impression on him as Kurt Cobain.  It   therefore came  as  a
surprise   to  the  editors  of  HIGH TIMES when on December 17, 1994, the
magazine received a fax from a Seattle-based group, "Friends Understanding
Kurt," laying partial blame for Cobain's suicide on the master himself.

The  gist  of  the  charge was that in the last months of his life, Cobain
acquired  a  device  called  the  Dream Machine, which had been created by
Burroughs'  friend  and   collaborator   Brion Gysin  and  popularized  by
Burroughs. The  Dream  Machine,  the  group wrote, is "a dangerous trance-
inducing contraption," and there has been a "string of suicides associated
with the machine since the '60s."  Furthermore,  they claimed, it  was "in
fact,  the catalyst in Kurt's unbelievably tragic, untimely death. To this
day  Courtney  ponders whether the Dream Machine is really responsible for
Kurt's death...If Kurt had not come into contact with its manufacturer, he
would be with us today."

The  Dream  Machine  consists  of  a  cardboard  cylinder with holes in it
attached  to a record-player turntable, in the middle of which sits a 100-
watt  light bulb.  When the machine is turned on, the cylinder spins at 78
rpm. Subjects  sit  in front  of he cylinder and close their eyes, and the
light  reflects through the holes in the spinning cylinder on the eyelids.
The  resulting   flashes  of  light may,  if the subjects are susceptible,
create  a  mild sensation  akin  to the effect of the simplest light show.
Aided by  the inhalation of good pot and the sound of hot rock, the device
might create at best a mild dreamlike senstion, or at worst (unless you're
prone to epileptic seizures) an even milder headache. It's an adptation of
flicker technology,  first  seen  with  strobe  lights and now packaged as
brain machines.

Broughs  once  said  about  the  Dream Machine,  "Subjects report dazzling
lights  and   unearthly   brilliance  and   color...  Elaborate  geometric
constructions  of  incredible  intricacy  build  up  from multidimensional
mosaic  into living  fireballs  like  the mandalas of Eastern Mysticism or
resolve   momentarily  into  apparently  individual images  and powerfully
dramatic scenes like brightly colored dreams."

Following  up the same fax, SOMA, the San Francisco "journal of Left Coast
culture," founder  Steve Newman, a representative of Friends Understanding
Kurt, who claimed Cobain had used the Dream Machine for "up to 72 hours at
a time." Newman  said  the  core of FUK was himself, Love, Love's attorney
Celeste Mitchell  and   other  friends   of  Cobain's,  as well as various
peripheral  members." Love, he explained, played more of a "low-key role."
HIGH TIMES'  efforts to  contact FUK were unsuccessful. Interview requests
made  through  Love's  record  company, Geffen, and publicity agency, PMK,
about  this subject, were not answered. An attempt to acquire photos taken
during Cobain's visit to Burroughs' home in Lawrence, KS in 1993--that had
been  given  to  Rosemary Carroll, Love's  principal attorney--also didn't
merit a return call.

However,  we  did  locate David Woodard, the San Francisco businessman who
manufactures and sells  replicas of Gysin and Burroughs' Dream Machine for
$145.  In an interview conducted by Victor Bockris for HIGH TIMES, Woodard
contended  that  Cobain called him as many as 20 times overa period of six
months  during 1993 and 1994 to talk about his life and the Dream Machine.
"I  got  the  sense  that  he  was using it for long periods but 72 hours?
That's ludicrous."

Woodard met Cobain at a party in Seattle in the summer of 1993. He prefers
not  to  detail  the   specifics  of how and when Kurt bought the machine.
According to the fax, "Woodard honorably complied with Kurt's very sincere
wish,  promptly   and  professionally shipping a freshly minted machine to
Madrone  [Seattle]:  The state of California does not prohibit the sale of
this fancy death machine to desperate young millionaires."

Sprisingly,  Woodard  admits  that  the  Dream Machine may have compounded
Cobain's  problems.  "If anything," he says, "the Dream Machine helped him
to  see  that he was beginning to fall apart as a cultural figure. He felt
like  Andy Warhol,  Wagner  and  Satan rolled up into on. He was in a very
special  place  which  invited timely suicide.  It  seemed like it was the
perfect decision."

Does  Woodard  concede  that  the device he sold Cobain contributed to his
death?  "I  pictured the suicide as being informed by an inner voice which
was  made  audible  through  his  experiencs  with  the Dream Machine," he
explains. "Yes, the Dream Machine played a part."

Perhaps  Cobain  knew what he was doing. Woodard leaves us with this image
of  his 27-year-old disciple: Kurt's in a full-scale Dream Machine-induced
trance,  his  body   hurtling  from the  glittering Manhattan skyline to a
panorama  of snow capped  Himayas.  His turquoise eyes are wide open. He's
above  the  clouds  now, contemplating the  next stop on this magic carpet
ride. Suddenly, he blasts off into deep blue space.

The  controversy  over what effect a psychedelic light machine had on Kurt
Cobain  during  the  last days of his life may be a smokescreen that plays
into  the  hands  of  those who would have us believe he took his life two
years ago. Tom Grant calls the fx a "cofusion tactic" and "a futile effort
to  throw   a   blanket  of deception over the truth." He clearly believes
Friends Understanding Kurt is Courtney Love.

Hopefully,  this  article  will  stimulate  discussion  and  lead  to more
revelations from those who really know what happend to Kurt Cobain and why
he is no longer with us.