David Ackerman and Monica Nelson

Christmas 1975

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.

David Ackerman photo of Nirvana at Satyricon (opening for Mudhoney) – 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.

Obituaries first show Satyricon1986

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.

Voodoo Doughnut Recordings single
Monica Nelson and the Highgates
Voodoo Save My Life b/w Love is Hell
released December 2014