Mysteries that could potentially be cleared up with access to Chris’ stolen materials
I’ve shown how some of my journal entries seem to have made it into popular songs including Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun,” Smashing Pumpkins “Bullet With Butterfly Wings,” and Nirvana’s “Sappy,” but in fact there are many more instances. In some cases there are incidents that happened that may not have had associated journal entries, or it’s just a phrase taken from my journals, so that it’s harder to make the case. This would include Hole’s “Asking For It,” and Nirvana’s songs “Very Ape,” “Pennyroyal Tea,” and “Something In The Way” (this is just off the top of my head). With regards to Chris, there are links to Nirvana’s “Very Ape” and to “Heart Shaped Box.” And then there are things like Leonard Cohen’s “Famous Blue Raincoat” which doesn’t reference a journal entry, but is pretty clearly a reference to a photo that was stored in an album along with a lock of my hair. What do you do with that? I don’t know because I’m not a lawyer and so far, lawyers are all afraid to touch this.
There are things I know, but cannot prove, like John Lennon putting a lick of mine into the beginning of the song “Woman” – it’s the suspended riff used in the intro, behind the phrase “for the other half of the sky.” Even though I was a child, I was already playing guitar and I played this suspended lick over and over and over. It’s not that this is actionable in court or that I would want to take it to court, but that it’s like a hidden message. That said, looking at what’s happened to us, I think that some of the more obvious stuff should be under consideration for court cases.
Chris played a lot more guitar than I did over the years, performed and recorded, and his style was copied in a lot of ways, including, I would say, in the theme song of “Magnum P.I.” (possibly a sources of the Zoolander joke about “magnum”). But that’s just style – people copy styles all the time. The reason I bring it up is because the same people profiting from the copying Chris’ style will turn around and say Chris as an artist wasn’t worth a damn.
I’ll note here that I’ve seen hints that the guitar player for The Carpenters took inspiration from Chris’ guitar playing. This would have been in the early 1970s.
Music-wise, the feel of Nirvana’s “Lithium” seems to have been inspired by Chris’ song Pugsley, and this is repeated again in PJ Harvey’s “Meet Ze Monsta.” And if I could access Chris’ archival materials – journals and tapes and that sort of thing, I suspect I’d find a lot more. So the thefts that have happened over the years were just not property thefts, as well as intellectual property thefts, but evidence tampering. This idea that all this crime can somehow be justified with libelous stories collected and distributed by the FBI is beyond absurd. Theft is theft and libel is libel and the repeated pattern is of crimes (theft, libel, medical malfeasance, kidnapping, assassination) committed specifically in order to cover up other crimes (theft, sex trafficking, child trafficking, medical trafficking, nonconsensual human subjects research, malfeasance, graft, murder) along with various other tactics and techniques like control of focus. The depravity of all of this, not to mention the criminality, senseless waste, and stupidity, is honestly, for me, almost beyond comprehension. I think anyone in my position would want to see the perpetrators of this collection of crimes, regardless of who they are, held accountable under the criminal statutes of this nation, same as they themselves do to others. They should not be permitted to kidnap and murder their way out of everything.
With regards to intellectual property theft, a lot would probably be cleared up by access to what must be mountains of stolen journals and other creative materials from Chris’ lifetime. In some cases, Chris was performing songs for years before recording them. Someone recently uploaded a bootleg to YouTube of a Napalm Beach performance from New Years Eve 1985 at Satyricon in which they perform a song called My Master Calls, a song that would not be recorded until 1993’s Curiosities, eight years later. At first I thought that the performance couldn’t have been from 1985 because of the presence of that song, but it later became clear that for whatever reason, the song had not been recorded in the studio until years later. In addition, there seem to be songs that show up on live recordings and bootlegs that were never recorded including in 1982, “Into The Sky” (among the inspirations for Nirvana’s 1993 song “Very Ape”) and a 1986 performance of a song called “Mercury” that was uploaded by Mike Lastra. Chris for whatever reason was ambivalent about both these songs, though I think both of them are good songs. (In the case of “Into The Sky,” Chris said, ironically, that “They didn’t seem to like it in Seattle.”)
When I met Chris in 2009 he either had never heard the 1994 Mazzy Star song “Fade Into You” or he had just recently heard it for the first time. Something I noticed, that he never mentioned to me, was the similarity between the Mazzy Star song and his song Crippled Mind. I don’t know when Chris wrote Crippled Mind, and I didn’t think to ask, because this was before I knew anything about surveillance or intellectual property thefts – I’d seen things I thought were weird coincidences. He recorded Stoned and Alone in 1996 under what seems like almost desperate circumstances. Now of course I wonder how long he was playing the “Crippled Mind” chord progression at home or in performances, unaware he was under this kind of surveillance. But he wrote his lyrics in his journals, and that is one reason the journals are important to unravelling mysteries like this.
