Tag: Kurt Cobain

Portland-Minneapolis-UK-Germany Connections

Chris Newman hand-painted skull guitar 1987
Chris Newman and his hand-painted guitar 1987 – photo by Denis Jones

As part of an effort to preserve and when appropriate and possible, re-release Napalm Beach albums, I’ve been working on parsing out Napalm Beach’s history 1980-87. There seems to have been a number of turning points in Napalm Beach’s history that, the deeper you get into it, look more and more like pre-planned set ups, secretly spinning the band around like a blindfolded child trying to hit a birthday party piñata. These turning points seem to occur every three years or so (give or take) and often they seemed to involve processes that take about three years to work through. This kind of thing can actually be seen as a repeated motif throughout Chris’ life history, I’d say going back to 1964 and the Beatles appearing on Ed Sullivan. In fact, it would be an interesting experiment to tell Chris’ life story that way – as a series of three-year increments starting with February 1964.

For now, however, I want to explore something I noticed yesterday, while working on the history of Napalm Beach during the period of time they were most closely paired Greg Sage and the Wipers, as well as teenage Courtney Love. I’d been creating a zine-style document to use as an incentive for a fundraising effort, and within this zine, trying to summarize the history around what I consider to be Napalm Beach’s first four albums – Rock & Roll Hell (1984 cassette), Pugsley (1985 cassette), Teen Dream (1985 cassette 1986 LP), and Moving To And Fro (1986 cassette 1988 LP). In doing so, I’ve found myself regularly going back to the draft memoir Chris composed, mostly in 2010, for details. Gradually, things start to come into focus with regards to the clubs Napalm Beach played most frequently, and the band’s professional progress (and lack thereof).

I will say right now that I’ve started writing this blog with only a vague idea of where it’s going to end up. This is a thinking through of patterns and puzzle pieces that seem to fit together.

Portland Met (closed Jan 1, 1983) and Seattle Met (March 1983 – March 6, 1984)

I do not think it is an accident that there was a club in Portland called The Metropolis aka The Met which closed on New Years Day 1983 (Wipers and Napalm Beach having played the last show there together on New Years Eve 1982) – and a club in Seattle that opened under the same name (Metropolis/Met) four months later, then closed after almost exactly one year in March 1984. Nor do I think it’s an accident that the last show at the Seattle Met – a club that featured almost entirely local punk/alternative bands with some punk/alternative touring acts, almost always from the US* – was Alien Sex Fiend, a band from England. Nor do I think that it was an accident that the Seattle Met closed almost exactly the same time Satyricon started up in Portland. Nor do I think it was an accident that I was told by several people in the early 2000s that the “favorite song” on Satyricon juke box was Alien Sex Fiend “I Walk The Line” – a song I would describe as hypnotic, possibly trance-inducing.

Seattle Met was founded by Hughes Piottin, a French immigrant who had moved to Seattle (either from Alaska or after fishing in Alaska) in 1982. In a 2014 article, Countercultural Seattle Remembers: May 13, 1983: The Metropolis, Piottin (Loser 1996) and Bruce Pavitt (in an undated “later” Seattle Post-Intelligencer article) both describe the Settle Met in ways that to me, sounded a lot like how George Touhouliotis described Satyricon. In some ways, the Seattle Met sounds a bit like a combination between all ages community spaces and Satyricon.

Susan Silver helped run and book the Seattle Met.

Marti Wyman, Courtney Love, Ursula Wehr, Robin Barbur (Bradbury)
Marti Wyman, Courtney Love, Ursula Wehr, Robin Barbur (Bradbury) – Satyricon, 1987

One of the things that Chris mentioned in describing the Portland club was that “Courtney Love and her friends Robin and Ursula were the femme fatales of the underage side of the Met.” If you look online, you may find photos of Courtney Love, Robin, and Ursula as early as the Met days, but having been researching this history off and on for a few years now, I’ve noticed these photos often tend to vanish or become difficult to find. I have a photo of the three of them, plus Venarays singer Marti Wyman, at a Napalm Beach show at Satyricon, in 1987, after Courtney had her film roles in Straight To Hell and Sid and Nancy, and probably wasn’t living in Portland.

I find it’s an interesting thing to think about, because the early 1980s was a period of time when it seems Courtney Love was just getting into music on all different levels – writing about music, playing music, becoming romantically involved with musicians – and it’s also a period of time that she was traveling a lot. In 1981, after a stint hanging out in Portland and house-sharing with Napalm Beach – she went to Ireland and the UK – apparently with her dad and Robin. And there are photos that occasionally surface online of Courtney, Robin, and Courtney’s father Hank Harrison at a 1981 photoshoot in San Francisco.

Robin and Chris Newman stayed in touch. Robin has always been friendly to us. Robin is one of the people whom Chris chose to sign as a witness on his will. When that time came, Robin arrived with a plywood cutout of a guitar, that I think she said came from Germany, that she asked Chris to sign.

I’m including this detail only because it suggests there might be a link between Robin Barbur and Germany. There definitely is an ongoing link between Robin and Courtney.

Cutouts, LSD, San Francisco, Minneapolis, New York, Berlin

One of the patterns that I see with Courtney Love is the whole time I have known Chris, she almost never has communicated with him directly – key word being almost. Every so often she would sneak in and make an exception to the rule – but never long enough to establish any kind of relationship or meaningful communication. Meanwhile, it seems like she has proxies everywhere. I doubt that Rozz Rezabek ever lost touch with Courtney Love. And there are things that suggest she’s had links to people I didn’t ever realized she’d really been linked to, like Monica Nelson.

The more I study this time period with Chris, also, the more I realize how important San Francisco and Los Angeles were.

With regards to Minneapolis, I’ve already seen that in 1988, while I was living in St Paul, Minnesota; Courtney Love was in Minneapolis and had contact with Erika Schlaeger, who was close to me. And I have detected a pattern of teenage honey trapping linked to Courtney and/or someone handling her. And I have noticed proximity links to LSD.

Now I’m noticing more things. I’m noticing lots of movement between San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle – with lots of different people. Maybe this isn’t so strange, or maybe there’s something special about San Francisco (and I will say I think there’s something special about San Francisco). San José, Oakland, San Francisco, Marin – are all part of the San Francisco Bay Area. People who seemed to travel frequently to San Francisco included Rozz Rezabek, Courtney Love, Chris Newman and his band mates Sam Henry and Dave Minick, and the guys in Mudhoney (who IIRC had a party pad across the street from Rozz’s) and Melvins (Buzz Osborne and Dale Crover circa 1988). Chris met Valarie through Sam in San Francisco, 1983, a few weeks after recording Rock & Roll Hell.

Back to Minneapolis – I started college in St Paul in late August 1987 – and I already knew Erika Schlaeger going back to 1985 (at that time Schlaeger had already been to Germany and I think England at least once) – so of course when I got to the Twin Cities, she’s one of the first people I contacted. I feel like, one of the first things she did was play me a cassette of Babes In Toyland – but maybe that didn’t happen until later. She talked about them like they were all friends of hers, and I guess she did know everyone in the band. And it’s interesting to speculate how Babes In Toyland got together, because I think that Kat Bjelland had moved to Minneapolis in 1987. Bjelland’s Portland band, The Venarays, seem to have been playing fairly frequently, mostly in Portland, at least at Satyricon, in 1986-87.

I can currently find very little history online about the Venarays, especially as far as dates are concerned. There is no existing Wikipedia page for Venarays. My recollection is there used to be a little more information online about this band, for example, who the other players were, when they started and ended, and any line up changes. Right now I’m finding most searches on the band lead to Kat Bjelland’s Wikipedia page, which I believe is informationally problematic. Did Kat Bjelland move to Minneapolis in 1985? If so, was she traveling back to Portland to play in the Venarays? It’s possible that she was no longer in the Venarays after 1985 – but I don’t think so.

I find it odd that it’s so difficult to find specific information about the Venarays – a band that actually wrote and performed songs – versus a “band” like Pagan Babies (and its previous/subsequent forms) which most of the time wasn’t a band that actually wrote and performed music.

It is possible that Erika Schlaeger, Kat Bjelland, and Courtney Love form a trio of links that extend out into different areas. Courtney Love travelled all over throughout the 1980s. Erika Schlaeger also often travelled to Europe and South America. Of course Bjelland and Love both travelled a lot in the 1990s, as they were both in successful touring bands. In 1988, when I was in St Paul/Minneapolis, and apparently Courtney Love was also traveling the same circles in Minneapolis, Erika Schlaeger travelled to places like New York, Chicago, Berlin. Berlin was her big destination spot at that time.

Leonard Cohen – First We Take Manhattan – written 1987, performed 1988

Chris Newman became linked to Berlin through a very small label called “Love’s Simple Dreams” aka LSD Records. He was put in touch with them through Henk Van Dreumel, a Düsseldorf-based German man who was working the door at Satyricon. Or at least, Chris understood Henk to be German – however his name is Dutch and Düsseldorf is very close to the border with The Netherlands. Henke’s girlfriend at the time was named Heike and I believe she went on to be an international booking agent. I do recall Mark Lanegan having known her. It was Henk and/or Heike who set Chris up with this Berlin label “LSD.” Henk then went on to form his own small label out of Düsseldorf which he ultimately called Satyricon Records. A test pressing of Napalm Beach’s LP Moving To And Fro, was sent to Chris, via Satyricon, with Henk Van Dreumel’s Düsseldorf return address under the name “Positive Sinking Records.”

The Berlin-based Loves Simple Dreams record label, according to Chris’ memoir was run by the owner of the Ecstasy club. Here is what Chris wrote about that club:

The Ecstasy club was a huge building. It housed apartments on top, four bars, and at the least five stages. It was run by Thomas and his beautiful wife Petra. We were extremely excited about playing there. The aprtments were covered in entertaining graffitti. Bands from everywhere had witty scrawlings, and drawings. I had to contribute. I saw a message from Mudhoney. It was a syringe dripping blood, and it said,’Hello Napalm Beach.’

This would most likely have been November 1989. Mudhoney had played the Ecstasy on April 1, 1989, and they had also played there on October 10, 1988. Of the 1988 show, Mudhoney tour book notes “This festival (Berlin Independence Days Music Festival) was sponsored by the former government of East Germany, which also featured a performance by French band, Les Thugs.”  This show stands out for a number of reasons. First – the bizarre mention of the “former government of East Germany.” What does that even mean? The fall of the Berlin Wall didn’t happen until the following year, November 1989 (a month when Tad, Nirvana, and Napalm Beach were all first touring Europe, and playing Berlin) and East Germany was still a nation until October 1990. Another strange thing about this show, is it appear to be the only show Mudhoney played in Europe in 1988. Mudhoney had actually only existed as a band since April 1988, Green River having officially broken up in October 1987, and it appears to me that the 10/10/88 show at the Ecstasy club was their one and only European date that year – and very likely the very first Sub Pop linked European show. Both Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman were there. This show was followed by Mudhoney’s first US tour. Mudhoney then returned for a European tour the following spring, 1989. You could say they hit the ground running. As for shows played in the first six months of their existence (April – October 1988) , Mudhoney played Seattle’s Vogue five times, Portland’s Satyricon four times, Seattle’s Central Tavern and Squid Row once. The last show they played before flying to Germany was Portland’s Pine Street Theatre, October 2. Ten days after their Berlin gig, on October 20, 1988, they played with a band called Toadstool at Minneapolis’ Uptown Bar – a favorite haunt of Erika Schlaeger. This about a month before Mike Payne left Minneapolis and I essentially never saw him again. Payne would soon end up at Western Washington University in Bellingham and eventually settle in Tacoma, just south of Seattle.

It would be interesting to look further into this and figure out how big this government – or possibly government to government – connection actually is. Mark “Arm” McLaughlin, the lead singer for Mudhoney, is the son of a German-born mother and Air Force veteran father, and he grew up in Bellevue, the same Seattle suburb where my grandparents had lived since the 1960s. Bizarrely, on April 9, 1994, one day after Cobain’s body was “discovered,” Mudhoney and Pearl Jam were both in Washington D.C. with the Pearl Jam meeting and taking a photo with President Clinton.

Everett True links to Olympia and Seattle

It’s worth remembering that June 27, 1988 is the date that Sub Pop Sundays ended and Bret Bowman, while high on LSD, was hit by a car. He would then remain in a coma for about 15 years. The situation with Bret is a link to medical malfeasance and financed FBI files. It’s also worth remembering that Bret was on his way to Oregon meet a mutual classmate of ours – Scott Gear, who at least by the end of 1988, had a job in Seattle with Sub Pop as a driver for the English rock critic Everett True. I do believe Scott ultimately worked for Sub Pop for several years.

The standard story about the global grunge explosion is that it was ignited by a story or a series of stories in the UK music magazine Melody Maker written by Everett True. That Sub Pop had the brilliant idea to finance True’s trip to Seattle to steward around town and show him there was an exciting music scene happening. What is less clear is what the roots of the connection were between Sub Pop (especially Olympia and Portland linked Bruce Pavitt) and Everett True, for example, at his prior job with New Music Express, where he was known as The Legend! – actually an interesting parallel Rozz Rezabek’s self-appointed tile years later “Punk Legend” – a title possibly spun off of one of Rozz’s self released albums “Lover Legend Liar” – which itself is an interesting title when you think about potential links between Rozz Rezabek, Courtney Love, and Everett True.

What I’m trying to say is, I think that Everett True’s links to Olympia, and K Records (from which Sub Pop essentially spawned) goes back years earlier. In his 2006 book Nirvana: The True Story Everett True says that he first became aware of Beat Happening in 1985. He mentioned specifically the cat in a spaceship album cover on the Beat Happening self-titled debut, which was a riff off of Wipers’ Greg Sage’s 1981 Trap Sampler that featured both the Bruce Pavitt managed band Pell Mell, and Napalm Beach. Both Trap Sampler and Beat Happening were recorded by Greg Sage. If True was dialed into Beat Happening, he was likely dialed into the Wipers and Bruce Pavitt as well. Did True have direct contact with Pavitt, Calvin Johnson, Tobi Vail, or others linked to this scene before 1988? I think he did. But again, this is rarely mentioned.

Coming back again to February 1988, that is the postmark on the test pressing of Moving To And Fro.

In other words, Napalm Beach’s fourth album (second album on vinyl), Moving To And Fro, was being pressed as Mudhoney was being formed, and it just so happens that the first European show Mudhoney ever played was at the club owned by the guy who was pressing Napalm Beach’s album, Moving To And Fro. And it also just so happens that this is the same period of time that I was living in the Midway district of St Paul Minnesota, and Courtney Love was about to arrive in Minneapolis to intersect with Erika Schlaeger, who was traveling back and forth from Minneapolis to Berlin. If I recall correctly, Erika S often flew first to New York, and then from New York to Berlin. And it also just so happens that the town where I’d gone to school in Germany 1984-85 (Kamp Lindfort) was about 30 miles from Düsseldorf, where Henk had been centered. These kinds of things are why, even though it would seem that Chris and I had different kinds of lives, we also had a lot in common. It also seems increasingly like these weren’t just non consequential coincidences. There were manipulations happening to me as well as to Chris, including manipulations intended specifically to sabotage my dreams of living in Olympia or Seattle and being in a rock band – both of which I’d wanted to do in the 1980s.

Moving To And Fro test pressing mailed to Chris Newman c/o Club Satyricon – postmarked 23 February 1988

At one point in his memoir, Chris abbreviated the Berlin club name as “XTC.” In fact, this period of time does seem to mark a turning point in an “X” – which the band Napalm Beach was sent down, and other bands like Mudhoney – but especially Nirvana – were sent up (crossing paths about this time – 1989-1991). Generally speaking, it looks to me very much like Napalm Beach and Nirvana were picked out ahead of time to parallel each other in a rise and fall kind of way, but that the intent was always to destroy both bands and their artist bandleaders – Chris Newman and Kurt Cobain.

German labels – L.S.D. and Satyricon Records

It appears that both Love’s Simple Dreams / L.S.D. and Henk Van Dreumel’s Satyricon records released a total of 18 items each, according to current information on discogs.com. LSD records released 18 titles between 1986 and 1990 (Moving To And Fro LP being number 7) – (in fact the number of unique releases seems to be closer to 14, others being the same title in different formats). Satyricon records (1988-94) released five Napalm Beach titles, at least two of which should never have seen light of day for reasons that would be obvious to anyone listening to them or understanding under what conditions they were released, and in fact, being as Napalm Beach’s contracts with Flying Heart were fraudulent, I think could easily be argued that most or all of these releases on Satyricon should have never happened. Chris has said he was reaching a point in the late 1980s and early 1990s when all that mattered to him was survival and drug money – and it’s clear that his choices for publishing were unduly limited – but from my perspective, that doesn’t make it ok to exploit an artist, regardless if you’re the record label or the alleged “manager.” By “exploit” I mean to take advantage of the person in a way that is clearly harmful to that person. I do suspect that a confidence game was being played here. By the time the really ugly recordings came out, Napalm was about to be, or had already been frozen out of touring for good.

In retrospect I think it has to be asked whether either one of these labels ever was truly intended to succeed as a label, or if they were not also constructed as a type of trap. They seemed to have worked out deals with Flying Heart on behalf of Chris – for example the addition of Snow Bud songs – songs to which Jan coercively stolen publishing rights – on Moving To And Fro – without asking Chris first. There were times when Chris could easily be manipulated simply by someone he saw as a person in a position of authority telling him “this is how we’re going to do it.”

All of these things of course were done under the guise of friendly and supportive relationships. The whole thing is complicated by that, and by the fact that Chris was increasingly blacklisted, meaning that by 1988 any record deal looked like a good deal to him. Chris didn’t understand when beginning in 1990, he was having to open for bands like Dead Moon, who had previously opened for him. This is epitomized I think by Nirvana playing Napalm Beach’s usual New Years Eve spot, headlining at Satyricon – while Napalm were in Berlin – at the Ecstasy Club – opening for Dead Moon.

New Zealand 1992
Fred and Toody – probably a photo from around 2010 – found on my hard drive

On most articles I write, I leave the comment fields off, because first of all, no one ever comments on my blogs, and second of all, should someone decide to comment, I don’t want some random Kurt Cobain / Courtney Love conspiracy theories or shaggy dog tales.

I think, however, I will leave the comment field open on this particular article, and here is why – I’ve covered a lot of ground, made a lot of connections, and mentioned a lot of names. I want to give people the opportunity – especially if their name has been mentioned – to explain, clarify, counter, or rebut. My intent is never to shut down dissent, to insulate myself from justifiable criticism, falsely accuse, or twist facts. So if anyone feels I’ve done any of these things, and has a countering viewpoint to offer want to make sure they have that opportunity. I don’t have a problem with debate. I do have a problem with people who object to things I say, but refuse to do so directly to me. How, exactly, is that helpful?

I said at the beginning of this article that I didn’t know where it was going. To me, I feel like where I ended up was at the idea that Napalm Beach (and their mirrors, Nirvana, Mudhoney et al) was at the center of an international conspiracy and confidence game linked not just to different branches of the music business, but possibly to a number of government entities both foreign and domestic. I mean, I feel like that’s basically what I have just described. And that the proto-Satyricon Records name “Positive Sinking Records” – was far more than a German accent joke.


* One of the other few instances of a non-US act playing at Seattle Met was John Cale with a band called Memory, and Napalm Beach on August 6, 1983.

How Courtney Love writes songs

I increasingly think that Courtney Love writes songs in an intentionally deceptive manner, and that this is especially true of everything she’s done since, and including, Live Through This. The reason is that she’s hiding her involvement with some massive crimes, including the murder of Kurt Cobain and the murder of Chris Newman, and of course, she’s now after me and my daughter.

Courtney constructs elaborate scenes to in which you can drown. She makes you think she’s talking about something, or to someone, when she’s actually talking to someone else, or about something else. She uses a lot of vague “he, she, you” where it’s difficult if not impossible to figure out who she’s talking about. Maybe if you have specialized inside knowledge you can figure it out – I usually can’t figure it out – or I figure it wrong.

I have said that Courtney Love was a honeytrap. As far as I know, Chris Newman was the first person she tried to honeytrap. She was, at the time, only sixteen, so I imagine she had been put up to it, at least in part by her father, who is the person who provided her with the LSD that she came equipped with. He in turn was likely working with another entity which was probably CIA and music business. She later honeytrapped Kurt Cobain.

When I ran into the Hole song “Honey” I didn’t know anything about honeytraps outside of maybe seeing a very superficial version of attempted honeytrapping in James Bond movies. It wasn’t something I would expect would happen to me or anyone around me. In any case, I listened to the album Nobody’s Daughter when it came out in 2010, a year after Chris and I got together, and then moved on – but later, after I began to see the parallel patterns between Nirvana and Napalm Beach, specifically Cobain’s adaptation of Chris’ early 1980s equipment set up and also the way the bands seemed to follow each other’s live performances in Europe (a pattern that I now see also happened in Seattle and Portland) – I started to look more closely at a lot of things, like Cobain’s lyrics “I’m a liar and a thief,” for example – and I started to see evidence that Cobain was extremely troubled by the way that Chris was being cheated, stolen from, and lied to.

Once Chris and I got together, and as we began to recover Chris’ catalog, and especially as Chris worked toward freeing himself from heroin addiction, Courtney Love no doubt knew that one or both of us would eventually detect this pattern, and that it could result in legal actions involving Nirvana.

I’m not sure how long the whole scenario had been planned out, but it seems like Courtney Love had been laying the groundwork for a profound deception going back years. She had Chris believing that she had a huge teenage crush on him, that she wanted him to be “her first” lover. She had written him letters from Europe. She had told him at a party, in front of a number of people “I would have married you Chris Newman!” And after appearing on the cover of Rolling Stone, she greeted him from onstage at La Luna. So Chris had no reason to suspect she held any ill will toward him.

Anyway, after discovering this bizarre pattern with Nirvana and Napalm Beach, I ran into a video of Courtney performing this song “Honey” live on the radio, and I felt that it was a “message to Chris.” What I really felt was that she was drawing a parallel in the song between Kurt Cobain and Chris Newman, and assumed that if Cobain had been troubled by the situation around Chris, she too would have been troubled by it, being as she seemed to care about Chris. And that the reason she didn’t reach out to Chris was because she and everyone was being prevented from speaking freely, or associating freely with Chris and me.

I thought these things because I was missing some key pieces of information.

The first key bit of information I was missing was that Courtney was not an innocent teenager who wandered randomly into a scene and somehow ended up living in the Napalm Beach band house. Courtney Love was actually a honeytrap, both with Newman and Cobain. That fact alone changes everything, especially if you also accept the idea that Courtney Love’s job was to destroy both Cobain and Newman. And that is what I think the truth is.

Once again, at age sixteen, she may not have had full agency – but she continued to make choices along the same lines.

Courtney Love is not just a honey trap but she seems to be a manipulator or “gruber” of finance, meaning she moves money around to get things done, including assassinations. This is achieved by concocting fake files with the FBI and CIA.

The song “honey” was itself a trap.

Another moment of reflection

Every once in a while I have to stand back and look at what the heck is going on here.

Initially, back in 2014, when I started I thought I was writing about an artist who had been unfairly ignored, or who may have burned some of his own bridges during a period of drug addiction. It didn’t take long for me to see signs of something far weirder going on. The response to this was, from the community and industry linked people alike, steadfast denial and pushback – including covert but violent – and ultimately deadly – pushback.

Nonetheless, people have a right to their own legacy, the fruits of their own artistic output, and the right not to be victims of crime, regardless of who the perpetrators are. Also, it became clear that if I did not push forward, the erasing machine would complete its task and not only Chris’ life, but his legacy and memory would be completely wiped. And that’s exactly opposite of what he wanted. He wanted to reach people with his art. He was tricked by what he saw as the community’s threat to withdraw what little support he enjoyed, and to shame him (or me) for expecting or wanting more recognition or reward than he had already received. Now this was all real, it was all scripted, and it was all coordinated as part of this plan to keep Chris sealed away in his corner, which they did, and that is where he was murdered.

Meanwhile, there are efforts out there to tell stories around Chris, but not in any way that will challenge the dominant narrative or have any kind of lasting influence. These are in publications that could easily disappear. Everything is designed to self destruct and disappear at a moment’s notice, and that is what had been going on.

It can be helpful to look at how these narratives are constructed. In fact, it can be helpful to look at how rock n’ roll narratives generally speaking are constructed. It’s increasingly clear these are almost always fairy tales which are concocted to teach people what to expect from artists, or from their own experience, or from the industry, should they wish to take this route. This is part of the financed cult-and-control system set up around celebrities.

Chris’ invisibility was concocted, not real. In fact, Chris was one of the most highly visible artists, but only in a covert manner which meant that he could not even see it himself, much less profit from it. Within this realm, Chris was highly controlled. A lot of this control was linked to CIA MKULTRA related research and technology – cult behaviors, mountains of drugs, hypnosis, lies, frequency based weapons, industry-wide blacklisting.

There are a limited number of scripts to work from with these rock narratives, and the fact that there are scripts at all is evidence of a coverup – or multiple coverups. This is one of those big crimes that is made of lots of smaller ones. The scripts include The Ugly Duckling, The Tale of Redemption, The Cautionary Tale, The Tale of Too Much Too Soon, etc. These are used to cover up CRIME.

The ugly duckling is someone who’s brilliance is not seen or appreciated at first, but then they bloom later on. The tale of redemption is a story about someone who gets set onto the wrong track and is headed for a fall but something or someone rescues the person and/or they are otherwise saved from destruction. The cautionary tale is the person who took the wrong road and didn’t survive (this is a tale that’s been pushed onto Chris and which he at times would internalize), and too much too soon is the concocted and often repeated story of Kurt Cobain. Of course, these tales get mixed up and combined in different ways – for example, Too Much Too Soon can either become the Tale of Redemption or the Cautionary Tale, depending on which direction it takes; the Ugly Duckling is a starter tale which can branch out into different directions, etc. And there are probably other scripts as well, the point being that these are scripts which are imposed onto artists – they are not reality.

And why would there be scripts like this? The primary reason, I’m beginning to think, is to cover up crime. Secondarily, perhaps the creators of these scripts think that they have some kind of timeless take home message or moral for the kids. But these scripts are weak, and more importantly, false.

Celebrities are presented to us for consumption like Roman Gods – larger than life, yet fallibly human.

I do believe that Chris Newman is a thread that when pulled sufficiently, threatens to unravel the entire celebrity system.

What was the motivation to elevate, then destroy Kurt Cobain?

And the sky was all violet
I want it again, but violent, more violent
Yeah, I’m the one with no soul
One above and one below

Courtney Love – Hole – Violet – 1994
Napalm Beach w Venarays

One of the things I’m trying to parse is the motivation to lift up, then destroy Kurt Cobain, and to involve Courtney Love in that endeavor. Because that’s what I think happened. I think that based on the way Nirvana was run parallel to Napalm Beach between 1987 and 1991 (I don’t know if I’ve fully shown that, but I’ve seen it) – and the movements of Courtney Love, from the Napalm Beach band house, to the UK, back to Portland, to San Francisco (this may have been Rozz-related, but there are a lot of people linked to San Francisco including some around me), back to Europe, making Straight to Hell and Sid and Nancy in 1986… during this period of time, she was always back and forth to Portland. Kat Bjelland’s band Venarays was playing around Portland and Seattle a lot in 1986 and 87; Bjelland probably moved to Minneapolis in 1987 and Love followed her (so the story goes) in 1988.

For my part, I left Humboldt County and started going to school in St Paul, across the river from Minneapolis, in late 1987. (Again – I’d wanted to go to school at Evergreen in Olympia.) My boyfriend Mike Payne showed up in June 1988 and we moved to Dinkytown in Minneapolis where he lived with me until November. The girl that I considered my best friend was Erika Schlaeger. She lived in a warehouse space downtown and she knew everyone in Babes in Toyland and I later found out she knew Courtney Love as well.

All of the people I thought were my friends (as well as Mike Payne) apparently turned out to be backstabbers, filing false reports with the FBI. This may be why the FBI/CIA started torturing me via back implants in 1990, though I think there was an alternate goal which was to introduce me to muscle relaxers and opioids. This was done, it seems deliberately, to many people in my circle, and of my generation. I had no interest in taking heroin, so they (corporate financed, medical malfeasance FBI/CIA) made me a “chronic pain patient” – which they also did to Kurt Cobain and many others. This kind of thing seems so insanely evil it may be hard for some people to believe but it’s really just normal operating procedure in this lucrative (for someone) living nightmare.

With regards to honeytraps, I’m putting together is a picture where there is a lot of movement with key individuals, including lots of traveling to Europe and elsewhere. Mike Payne went to Europe/UK and Southeast Asia at least three times in the late 1980s. Erika Schlaeger was traveling in Europe and South America. Courtney Love was in Europe/UK and Guam, maybe other places. These same individuals also travelled frequently within the Untied States. Where did all the traveling money come from, and what, exactly, were they doing on these trips? Were they collecting and distributing finance? Were they brokering deals? Were they peddling malfeasance and murder?

There are other weird coincidences. I’ve talked about the matching jailbait honeytraps – Courtney (aimed at Chris) and “George” (aimed at me) both of whom were linked to Erika Schlaeger in Minneapolis. But my daughter was also honey trapped beginning in 2018 by a guy she met in Washington D.C. while she was doing an internship. This was a very nasty and traumatic thing that was done to her. This man (who lied a lot) had grown up (he said) in Hollywood, Florida (near Miami). During that period of time my daughter had been placed in housing on the George Washington university campus and her building was called The Dakota (about five blocks from the White House, it looks like). That’s a link to (John and Yoko and) Courtney Love and Erika Schlaeger. I say it’s a link to Erika Schlaeger because in the 1980s there was an old hotel in Minneapolis called the Dakota with a dark bar downstairs that Erika liked to frequent. I say it’s a link to Courtney Love because she wrote a song called “20 Years In The Dakota.”

map of Washington DC showing location of Dakota building

This is really hard to write about because it is so infuriating as a mother that they did this to my daughter, even after I was actively trying to address this issue, warn my daughter, etc. These occult creep-stars have a million different ways to kidnap, lie, exploit, betray, harm, and murder, and Courtney Love is at the forefront of a tremendous amount of this, representing, I think, global corporate finance and entertainment industry interests, all while being backed by the FBI and CIA.

This brings me back to why there was this plan to promote, then destroy Kurt Cobain. I have to guess it was for a few reasons. First, there’s the occult. It could be a very old thing done with modern technology, as I suspect what was done to Bret Bowman was a very old thing done with modern technology. But the practical reason may have been to essentially capture everyone involved in the crime, especially Kurt and Courtney. Kurt Cobain was likely chosen for a number of reasons, including his talent, his location, his background (family ties, butterflies) – and possibly also because he was not fully on board with the program of destruction aimed at me and Chris Newman, thus he was a strategic elimination. By involving Courtney Love in all of this, it makes her very invested in not having the truth revealed. And there’s been a ton of energy put into hiding the truth. Even the so-called “justice for Kurt” movement is part of the hiding of truth, because it presents a scenario that isn’t even close to what happened.

When I look at what happened to Bret Bowman and what happened to Kurt Cobain as matched atrocities, what I see are the same players, basically. At the very least, you see that people involved in each scenario were adjacent to each other, but I honestly see signs of Courtney’s tracks in both events. When Bret was hit by the car on June 27,1988 while high on LSD, he was on his way to the Country Fair in Oregon. In my mind, the Country Fair is linked to Rozz Rezabek, because he went every year, and to Courtney Love adjacent hippies (the Ken Kesey crowd). And Bret was going to meet Scott Gear who worked for Sub Pop either at that time or right after that. Also, as I’ve mentioned, the day Bret was hit was the last day of the monthly Sub Pop Sundays showcase, held this time on a Monday. It’s not clear who played that day, but the previous month it had been the Derelicts and the month before that, Nirvana (April 24, 1988). Before Nirvana it was Doll Squad, and the month before that, Snow Bud and the Flower People (February 28, 1988).

Bret had been hit in Crescent City, California which is where my daughter’s father lived. I can tell that Courtney Love is a malfeasance link to my daughter’s father’s family, and I know that the children in that family have been subjected to trauma based mind control attacks and abuse (because that is really what trauma based mind control is – repeated abuse, at a multigenerational level, applied with intent of molding a slave/prostitute/warrior personality) and I have reason to suspect that Courtney’s father Hank Harrison is behind some of it and I’ll say why that is. It has to do with the comment he made on the Nick Broomfield movie Kurt and Courtney about setting a pitbull after teenage Courtney. I don’t know if that really happened to Courtney (I sort of doubt it) – but it did happen to one of my daughter’s cousins, a cousin that grew up in Oregon and who seems to have been very involved in making false reports to the FBI. These are Native Americans being systematically molested, abused, and exploited by corporate forces, the FBI, and the CIA.

Like I said, Courtney doesn’t really care about her butterfly warriors. She cares about power, money, and keeping the truth buried. And she cares about getting kills. Backed by corporate greed and medical malfeasance, she really has weaponized the FBI and CIA as a killing machine.

And also, as I’ve said, not just Courtney, but a lot of people would rather it not be known that they knew about, participated in, or profited from the take down of Kurt Cobain. That’s one reason there is such a focus right now on taking me down. The other reasons have to do with the thefts and fraud around Chris Newman, who’s estate I inherited. Chris’ true story interferes with the myth of Sub Pop, among others.

So much of this is written right into the songs themselves. Cobain’s song, “Opinion” which he bravely played on KAOS with Calvin Johnson loudly crunching some food as Cobain introduces the song, for example. Sub Pop had been a subscription service – starting with a cassette zine and by 1990, singles – something everyone who comments on this song pretends not to notice – but that’s par for the course.

Congratulations, you have (won/one)
It’s a year’s subscription of bad puns
And a makeshift story of concern
And to set it up before it burns

My opinions. Mmm hmmm (4x)
And there seems to be a problem here
And the state of emotion seems too clear
Now they rise and fall like wall street stock
And they have an affect on our peace talk

Our opinions….

Hole and Nirvana – Dirty Boots 1990

Pinking out the black, dreaming in a crack
Satan got her tongue, now it’s undone

Sonic Youth, Dirty Boots (1990)

Every time that I stare into the sun
Angel dust and my dress just comes undone

Hole, Asking for It (1994)

“Good come in pink boxes”

The magic is in the hole

Voodoo Doughnut Slogans (2003-present)

When did Kurt Cobain meet Courtney Love? I’ve looked into this, and I don’t have an answer. Honestly, I’m not even sure when Chris and I first met, and that is because when you are into music and/or are a musician, and you are in a scene with other people who are into music and/or are musicians, you tend to know about people, especially performers, before personally meeting them. You might be in a room with the person, maybe be introduced briefly, or in someone’s orbit, part of a group conversation, etc. Then later on down the road, maybe you have the opportunity to have a longer conversation, but often it’s in a social setting with lots of other people. That’s how it was with Chris and me, and likely it was that way for Kurt and Courtney, but with the added twist of Courtney likely always had a mission and knew she had a mission. I say this because it seems clear to me now that when Courtney arrived in Portland in 1980, she was apparently on a mission to frame Chris Newman as a child rapist. It also seems clear that her father was part of that plan. Supposedly it was her father who provided her with the Owsley barrel acid she brought with her.

If it is true that Courtney had a mission with regards to Kurt Cobain, say by the mid-1980s, then it stands to reason she would have known when she first met Kurt, because she would have been paying attention, and it would have been a set up. By now I see that set ups are the rule, not the exception for people under this much surveillance and control – including Chris, me, my daughter, Kurt Cobain. This is unacceptable, by the way.

When I was running this Satyricon fan page on MySpace, as I said before, I received this at the time unpublished photo of Kurt Cobain by email which I thought was really neat. It was from Monica Nelson’s friend David Ackerman, a photographer who liked to take photos at Satyricon, and it was a performance photo from January 6, 1989.

Over time I saw more and more photos from that set eventually having access to the full collection. In one photo, I thought I recognized Courtney Love’s face looking up at Mudhoney, and sent an inquiry to Everett True about it, whom I already had had some email exchanges with, and he said that it might be her, but even if she was at the show, she was probably there to see Mudhoney, and there’s no evidence she met Kurt Cobain there. Later I realized the blonde woman in another photo was Courtney, or David told me it was her. The thing about this show is there weren’t many people there. Also, Courtney is pretty dressed up and front and center. I don’t know where she was living in 1989, but I now know she had been around my circle in Minneapolis in 1988, and in April or May of 1989 I would run into some LSD that was likely Owsley LSD – in Minneapolis. That may be nothing to do with Courtney, and everything to do with the CIA. It seemed like in the 1980s (and probably to this day) Courtney was/is always on the move with stations in New York, London, Los Angeles, etc. In the old days it included Portland, Seattle, San Francisco.

Then there’s this whole thing going on where even the most cursory contact with a person somehow earns another the “right” to file defamatory reports with the FBI. And by “defamatory” make no mistake – I don’t mean “negative” I mean full of damaging lies. For example, if I sell something to someone through the mail – the person pays me some money, and I put something in the mail to that person – or if I go and sell some musical equipment at a store – these people who engage in this simple, single straightforward transaction somehow have now earned the right make reports about me to the FBI. How this works I don’t understand. It could even be untrue, because I have no corroborating evidence. But it does seem to be true that any contact with a person whatsoever earns people, especially certain people, the right to create FBI files. So as soon as Courtney had some contact with, for example, Kurt Cobain, she could have been filing reports on him, with an agenda behind it all. And I have reason to believe that Sub Pop as a business was linked into all of this. The reason I believe this is because of how Cobain’s (Nirvana) shows were scheduled in relation to Chris’ (Napalm Beach or Snow Bud) shows – there was a parallel going on, not just in Europe but in Seattle and Portland, too. By this I mean, they typically would play the same clubs within a week or two of each other. (“I’ve been in your heart shaped box for too (two?) many weeks…”) I haven’t really shown this yet because every time I start working on collecting the data, the isht hits the fan.

I would ask myself why there would be a parallel going on. Sometimes things like this happen because there’s an occult side to this. Because the crimes are CIA and FBI linked, and police and the press are locked down (or that’s how they behave), there’s far less than usual concern about being “caught.” So there is some flaunting, display of power, going on.

The dirty plans for Kurt Cobain were, as most of these larger and more coordinated crimes are, not so much secret but covered up. I say this because I’m starting to see suggestions of something come out in videos both before and after the death of Kurt Cobain. There is the Sonic Youth video for Dirty Boots from 1990 showing a boy in a plaid shirt and a girl in a Nirvana t-shirt dramatically leaping off a stage, falling through the air. The Nirvana t-shirt has a home-made screen print look, with the word Nirvana appearing above a concentric circle radiation/target design similar to that used by Courtney on her posters for Hole. Also interesting that the t-shirt screen is red, since Cobain’s wrote his suicide note ~3 years later in red pen.

still from 1991 Sonic Youth Dirty Boots video showing girl in Nirvana t-shirt
Sonic Youth – Dirty Boots 1991

The girl in the Dirty Boots video supposedly was chosen after being seen dancing in a club in New Jersey. I suspect that there is something deliberate in that, the New Jersey link. The boy in this video seems like he had some resemblance to me during this era. His hair is the same or similar color, length, style.

Is “boots” a play on bootleg? See poster with Babes In Toyland mentioning “bootleg” and “dirty, icky clothes!!” – Is that in turn a link to the Columbo coat? And later, the cat-piss leather jacket? Another possibility has to do with Chris getting back together with Valarie in San Francisco October of 1989, the weekend before the Loma Prieta earthquake. Jan Celt had been quoted in the local music press making a comment that Chris had found gross, about how their “boots would be knocking.” In fact, just as Chris was leaving San Francisco, the bridge-buckling earthquake hit.

Later, when Chris and Valarie were living homeless on the streets of San Francisco (and it sounds like running off to San Francisco was Valarie’s idea; she’d grown up in San José) – there’s a story that I heard from both of them which is that Valarie would go dumpster diving for clothing or fabric behind a high fashion store, and the police would call her “Courtney” – like, greet her, “Hi Courtney!” I don’t know if this was a one-off or a regular occurrence but it suggests a link or parallel between Valarie Caldwell Newman and Courtney Love Cobain and that the police in San Francisco were aware of it. And it’s also linked to dumpster diving and maybe “dirty clothes.” Is the world “clothes” linked to death? (clothes/close)

Then there’s the 1992 Radiohead song “Creep.” There are different ways to listen to this song. Like, to me, maybe he’s not singing “I’m a weirdo” but “I’m a widow.” And “running out the door” is by design a mirror – meaning – either escape for the prisoners, Chris and me, or escape for the crime gang. In this case, the meaning is the latter, escape for the crime gang. And a primary strategy in this is to run out the clock – to get enough time to attack with radiation weapons and kill with cancer. This is what they need time to do, and why they always find a reason to ask for or incentivize others to accept the idea of giving us more time in captivity. Now, we should never have been kept in captivity. It is illegal, immoral, unethical, and cruel. But brainwashing and cult-like control is a huge part of this. They can make people believe or accept almost anything (they hope), and all they need to do is to keep the loop running long enough to “escape” and that in turn will give them the ability to continue the crime indefinitely (they believe). Another aspect of Creep is that the idea of it being about Courtney is probably a back side to it being about portraying me as a creep, the idea that I’m someone no one notices, that I want to be special, etc. That’s been both the manipulation around me, and the set ups, and the portrayals. I may have wished to be noticed, etc, but I never thought that I was a creep. But it’s not really about what I think, it’s about what the actual creeps project. At the end of the song they sing “run, run, RUN!” like a warning, which is, I think, what they wanted to do. To warn me, to warn Chris, to warn Kurt Cobain.

I think knowing this now, other songs like this will come forward. For example, Tom Petty’s “Into The Great Wide Open” (1991) and possibly Peter Gabriel’s “Big Time” (1987). I definitely see it in music videos that came out after the death of Cobain, like Soundgarden’s Black Hole Sun which is another mirror type song.

Back in 2014 I thought that the concept of the “hole” and the “sun” were equivalent but now I realize they are opposite. The hole represents death and darkness, while the sun represents truth.

It’s also pretty obvious, looking at this, that there’s a link between Courtney Love and Voodoo “the magic is in the hole” Doughnut, the spiral on the voodoo doll style doughnut being a link. The spiral may be worth its own entry.

I do see that in the Dirty Boots video it’s less a spiral than concentric rings, and I suspect this has to do with the acid test I would be put through on June 8, 1991, on the Klamath River (one year to the day, as it turns out, before the release of Faith No More’s album Angel Dust). The target shape looks like a topographic map.

As it appears on the t-shirt, it could be a vinyl record, a mountain peak, or a hole.

The Leather Trench Coat

This is just a follow up on the Jeffrey Ofelt comment made in the 2007 Stranger article (Beerly Deloved) about Courtney Love picking up a leather trench coat for Kurt Cobain in the early 1990s. Like I said, although it’s possible, I’d be surprised if Cobain ever wore a leather trench coat. But what I think is interesting about that comment is it links together the incident where Chris had his belongings taken in 1996 and I witnessed belongings thrown out into the yard of a rented home that had been temporarily abandoned around 2003. When I was reading through Charles Cross’ book on Kurt Cobain, it looked like Cobain too had something like that happen.

Among the belongings that were thrown out in 2003 were a little 1970s paperback (like, almost a zine), sort of small press book called something like How To Play Guitar Left Handed that I was told had belonged to Kurt Cobain. It included a version of “In The Pines.” I sort of wish I could have held onto that somehow, though it wasn’t mine, but it was lost in this incident. I have an old paperback Pete Seeger folksong book from the early 1960s that belonged to my dad, and it has the same song in it. Leadbelly was a popular folk artist for several decades. The other thing that Kenny had that supposedly had belonged to Kurt Cobain, and got thrown out, was a leather jacket, that supposedly a cat had peed on. How Kenny got these things, he said, was he was in a band where one of Cobain’s cousins played drums. No idea whether any of this is true. I didn’t think at first that Cobain had ever been seen wearing a leather jacket, but later I saw that in fact he did wear a leather jacket like the one Kenny had in The Year Punk Broke. So maybe it had been his jacket.

And then there was that thing where Courtney Love left a beige oversized trench coat in the back of the Napalm Beach van when she jetted off to Europe in 1981, and Chris picked it up and wore it onstage. So that Ofelt story looks to me like it combines two coats into one – the leather coat that had allegedly belonged to Cobain that showed up in my life, and the Columbo coat that had belonged to Courtney, that Chris later wore. If I’m correct – and that’s what Ofelt was doing, it shows the surveillance going on, and likely the manipulations as well. Also, it makes me think that Courtney may have actually been behind Kenny and the Kurt Cobain linked items he brought with him. She had a tendency to spread Cobain’s belongings around.

I have reason to believe that Cobain was under heavy surveillance. These kinds of things, getting all your belongings thrown out or destroyed are traumatic. Those of us who are under this kind of surveillance are treated this way for the benefit of pleasing and/or controlling and/or traumatizing the viewers. Other things, like leaving something for someone to find and seeing what they do for it, also seems to be a form of entertainment.

This. surveillance. must. end.