Grunge Match

When Courtney Love first met Kurt Cobain in the Portland, Ore., night-club Satyricon in 1989, she was so smitten with the wiry, blue-eyed singer that she affectionately wrestled him to the ground. When she found out that he didn’t have a girlfriend, she sent him a heart-shaped box (later used by Cobain as a song title). Three years later they married.

Now, eight years after Cobain’s suicide, Love, 37, is engaged in a legal wrestling match to control Cobain’s music with Nirvana. She has already stopped the Seattle grunge trio’s surviving members—drummer Dave Grohl, 33, now of Foo Fighters, and bassist Krist Novoselic, 37, now of the band Eyes Adrift—from bringing to market a boxed set of 45 unreleased recordings. Grohl and Novoselic countersued in December, claiming Love is mentally unstable—a charge she denies—and bid unsuccessfully to have her examined by a psychiatrist. “As a result of the bickering, Kurt’s legacy has suffered,” says Charles R. Cross, author of the Cobain biography Heavier Than Heaven.

The feuding began soon after Cobain died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in his Seattle home on April 5, 1994. Love held a wake after the private memorial service, but Novoselic hosted his own. “I don’t hate anybody,” Novoselic says now of Love. “But I wouldn’t say we’re friends.”

Yet for a while the band members had at least reached an accommodation with Love, who meanwhile was fronting her own band, Hole, and acting in such films as The People vs. Larry Flynt. Since Cobain died without a will, his estate automatically went to Love and their daughter Frances Bean Cobain, now 9. In 1997 Novoselic, Grohl and Love formed Nirvana LLC, a partnership that gave each of the three an equal say in decisions about Nirvana’s music.

When Grohl and Novoselic tried to release the boxed set—which was scheduled for last December and was to include a much-hyped unreleased song called “You Know You’re Right,” recorded three months before Cobain’s death—Love sued to stop it. The song’s chorus includes a harrowing wail of the word “pain” stretched out for nearly 10 seconds, says Cross, who has heard it.

Love now wants to nullify Nirvana LLC and take sole control of future Nirvana releases. “Grohl has consistently refused to discuss LLC matters with me, either in person or on the telephone,” she says in the suit. She wants the remaining songs to be portioned out piecemeal for maximum marketing impact. “With their plan [the release of new music] would have been over by now, generated a significant amount of money, but that would be it,” says her lawyer O. Yale Lewis Jr. “It’s simply not the proper way to introduce music of this quality.” To complicate matters, Love accused Novoselic of threatening—in a June 2000 e-mail—to destroy some of the songs. He says he just wanted to keep “outtakes that sounded really bad” off the Internet. “We were always trying to get the music out,” says Kelly Corr, a lawyer for Novoselic and Grohl. “That was our goal.”

Cobain’s mother, Wendy, 55, his sister and half-sister are backing Love, who after Cobain’s death bought Wendy a $400,000 home. “Kurt Cobain was Nirvana,” the family said in a statement last December. “He named the band, hired its members, played guitar, wrote the songs, fronted the band onstage and in interviews and took responsibility for the band’s business decisions.”

Novoselic counters that he and Cobain began playing together in Novoselic’s mother’s Aberdeen, Wash., home in 1985, two years before they formed Nirvana, which Grohl joined in 1990. He points out that before Love wed Cobain, the band released its seminal 1991 album Nevermind and its anthem “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” “I don’t recall any role for Courtney,” says Novoselic. “She is a complete alien to Nirvana’s music and success.”

In their suit the band members claim that Love is so addled by drink and drugs that her vote in the Nirvana partnership should be assigned to a representative. They cite a 1995 incident at a George, Wash., Lollapalooza concert when Love allegedly tried to slug another performer (a judge dismissed the charges). They even suggest that Frances Bean might not be Cobain’s daughter (Love’s lawyer insists she is) but have not requested a DNA test. Love, they allege, “is irrational, mercurial, self-centered, unmanageable, inconsistent and unpredictable.”

Which sounds like a typical rock star résumé. King County Superior Court Judge Robert Alsdorf—who will preside over a September trial—ruled April 24 against the band members’ request that Love undergo psychiatric evaluation, saying it would “serve no purpose other than to contribute to a circuslike atmosphere to the trial.” That’s probably a given anyway, but Novoselic is thinking long-term. Very long-term: “Two hundred years from now, they’re not going to be thinking about this. I’ve got my eyes on the prize—the musical legacy of Nirvana.”

Thomas Fields-Meyer

Cynthia Flash in Seattle

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