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Shine On - Musicians RIP Thread


Dolfan in NYC

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I literally have no idea if this is a big enough name around here for their own thread.

Scott Walker passed away today. He is a central figure in the development of my songwriting style, the patron saint of the idea that your instrument choice is your message. I could spend the rest of the year praising him and might never run out of things to say. Discovering Scott Walker was like having a door in my head kicked open. I would be sadder if the work he left behind wasn't such a dense monolith that I'll be unwinding forever.

 

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1 hour ago, Dolfan in NYC said:

Just a reminder that you're old AF.

25 years ago today, Courtney Love killed Kurt Cobain. 

It's still kind of jarring to see it put that way but you're not wrong.  I remember watching MTV when Kurt Loder announced it and holy crap was that weird to process.  It was the first musician death I remember finding out as it happened.

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2 hours ago, BobbyWhioux said:

17 year anniversary of the death of Layne Staley as well.

17 years minus two weeks since his body was found.  ?
 

 

Layne Staley's death hit me harder than any other musician death. You knew it was coming, but that didn't make it any easier. In fact, it may have made it harder watching an artist whose work you've loved and turned to in difficult times slowly wasting away. I think Layne lost the will to live when his girlfriend and former fiancée Demri Parrott passed away. To quote Layne from Mad Season's "Wake Up", "Slow suicide's no way to go.".

3 hours ago, Dolfan in NYC said:

Just a reminder that you're old AF.

25 years ago today, Courtney Love killed Kurt Cobain. 

I was 13 years old and turned on MTV like I usually did after coming home from school. I think I sat in front of the tv in shock for hours. I fully believe Courtney had him murdered.

Edited by Nice Guy Eddie
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8 minutes ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

Layne Staley's death hit me harder than any other musician death. You knew it was coming, but that didn't make it any easier. In fact, it may have made it harder watching an artist whose work you've loved and turned to in difficult times slowly wasting away. To quote Layne from Mad Season's "Wake Up", "Slow suicide's no way to go.".

I was 13 years old and turned on MTV like I usually did after coming home from school. I think I sat in front of the tv in shock for hours. I fully believe Courtney had him murdered.

I don't understand why so many people are so convinced that someone who was as clearly depressed and troubled as Kurt Cobain didn't commit suicide.  I'm not saying that Courtney couldn't have had him killed, but he was clearly broken in ways that no one seemed to be trying to fix.

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30 minutes ago, supremebve said:

I don't understand why so many people are so convinced that someone who was as clearly depressed and troubled as Kurt Cobain didn't commit suicide.  I'm not saying that Courtney couldn't have had him killed, but he was clearly broken in ways that no one seemed to be trying to fix.

My reasons:

1. The amount of heroin in his system not making it possible for him to lift a shotgun and pull the trigger.

2. The letter doesn't seem like a suicide note until the end, which couldn't be confirmed or denied as being in a different handwriting. I believe Nirvana was breaking up and Kurt was leaving Courtney. 

3. The story of Eldon Hoke aka El Duce, who claimed Courtney had offered him $50,000 to kill Kurt. Although Hoke claimed he knew who killed Cobain, he failed to mention a name, and offered no evidence to support his assertion. In Kurt & Courtney, filmmaker Nick Broomfield inadvertently captured Hoke's last interview, as he died days later, reportedly hit by a train. 

I will agree with you nobody was trying to seriously help Kurt, because a clean Kurt Cobain with his head on straight isn't worth as much to anybody than the heroin addicted, voice of Generation X.

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10 minutes ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

My reasons:

1. The amount of heroin in his system not making it possible for him to lift a shotgun and pull the trigger.

2. The letter doesn't seem like a suicide note until the end, which couldn't be confirmed or denied as being in a different handwriting. I believe Nirvana was breaking up and Kurt was leaving Courtney. 

3. The story of Eldon Hoke aka El Duce, who claimed Courtney had offered him $50,000 to kill Kurt. Although Hoke claimed he knew who killed Cobain, he failed to mention a name, and offered no evidence to support his assertion. In Kurt & Courtney, filmmaker Nick Broomfield inadvertently captured Hoke's last interview, as he died days later, reportedly hit by a train. 

I will agree with you nobody was trying to seriously help Kurt, because a clean Kurt Cobain with his head on straight isn't worth as much to anybody than the heroin addicted, voice of Generation X.

OK, now it is making more sense.  My Nirvana fandom/knowledge is much more based on being a preteen/teen during their peak.  I grew up in a place where Nirvana was to the white kids at school what 2pac was to the black kids at school.  We lived in an old steel town and it was pretty clear that the opportunities of the past weren't going to be around for our future.  So, I knew about Kurt Cobain and understood what he meant to people, but I had my own broken musical heroes.  I know when 2pac died, we all kind of built our own narratives around his death that ranged from batshit insane to totally possible.  I was just wondering where the Cobain murder conspiracies were on that scale.  

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Like I said, I was only 13 when he died and at first I did believe he killed himself. I've seen the Kurt & Courtney documentary and have the book Who Killed Kurt Cobain?. To me, it all points to murder. It's just one of those cases that we're never going to know.

Edited by Nice Guy Eddie
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6 hours ago, BobbyWhioux said:

17 year anniversary of the death of Layne Staley as well.

17 years minus two weeks since his body was found.  ?
 

 

Of the entire Unplugged show, "Frogs" gets to me the most. It kills me to watch the shell of a man whose soul had pretty much already died. To think that he lived another six years in almost total isolation is so sad. In closing, fuck mental illness and fuck heroin. 

 

Edited by Nice Guy Eddie
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2 hours ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

I was 13 years old and turned on MTV like I usually did after coming home from school. I think I sat in front of the tv in shock for hours. I fully believe Courtney had him murdered.

I was 19, and while I was a Nirvana fan, I didn't buy all the mythologising of him at the time. Which has since gotten totally out of hand and there's this whole Grunge Jesus legend now. Which really doesn't fit with what he was actually like. 

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47 minutes ago, supremebve said:

 I was just wondering where the Cobain murder conspiracies were on that scale.  

Real fucking high, minus the "you'll find him if you drive into the desert and ask the sketchy dude who sells homemade kombucha in Kingman, AZ where 'The Star' lives" kind of bullshit.

Edited by Contentious C
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7 minutes ago, AxB said:

I was 19, and while I was a Nirvana fan, I didn't buy all the mythologising of him at the time. Which has since gotten totally out of hand and there's this whole Grunge Jesus legend now. Which really doesn't fit with what he was actually like. 

I disagree with this.  When he died I was literally surrounded by people who looked at him as the Grunge Jesus.  Most of the kids I was in school with at the time looked like members of Raven's flock and he was their hero in a way that I don't actually think can be duplicated in modern America.  He was a cultural icon in real time to a large group of disaffected youth.  

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1 minute ago, Contentious C said:

Yeah, sounds like my high school, too.  The two-generations-clear-of-redneck, rich-but-not-really fucks I went to school with called us, "The Flannel Channel".  

Mine were the opposite.  These were people who's parents were getting laid off from the jobs that their grandparents retired from.  These were the kids of the disappearing middle class.  This was a group of people who were just old enough to see that life was going to end up kicking them in the ass.  I can tell you some stories about how a lot of them ended up.  I remember talking to my cousin a couple of years ago about how we may have grown up in the only part of the country where the white kids ended up worse than the black kids.  

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I know it happened, I know people thought of him that way, and still do. I just don't understand it. He was a decently talented musician who figured out that having ambiguous lyrics allows your audience to personalise your work to themselves, who became more famous more quickly than he could handle and made some terrible life and relationship choices. I don't see where the whole messiah thing comes from.

Of the Seattle bands, I had Nirvana third, behind Alice in Chains and Soundgarden. But it's one of those... even though there's a very small age gap, it sometimes feels like a chasm between the Guns N Roses/ Iron Maiden/ Metallica generation, and the Nirvana/ Tupac/ Oasis generation. And those extra five years really let the older people accept that their heroes are most likely DIRL (Dicks In Real Life) and not actually idolise them to that extent. Whereas Kurt and Tupac died and therefore weren't around to fuck up like Axl, or get replaced by Blaze Bailey or anything. And Oasis' twattishness was what people liked about them anyway.

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On 4/5/2019 at 9:51 PM, Execproducer said:

.... is shakier than Don Knotts. Courtney's only crime against Nirvana fans is that she was in a better band.

but she wasn't

I mean, neither band was Alice in Chains or Soundgarden, that's for sure.

Edited by Nice Guy Eddie
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8 hours ago, Execproducer said:

.... is shakier than Don Knotts. Courtney's only crime against Nirvana fans is that she was in a better band.

Faith No More?

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15 hours ago, Execproducer said:

.... is shakier than Don Knotts. Courtney's only crime against Nirvana fans is that she was in a better band.

I had the displeasure of knowing Eldon Hoke. He was a drunken sociopath who if he told you the sky was blue, you would be well-advised to have it verified by a third party. Anyone that puts any stock in his ravings is a fool. Being hired to kill someone? Shit, I wouldn't trust the guy to pick up a six-pack of beer without fucking it up somehow. If Courtney were really going to have Cobain offed, there are thousands of people that she could've picked from that are far more competent than Eldon fucking Hoke.

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