Erlandson - Letters to Kurt

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the written permission of the publisher.

Published by Akashic Books
2012 by Eric Erlandson

eISBN-13: 978-1-61775-114-1
ISBN-13: 978-1-61775-083-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2011943447

All rights reserved
First printing

Akashic Books
PO Box 1456
New York, NY 10009
info@akashicbooks.com
www.akashicbooks.com

My mother groand, my father wept;
Into the dangerous world I leapt,
Helpless, naked, piping loud,
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.

Struggling in my fathers hands,
Striving against my swaddling bands,
Bound & weary, I thought best
To sulk upon my mothers breast.

When I saw that rage was vain,
And to sulk would nothing gain,
Turning many a trick & wile
I began to soothe & smile.

from William Blakes Infant Sorrow

You probably think this song is about you dont you?
Carly Simon

Just cause you got the monkey off your back
doesnt mean the circus has left town.
George Carlin

CONTENTS

Twenty years ago today, I met Kurt Cobain. My girlfriend and bandmate at the time, Courtney Love, and I were introduced to him in the parking lot after a Butthole Surfers show at the Hollywood Palladium. Around three or four a.m. that same night, the phone rang as Courtney and I were just about to fall asleep in our small basement room under a house in the hills near Universal Studios. Kurt was drunk and had been goaded by an English journalist friend to call Courtney. After she hung up the phone we had ourselves a chuckle. We had kept our relationship secret. Courtney did not want our band to lose its sex appeal. She believed that couple bands were too unavailable. The fact was, for more than a year, we had shared a deep and powerful, if codependent, bond. But after that night, cracks began to appear: great change was on the horizon.

During our first U.S. tour that summer, Courtney began having an affair with Billy Corgan from the Smashing Pumpkins. We broke upnot an easy feat while touring in a van and playing night after night together. Among many conflicted feelings, I was also relieved to finally be set free from our ever more volatile relationship. Our band was on the verge of success, so we sludged on as friends and partners. Then, on September 17, 1991, we released our debut album, Pretty on the Inside, and toured in support of it. A week later, Kurts band Nirvana released Nevermind. The world would never be the same.

Within a month, Courtney and Kurt were dating, soon to be elected first couple of grunge. Their relationship was dragged under the magnifying glass of the media as the pressures of fame gathered around them. I fell into a sort of friend/caretaker role early on, which lasted throughout the tumultuous years of their marriage. I was present when their daughter was born. I chaperoned Kurt, at Courtneys behest, to help shield and comfort him during a Nirvana performance in the UK at the height of his fame and most fragile. I listened to him work on music and lent an ear to his frustrations. But there was always something stopping us from becoming really close: my loyalty to Courtney, along with my self-protective tendency and, perhaps, subconscious jealousy. Damn, how I wished I could write and sing like him! The way he married fearless punk rage with a melodic emotional vulnerability and made it look so simple. He truly was the voice of his generation. Yet, I saw firsthand the toll it took on his soul.

The rollercoaster came to a screeching halt one April morning in 1994 when Kurt was found dead after committing suicide. Our breakthrough album, entitled Live Through This, was released, ironically, just four days after Kurts death. Two months later, Kristen Pfaff, my ex-girlfriend and Holes bass player at the time, was found dead of a heroin overdose. The following March, I lost my dad as well. Over the next six years, I was carried by the winds of success and all the attendant drama. There were albums to make, shows to play; I never properly grieved or processed all that loss. By the year 2000, my relationship with Courtney had disintegrated, and the band eventually dissolved. After settling a lawsuit initiated by Courtney with our record label, I set off on my journey into the unknown.

A couple of years ago, a kid who called himself Kyle Cobain showed up early for one of my weekly Buddhist meetings. He was about to turn 27. The Anonymouses werent working for him and he was stuck inside an existentialist tunnel looking for a way out. He spoke of his friendship with Elliott Smith, a red flag if there ever was one. Suicide idols. I tried to help him the best I could, but I hadnt come to terms with suicide, what causes it, how it happens, and why so many people around me have chosen it as a way out. A few months later, Kyle killed himself. He was the last in a too-long string of friends who had taken that route, following in the footsteps of a growing list of self-destructed heroes. Weve numbed ourselves to pain and no longer seek a proper understanding of the cycle of life and death. No wonder more and more people seem to be choosing to end their lives.

At a writing workshop, I was introduced to Jim Harrisons book Letters to Yesenin, a gripping and desperate correspondence in the form of daily prose poems to a Russian poet who had committed suicide back in the 1920s. I began writing prose poem letters to Kurt as a way of exploring all Id been through, my experience of life as it is now. My inner demons, personal means of self-sabotage, musings on death, suicide, masculine/feminine roles, food, sex, addiction, the financial crisis, global disturbances in the world, societys ever-increasing greed, anger, delusion, the movement in art toward style over substance, the mass disconnect between body and mind, and various current events all come into play. Im talking to myself really. But I found Kurt to be the perfect muse. He was someone whom I knew briefly, yet loved and admired immensely, a friend whom I wanted so badly to help, yet in the end failed to understand.

I see these letters as songs, fifty or so grooves from my brains tape deck to you. A fifty-two-card pickup, presented in the order in which they came. In no way do I intend to glorify or romanticize Kurts chosen way out, nor make light of it. Nor do I mean to demonize Courtney. Though my frustration comes through, these letters did not arise from vengeance. On the contrary, I thought if I could sort out my struggles and disappointments, face my demons, become more aware of the ways in which I attempt to escape this troubled world, maybe I would be in a position to help others. There is no way out, of course. But there is a way in, back to our true selves, our connection to the earth, the universe, to each other.

Twenty years later and I feel ready to embark on a new journey. The previous one has been beautiful, heartbreaking, and hilarious. Like a friend of mine once said, Real life is way more fucked up than you could ever imagine. Who knows, if we open the mouth of the dead inside each one of us, we may just find a new reason to live.

Eric Erlandson
Los Angeles, California

Destiny. My friend Ken said she changed his life. I found her on YouTube channeling you, her piercing black eyes not of my world. Not of yours, I hope. Wake up, humanity, there are vampires! she howls. Noshitsherlock. Theyre everywhere. Zeitgeist Gesundheit Kindergarten Angst Kaputt. Fever-pitched salesmen barking out bargains on coffins, discounts on faith, selling us everlasting life in the form of teen neck fests and teeth-whitening paste. And when our meager lives are most at stake, the moneylenders waddle away with the bountys share of blood, the government corps burden the decomposing body with bureaucratic formaldehyde, and clever spiders circle our debt-ridden nests for any lone survivors or secrets. I bet you dressed as Dracula on Halloween. You seem like the type. And when your surrogate mother came to take your kid away, long after the ringing chords faded from the closet where the Fender Twin with one tube and one speaker gave solace, just weeks after the fall of Rome, a bottle of Rohypnol chased by a bottle of champagne, your failed intervention, there was no way out but to turn your fangs in. Rattlesnakes bite themselves. Young birds fly into cliffs. Parasites cause madness. Your burning stomach eaten by life itself. Too much heat, heroin, and Klonopin. Whos to blame, the scorpion that stings itself or the ring of fire surrounding it? Great panic is a great excuse. My new book