Kurt Cobain suicide truthers might be astonished to find that Courtney Love was once among them. The woman who is regularly and flimsily accused of being behind Cobain’s death was suspicious of the suicide ruling, according to a new book on Alice in Chains.
Alice in Chains: The Untold Story features a passage that reveals Love’s disbelief that her husband committed suicide.
From the book:
A few weeks after Cobain’s death, Jim Elmer [Layne Staley’s stepfather] got a call from Courtney Love. She had been trying to get a hold of Layne and somehow got Elmer’s phone number. According to him, they spoke twice. “The gist of the conversation was that she was looking for Layne because she knew Layne and Kurt were friends and wanted to find out what happened the last few days, that she intimated to me that she was not happy with the outcome that it was a suicide. She thought there was more to it than that, and she wanted to chase down Layne and have a discussion with him.”
Love was probably assuming that because Cobain and Layne ran in the same social circles — musicians, drug users, and drug dealers — he might have seen Cobain or have some knowledge of his final days. Whether Layne saw Cobain during his final days is not known, but there is evidence of at least one mutual drug connection.
Elmer also said that Alice in Chains’ Layne Staley didn’t believe that Cobain would take his own life.
“Layne was a little more vocal on the Kurt issue, because he never thought Kurt would take his won life,” Jeff Elmer said. “He mentioned that multiple times, about that issue, that he never did believe it. And so this was not right after he died, this was years after, too. He still remembered that and just thought that was not characteristic of Kurt.”
Staley said he saw drugs and mental illness change Cobain from a “vibrant person turn into a real shy, timid, withdrawn, introverted person who could hardly get a hello out.”
Staley would, of course, go through his own downward spiral and eventually die of an overdose in 2002.
(via Stereogum)
