Love & Death is yet another in a long line of books that detail the insidious conspiracy that robbed the world of an influential musician who may or may not have spoken for a generation. Like other untimely deaths, Cobain’s apparent suicide didn’t sit well with his fans and spawned an industry of investigations into the specifics surrounding his death. The latest book that details the flaws in the investigation of Kurt Cobain’s death doesn’t shed any more light on an already dark icon’s demise but it does shed light onto something I’ve long thought… and that is that dead men tell no tales, which is just another way of saying, we’ll never know what happened and we’re probably all better off coming to terms with this fact.
If you read the original Cobain investigation by Ian Halperin and Max Wallace (Who Killed Kurt Cobain? The Mysterious Death of an Icon), you really don’t need to read this one since all it does is reiterate evidence, interviews and timelines. The compilation of evidence is sometimes presented in a hysterical manner almost daring readers to find plausible explanations for the information that they have uncovered. Most of it is innuendo, conjecture and guesswork that shouldn’t be seen as anything more than what it is… sensationalism for the sake of a buck.
I’ll save you from giving them the few bucks they might otherwise get and tell you that Mssr’s Halperin and Wallace edge ever closer to actually accusing Courtney Love of murder without actually accusing her of murder. I would imagine that they are hoping to milk more money from Cobain’s fans with yet a third as yet unreleased installment in which they will finally say (write) out loud what they’ve been hinting for 10 years now.
The bottom line is simply that Courtney Love is a paranoid, erratic and clearly delusional character. Is she capable of the things the book almost accuses her of? Perhaps. Only one person knows what really happened in that greenhouse above the garage of Cobain’s house and I don’t think he’ll ever tell.