Sunday Night, 2:30 AM ... Did Mark Lanegan Kill Kurt Cobain?
- 4 hours ago
- 14 min read
At time of writing, I am currently trying to process the insane "coincidence" that a frankly overwhelming amount of evidence has reached my attention just about a week prior to Lanegan's death day, specifically right after I wrote a piece exalting his significance in the tapestry of life for his birthday a few months prior. It's almost like he heard me and growled.
"Oh, you think you know me, do you?" Well, hypothetical Lanegan, as a specialist in The Human: In Action and Concept. And because I invented this particular branch of... -ology, by combining more pieces of -ologys than anyone ever has before (I'm pretty sure), I can confidently state that I am the expert in this new specialty. I invented it, only I know the details that define it (there are so many that I periodically must re-stitch them together to remember my own conclusions), I get to be the pioneer, so... Yes. Yes I do. Much better than you do, in fact. And now I'm going to prove it, hypothetical Lanegan. And sir, this article is about you not me, stop making me justify why I like you? Sit down and learn a thing or two about the Thing you happen to be - a little Thing called Human. And because I find so much to appreciate in your existence - regardless of your inability to see it - I'm going do my best to argue why you not only deserve mercy, but are ultimately still worthy of celebration. But, like, not at all because I think you're falsely accused...
|
The Evidence
When I first saw the accusation, I thought it was ludicrous and insulting. But then I did my research... Nothing brought me to the internal recognition that it was really true more so than the man's own confession, thinly-veiled in a song found in his final studio work - a collaboration with Joe Cardamone. That song is the very title of this article: Sunday Night, 2:30 AM. Here is the exact lines from the track that formed the pit in my stomach the moment I heard them: Sunday night in the AM
2:32 My trigger-finger all blistered and blue
From 24 hours of turning the screw
And it makes me wonder
How long I'll wander
I'm gonna have to wander
All the rest of my days
From his last solo LP, there is a track called "Hangin' On (for DRC) - DRC stands for Dylan Randolph Carlson of the band Earth another close friend of Kurt who is also heavily implicated in his murder. But from that song, the relevant lyrics read: We've known eachother all too well
Walking side by side through fields of Hell You've always held your tongue
Despite what evil thing I done
"Thing". Lanegan did many things in his early life that he'd call "evil" by his own admission, so why is this not plural?
But Intuition and suspicious lyrics aside, what other evidence is there? Well, a quite lot actually.
Cigarette butts of the particular kind Lanegan smoked (he used 2 different filters) were found near Kurt's body.
An anonymous woman called the SPD to say that they should be looking for 'Mark' [no last name given] and also that they should look for a silver ring and ear-clip, both of which there are numerous photos of Lanegan wearing before Kurt's death, but not after. The SPD noted 'probably Tammy Hill again' - Tammy Hill was a girl Lanegan featured in his autobiography Sing Backwards and Weep and said she "helped him believe in himself". He probably felt safe enough to confide in her.
A eyewitness testimony from Joe Burns claiming Lanegan was one of three men who attacked Kurt and gave him a lethal hotshot of heroin. The witness' story never changed since it was first told except for the addition of Lanegan when he released the book To Kurt, I'm Sorry. Some claim this was added for sensationalism but the other evidence suggests Joe Burns simply achieved a more complete recollection.
Photos also possibly place him at Kurt's house on that same day, which doesn't line up with Lanegan's statements at all.
Although blurry, there is a photo of Mark at Kurt's funeral, where his "trigger finger" does indeed appear to be "blistered and blue" when zoomed-in and upscaled.
His gravestone reads "the Night Porter", which was specifically Kurt's nickname for him.
Many instances of Lanegan acting weird any time Kurt is the subject of conversation.
I got this information from Zachary McQuaid of the youtube channel The Life of a Borderline, who, despite being of questionable mental health, is nonetheless extremely meticulous, diligent and determined in this matter. And we should be very grateful for it because this event left a scar on the collective unconscious and only truth will heal it.
If you would like to understand the case deeper in regards to other people involved and forensic evidence that it was homicide, check out the Who Killed Kurt Official podcast, which is where I've gotten all the rest of the info needed for this article.
The Defence
Now, I should hope it's obvious that I'm not defending the act in any way, but there are layers upon layers of complexity to this story and the self-righteous people screaming that Lanegan was some kind of evil monster need to check themselves. This character's Trajectory was cursed from the beginning of his life in a way few people could ever understand, and when you study cause and effect like I do, it becomes pretty clear why this happened. For starters, Lanegan was relentlessly and in many forms abused by his own Mother as a child. People might compare Kurt's own strained relationship with his Mother and claim this as evidence that Mark was just inherently bad, but the severity was simply not comparable and people also react in different ways to abuse.
"My place in our family tree was the lowest hanging, most easily pounded pinata, the anti-protagonist, always living under the threat of taking a mental or physical beatdown from this sick person and always fighting back with feral intensity. I didn't know why I was the constant target, but neither did I ever care, protecting myself was my main concern and every dread-filled moment I was alone in her presence set me on high alert. She tried so many times and so many ways to destroy me, I would have murdered her if I ever had the opportunity."
Devil in a Coma, p. 38
Mark was an alcoholic and violent delinquent by age 14. His passion for football was uncermoniously ended by injury, and few things destroy a person more than broken dreams. He ended up with a genuine self-loathing Death Drive with which Kurt could simply not compete. Kurt hated himself, sure, but probably because he couldn't find the strength to stand up to his "wife" Courtney Love, who constantly and viciously emasculated him, and used the results later to push the suicide narrative. It was a pitious and impotent kind of self-hatred.
Lanegan's was extremely turbulent. Violent, even.
Let me try to briefly summarise the importance of the Death Drive: So, basically, according to the work of Melanie Klein, as infants we experience something called "splitting" and this essentially means that since we cannot handle negative emotions with any nuance yet (because we're babies, duh), we project it out into our entire perception of the world. But she wasn't equipped to recognise the abstract importance of this fact. Long-story-short, it means you either see the world in terms of Love or Hate, because in your mind only one can be victorious. But the really important bit is... if you don't happen to be raised in an environment condusive to learning to balance this inital perception, it's likely to compound upon itself, and in extreme Hate-oriented cases like Lanegan, it's likely to end up in tragic early demise.
Note: 'Hate' in this instance is not so much the emotional state, but rather the destructive impulse that it implies. Hence: Death Drive.
But for whatever reason, which neither you or I will ever fully understand, Lanegan avoided the worst. He was extraordinarily lucky in some ways, to keep finding people who recognised his worth not only as an artist, but as a person. And as someone infinitely luckier, I refuse to let him whine about how evil he is, and quite frankly, I refuse to let all of you keep judging yourselves and each other as if you have sufficiently internalised the above information (which, by the way, is the tip of the tip of the tip of the tip of the iceberg!)
Sub-section: Lanegan's Death Drive
Excerpt from 'Trapped' - Devil in a Coma On my way home through the fields I came across a cow stuck in the mud
a huge animal in distress
I tried for hours to push it feee
but I was just a boy, not a tractor
Exhausted and nearing nightfall
I walked back to the canal
set off the trap with a stick
and threw it into the water
Months later I trudged back that same way
and found the intact skeleton of the cow
I'd tried to set free That's an extremely harrowing experience for a young mind, especially one with a disposition to see the world in patterns and themes like most cognitive types with high Intuition>Sensing, which Lanegan's profile invariably fits. The Death Drive is all about the consuming nature of inevitable oblivion and futility of hope it implies. This moment clearly had great impact or it wouldn't have been one of very few pieces about his early childhood in the poetic accompaniment to his memoir.
Excerpt from 'Father and Son' - Devil in a Coma
That was the only time we were in conflict
because at heart he shunned conflict
he just wanted to get by quietly
had enough of war
but on those occasions he wanted
his son to work a war began
because his son was at heart
something different, half-father
but part-spider too
part-snake and part-hateful fiend
part-wolf caught in a trap
thirsty for blood and revenge and chaos and
escape
digging graves and brooding discontent
His Mother's vindictive vendetta made him feel like this about himself as. a. child. Of course, it should be noted Mark mentions that his grandmother was even worse somehow, so gotta take into account the cycle-of-abuse and all that. And subsequently he believed he was literally part of a cursed bloodline, destined to be degenerate and worthless.
I had spent my life in the shadows, facilitating my own and others' undoing, taking on nearly any dark task that came my way, every action the means to an end, the end being oblivion.
Devil in a Coma, p. 56-7
Excerpt from 'Chemical Protection' - Devil in a Coma
As far as I know
the only times I've had multiple personalities
were when I was in an alcohol-
induced blackout
then I was definitely another animal
just tiny visual flashes or no memory at all
of what I said or did
That can be somewhat off-putting
the days and weeks following a bender
especially if the other thing you became
had a propensity towards violence, crime
and erratic behaviour
in the sleeping state
like my shadow-self did
What a pity Lanegan never lived to understand that the shadow-self is not a representation of who you are - for you are but a child - but the conditional attitude of said child, which you are sadly at the helpless mercy of unless something or someone intervenes. For example, if the court-ordered therapist he had been sent to had said [in response to young Mark describing his home life]: "That must really hurt, your own caregiver treating you so badly" instead of: "It sounds like your Mother needs help, not you." Perhaps his life would have been very different. But that's the "therapy" industry for you - if they aren't intellectualising everything and misunderstanding their own profession then they're going the total other extreme direction and putting self-perception on a pedestal it has never deserved. Either way, failing society like every other institution. Perhaps by design.
If you have any interest in understanding the possible murderer of one of the biggest names in music history, read Devil in a Coma, it's short and packed with insight into how fucked-up Lanegan's life before he could even defend himself + the inevitable consequences of that.
It's pretty telling that Mark was involved in the creation of Something in the Way, which is Nirvana's most genuinely brooding song. Near the end of his life, evidence shows Kurt actually wanted to get clean, quit Nirvana, divorce his abusive wife and take care of his daughter somewhere far away from fame.
Lanegan wanted to keep doing heroin until he died. That was pretty much his only goal at that time. "Oblivion" was always his word of choice, and the title of his band's most recent album in 1994 was in fact Sweet Oblivion (absolutely incredible album, by the way).
You may be thinking: why wouldn't he just kill himself then? Because he also had a very obviously strong Libido, is the answer. His autobiography showcases a naturally large appetite for pleasure and experiences, corrupted by childhood trauma into an extremely unhealthy coping mechanism + the already psychopathy-inducing effects of opioid addiction. Additionally, a little thing you may have heard of called 'survival instinct'?
This also made him ripe for manipulation. And who do we know close to Kurt who just-so-happens to be a masterclass in manipulation?
To that end, here's a line from Sunday Night 2:30 AM that no one has yet picked up on, but stood out to me immediately: "From 24 hours of turning the screw"The idiom 'turning the screw' means to exert pressure onto something. Its inclusion here implies that someone or multiple someones pressured him to do the deed for 24 hours prior. Truly a mystery who might have motive for such a thing... Anyway, on a completely unrelated note, there's some evidence Lanegan may also have been having an affair with Courtney Love! And you might think "wow, he cheated with his friend's wife? That makes it even worse!" but Kurt had so many justifiable reasons to hate Courtney; to want absolutely nothing to do with her, and it makes sense she'd target the next most popular star in their circle. Most who came into contact with her seemed to be helpless to her superficial charm, after all, which she would routinely use to torture her "husband" in totally sane and un-sociopathic ways. There's references in the above song to a female lover - it could be Courtney, or it could be talking about Lanegan's wife, Shelley Brien (if he never told her):
Do you know what I gave you?
Don't think that you do
Gave you everything I had
Did you know that I loved you?
I don't think that you do
Did you think that you knew me?
Baby you don't know me
You don't know me no more
If Courtney managed to fool him into thinking she loved him (as if she's capable of love) then who knows what she promised (beyond the already immense temptation of abundant heroin). Also, there's a very high chance Lanegan was dissociating during the act, whether by influence of substances (also very likely), or by sheer trauma. Again, from Devil in Coma:'Outside Myself'
It was like I was standing outside myself
I know that feeling
looking at myself from a distance like I were there but not really
as though it were someone else doing it not me
Note: your understanding of trauma is probably too narrow, and you might think having sudden and overflowing access to all your temptations sounds like the opposite of trauma, surely? But (at least especially so) for someone of Lanegan's (and Kurt's, for that matter) cognitive configuration, that's pretty much a recipe for maximum damage. It is true Courtney rescued Mark off the street and into rehab but her motives for that are unknown - it could easily have been fear of him confessing to everything. If you would like to understand how truly poisonous Courtney Harrison (henceforth I refuse to allow the association between her and the concept of Love) is, perhaps you aren't aware of how she actually treated Kurt. Pure vindictive malice. This is well-covered in the aforementioned podcast, in particular the video called Courtney Love’s “Isolation Playbook”: How Kurt Cobain Was Cut Off From Everyone, but as a taster of her toxicity she used to pay teenage girls to run up to Kurt and ask if he was Layne Stayley (Alice in Chains) just to deflate any spirit left in him.
Sub-section: Exactly what I think about Courtney Harrison Well, positively, I can say she's a genuine artist.. Her entire life is art... including the people in it. People often throw words like "sociopath" towards her and that's just not right ... she's so much more pathological. I genuinely believe she's a philosophical solipsist; she believes she's the only one who's "real" and everyone else is free-use art supplies. She wanted to recreate her own vision of the mythological Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen and Kurt was her canvas for that piece, and a cash-cow to boot. The crime scene has oft been described as "like a movie", after all.
It's pretty obvious Lanegan was also pretty sensitive by nature. It's why him and Kurt got along so well before it all went wrong. There's a story that they tried to make an album together and it couldn't happen because they were both so bashful that neither wanted to take the lead. And there's a key moment in his book where the simple question of "What happened to make you so sad?" leaves him sobbing uncontrollably at the thought of the damage he'd done to other people over the years. Not what happened to him, but what he'd done to others. Not just Cobain. He carried a burden of remorse for every misdeed he ever committed. It's blatantly obvious if you read the tone of his musical career, and using that as indication he didn't allow himself to be happy until 2014. That's 2/3 the remainder of his life he spent in psychic repentance. Is that not good enough?
I've seen comments of people saying they "wish he was still alive to face justice". Well, the purpose of prison is supposed to be rehabilitation, not punishment. Let me take this opportunity to tell you something really fucking important: Being a "good person" is not a badge of honor. It is a privilege. And one "you" had nothing to do with. You got lucky; now be grateful for it. Use it to bring the ones on the fringes back to the light, not chase them further into the darkness with your pitchforks, demanding blood to soothe your discomfort at the complexity of the Human condition.
Because in truth this is much more important than one man's dark story. This is about our own tendency to split the world into the good self/bad other, and paradoxically at the same time, the bad self/deified other. If they'd sent the young Mark to the oh-so-effective negative-reinforcement system (again) after the event then what, exactly, would've been accomplished? He gets killed in there or gets out only to waste away somewhere else after being systematically abused some more, like his run-ins with the cops when he was a teen.
Lanegan didn't need jail time to become a better person. Remorse and some goodwill from others was evidently all he needed. Nobody forced that remorse upon him, he carried it, got mostly clean (he'd still abuse painkillers; the yearning for oblivion never left) and became someone that many people loved thereafter, because that's who he was under all that addiction and trauma. He was lovable, no matter what his Mother told him; no matter how much he believed otherwise. People don't throw memorial shows in your name if you're an asshole. Even his ex-Screaming Trees bandmates have plenty nice things to say about him and he kind of was actually an asshole to them at times. But mostly he was humble and grateful to be alive, making the most of his time by creating and performing music with others and trying his best to atone (while possibly avoiding being killed if he admitted anything, let's be honest here).
"Time stolen from Kurt!" "Frances was left without a father because of him!" You may cry, and... you aren't wrong. But what of people like me? People for whom Lanegan's music, not Kurt's, has been an irreplaceable guide, inspiration or has even saved their life? Are we not valid? Because the tragic truth is that it's highly likely without that terrible event Lanegan would probably have died a homeless junkie. Lanegan's friend and my own chief-inspiration, Joshua Homme, says to: "move at the speed of inspiration" and I can't help but feel you need people to inspire you to do that? So if Josh helps me with the thought of being in the light, then Lanegan helps to process the darkness. They are a perfect Extraversion-Introversion dual-inspiration, in fact.
I am not merely a fan of Lanegan's music. I am utterly fascinated by his character and his story. And, quite frankly, Kurt may have been the "voice of a generation", but a voice that screams about everything isn't particularly helpful in the long run. Lanegan's music is a deep and mature exploration of pain and tragedy, of surviving the fall and the possibility of redemption. His authenticity as a man baring the raw struggle of his lived experience shines through countless songs - those he wrote, and those he covered. I MEAN, JUST LISTEN TO THIS:
Conclusion: he and Kurt were both in desperate need of help, and regardless of how you feel about it, fate chose Lanegan. Of course, it's also possible his clues are a decoy as payment of his lifetime debt to Courtney. And she herself might not be lying when she says the C.I.A. was involved. If the Epstein stuff surprised you, you might wanna think about the fact that the elite of society have been into the occult since f o r e v e r. That's a well-documented fact. And Cobain just happened to die on Easter Sunday with alleged ritual stuff included? Lanegan may just have been a disposable pawn in a much darker game...
Comments