Note Found in Kurt Cobain's Wallet: True Scorn or Inside-Joke Love Letter?

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Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love and daughter Frances Bean Cobain at the MTV Video Music Awards on September 2, 1993.

Image: Ron Galella

By Josh Dickey2014-04-30 21:10:18 -0700

We’ll probably never really know the intent of the note that was found in Kurt Cobain’s wallet the day he killed himself 20 years ago and first made public this week — the one that appears, at first read, to badly disparage his wife, Courtney Love.

"Do you Kurt Cobain take Courtney Michelle Love to be your lawful shredded wife," goes the scrawl (below), “even when she’s a bitch with zits and siphoning all yr money for doping and whoring…"

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The note is written on stationery from the Phoenix Hotel, a hip and gritty rocker hideout in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. The last time Nirvana played in the Bay Area was New Year’s Eve 1993 at the Oakland Coliseum, less than four months before Cobain wrote a page-long, heart-wrenching suicide note in red pen, pointed a shotgun at himself and took his own life.

Was this new note written during that weekend in the Bay? Hole had wrapped its ’93 tour dates a month before, so it’s at least plausible that Love was in San Francisco with him.

The note found in Kurt Cobain's wallet and obtained by CBS News.

Image: CBSnews.com

Given their known troubles with drugs and stormy interaction, it’s conceivable that the note was every bit as vitriolic as it sounds, written in a moment of sardonic rage.

Given their dark senses of humor and penchant for mischief, it’s also conceivable that the note was some kind of inside joke between lovers and co-dependents; a tongue-in-cheek renewal of vows vis-à-vis their many shared flaws, scrawled on stationery in an intimate hotel-room moment and carried around for months as a keepsake.

And given that the note was found in Cobain’s wallet, it makes little sense that it was intended as some kind of addendum to his actual suicide note, wherein he calls Love a “goddess of a wife who sweats ambition and empathy.” He had probably forgotten it was even there.

And yet the two sentiments are offered – beneath headlines implying that the wallet note “mocks” and “scorns” their union – as a sharp contrast. Which is really just an excuse to subtly speculate all over again that Love was responsible for Cobain’s misery and, by proxy, demise.

Ironically enough, it was investigators’ anticipation of just this sort of thing that brought the note – along with more than 30 new photographs of the death scene – to light in the first place. Knowing that the 20-year anniversary would crank up old conspiracy theories, detectives quietly reviewed the case, only to confirm without equivocation that Cobain committed suicide.

But during that review, they found a roll of film that was undeveloped because detectives at the time determined that they had all the prints and Polaroids they needed. The new photographs didn’t reveal much; most were exteriors of the home, though one snapshot of a cigar box heroin kit intercepted a lot of pageviews last month.

A newly released photo from the scene of Kurt Cobain's suicide.

Image: Seattle Police Department

That prompted CBS News to file a public records request, which turned up hundreds of pages of documents, including the wallet note.

The one whose meaning we’ll never truly understand.

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Topics: Courtney Love, Entertainment, kurt-cobain, Music