I applaud people who dare to have an opinion which goes against the flow, against the majority and the establishment, people who dare to tell what they think at the risk to sound totally politically incorrect. It’s a very punk attitude in all the good sense of the term.
If almost everybody praised ‘Montage of Heck’, Brett Morgan’s documentary about Kurt Cobain, if Rolling Stonecalled it to be the best rock doc ever made or something like that, I am very happy to see that The Melvins’ Buzz Osborne, who knew Kurt Cobain very well, is expressing a totally opposite opinion. He did not like the movie to say the least, and wrote an article for The Talkhouse in which he expresses his profound disagreement with the celebrated documentary:
‘I went to high school with Kurt and was a big part of all the Nirvana guys’ lives before and after they became famous. I thought very highly of Kurt, Krist and Dave. We were good friends when they were all flat broke, long before they could buy big houses and cars with credit cards. My band played with Nirvana at their last show. I was there for the beginning and I was there for the end, for the very good and the very bad,’ he starts his essay with, before saying he does not buy Morgen’s propaganda: ‘First off, people need to understand that 90% of Montage of Heck is bullshit. Total bullshit. That’s the one thing no one gets about Cobain — he was a master of jerking your chain.’
So says Buzz!! And he continues demolishing all the juicy stories concocted by Morgen and sold as Cinéma vérité because extracted from Cobain’s own diary: ‘For instance, I know the whole “I tried to fuck a fat retard” story is complete bullshit. Not even an inkling of truth. That’s too good a story to have gone this long without me hearing about it, especially if, as he suggests, the girl’s father freaked out about it at the high school. In that small-town shit-hole, exciting news of that nature would have been common knowledge before the sun set. It never happened. And the trying-to-kill-himself-on-the-train-tracks story is bullshit as well. It never happened either. There it is, though, told in a recording of Kurt’s own voice so it must be true…right? Wrong.’
And this is a very important thing to say this because Morgen’s film maliciously manipulates the public to make us believe that Kurt was thinking about suicide since his teenage years… Remember, Courtney Love is behind the scene despite what Morgen has repeated (that she was not involved, blablabla…) and she has a big interest into perpetuating the suicide story. After all Kurt tries to commit suicide in Rome just a few months before he died when he thought she was cheating on him, right?? Total bullshit again according to Buzz:
‘For instance, she’d have us believe that Kurt tried to off himself when she’d only thought about cheating on him? Wow. That’s a whole lot different from the stories he told me in regards to Courtney’s behavior — and this was well before he ended up dead. And that’s just one example.’
Just one example but a big one! Buzz had already expressed a similar opinion in the book ‘Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge’, when talking about the last time he talked to Kurt:
‘The last conversation I had with Kurt was in Munich, after he had the screaming match with his wife. I had told him this before and I basically reiterated, “I think that what you should do is give her everything, and run as if your very life depends on it. Sign everything over to her from this moment and just be gone. And if you need money, just go out and do a fucking solo tour, play acoustic guitar, you’ll be fine.” He felt like he was trapped. He was embarrassed by her. He wanted to divorce her. He wanted to get out of it. But he was too much of a mess to get out of it.
Right when they were walking onstage, he said, “I should just be doing this solo.” And that was it. I never talked to him again. They canceled the rest of the tour.’
Isn’t it clear that Courtney and Kurt didn’t get along very well at the end? Many people think they were about to divorce, and one of the proof is a recorded phone conversation with her attorney telling that Courtney had asked her to get the ‘meanest, most vicious divorce lawyer’ she could find. So why would Kurt have cared about Courtney cheating? He was about to leave her! The divorce is even mentioned in that same book about Grunge, when Dan Raymond (the Melvins) says, ‘I know Kurt wanted to divorce Courtney, I heard that come out of his mouth, when he was supposedly producing the Melvins’ Houdini sessions. He said, ‘She’s running up my credit cards’ and something or other and, ‘I want a DIVORCE,’ like out of that country-western song.’ Plus there are so many stories of Courtney cheating on Kurt at many occasions that what she said in the movie (‘I thought about it but I didn’t do it’) sounds as ridiculous as the rest.
Buzz has more to say about Courtney and it’s not flattering:
‘A lot of what she says in this documentary doesn’t exactly jibe with things Kurt told me himself, but I suppose that’s not surprising when you consider history becomes elastic every time Courtney Love opens her mouth.’
Echoing what he had already said in the book ‘Remember this: How do you know when Courtney Love is lying? Her lips are moving’
So could it just be bad blood between Love and Osborne? Who are you ready to believe? Of course Buzz got my vote 100 % because of all I know about Courtney Love, the lies, the manipulation, the awful behavior.
But one of the surprises of Buzz’ essay is this revelation:
‘Kurt also told me there was absolutely nothing wrong with his stomach. He made it up for sympathy and so he could use it as an excuse to stay loaded. Of course he was vomiting — that’s what people on heroin do, they vomit. It’s called “vomiting with a smile on your face.’
Wow, it means that Cobain was fooling with the press and the rest of the world much more than I thought! But why not?
‘I find it amusing that the filmmakers never bothered to fact-check simple stuff like this, and just took Kurt and Courtney at their word. That’s a bit risky when you’re supposed to be making a behind-the-scenes documentary — but not surprising considering that not a lot of what’s out there about Kurt is the truth anyway. But no one seems to care. Unfortunately, it matters very little what the facts are; what matters is what people believe. And when it comes to Cobain, most of what they believe is fabricated nonsense. Montage of Heck does nothing to counter that. With that in mind, it’s really hard to take any of this film seriously,’ he almost concludes. But I knew that already, Morgen said he was more interested by the ‘emotional truth’ than fact checking… seriously, a great attitude for someone selling a documentary about someone’s life!
I worry a lot when people who writes biographies and make documentaries about people they have never met, come with such confidence and declare, ‘look I have totally figured him out, this is the definitive bio, doc about him’… what a pompous and self-serving stance to have! Brett Morgan has this attitude and he will probably ignore Buzz’s essay as he has ignored photographer Alice Wheeler’s opinion about the movie when she said that the movie appeared to be looking through the eyes of Courtney Love and to be serving her ongoing agenda…Morgen does not care for the truth, he got the approval of the establishment which has crowned his movie as ‘the definitive Cobain documentary’, ‘a true achievement, both in documentary filmmaking, and in preserving the memory and legacy of Cobain’… But I say it’s bullshit.