Former Nirvana manager Danny Goldberg, who recently released a book called Serving the Servant, called the conspiracy theory that Courtney Love had Kurt Cobain murdered nonsense in a new Independent interview.
He watched Cobain’s final downward spiral as a close associate, friend and adviser. His repeated unsuccessful attempts at rehab, his phoned threats to potential biographers he was suspicious of (Danny was “horrified” that Cobain would do such a thing), his drug meltdown backstage at the recording of Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in New York performance in November 1993, his overdose in Rome. All of it made Goldberg, when the end finally came, wearily dismissive of the “conspiracy theories” that claim Cobain was murdered.
“It’s ridiculous,” he asserts. “He killed himself. I saw him the week beforehand, he was depressed. He tried to kill himself six weeks earlier, he’d talked and written about suicide a lot, he was on drugs, he got a gun. Why do people speculate about it? The tragedy of the loss is so great people look for other explanations. I don’t think there’s any truth at all to it.”
Shortly before his death, Goldberg confesses, Cobain had asked him if he might be able to launch a career outside of Nirvana. He’d even arranged to record with REM’s Michael Stipe and bought the plane ticket, but never showed up. Had he lived, Goldberg surmises, he might have been his generation’s Neil Young, always burning out and never fading away. “I think he would’ve found different ways of expressing himself, sometimes with the band and sometimes not.”
