Nirvana’s Dave Grohl, Krist Novoselic Talk Nevermind w/ Jon Stewart

As even Stephin Merritt could tell you, Wikipedia is no place to gather factually accurate information (obvs), but its user-driven database is still, unfortunately, a one-stop shop for many who believe it to be an expert-driven encyclopedia. It’s also the second Google result for “Mary Lou Lord” and many other notable artists.

In a lengthy post on her Facebook page (via ONTD), Lord ranted, reacted, and responded to false information submitted by anonymous users to her Wiki page, recounting the story of her friendship with Kurt Cobain in the months prior to the release of Nirvana’s breakthrough album, Nevermind.

No, that first part of the headline is not from The Onion: Courtney Love was invited to speak at Oxford University recently and that’s exactly what she did last night, discussing the much-publicized conflict with her daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, suicide, and more for the Oxford Union, the school’s renown debating society.

“I’m having my Demeter and Persephone moment with my daughter,” BBC News quotes Love as saying. “My daughter’s the most important thing to me, in my life,” she added, insisting later that Frances Bean was the only thing keeping her going after Kurt Cobain’s 1994 suicide. “What gave me strength was my daughter’s life force.”

[Cobain’s suicide] had a horrible effect on our family. It’s not cool. It just wasn’t cool… I was expected by the zeitgeist to go with him or something. But I worked. I had to work to get money to feed my kid.

And the feud rages on. We’ve mentioned Trent Reznor’s calling his former partner in crime a “dopey clown” a couple of times now, and at long last Marilyn Manson himself has joined the fray with some barbs of his own.

The Herald Sun quotes Manson as saying, “Since I’ve known Trent he’s always let his jealousy and bitterness for other people get in the way. I’m not talking about me — I sat back and watched him be jealous of Kurt Cobain and Billy Corgan and a lot of other musicians in the past. I just don’t find the time to do that. I stopped thinking about him a while back, but I know that every day I have a song played that money will go to him, forever.”

Seems kind of cyclical to me – remember their falling-out in the late nineties and Nine Inch Nails’ subsequent anthem “Starfuckers, Inc.,” which was, depending on the article, a jab at Manson? I do. Just saying.

Not all ties are severed, though. “As long as I have a record deal it will be attached to him financially. In the words of his own song, you shouldn’t bite the hand that feeds you — you should take that hand and punch yourself in the face.”

Lemonheads singer Evan Dando has been a rumored notch on Courtney Love’s bedpost ever since he and Kurt Cobain had a falling out in the early 90s. In an exclusive interview with Gigwise’s Paul Reed, Dando recently revealed that the rumor was started by Love herself in a likely attempt to make Cobain jealous.

“Courtney was saying that we were having an affair - I was never attracted to Courtney,” Dando said. “She was like ‘I made Kurt cry last night’. She is crazy.” The whole debacle troubled Dando for years because Kurt, as he says, “went to his grave misinformed” about the rumor.

There’s a bit of a trend of musicians burying the hatchet with Cobain lately (save for Brandon Flowers), including Eddie Vedder’s recent statement that, “if Kurt were around today, I know he’d say to me, ‘Well, you turned out OK.’”

For more from Gigwise’s talk with Dando, click here.

Likely due to the 15th anniversary of his death, Kurt Cobain has been popping up in the press even more than usual lately. Today’s big story is that The Killers singer Brandon Flowers allegedly dissed Cobain in an interview, but we don’t really agree with that angle. First, here’s the quote:

“I don’t mean it in a bad way,” Flowers told the Daily Star (via Chart Attack), “but I think Kurt Cobain and grunge took the fun out of rock ‘n roll.”

Flowers is certainly not the first person to note that Nirvana and the 1990s grunge movement were influential in ending the era of hair metal and glam. It’s such a common notion that it even came up in Mickey Rourke’s The Wrestler last year, when he tells Marisa Tomei’s character that hair bands were the best until “that Cobain pussy had to come around and ruin it all.” “Like there’s something wrong with just wanting to have a good time?” she replied. Don’t you think Cobain would be kind of proud to be associated with taking the “fun” out of music?

No, we don’t think Flowers really took much of a stab at Cobain. If he really wanted to get him good, he could’ve used this line from Bart Simpson on the Smashing Pumpkins: “Meh. Making teenagers miserable is like shooting fish in a barrel.”

Back in the early nineties, Nirvana and Pearl Jam were possibly the two biggest bands in America, but despite both groups having sprung from the same Seattle grunge scene, Kurt Cobain didn’t initially think they had both stayed true to their roots. Cobain even famously accused Pearl Jam of “pioneering a corporate, alternative and cock-rock fusion.”

Now seventeen years later, Eddie Vedder is reissuing Pearl Jam’s breakthrough album Ten and has spoken out on Cobain’s early opinions of his band. “I don’t think Kurt understood us at the time, but we became friends and I’m glad we had some of the great conversations we had, that I’m always going to keep up here,” Vedder told The Sun, pointing to his head.

“I don’t talk too much about him in respect to Krist (Novoselic) and Dave (Grohl) and I know he said that early stuff about not liking us,” Vedder added. “But there’s a couple of complimentary things that he said in public about me as a human being, which I’m proud exist. But if Kurt were around today, I know he’d say to me, ‘Well, you turned out OK.’”

After years of dedication to their fans, a war with Ticketmaster and very few questionable licensing deals, Vedder has put all the early-nineties criticism over the band “selling out” to rest. “People offered us money to sell out but do I look like a whore?” he said.

Gus Van Sant’s Last Days may have been an interesting abstract imagining of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain at the end of his life and 2007’s Kurt Cobain: About a Son did feature exclusive audio interviews with the music legend, but a proper biopic, with some good ol’ Oscar bait acting, has never been attempted. The Playlist (via Production Weekly) reports that Marc Forster, the director of the newest James Bond flick, Quantum of Solace, is eyeing a Cobain script written by David Benioff.

Benioff, who was hired by Universal to write a Cobain biopic in 2007, and Forster have worked together before on 2007’s The Kite Runner. The script is said to be based on Charles Cross’ Cobain biography, Heavier Than Heaven, and the executive producer for the much-buzzed about project? Courtney Love.