KAT BJELLAND I’d gotten a flight out there to go to the funeral and to hang out with Courtney and support her. In the funeral home, I saw him dead, which was more than disturbing. She made me hold his hand. Isn’t that gross? I just sat there, frozen. Paralyzed. It was icky, awful. I never told anybody that before, except my friends. I just feel like gettin’ it out of my system because I’m sick of holding secrets. I had a nervous breakdown right after that, when I got home to Minneapolis.
MATT LUKIN Years later, Courtney started talking a lot of shit about Mudhoney not being at Kurt’s funeral. I’m like, **** that! We were busy! We were on the other coast! My then-wife was there—I guess I was somewhat represented by her. At one point, Courtney invited each of us to pick a guitar of Kurt’s: “Go pick up a piece of Kurt’s stuff to remember Kurt by.” The only one who took her up on it was Steve Turner. To me, it was like, I knew Kurt, I got my memories. I don’t need her to ****ing help me out with that.
MARK ARM Getting a guitar of Kurt’s? It would make me feel like a vulture, I guess. I spent about a year putting distance between myself and them, so it seemed like a ruse on Courtney’s part somehow. Like she’s buying us off or something.
STEVE TURNER I ran into Courtney somewhere
and she called me a few times and said she really wanted to give me one of Kurt’s guitars, how much Kurt looked up to us and all that kind of stuff. So I went over there and basically took some old, ridiculous guitar that wasn’t any guitar he played. Courtney seemed just kind of lost and crazy to me. I kind of regretted it upon walking into the house. It seemed like total zoo chaos. Kurt’s mom was there, they had the baby, obviously, there’s nannies that were high on drugs. It was like a drug house, a giant mansion with ****ups wandering about. And the guards and the hangers-on and the people that were still trying to get something out of them—the sharks that were living there. I took some stupid guitar at her insistence, and I’ve never seen her since.