Courtney Love is looking for a new pair of pyjamas. Thirteen years to the month after her husband Kurt Cobain was found with a shotgun wound to the head at the home they shared on Lake Washington, she has decided to move on.
No more will she wear his pyjamas to bed, and no more will she cart around Cobain’s trademark flannel shirts. She is preparing a final clear-out from her life of the last possessions of the Nirvana singer, whose drug-fuelled songwriting epitomised the so-called slacker generation of the early 1990s, and whose eventual suicide in April 1994 gave birth to a rock legend.
Love revealed her decision to sell the items on AOL’s music website, Spinner.com, lamenting that her house was ”like a mausoleum”. She said she would stage the sale through the auction house Christies at a date yet to be determined.
Only a small part of the Cobain legacy will be kept out of the sale, as heirlooms for the couple’s daughter, Frances Bean, who is now 14. Love said that among them would be the original lyrics of Smells Like Teen Spirit, the 1991 hit single that Cobain once said was his attempt to write the ultimate pop song.
Love explained the thinking behind the auction. ”My daughter doesn’t need to inherit a giant hefty bag full of flannel … shirts,” she said. ”A sweater, a guitar and the lyrics to Teen Spirit — that’s what my daughter gets. The rest of it we’ll … sell.”
More than a decade on from his death, the Kurt Cobain legend remains hugely powerful, with his estate selling about a million units a year and Forbes magazine putting him at the top of its list of highest-earning dead artists last year.
In 2006, Love sold a 25% stake in Nirvana’s song catalogue to a New York music publishing house for a reported $50-million.
And those pyjamas? ”How am I ever going to go form another relationship in my lifetime wearing Kurt’s pyjamas?” Love told Spinner.com. — Guardian Unlimited Â