Why So Blu?

‘Soaked in Bleach’ Drenches You In The Mystery of Kurt Cobain’s Death

You’re going to have to forgive me.  I’m a little late to this party here.  I had every intention of posting this video when it was released yesterday, but I never got around to it.  It’s not that I didn’t want to or that I was procrastinating, but maybe like a lot of you, the death of Kurt Cobain had a very profound impact on my life.  And quite honestly, that’s hard to admit sometimes.  As soon as you utter the name Kurt Cobain to an elder and profess your mad affinity for the man you kind of instantly get mislabeled as a druggie or a degenerate, sort of the bad rap he received himself.  So I would think it’s odd to hear praise of the man’s career coming from someone like me who has sworn off drugs his entire life, not even touching a cigarette once, to say my love for the man and his art knows no boundaries, even in his death.  And that’s truly where our story begins.

Saddened by the news on April 7, 1994 of Cobain’s “questionable” death some two days earlier, I became obsessed wanting to know the entire truth.  I watched whatever video footage I could collect, read whatever tabloid there was on the supermarket shelves and went out of my way to even gain access to whatever info I could that wasn’t officially public in knowledge, so to speak. After all, it was just some three years earlier that I first read about the man, attended my first Nirvana concert before the general populous even knew about them (thanks to David Grohl’s aunt working in my high school library) and declared to my mom that I was going to be a rock star just like him.  And in some respects I did just that.  I grew my hair freakishly long, learned how to sing and play guitar and even wrote a slew of songs, some recorded (more on the subject here) but many not, and of course had one hell of a time playing them all on stage, thus conquering my fear of crowds, in the many bands I would come to front.  And you know who I attribute and owe all that to?  If you said Kurt Cobain, you couldn’t be anymore dead right.  The man was everything to me and when he was taken from this world, I’ll get to that more in a minute, it hurt something awful like a close family member had exited my life.

Now don’t get me wrong.  I don’t consider myself anyone special and nor do I naively think that I am the only one who was ever touched by Kurt Cobain.  Like it or not, regardless of how he viewed his life, Kurt Cobain was the voice of a generation and he left his mark on the life of others (past, present and future generations yet to come) through his unbridled passion in his art, performances and ultimately his words and music (he was also quite the animal lover too).  But like all good things in life, they ultimately have to come to an end.  And no matter how much people like me worshipped the man, you have to face the music.  I’ve been there before myself, many times more than I care to think about while crafting these words.  The grass isn’t always greener on the other side.  Just like the common folk, Kurt had his own demons, medical aliments and problems that many say he ultimately succumbed too.  But that’s the question of the day.  Did he?  Or was it all too convenient to blame his real-life problems as suicidal tendencies?  However, don’t get me wrong.  I’m not going to be the man that points the finger and irrefuatbly says he was murdered.  I’m not that foolish.  I value my life and don’t want to end up dead on some railroad tracks like the ones who have tried to prove it before.  There’s a certain woman in life you just don’t want to cross.  I know this, and so do others, but this is where I talk about my new Facebook friend, Mr. Tom Grant.

Around the time when I was digging up all the information I could in regards to the “mysterious” death of Kurt Cobain, meeting people and learning “things,” I was eventually directed to the writing and public case files of a man by the name of Tom Grant (his website can be visited here).  You see, Mr. Grant was the private investigator hired by Courtney Love in 1994 to track down her missing husband only days before Kurt’s deceased body was found at their Seattle home.  Now tell me.  Didn’t you always find it strange that the police instantly declare Kurt Cobain’s death a suicide by a self-inflicted gunshot?  Sure there was a lot of evidence at the scene and it was staged perfectly for this kind of speculative ruling, but you didn’t see this kind of treatment when Michael Jackson died or countless other celebrities bought the farm, did you?  They usually take their time to formally make an appropriate statement to the public as an official cause of death  after a lengthy autopsy and many other things are checked off regardless of the obvious.  How could a man injected with two times the lethal dose of heroin ever pick up a shotgun and kill himself, not to mention wipe the prints off the gun afterwards?  And that’s just the cusp of circumstantial evidence Tom brings full circle in his case that maybe foul play could very well have occurred in the death of Kurt Cobain.

There was even talk of a divorce, wasn’t there?  Mrs. Love wouldn’t have seen a cent if Kurt had left her.  She originally thought she was going to be the superstar.  LOL.  It makes sense, but again, this is only the beginning of a greater understanding that Tom opens our eyes to and what a sigh of relief it is to finally see that some twenty years later a courageous filmmaker, Benjamin Statler, has ambitiously set out and taken the next step that no one else would dare by bringing Tom’s story and the events behind Kurt’s death to the big screen in Soaked In Bleach, slated to be released sometime this year.

Now don’t get me wrong.  I’m not saying one way or another.  I have my own beliefs in regards to what really went down on that fateful day of April 5, 1994, but there’s no denying Statler’s Soaked in Bleach will have you questioning what you may have thought was a closed cased.  Others have mysteriously died trying to reopen this case.  I’m just glad Tom’s recollections are finally going to be available to a wider audience to see and learn about.  Cinematically speaking, until that magical day finally arrives in 2014 here, I wanted to drop on all you readers of Why So Blu the debut trailer of Benjamin Statler’s Soaked in Bleach below, which was released on Yahoo Movies just yesterday.  I hope it conjures memories of Kurt’s impact on your life and places doubt in what you may have thought really happened to him.  However, if it just achieves one of those, Mr. Statler has done his job in my opinion.  I wish I could have been a part of this production, but just spreading the news of this future release is satisfaction enough for me.  I’m salivating to get my hands on the Blu-ray!  Thanks for reading and enjoy the trailer below.  And thank you Benjamin and Tom.