RAW33094

SO LET�S ask that question again, shall we: what exactly happened to Kurt Cobain on the night/morning of March 4?
The truth is, it�s doubtful anyone will ever know the full extent of what really went on, though the clues are there for anyone to pick up.
To begin with, there was Nirvana�s performance in Italy the week before. The band had played two shows at the Dala Giaccio, an ice-rink in the Roman suburb of Marino. According to eyewitness reports, neither concert featured one of Nirvana�s more cohesive performances. The latter was a particularly listless, ill-tempered set. Cobain had sat down on the stage throughout much of the truncated 40-minute performance, appearing silent and morose � a condition the singer�s handlers put down to the onset of flu.
The band left the following day for two shows in Munich, but cancelled them at the last minute after Cobain complained of a throat infection. A two-week break was called, and Cobain and Love returned to Rome. The Nirvana tour bus was to have resumed in Prague on March 11.
Courtney, whose own band, Hole, are about to release their new album, �Live Through This�, spent a couple of days of the first week in London, where she was busy promoting her record. She returned with baby Frances, to Rome on March 3.
The hours between her return to the Excelsior and Kurt�s collapse into a coma later that same night are not easily documented. What has been ascertained is that around midnight on the night in question, Cobain had acquired a quantity of the prescription drug Roipnol from an all-night chemist (presumably he had obtained the prescription from his own doctor in the US before Nirvana left for the tour) and that, later, he had ordered at least one bottle of champagne from room service.

AS AN experienced drug user � it is no secret that both Cobain and Love have been heroin addicts in the past � it would appear highly improbable that he would not have realized the potential consequences of such a mixture.
Revealingly, in a strange aside while commenting on the group Madder Rose�s single to a journalist in London the day before, Courtney said it reminded her �of when I take those dihydrocodeines I get over here in London with the Roipnol and a glass of champagne�.
But was Kurt really dumb enough to accidentally OD? As he told his biographer, Michael Azerrad, �You just don�t mix (drugs) and alcohol at all, or you�ll die. You pass out when you�re drunk and you wake up and get high and there�s no way you�re going to survive that. Everyone I know of who has OD�d has gotten drunk. And it�s been late at night, too�.
RAW spoke to a top London doctor, experienced in treating famous musicians with drug problems, who told us that the normal dose of Roipnol for a good nights sleep is one tablet, taken with water. Five Roipnol tablets and a few glasses of champagne would, he said, �put you completely out for about 14 hours�.
We asked the doctor how many Roipnol tablets, in conjunction with a bottle of champagne, it would take to put a person into a life-threatening coma for 48 hours. �Upwards of 20 tablets would do it,� he replied. �At least 10 or 12, put it that way�.
Despite giving �In Utero� the working title of �I Hate Myself So Much I Want To Die�, with millions of dollars in the bank, a wife he loves and an 18-month old baby daughter he is absolutely dotty about, it is impossible to believe that Cobain had suicide in mind.
Singer, Pete Shelley, whose band The Buzzcocks opened some of the early dates on Nirvana�s European tour, said that, contrary to rumours, Cobain had appeared to be in good health and reasonably high spirits.
�On the first date in Lisbon, he came into the dressing room and started chatting. If anything, while the rest of us were getting into all sorts of debauchery, he would just wish us a good night and go off for an early night.�

ALL WE know for sure is that, as the afternoon of Friday March 4 wore on, Cobain began to drift uneasily in and out of consciousness. At which point, Love recovered herself enough to place a call to Cobain�s mother, Wendy, back home in America.
Wendy was quoted the next day in her local Washington paper, The Daily World Of Aberdeen, as saying, �He�s going to make it. All I know is he suffered a massive drug overdose�.
After that, nothing. Neither Love nor any other member of Cobain�s family responded to further questioning, and senior medical staff at the American Hospital were instructed that all further details of the singers condition be kept secret.
By 8 pm, nearly 100 worried Nirvana fans had gathered at the gates of the American hospital, waiting for news of their idol�s condition, still then being described as �critical�.
It was fully 24 hours before Kurt Cobain gradually began to emerge from his death-like sleep and another 12 hours before he was conscious enough to hold a blurry conversation with his doctors.
Late Saturday afternoon, Dr Osvaldo Galleta, chief medical officer at the American, gave a brief interview to waiting reporters, during which he reported, �Cobain doesn�t know what happened to him. He hasn�t gained complete control of his memory. When he emerged from the coma, he was hungry and asked for a strawberry milkshake. He is not fully recovered yet, but he can move and soon, if he wants, he can go back to work�.
Which, after a further month�s recuperation at home in Seattle, is exactly what Kurt and Nirvana will do when they resume their UK and European tour commitments in April (see details of all rearranged UK dates in this Hard News).
According to his manager, Janet Billig, what happened to Kurt Cobain was�
��an accident. He had been sick with influenza and had a bad throat condition, so he went to Italy to recuperate. Then he inadvertently mixed a dose of tranquillisers and alcohol�.

IT ALL sounds so simple�so why the secrecy? The truth may be even more prosaic. If Cobain and band had been forced to completely cancel their touring plans, he and Nirvana could have faced legal claims for damages stretching into millions of dollars from the tour�s irate promoters.
And, more fundamentally, nobody likes to admit they f**ked up, accident or not. Not even Kurt Cobain, who affects to care so little about his fate he probably cares a little too much.

The official news agency fax arrived at precisely four minutes past midday on Friday March 4 1994. It read: �Kurt Cobain, lead vocalist and guitarist with top selling American Rock band Nirvana, was in a coma in a Rome hospital on Friday after overdosing on a mixture of champagne and barbiturates, Italian radio reported. Doctors were pumping his stomach and the radio report said the musicians life was in danger��

Six hours and twenty three minutes later, word came through on a fax from the bands UK publicity firm, Bad Moon.
That read: �Kurt Cobain, the 27 year old lead singer for the Rock group Nirvana, was admitted to hospital in Italy after slipping into a coma. He has suffered a complete collapse due to fatigue and severe influenza. Complications arose after he combined prescription painkillers and alcohol. Doctors report that he has made responsive signs��
By now you�ve all read the stories, some true, most of them not: stories made up by officials close to the band who didn�t know the full extent of what really went on in the suite at the Excelsior Hotel in Rome, where Cobain was staying with his wife, Hole�s singer Courtney Love, and their baby daughter, Frances Bean.

So, what�s the truth? Was Cobain�s sudden incarceration in hospital just a bizarre accident�or is there something they�re not telling us?
Let�s examine the facts.

THE SHIT hit the fan on the morning of March 4, when Courtney rang down to the reception desk of the Excelsior, frantically calling for medical assistance after she realized with mounting horror that she was unable to rouse her unconscious husband.
An ambulance screeched to a halt outside the hotel at 6.30 am, where paramedics discovered the singers crumpled, unconscious body on the floor of the couple�s suite, his breathing barely audible.
He was placed on a stretcher and immediately rushed to the nearby Umberto Prima Polyclinic, where he was admitted under the name of Kurt Poupon � the pseudonym he was using at the Excelsior.
Both his wife and former Germ�s guitarist Pat Smear (who has been touring with Nirvana as second guitarist and is an especially close friend of Kurt and Courtney�s) were present at the hospital, as was Marco Cestoni, head honcho of Geffen Records� Rome office.
By midday Friday, after five hours of intensive treatment, during which Cobain�s stomach was pumped and the stricken singer was placed on emergency life-support systems, word had leaked out to the typically frenetic Italian news media. Reports were being given over Italian television and radio that Cobain had slipped into an �irreversible coma�.
The medical team that treated him reported that the substances they had retrieved from the singer�s stomach included champagne, Roipnol (not a barbiturate, as reported at the time, but a sleeping pill available on prescription in America, and known in the UK as Rohypnal), and a third substance called Clorariohydrate (widely used in the US as an anaesthetic to treat infants).
An hour later, Courtney insisted that Kurt�s still unconscious body be removed to the American Hospital, a well-guarded private clinic situated in the suburbs of Rome.
One of the doctors who treated Cobain at the Umberto was quoted in the Italian press as saying: �Cobain was in a grave condition when he left here�.
By now, of course, the rest of the world�s over-eager media had been alerted of the singer�s near-death predicament. Back at the Excelsior, shocked fans had begun arriving, joining the hovering TV crews, journalists and photographers camped out like vultures on the hotel�s plush doorsteps.
The hotel�s staff were under strict instructions to keep their mouths shut and under no circumstances speak to the press. They were told to stick to the official story of �fatigue� and �severe� influenza��