The U.S. government pays employees a total of about $1 million per minute, according to a watchdog group’s report on the sprawling federal bureaucracy.
Looking at 78 large agencies, the nonprofit organization OpenTheBooks.com found that the average salary of a federal employee exceeds $100,000 and t hat roughly 1 in 5 of those on the government payroll has a six-figure salary.
Almost 30,000 rank-and-file government employees make over $190,823, more than any governor of the 50 states.
“Our oversight report shows the size, scope, and power of the administrative state,” Adam Andrzejewski, Open the Books’ CEO and founder, told The Daily Signal in a phone interview. “Two million federal bureaucrats have salaries, extraordinary perquisites, and lifetime pension benefits. This compensation package has never been seen in the private sector.”
The median wage for all American workers was $44,148 a year for a 40-hour
work week in the final quarter of 2016, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Andrzejewski said the Open the Books report, released Tuesday and including an interactive map of the 2 million federal bureaucrats by ZIP code, is meant to educate taxpayers on where their dollars are going.
So what about those perks?
When federal employees reach the third anniversary of their employment, he said, “they get eight and a half weeks’ paid time off,” including “10 holidays, 13 sick days, and 20 vacation days.” [Correction: The word “plus” has been replaced with “including” to convey his meaning accurately.]
“We estimate those perks alone cost the American taxpayer $22.6 billion a year,” Andrzejewski said.
With the government paying the disclosed workforce $1 million per minute, according to the report, every eight-hour workday costs taxpayers more than $500 million.
A total of 406,960 employees make a six-figure income, amounting to roughly 1 in 5 employees. From 2010 through 2016, the number of federal employees making more than $200,000 increased by 165 percent.
“People are really hungry for these hard facts, they are interested in searching their little piece of the swamp,” Andrzejewski told The Daily Signal.
An image from the report.
(Photo: OpenTheBooks.com)
—A small federal agency in San Francisco, Presidio Trust, paid out three of the government’s four largest bonuses, including the largest in fiscal year 2016. The biggest bonus, $141,525, went to a personnel manager who did payroll.
—The Postal Service and the Department of Veterans Affairs employ over half of all disclosed federal workers, at 32 percent of and 19 percent, respectively.
—About 2 million “undisclosed” employees work for the Defense Department, including active military duty. Their compensation, including $1 billion in bonuses and $125 billion in pensions, amounts to $221 billion per year.
Federal workers are paid a “new minimum wage,” Open the Books argues, because the average employee at 78 of the 122 departments and independent agencies reviewed makes $100,000 or more.
“Congress should hold hearings to bring transparency to all the information we’re still missing, including performance bonuses and pension payouts,” Andrzejewski said in a prepared statement. “It’s time to squeeze out waste from compensation and stop abusive payroll practices.”
Rachel del Guidice is a reporter for The Daily Signal. She is a graduate of Franciscan University of Steubenville, Forge Leadership Network, and The Heritage Foundation’s
Young Leaders Program. Send an email to Rachel.
A mind-boggling 5,168 employees of Ohio State University made a six-figure salary or higher in 2018, while 18 of those employees earned more than $1 million last year.
The university employs 47,686 individuals, of which roughly 11 percent – a little more than one in 10 – earned a six-figure salary or higher.
The salaries of the state’s flagship university were released Wednesday by Dayton Daily Newsas part of its “Payroll Project.” The outlet notes that former football coach Urban Meyer was the highest paid employee in 2018 at a salary of more than $5.1 million.
Vice President of Health Services Mark Larmore earned $1.5 million in 2018, making him the highest-paid non-athletics employee, while University President Michael Drake made more than $1.1 million. Closely behind Larmore was Vice President of Shared Services David McQuaid, who made $1.4 million last year.
Some professors came close to earning more than $1 million in 2018, such as William Farrar and Raphael Pollock, both of whom teach in the Department of Surgery. They earned $905,478 and $927,706 respectively. Rene Stulz, a professor of finance, walked away with $655,877 in 2018.
One “special assistant to the president” in the Department of Health Sciences Administration made $504,167, while an associate professor of plastic surgery raked in $492,928.
James Moore, vice provost of the Office of Diversity and Inclusion, made $284,419 in 2018. The Office of Diversity and Inclusion has two assistant vice provosts, Robert Solomon and Yolanda Zepeda, who earned $169,677 and $110,816 respectively last year.
In total, 5,168 employees walked away with at least six-figures, while 20,466 employees made $50,000 or more. Compare that to the median household income in Ohio of $54,021.
Ohio State University has its own salary database, which shows that only 129 employees make the Ohio median household income of $54,021. There are 537 people who make less than $17,000 annually, which is about $8.55 an hour for full-time work.
The university’s full salary database can be viewed here.
– – – Anthony Gockowski is managing editor of Battleground State News, The Ohio Star, and The Minnesota Sun. Follow Anthony on Twitter. Email tips to anthony.gockowski@gmail.com. Photos “Mark Larmore” and “Michael Drake” by Ohio State University. Background Photo “Ohio State University” by Robert Chriss. CC BY-SA 3.0.
What a difference a year makes. With the announcement of the 2019 Pulitzer Prizes set for next Monday, last year's award to the New York Times and Washington Post for Trump-Russia coverage is already looking like a crumpled first draft of history lofting in a high arc to the dustbin. It's eclipsed by the double-whammy of the Special Counsel’s finding of no collusion with the Kremlin and Attorney General William Barr's disclosure this week that he'll investigate spying by federal authorities on the Trump campaign.
Eclipsed and how. But the deep flaws in this honored coverage, instrumental in pushing the collusion narrative, shouldn't be overlooked just because it's been overtaken by events, or many journalists would prefer to move on, or because President Trump calls it "fake news." The flaws reveal broader problems in reporting this continuing story and journalism in general.
The prize went jointly to the two publications for 10 articles apiece reporting on Trump-Russia developments throughout most of 2017, the chaotic first year of Donald Trump’s presidency.
Washington Post Executive Editor Marty Baron: basking in acclaim last year.
AP Photo/Andrew Harnik
Their heavy investment in shaping and advancing the collusion story is telegraphed by some of the headlines alone. Imagine them with exclamation points and they could easily have appeared in the sensational sheets published by Joseph Pulitzer himself: Sessions Spoke Twice to Russian Envoy! (Washington Post); Emails Disclose Trump Son’s Glee at Russian Offer! (New York Times); Trump Reveals Secret Intelligence to Russians! (Post).
This work is not comparable to earlier Pulitzer scandals that still haunt the Times and Post. But in a way, a lot of it is worse. The Walter Duranty and Janet Cooke embarrassments mainly involved individual fraud or malpractice – outlier transgressions. The articles at issue now generally reflect abuse of a widely accepted but problematic practice that the profession is unlikely to abandon: anonymous sourcing.
Anonymous sources are a necessary evil. They often allow journalists to report information they could not gather otherwise. But because their identities are shielded from readers who have no independent means of assessing their credibility or motivations, news organizations must vet these sources rigorously and convey that they are not being used at the expense of a faithful presentation of facts.
New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet, right, in 2015 with the publisher at the time, Arthur Sulzberger Jr.
Ruth Fremson/New York Times via AP
In the case of much of the Pulitzer-winning Trump-Russia work, anonymous sources were used with insufficient skepticism and a lack of caveats in the service of a credulous and disingenuous journalism of innuendo. The journalistic failures these articles reflect would be problematic even if Special Counsel Robert Mueller had made a case for collusion. His findings just make them all the more obvious.
In the main, the honored, mostly multi-bylined articles are sourced to “current and former officials,” “people with knowledge of ...” or similar formulations. Sometimes a specific number of sources is given, but with few exceptions there is little insight into who these people were beyond the adjectives “senior” or “foreign” to describe officials here and there.
Rereading the stories, I searched mostly in vain for answers to these questions: Which government departments did the sources work for? What were their motivations? Were any of them seeking to deflect attention from their own failure to prevent Russian meddling in the 2016 election? How many were current and how many former (i.e. Obama administration) officials? Were any of them connected to former high-ranking officials who publicly – and profitably -- turned against Trump? (Men such as James Comey of the FBI, John Brennan of the CIA and James Clapper, the former Director of National Intelligence.) For that matter, were those high-profile men also serving as anonymous sources? And – a problem little discussed in journalism – could the same people have been sources for multiple stories, creating a distorted, snowballing impression of major wrongdoing?
Just as important, apart from White House denials of allegations, I usually searched in vain for voices both inside and outside the government who dissented from the dark interpretations that were offered.
Michael Flynn: a treason story?
AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta
The work’s shortcomings become clear in Pulitzer-winning articles on two members of Team Trump: two published by the Post at the beginning of 2017 on the president’s first national security adviser, Gen. Michael Flynn; and one published by the Times at the end of the year on campaign adviser George Papadopoulos.
Both men pleaded guilty, under pressure, to so-called process crimes of lying to investigators – not for conspiring with Russians.
The Posts’ two February 2017 articles on Flynn, totaling more than 3,300 words, read, then as now, as though the paper were drawing a bead on a treason story for the ages. They quote anonymous sources (“current and former U.S. officials,” “some senior U.S. officials”) inviting the worst possible interpretations from Flynn’s contacts with Russians and his misstatements about them.
A central premise of the stories – that acting Attorney General Sally Q. Yates felt the 1799 Logan Act was a good reason to raise alarms about Flynn – should have provided a strong tipoff that the sources might have been politically driven. Democratic Party partisans had long had the knives out for the maverick ex-general, whom President Obama had forced to resign as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. But that context is missing as the Post presents at length, with grave seriousness and little skepticism, deep official suspicion seemingly of Flynn's every recent move. He's flouting the Logan Act! That the Logan Act is a moldering, never-used statute against private diplomacy routinely honored in the breach – and almost certainly not applicable to members of an incoming administration -- is referred to only as a challenge to be overcome in nailing the guy.
A similar lack of skepticism drove much of the Trump-Russia coverage, in which the president’s allies were cast as nefarious operatives and the president’s enemies as high-minded protectors of the nation. This mindset led the Post, Times, and other outlets to push the collusion narrative while ignoring or downplaying unprecedented scandals that led to the removal or demotion of top officials at the Justice Department and FBI who led the Russia investigation.
Emailed with an interview request, Washington Post Executive Editor Marty Baron sent back a stock defense of the Post's Trump-Russia work through a spokesperson (full text here). "Our reporting never presupposed what the special counsel would conclude with regard to obstruction of justice or an actual conspiracy with the Russians," the statement reads. The Times, where I worked for a long time, did not respond to emailed interview requests.
Doubling Down on Collusion
One might chalk up the failures of the Flynn coverage as a one-off in the fast-moving early days of the Trump administration – before major questions had emerged. But, as doubts grew about the papers' coverage – and what their anonymous sources were telling them - the Post and Times just doubled down on the collusion narrative. This is another peril of using anonymous sources, especially for a major ongoing story: Reporters can come to identify with and feel they are working with those sources. Now, unless the reporters betray sources they have promised to protect, or the sources release them from their pacts of confidentiality, the Times and Post will be hard-pressed to explain how and why they misrepresented a story of historic import.
With such misrepresentation in mind, consider the brand-new origin story for the Trump-Russia probe that the Times broke on Dec. 31, 2017 – coincidentally the publication cutoff date for 2018 Pulitzer consideration.
The timing is key for another, more important reason. Until then, it was widely believed that the main impetus behind the Trump-Russia probe had been the so-called Steele dossier – a series of memos supposedly from a former British intelligence agent, Christopher Steele, that suggested Trump was in cahoots with the Kremlin. The FBI had used it to secure a warrant to spy on Trump campaign aide Carter Page.
George Papadopoulos with his wife, Simona Mangiante. He says the FBI set him up.
AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin
Revelations in late October that the Clinton campaign had funded the dossier, whose main claims had never been verified, raised new questions about the probe. Cue the new origin story, starring George Papadopoulos. Right at this time of doubt, “four current and former American and foreign officials” were suddenly telling the Times that the collusion probe was sparked not by the dossier, but by the loose lips of the junior Trump campaign foreign affairs adviser, during “a night of heavy drinking” in London with a senior Australian diplomat.
Papadopoulos told the diplomat, Alexander Downer, in May 2016 that Russia, as the Times put it, “had political dirt on Hillary Clinton.” And in the next paragraph the Times article connected that to her missing emails.
But the powers of deduction at the paper went only so far – and in only one direction. The Times reporters' email insight did not prompt them to raise in their story the issue of Hillary Clinton’s illegal use of a private server. If the government believed Russia or other foreign countries had access to Clinton’s unsecured emails while she served as secretary of state, why didn't the Times story address whether the "political dirt on Hillary Clinton" compromised national security or opened her up to blackmail? Similarly, the "dirt" revelation did not lead the paper to question FBI’s Director Comey's public exoneration of Clinton in July 2016 over the email affair.
Instead, the Times article left the very strong impression that the man who supposedly tipped off Papadopoulos about the emails, the Maltese academic Joseph Mifsud, was working for the Russians – even though his ties to Western intelligence were well-known. Cryptically, the Times suggested that Downer might have been “fishing” for information from Papadopoulos, without asking why, or for whom. It also did not report that Downer had long ties to the Clinton Foundation.
These details were important then and remain so now, not least because Attorney General Barr is looking into federal authorities' spying on the Trump campaign and because Papadopoulos suggests he was set up by the FBI. Whatever the truth, the point is that the newspaper’s coverage demonstrated little interest in pursuing legitimate avenues of inquiry that conflicted with the collusion narrative.
President Obama scoring points against Mitt Romney in 2012 over the latter's Russia warning. "The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back," Obama said.
AP Photo/David Goldman
Clinton’s insecure email server also does not merit a mention in another honored article: the Post’s 8,000-word ticktock, “Obama’s secret struggle to punish Russia for Putin’s election assault,” a largely sympathetic piece with spy-potboiler overtones sourced to Obama aides on a legacy-cleanup mission. Despite all the space granted to this lengthy takeout with mega-graphics, there was evidently no room for a mention of the possible cues for anti-American mischief that Vladimir Putin might have picked up from Secretary Clinton’s mistranslated “reset” button; Obama's assurance into an open mic to President Dmitri Medvedev of post-reelection "flexibility" on missile defense; Obama's belittling of Mitt Romney's warning of the Russian threat in a presidential debate; or Russia's land grabs on the Obama administration’s watch.
The prize-winning articles appeared at a time when both publications, only recently flirting with extinction in the digital age, were enjoying anti-Trump surges in online clicks, subscriptions, and circulation. In the runup to the 2016 election the Times’s newsroom, not opinion, editors -- that is, people who would oversee Trump-Russia coverage -- had given premier front-page display to its media columnist articulating a rationale for anti-Trump media bias. In this charged atmosphere, and no doubt with an eye to posterity, the Times let cameras follow its journalists into their work spaces and personal lives in real time for a brand-extending documentary series on left-leaning Showtime.
'Deeply Sourced'
In its announcement, the Pulitzer Board praised the papers, probably Washington’s biggest recipients of unauthorized government leaks, for their “deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage.” I asked Dana Canedy, the Pulitzer Prize administrator, how the board knew enough about the unnamed sources and the relentlessness of the work to say this, and she said it concluded this from the work itself, and the papers’ prize applications.
But if anything was "deeply" demonstrated, it was the deeply embedded Washington Post and New York Times DNA on last year’s Pulitzer Board, a third of whose 18 members were current or former Times or Post journalists. In addition, two board members, ex-Timesman Stephen Engelberg of ProPublica and Emily Ramshaw of the Texas Tribune, head nonprofit newsrooms that share coverage with the Times and the Post.
Canedy, a Times alumnus, declined to comment on its deliberations for this prize, but she said that as a general rule board members who presently work for an outfit with submissions under prize consideration have to recuse themselves. Presumably, that meant recusals from the National Reporting deliberations by Pulitzer board Chairman Eugene Robinson, an ardent anti-Trump Post columnist, and member Gail Collins, an ardent anti-Trump columnist for the Times. Canedy says she remains a party to final prize decisions as part of her present job.
Still, The Federalist this week noted numerous coincidences of Pulitzers going to news organizations with journalists on the board. Whether the apparent conflicts are benign or problematic, news organizations risk coming off as clubby, back-scratching pots alleging that the kettle has the world’s darkest hue when exposing self-dealing in corporate, government or even industry prize-awarding contexts.
That’s a long way of coming around to what the board ultimately did, after jurors got through with their evaluations of entries: jointly award the National Reporting prize, making not one, but two news powerhouses happy. “The New York Times entry, submitted in this category, was moved into contention by the Board and then jointly awarded the Prize,” it said in its announcement.
And the rest, as they say, was history. Until the special counsel delivered his report.
RealClearInvestigations Editor Tom Kuntz helped edit the New York Times's Pulitzer Prize submissions in several years of his 28-year tenure as an editor at the paper ending in 2016. RealClearInvestigations, which aims to fill gaps in Trump-Russia coverage, also relies on anonymous sources. Examples can be read here, here, here and here.
Boston musician Mary Lou Lord dated Kurt Cobain just as Nirvana was rocketing from relative anonymity to international fame. Twenty-five years after his death, she tells her story.
Sept. 22, 1991
The bouncer wasn't letting Nirvana into the club. The band's album "Nevermind" was only a few days from being released, and the trio from Aberdeen, Washington was only a few months from international fame. But that night, they weren't yet rock stars. And they weren't on the list to get into Boston's legendary rock club the Rathskeller, known as "The Rat," at least according to the bouncer. And anyway, the Melvins had already wrapped up their set.
"You should let them in," said a young woman who recognized the band.
Kurt CobainCOURTESY MARY LOU LORD
"Who the f--- are you?" inquired the bouncer.
The woman was musician Mary Lou Lord. The 26-year-old was known around town for busking in the subway, playing acoustic covers of musicians she liked but not many others knew of, at least not yet -- like Shawn Colvin and Daniel Johnston. She knew Nirvana because her radio DJ friend had given her a copy of their demo tape that included songs from "Nevermind" before it was released. She loved it. She had spent the whole summer listening to it in her Walkman. Something about their sound kept pulling her in, she said, like a magnet.
Lord didn't tell any of that to the bouncer, though. She repeated her advice and then went back inside the Rat, hoping the band would eventually get inside.
They did. When the blond guy came over to thank her, she said she didn't know at first that it was Kurt Cobain. Slight and soft-spoken, he certainly didn't seem like the lead singer. She was expecting someone huskier, to match the big voice.
"I thought he was the roadie, I honestly did," Lord said.
Nirvana was part of the new guard of rock, and Lord wasn't the only one at the Rat that night that knew it. When some acquaintances came over to say hi, she suspected it was because of who she was talking to.
Legendary Boston music club The Rathskeller, known a "The Rat," closed in 1997RICHIE PARSONS
"The guy said, 'Hey Mary Lou, heard you playing in the subway, you sounded really good!'" Lord said. "Kurt was like, 'You play in the subway?"
Cobain, then 24, asked her what kind of music she played. She replied he probably wouldn't know it. When Cobain said he liked a lot of music, Lord told him about bands like Daniel Johnston, Teenage Fanclub and the Vaselines.
"Those are my favorite bands, in order," Cobain said, according to Lord.
Mary Lou Lord, pictured in 1991COURTESY MARY LOU LORD
Lord didn't believe him, at least not at first.
Cobain invited Lord upstairs to talk. Lord said she soon discovered Cobain, like her, had an affinity for bands that were underappreciated. She found she shared Cobain's taste for music, which she describes on a podcast she recently produced with fellow musician Maryanne Window as "melodic, different, daring."
At the end of the night, Lord offered Cobain a ride back to the Howard Johnson where the band was staying.
Cobain accepted gratefully, Lord said. He was confused when she started unlocking her bike.
"I said, you get on the back," Lord said.
Cobain rode on the back of her bike to the hotel. They stayed up all night talking, Lord said, watching the sun come up. It was Sept. 23, 1991.
The next day, the release of "Nevermind" would mark the beginning of a rock revolution. Cobain would be at the center, and Lord would have a front row seat.
"The underdog gets his day"
Lord spoke to CBS News last month from her childhood home in Salem, Massachusetts, detailing a relationship with Cobain she called short, but intense -- in many ways like the band's rise to fame. The less than two months the two dated marked the time period that Nirvana was rocketing from relative anonymity to international stardom. "Nevermind" exploded in popularity in the U.S., the U.K. and most of the world within months of its release, and by the beginning of January 1992 it had reached #1 on the Billboard 200 chart, replacing Michael Jackson's "Dangerous."
Nirvana appealed to a generation that was rejecting the formulaic commercial rock and longing for music that was not only powerful, but accessible, said former Nirvana manager Danny Goldberg, who recently released a book about his friendship with Cobain. As hair bands dominated the radio waves, Nirvana was a "f--- you" to the mainstream, said Marco Collins, a Seattle radio DJ who championed the "Seattle sound" in the early 90s -- later known as grunge, or to many in Seattle, "The G-word."
In this 1993 file photo, lead singer of Nirvana Kurt Cobain is photographed.MARK TERRILL / AP
"[Nirvana] was pure punk rock energy. It was the system being flipped on its head. It just felt revolutionary," Collins said. "...The whole mainstream schlock had gotten so boring, and MTV was inundated with this s---. All of a sudden, the anti-rock star steps up and steals the mic -- it was just this feeling that the underdog was finally getting his day."
But even in Seattle, where Nirvana was so popular by 1991 Collins would often play "Smells Like Teen Spirit" on his radio station twice in a row, Nirvana's crossover success came as a huge shock. For those who know Lord, including Collins, it comes as no surprise that she recognized a uniqueness to Nirvana before anyone knew just how popular they would become.
"Mary Lou can sniff out soon-to-be superstars better than anyone I know," said singer-songwriter Shawn Colvin, a three-time Grammy winner. Lord was playing Colvin's songs in Boston's T well before Colvin signed a record deal and was catapulted to international fame with her 1997 hit, "Sunny Came Home." The two became close friends.
Lord later began writing songs, moved to Olympia, Washington and recorded for the Kill Rock Stars label. She made her major label debut on Sony with her album "Got No Shadow" in 1998. The album, re-released last year on Fire Records, featured collaborations with Colvin and Elliott Smith -- another celebrated singer-songwriter of whom Lord was an early champion.
"She pays attention beforehand," Colvin said. "Most of us just kind of wait till it hits us -- but Mary Lou seeks it out. She knows what's great, and before everybody else."
Sept. 23, 1991
In the cluster of clubs that dot Boston's Lansdowne Street, in the shadow of Fenway Park, there was only a line to get into one. It was the Axis, where Nirvana was playing with Bullet Lavolta and the Smashing Pumpkins ahead of the "Nevermind" album release the following day. Lord had taken Cobain up on his invitation to come.
Kurt Cobain PHOTO: MARY LOU LORD
The place was packed, the room "sick with excitement," said Bullet Lavolta drummer Todd Phillips. After the opening bands finished their sets, WFNX DJ Kurt St. Thomas introduced Nirvana as the "coolest f--ing band in the world." As Philips described in a 2011 Boston Phoenix article cited by Vanyaland, Nirvana went on to play a raucous 60-minute set that was "hot, sweaty, loud and reckless."
"Sometime around 'Drain You,' I looked around the room and noticed that everyone had this dough-eyed yet-wide-awake look on their faces; that they were really seeing something important, or really being a part of something important," Phillips wrote.
Afterwards, Lord invited Cobain to the Central Square apartment of Boston music scene icon Billy Ruane. She was staying there in exchange for organizing the beloved music promoter's massive record collection. She had only gotten through the C's.
Cobain and Lord played records and talked music, Lord said. Cobain loved Lord's 1953 Martin D18 guitar and asked her to play for him. Lord worked up the nerve to play songs off of Nevermind -- just released hours before. Cobain, she said, was stunned.
"He just looked at me like, 'What is this?" Lord said. "He was kind of blown away because they were just a small band from Seattle at that point."
Kurt CobainMARY LOU LORD
Cobain insisted that she open for Nirvana the next night, she said, when they played again at the Axis. Lord demurred.
"He's like, well, we'll bring the guitar just in case you change your mind," Lord said.
Cobain spent the night. The next evening, they returned to the Axis, where another line had formed outside. This time, Lord walked to the front of it with Cobain, as he carried her guitar and held her hand.
"People knew me as the dorky busking girl from the subway," Lord said. "As we walked by the people in the line, I saw them looking like, 'What is he doing with subway girl?'"
Lord didn't end up opening for Nirvana. But like the night before, she said she was blown away by the energy of the performance.
"You could really feel that there was some kind of a change happening," Lord said, "You just had the sense of, I'm in the right place right now."
"Almost written out"
Lord and Cobain's relationship has not been free of questions. They dated just before Cobain and Courtney Love, who has publicly accused Lord of harassment and trying to make a career off a fling with Cobain. Lord denies those claims, and says Love was the one who threatened her. A representative for Love did not respond to a request for comment from CBS News.
Mary Lou Lord performing in Boston's "T"COURTESY MARY LOU LORD
A note faxed to the Boston Phoenix in 1993 and signed Kurt Cobain, in response to a profile of Lord in the newspaper, said Cobain was drunk in Boston when a "creepy girl came on to me."
"I NEVER had a relationship with her," the note read. "Please Mary whoever you are, leave me alone and see a therapist."
Lord is convinced the note was a fake.
The dispute between Love and Lord has largely dominated the media coverage of Lord's story, but the account of Lord's relationship with Cobain has remained a relatively unknown chapter in the public picture of Cobain's story. In February, Lord recounted her time with Cobain extensively on her podcast, "How the Hell did that Happen?"
Lord's story was also detailed by Cobain biographer Charles Cross and in the account of music writer and Cobain friend Everett True in his book "Nirvana: The Biography." True says Lord "has almost been written out of the Kurt Cobain story."
"Yet I have a strong memory from around this time of meeting a besotted Kurt going on and on about this girl called Mary Lou Lord, how in love with her he was, and how he was going to move to Boston to be with her," True wrote. "A fantasy perhaps, but he believed it at the time."
Sept. 29, 1991
Nirvana was going to be on MTV. Lord, her friend, Cobain, bassist Krist Novoselic and drummer Dave Grohl were gathered at a New York City hotel, eagerly awaiting the premiere of the "Smells Like Teen Spirit" music video on MTV's "120 Minutes."
Nirvana pose after receiving an award for best alternative video for "In Bloom" at the MTV Video Music Awards in 1993. From left: Krist Novoselic, Dave Grohl, and Kurt Cobain. Man at right, not a member of the band, unidentified MARK J. TERRILL/AP
It was a landmark for any musician at the time, but a monumental moment for Nirvana. The song, now considered the defining anthem for a disaffected generation, would propel the band's explosive success -- aided in no small part by MTV's heavy rotation of the video.
Lord had taken a bus to New York from Boston the night before, after getting a message on her answering machine from Cobain beseeching her to come and see them play. Lord said she got in too late to catch the show, but Cobain was still elated to see her, even dancing with her to disco music she put on a jukebox at a bar.
When the video aired, the bandmates were ecstatic, Lord said, calling their moms as Lord and Cobain jumped on the bed. "They were just like, look at us, we're on MTV!" Lord recalled. "...Knowing what we know, that was a very big deal to share that moment with him and with Dave and Krist."
In the following weeks, Lord was meeting up with them on their U.S. tour dates while still trying to hold down her job at a Boston record store. With no cellphones and internet, she said, they had little indication of their exponential success other than the "MTV-watching jocks" starting to show up at the clubs they played.
When the tour reached Detroit, Lord told Cobain she had to go back to Boston. She couldn't risk losing her job at the record store.
"Kurt said to me, he's like 'no, please, please stay,'" Lord said. "I couldn't."
The two parted ways. Lord headed back to Boston, and Nirvana continued on to perform that night in Chicago. It was where Cobain's romance with Courtney Love would begin.
Nov. 5, 1991
Lord had spent the past few weeks busking to save up for a ticket to England. Cobain had been calling her regularly from the road, regaling her with tales of raucous shows, and he wanted Lord to meet Nirvana as the European leg of the tour launched.
Kurt CobainMARY LOU LORD
Lord arrived in London to a much different Nirvana than she had parted ways with in Detroit. "Nevermind" was already spiking in the charts, and the band was at the center of a near-constant buzz of activity. She couldn't have a conversation with Cobain without others butting in --"Kurt, Kurt." The band seemed stressed out -- the tour was starting to take a toll -- and Lord suspected, not for the first time, that Cobain had a drug problem.
But the shows still had their trademark energy, Lord said, and British crowds were "out of their minds" to see them. And Cobain, she said, seemed genuinely happy to see her.
Then, the phone rang. The call came in around three in the morning as the two were asleep in a hotel after a gig at the London Astoria. Lord was exhausted and went back to sleep, but she recalled Cobain was on the phone for a long time.
The next morning at breakfast, Kurt told Dave Grohl, "Oh, Courtney called," Lord said. She wasn't sure what he meant.
After they checked out, Cobain asked Lord how she was getting to Wolverhampton, the next stop on the tour. She said she was taken aback by the question.
"I felt like saying, 'I'm going with you,'" Lord said. "But I said, 'Oh, I have things to do in London,' which I didn't, it was a lie. I just didn't know what he meant."
Cobain gave her an itinerary with the tour contacts and said, "This is how to reach me."
Courtney Love, second from right, poses with Hole at the 1998 MTV Video Music AwardsGLOBE PHOTOS/MEDIAPUNCH
"I said okay, and I gave him a kiss and a hug, and I said bye," Lord said.
Lord went to visit friends in London, confused. That night, she watched as Nirvana came on a British television program. Before the performance, Cobain said, "I just want everyone in this room to know Courtney Love, the lead singer of the pop band Hole, is the best F--- in the world."
Lord was shocked.
"I had been with him the night before," Lord said. "I didn't know who Courtney Love was."
Lord soon found out that Dave Gwiazdowski, her radio DJ friend back in Boston, had the previous day interviewed Love, who was in town to perform with her band Hole at the Rat. When Love said Hole had tour dates planned with Nirvana, Gwiazdowski mentioned that Lord and Cobain were together in London. Unbeknownst to the DJ, Love and Cobain had struck up a quiet romance in Chicago, and Love seemed stunned.
Lord isn't sure what Cobain and Love may have spoken about on the phone, or what precipitated the sudden breakup. She returned to Boston, devastated, and started the difficult task of trying to get over the world's biggest rock star.
"Born Lonely"
When Cobain took his own life in Seattle on April 5, 1994, Lord felt as though she had lost him for the second time. Lord was then living in Olympia, Washington and had just returned there after touring with Beck when she learned of Cobain's death, Lord told CBS News in the interview. Devastated, she mourned his loss along with shellshocked fans and friends there.
A sign marks the location of "Kurt Cobain Landing" at a park near the childhood home of Kurt Cobain, the late frontman of Nirvana, in Aberdeen, Wash. ELAINE THOMPSON/AP
Looking back on that day, she said it sometimes seems longer than the 25 years Cobain's been gone because she hadn't seen him since their breakup in London. Even today, there's much she still wants to know -- including what Love may have told him on the phone that night.
"I have a million questions," Lord said. "And I always thought that I would see him again and I would get to ask him those questions, but it didn't turn out that way."
Lord says she doesn't remember Cobain as a rock star, because he wasn't one when she met him. She remembers him as a "good kid" who loved music, but one who was "born with a certain kind of loneliness."
"I didn't have to see [loneliness] in Kurt, I knew that in Kurt, I felt that in Kurt," Lord said. "I could hear it even in his voice when he said 'Please don't leave.'"
Unlike a rock star, Lord believes Cobain didn't crave attention when he performed -- rather, he wanted the listener to see themselves reflected back in his songs. Lord believes Cobain saw music as a way to connect with others, to feel less alone. She describes the same kind of loneliness in singer-songwriter Elliott Smith, whom she met five or six months after Cobain's suicide.
Lord calls Smith, who later became her close friend and touring partner, "incredibly similar" to Cobain. Though Smith had a much quieter musical delivery, Lord said she felt the same kind of "magnetic pull" to Smith's music as to Nirvana's.
Mary Lou Lord and Elliott SmithCOURTESY MARY LOU LORD
"These two people, in my mind, in the 90s, were the ones who spoke to the lonely kids," Lord said. "Just like them, they were born lonely, and no one could understand that more than them."
Like Cobain, Smith took his own life. He was 34 when he died in 2003. Cobain and Smith never met, but Lord is positive Cobain would have adored Smith's music.
To friends of Lord, it comes as no surprise that she shared a natural connection with fellow artists like Smith and Cobain.
"[Cobain] was obviously so passionate and such a deep artist that I'm sure he found her appreciation and what she intuitively understood about him as a person comforting," Colvin said. "A lot of artists feel like nobody gets them, and he was clearly a tortured soul and obviously a sensitive person. There's no one kinder than Mary Lou -- and I think he knew that about her."
Interesting tidbits I found, mainly for my own entertainment. I copied some sites, since after some time, I find they are gone.
Erdekessegek amit talaltam, foleg a magam szorakoztatasara. Nehany oldalt masoltam, mert egy ido utan eltunnek.
