Danny Goldberg, former manager of Nirvana, has said Courtney Love was a toxic presence among the band.

Love married Nirvana lead singer Kurt Cobain in 1992, with the couple having a daughter, Frances Bean, before Cobain's suicide in 1994.

And according to Goldberg, Love had an instrumental role in Cobain's struggles with heroin and acted as the frontman's "mouthpiece".

"Courtney's very presence was a metaphor for the end of one era in the band's life and the beginning of another," he writes in his upcoming book Bumping Into Geniuses: My Life Inside the Rock And Roll Business.

Goldberg discusses an incident in which he delivered money to the couple, believing they were about to spend it on heroin.

"The weekend in January 1992 that Nirvana did Saturday Night Live for the first time was a turning point that put into focus the heroin problem that was to haunt Kurt for the rest of his life.

"Courtney called me at home the morning the show aired," Goldberg continues in an excerpt, reproduced at Spinner.com, "and asked me to get Kurt $5,000 (£2,800) in cash so they could do some 'shopping'.

"I felt pretty uncomfortable as I delivered the package of $100 (£56) bills to her [Love] at the hotel," he explains.

"Abruptly, the dark cloud of drug excess had entered the band's life. I was confronted by the baroque facade of lies and the awful glassy-eyed deadness that regular heroin use provides."

Bumping Into Geniuses: My Life Inside the Rock and Roll Business is released in the US on Thursday September 18th.


15/09/2008 13:56:03