(Photos by Ellen Cedergreen for WSB)
This week, an infamous chapter of Seattle rock history is being revisited – and late today, West Seattle’s Feedback Lounge (WSB sponsor) had a share of the spotlight. Italian journalist Ezio Guaitamacchi brought a camera crew for his interview with Gene Stout, whose career as a Seattle music critic included the ’90s heyday of grunge – including covering Nirvana, whose frontman Kurt Cobain killed himself 17 years ago this week. Stout is friends with Feedback proprietor Jeff Gilbert, so between that and the rock ‘n’ roll atmosphere – memorabilia and all – at the Feedback, it was the logical choice for the interview, covered by Ellen Cedergreen for WSB.

She says Guaitamacchi (above) has a show called “Delitti Rock” on Italy’s RAI network, with “delitti” translating roughly to “murder in the sense of a tragic early death,” as it was explained to her. (Web research indicates he’s written a book of the same name.) He’s doing a series of reports on rock stars who died at a young age. His questions for Stout, reports Ellen, “were focused on Cobain’s legacy and mainly, his death. … Ezio asked if there were two Seattles, as in, one with Microsoft and Boeing,and Starbucks, and another with a darker undercurrent, realized by the music scene.

Stout (above) agreed that, in a sense, there are/were two Seattles and used our weather as an apt metaphor: the harsh gray winters and the spectacularly beautiful summers. When Stout was asked if he felt that, when looking back, Kurt’s lyrics could have foretold his death, he gave this reply: ‘Certainly there was a lot of darkness in his lines… it wouldn’t be a pretty end… He was obsessed with darkness’.”

Gauitamacchi told Ellen he also has interviewed Tom Grant, the private investigator hired by Cobain’s widow Courtney Love to find Kurt in the days he had gone missing in the days preceding his death, and will be meeting with local record producer Jack Endino, who produced Nirvana’s debut album “Bleach,” among other pivotal work.