Courtney Love found a buyer for the 25 percent stake in Nirvana's lucrative back catalog last week, after holding on to the rights on her own for nearly 12 years. The buyer was Virgin Records' former COO/GM Larry Mestel, who now owns the music publishing company Primary Wave Music Publishing. When Cobain died, Love received 98 percent of the publishing rights while Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic received the other 2 percent. "I took on a strategic partner, Larry Mestel, to help me co-manage the estate because it was overwhelming," said Love in an interview with rollingstone.com. "The affairs of Nirvana are so massive and so huge, and they've all fallen on my lap. I own almost all of [the publishing] and it proved to be too much for me. I needed a partner to take Kurt Cobain's songs and bring them into the future and into the next generation. And this guy's the guy to do it." Mestel explained, "The appeal to me is that Kurt was one of the most important songwriters of his time. Kurt was an incredible songwriter, and Courtney is an exceptionally talented person herself. So I felt the combination of Courtney's creativity and the things I can add can really help in creating more value for these copyrights." With ownership of Cobain's music being passed along, not to a loved one but to a former record company employee, fans are speculating on how his music will be used, and how it might be exploited. Cobain was strongly opposed to corporate controls on the music industry. Mestel assures that his "goal is to keep the music very true to who the songwriter was and what his passions and tastes would be and to work through Courtney to figure out exactly the best way to go about exposing his music to a new youth culture to a new generation." Earlier this year, while the sale was only a rumor, U2's Bono was one of the prospective buyers. Nothing, however, came of the meetings between Bono and Love. Love also expressed her desire to keep the music untainted. "We're going to remain very tasteful," said Love, "and we're going to [retain] the spirit of Nirvana and take Nirvana places it's never been before." Nirvana's music has yet to be used in soundtracks or for commercial use, and both Love and Mestel aim to dispel any fears that Nirvana and Cobain's music might end up used in that way. Though the fate of the Nirvana rights is still open, hopefully not to an exploitation akin to the Michael Jackson owned Beatles rights, the assurance that Love and Mestel will handle the music "tastefully" should set some minds at ease. It would be a shame to hear "Radio Friendly Unit Shifter" in a tampon ad.
