Chris Newman and Sub Pop
In Chris’ case the relationship is more overt and obvious, but the the bizarre nature of it didn’t become clear to me until 2013 while I was writing article about Chris’ musical history, and even then it was hard to know what to make of it.
Specifically, from the beginning, Sub Pop had been following in Chris’ footsteps, both physically – probably for the purpose of surveillance, but also artistically. Sub Pop essentially branched off of K Records, and K Records seems to have had close links to Portland’s all ages punk scene. People who were close with the Wipers and the all ages scene in Portland worked with K Records doing things like cassette duplication.
Chris recorded his album Teen Dream with Bill Stuber at Triangle Studios in Seattle, 1985. The following year it became Reciprocal Recording which is where Sub Pop artists recorded their early albums. Sub Pop also began to use a club where Chris frequently played in Seattle – The Vogue (booked by Claudia Lemon) – to audition new talent.
Chris’ musical set up – amps and effects – was adapted rather overtly and obviously by Mudhoney and Nirvana. Nirvana also made nods to Chris’ lyrics (especially in In Utero) and arguably imitated Chris’ song Pugsley with the song Lithium.
The first contract Chris signed with Flying Heart Records in 1988 had similarities to the first contract Nirvana signed with Sub Pop in 1989, though it was for a lot less money and doesn’t appear to be from exactly the same source, still I suspect a link between Flying Heart – and other regional labels – and Sub Pop. The links are likely financial but also have to do with what I call the Script – what people are and are not allowed to say, and how stories are told.
Napalm Beach’s first tour of Europe in fall of 1989 traveled a circuit of clubs simultaneously with Tad/Nirvana (“Heavier Than Heaven”) who were at that time young and green in contrast to Napalm Beach, as seasoned band. Two years later, Napalm Beach toured the same circuit, just behind Nirvana, as Nevermind was on its way to number one.
Chris told me that the year before their first tour, in 1988, a German magazine called Spex had named Napalm Beach’s album Moving To And Fro one of the best albums of the year. The first song on the cassette version of the album was called “Monster” (also featured on the 1986 Bands That Will Make Money compilation). In August 1991 there was a festival in Cologne called “Monsters of Spex” – Napalm Beach doesn’t seem to have been invited. Also around 1986 the Melvins released a song called Disinvite aka Steve Instant Newman in which at the end, in the printed lyrics, the name Newman is switched to Neuman (Gluey Porch Treatments). I recently found, while digging up Chris’ old recordings from 1985 and 86, on some of them, Chris’ last name was switched to Neuman, suggesting to me that the mislabeled tapes may have been accessed by, people in the Melvins/Mudhoney camp. The sound engineer was linked to the Wipers.
My boyfriend from the mid 1980s, a honeytrap likely connected to the FBI, named Mike Payne, told me that in school the other kids used to call him “Mister Instant” and made up an unlikely sounding story to explain it. Payne who had been born in Dallas and grew up mostly in Sonoma county, California, showed interest in Seattle in 1986 and by 1991 had moved to Washington State, where he still lives today. Payne is who I think the “him” is in the Nirvana song “Sappy,” and I think he’s also referenced in Cobain’s final recording “You Know You’re Right” when Cobain screams “PAIN.” I have reason to believe Mike Payne has links to these biomedical implant networks and that during our first date in 1984 he put an implant into my food that remains in my digestive tract to this day. Based on patterns of how implant related diseases manifest, I am confident that Kurt Cobain also had many biomedical implants in his body, including in his digestive tract. I have reasons to believe Chris, my daughter, and I all have implants in our digestive tract. This specifically is was how Chris was killed.
In 1986 or 87 Kurt Cobain worked briefly at the Polynesian Hotel in Ocean Shores, Washington, where my grandparents had a time share. Both Kurt Cobain and Jimi Hendrix seem to have had some kind of links to my paternal family. My grandmother Helen Meyer was a head nurse at Swedish Hospital in Seattle.
It seems like during this period of time, the mid 1980s, Napalm Beach was being pushed down as Nirvana and bands in their wake were being lifted up. But in reality, with Napalm Beach and Chris’ bands in general, it was part of a bigger pattern that seems to have been going on since Chris started playing music in bands, especially once he became ambitious.
The difference is that with Sub Pop, and during the 1980s and into the 1990s, Chris’ musical and artistry was clearly being emulated as well as, for Chris, subverted, diverted, obstructed, and sabotaged.
Although he himself wasn’t aware of it, and no one who professed to be his friend would tell him, Chris had a number of potentially very lucrative legal cases against a number of wealthy (and obviously powerful) corporate and government entities. He had valid cases for fraud and intellectual property theft. The 1991 Nirvana song Lithium to me seems close to Chris’ 1985 song Pugsley, as is the PJ Harvey’s 1996 song Meet Ze Monsta. In PJ Harvey’s song, the lyrics suggest she imitated Chris’ sound on purpose – in fact I think both artists did.
There are potentially other songs like this – I’m not enough of an expert in cases of that sort to know exactly how to discern what is and is not a valid case. While Chris was sick with cancer he happened to mention that the Led Zeppelin song Kashmir was like a song he’d written when he was playing with his first band, Bodhi. There’s no way that I know of for me to show that now, it’s just an example of the kind of thing that was going on. Chris never believed anyone knew who he was, so he couldn’t put it together that artists were copying him, covertly.
A 2018 judgement against the song Blurred Lines for imitating the feel of Marvyn Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up” awarded Marvyn Gaye’s estate $5 million.
Of course, even if Chris had been alive and willing and able to take a lawsuit like this to court, no judgement or award could have made up for what Chris really wanted and had deserved – a successful music career, good health, and a long life. Still, some money would have allowed him to buy himself the things that made him happy. We could have had a home, with a garden where my daughter could come and visit, and he could have had his own recording studio. There are so many things he wanted to do, and that we wanted to do together. I wanted for him to be able to enjoy the fruits of his efforts, and for his mother to live and see him succeed. I have reason to believe she was also made sick deliberately, then murdered via piezo-electrical biomedical implants.
Instead of trying to work with us to rectify the situation, Chris was brutally tortured and murdered with cancer via the same piezo-electrical biomedical implants that had been used to torture him for most of his life, and so was his father and mother.
The longer this behavior goes on, the worse it will become, especially if the involved entities are permitted to continue to profit from the cancer, without consequence.
web page updated 27 August, 2022