Nirvana Members Diss Love

Seven months after Kurt Cobain's widow sued the former Nirvana bandmates in an attempt to gain sole custody of the seminal grunge band's music, drummer Grohl and bassist Novoselic are now striking back with their own lawsuit against the Hole singer.

In their lawsuit, filed Wednesday in King County Superior Court in Seattle, Novoselic and Grohl labeled Love a greedy "prima donna" with a "waning recording and acting career," and accused her of using her late husband's music to "further her own career goals."

She is, in the words of their suit, "irrational, mercurial, self-centered, unmanageable, inconsistent and unpredictable."

Last May, Love took Grohl, Novoselic and the band's record company, Universal Music Group, to court and successfully persuaded a judge to block the release of an upcoming Nirvana set titled The Heart-Shaped Box because she was unhappy with the way it was being packaged. The greatest hits collection, in the works for five years, was supposed to have included "You Know You're Right," said to be the last song recorded by Cobain & Co. before he committed suicide in 1994.

The two also took offense at Love's attempts to paint them as nothing more than "sidemen" to Cobain's songwriting genius. In fact, Novoselic and Grohl say it was just the opposite, that the three men originally launched Nirvana as an equal partnership, and that Love was not involved until much later, only using her relationship to Cobain and the band to propel her own career along.

"Love now claims she wants to protect the legacy of Cobain and Nirvana by withholding approval of the public release of Nirvana sound recordings," the suit says. "Yet, Love felt no such protectiveness when it came to her own career, exploiting the cache surrounding Cobain's death for her own benefit by performing ["You Know You're Right"] on MTV after introducing it as Cobain's last song."

In an open letter to fans explaining the reasons behind their countersuit, Grohl and Novoselic claim Love's "actions are only about the revitalization of her career motivated solely by her blind self-interest. She couldn't care less about Nirvana fans."

The two insinuate that Love "is using Nirvana's music as a bargaining chip" to help win a separate court battle with Universal (she sued in January to get out of her recording contract) because she could leverage her ownership of Nirvana's catalog to help score a better deal. "Our music is just a pawn in her endless legal battles and her obsessive need for publicity and attention," Grohl and Novoselic write in their letter.

The feuding parties weren't always at odds. In 1997, Grohl, Novoselic and Love formed a limited liability company to jointly make decisions regarding Nirvana's legacy.

Now, Grohl and Novoselic are asking judge to toss Love off of the company's board and declare them the legal supervisors of Nirvana's legacy. (Love has claimed she agreed to the partnership under duress.)

Meanwhile, Love's Seattle-based attorney, O. Yale Lewis, vehemently defended his client and dismissed Grohl and Novoselic's accusations.

"Those allegations are totally inconsistent with the public record," Lewis tells the Seattle Times. "[Love] is recognized widely as a very successful businessperson, a very successful actress and a very powerful person. And I would say she has achieved much more success on her own than either Mr. Grohl or Mr. Novoselic has on his own."

(Apparently he forgot about Grohl's platinum-selling band, the Foo Fighters.)

Saying that it was Cobain who was the real force behind the band, Lewis adds: "It was his own will and his own talent. It was not a three-party partnership. After his death, his property and assets and legacy evolved to his wife and child, not to the two guys who played with him."

Naturally, there's a lot of money at stake when it comes to the band that owned the world. Nirvana's albums have generated an estimated $500 million in sales worldwide and the unreleased song and box set are expected to reap millions more to whomever controls the recordings.