A GoFundMe for Seattle music fixture Susie Tennant is rallying some of the key players from the ’90s grunge explosion to help the former Geffen Records publicist and her family as they face a litany of health issues and costs. Nirvana’s Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic, Sub Pop Records, Sub Pop co-founder Jonathan Poneman, Pearl Jam’s Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament, music manager Susan Silver and many more have contributed to a GoFundMe account for her organized by former Sub Pop rep Steve Manning.
Tennant, a music promo veteran, worked at Geffen Records in the early ’90s, helping Nirvana and Weezer break into the mainstream. She organized a record release party for Nevermind at Seattle’s Re-bar, which ended prematurely when Kurt Cobain, Grohl and Novoselic started a food fight that caused the venue owners to kick them out. Two decades later, Novoselic participated in a 2011 Seattle all-stars fundraiser performance of Nevermind when Tennant faced a cancer diagnosis.
Now, Tennant is struggling with “symptoms of early onset Alzheimer’s and dementia,” according to a statement from Susie and her family on the GoFundMe page, which seeks to raise funds to help the family deal with medical costs and possible in-home care. She recently underwent surgeries “to remove an unburst aneurysm,” and is “healed and healthy” as her doctors try to determine what exactly she’s facing. According to the family’s statement, “Susie’s medical experts were able to eliminate causes, and are now pointing to something called Frontotemporal Degeneration Disease (FTD). FTD is new and rare with only about 60K confirmed cases in the United States. Susie’s symptoms at home, with her memory loss and physical degeneration, align nearly exactly with this disease’s progression.”
Additional details are on Tennant’s GoFundMe, which has already exceeded its $100,000 goal.
