“I want to be somewhere above you with all the candy in mmy hands. You smell like waffles and milk. I love and miss your body, and your twenty minute kisses”
Interview Of Courtney Love where she explains why she wants to do the Vanity Fair article to get back at Madonna, and that falling james wanted to beat up kurt
She explains why you should never go out with a guy in a band more famous than yours
also this great quote:
“You know I cant play reading because of it (being pregnant) Im going to call this baby “My Ruined Career” lol
“You've co-written a song on the new album with your wife (Pennyroyle Tea), Courtney Love. Do you foresee further collaborations?
"It's a nice thought. I'd like to, but... to tell you the truth, I would rather just quit my band and join Hole, you know-only because when I have played music with them, there's a level of connection that's a little bit higher than with anyone else I ever played with. It's amazing. It's totally satisfying for Courtney and I, but completely unrealistic because we're already so intertwined with each other. Most people don't even think of the band Nirvana, they think of Kurt and Courtney, and it's just too much, it gets in the way. People would overlook the music and look into other things. It just wouldn't be taken seriously, so... I'd like to someday, but now I can't see anything for the next five years or so. We still jam together once in a while. It's such a sad situation. I really wish we could just join bands."
"Just yesterday I was listening to new recordings of Courtney and Hole, some songs are really fantastic. I would so love to have written them.. its a motivation for me. Courtney writes all the time. Me, I lost my ambition."
"Everyone thinks of me as this sad little spineless puppy who needs to be taken care of. It sickens me. When I first met Courtney, I thought of her as this totally independent self-serving person and I really respected her for that—that’s why I fell in love with her. I didn’t think I’d ever have a best friend, let alone a mate."
“Yeah, absolutely, I'm happiest sitting here, looking out over the lake, with my wife and baby. We understand each other. it's when the outside world comes in and puts its outdated values on my life that I get angry.”
"As he says earlier, Kurts wife and child keep him from teetering over the edge.. "I started to heal my negative attitude when we got married. Just finding a marriage partner, a soulmate. I never expected it to happen"
"I've suffered on a large scale but most of the attacks haven't been on me, they've been on someone I'm totally in love with, my best f***ing friend is being completely f***ing crucified every two months, if not more. I read a negative article about her every two months."
"She's not made of stone, she's not what's been written about her, she has emotions and feelings like everyone else and it really upsets her. And she's also constantly combating this stuff, trying to clear it up.”
“Oh, yeah! absolutely! I really can't describe what changed our attitude so fast, I think I was… I really was a lot more negative and angry and everything else a few years ago, but that had a lot to do with not having a mate, not having a steady girlfriend, and stuff like that… that was one of the main things that was bothering me, that I wouldn't admit at the time… so now that I've found that, the world seems a lot better for some reason! It really does change your attitude about things. I mean, 4 years ago I would have said the classic thing, like, "How dare someone bring a child into this life, y'know? It's a completely terrible way to go, the world's gonna explode any day…" and stuff like that, but once you fall in love it's a bit different… [laughs]”
“Cobain and Love were married in February at a secluded Hawaiian location after the band's tour of Japan and Australia, with only a female nondenominational minister and a roadie as a witness.
"It's like Evian water and battery acid," Cobain says of the couple's chemistry. And when you mix the two? "You get love," says Cobain, smiling for the first time. "I'm just happier than I've ever been. I finally found someone that I am totally compatible with. It doesn't matter whether she's a male; female or hermaphrodite or a donkey. We're compatible." Whenever Love walks into the room, even if it's to scold him about something, he gets the profoundly dopey grin of the truly love-struck.’
“Everyone seems to think that we couldn't possibly love each other, because we're thought of as cartoon characters, because we're public domain. So the feelings that we have for each other are thought of as superficial."
"The strange thing is I used to be an extremely negative person," he says. "My attitudes and opinions have only got more optimistic in the last couple of years and thats because of having a child and being in love. Its the only thing Ive been blessed with. I wanted a partner. I wanted security. Everything else is totally irrelevant."
"A lot of it just simple sexism. Courtney is my wife, and people could not accept the fact that I'm in love, and that I could be happy. Because she's such a powerful person, and such a threatening person, every sexist withinthe industry just joined forces and decided to string us up."
"Courtney especially could relate to Frances Farmer. I made the comparison between the two. When I was reading the book, I realised that this could very well happen to Courtney if things kept going on. There's only so much a person can take, you know?
"I've been told by doctors and psychiatrists that public humiliation is one of the most extreme and hardest things to heal yourself from. It's as bad as being brutally raped, or witnessing one of your parents murdered in front of your eyes or something like that. It just goes on and on, it grinds into you and it's so personal.
"And the Frances Farmer thing was a massive conspiracy involving the bourgeois and powerful people in Seattle, especially this one judge who still lives in Seattle to this day. He led this crusade to so humiliate her that she would go insane. In the beginning, she was hospitalised—totally against her will—and she wasn't even crazy. She got picked up on a drunk driving charge and got committed, you know. It was a very scary time to be confrontational."
"Kurt, so often impassive, glows whenever he mentions Courtney. He’s very much in love. Courtney does more than loan Kurt her clothing; she challenges him. "It’s a whirling dervish of emotion, all these extremes of fighting and loving each other at once. "If we weren’t married, just living together, there would have been three or four times when one of us would have walked out on the other. But because we’re so committed to each other, we’ve never had a fight last longer than an hour. We make up every time." While constant conflict may indicate instability in the relationship, it also shows that Courtney can break through his detached facade. Kurt says he doesn’t want to prove to the world that he loves Courtney, but that he needs to defend her against media attacks.
Kurt objects to the misogynist overtones of making Courtney the scapegoat for everything that might go wrong with Nirvana. And he sneers at the suggestion that he’s under Courtney’s thumb. "Everyone thinks of me as this sad little spineless puppy who needs to be taken care of. It sickens me. When I first met Courtney, I thought of her as this totally independent self-serving person and I really respected her for that—that’s why I fell in love with her. I didn’t think I’d ever have a best friend, let alone a mate."
So is Courtney the best fuck in the world?
Kurt stands up without saying a word. He turns around and hikes his black pinafore dress up around his chest so I can see dozens of red scratches on his back, furrows from Courtney’s fingernails.
Kurt concedes that being married to Courtney has meant losing his single-minded focus on all things Nirvana. He doesn’t care. He dreams of just writing his songs and selling tapes by mail order. If he can’t get up the enthusiasm he once had for Nirvana, it’s partially because the band have achieved every pinnacle of success they ever wanted, and several that they didn’t."
Courtney Love-Cobain is lounging barefoot on a sofa. "Where are my babies?" she demands, her arms outstretched. Kurt changes direction, pretends to be out of control and stops the pushchair just short of the sofa. He leans over his wife and kisses her. Long and passionately.
Courtney Love chooses her women of the year, December 1993
Rare Courtney Love interview December, 13 1993
I transcribed this myself from looking at a low quality pic of a magazine page so pls appreciate it lol
Rita Bobbit, folk heroine
“Shes sort of too much of a folk heroine already, but I wanted to include her because shes so damn funny. Shes the one who cut her husbands dick off in his sleep.
Courtney Love chooses her women of the year, December 1993
Rare Courtney Love interview December, 13 1993
I transcribed this myself from looking at a low quality pic of a magazine page so pls appreciate it lol
Rita Bobbit, folk heroine
“Shes sort of too much of a folk heroine already, but I wanted to include her because shes so damn funny. Shes the one who cut her husbands dick off in his sleep.
Courtney Love chooses her women of the year, December 1993
Rare Courtney Love interview December, 13 1993
I transcribed this myself from looking at a low quality pic of a magazine page so pls appreciate it lol
Rita Bobbit, folk heroine
“Shes sort of too much of a folk heroine already, but I wanted to include her because shes so damn funny. Shes the one who cut her husbands dick off in his sleep.
“He was very abusive and mean to her, and she put up with it for years and years, and then he started beating her and cheating on bher. It wasnt so much the cheating that got to her, it was the fact that shed left her family and everything behind in El Salvador or somewhere to go and live with him in Virginia. So she got this knife while he was sleeping and chopped off his penis. Then she grabbed it, got into her little Honda with his penis, drove about a block, and threw it onto this grassy ?.
“Then she pulled over and called the cops, and said, “Ive just cut off my husbands penis, and its on this grassy ?”
“Her husband, meanwhile calls an ambulance
She didnt cut off his testicals though - just his penis. I dont know how she did it with a clean sweep because youd have to really hack, wouldnt you? She mustve been sharpening that fucking thing for days.
“I just think its funny. Im not advocating it, but I bet everyones felt like it. This story really sends shivers up mens spines.”
Susan Faludi
“She wrote the award winning “Backlash” - the most well-researched, well written piece of non-fiction Ive ever read in my life.
“Its totally mind blowing, totally factual, shocking, insane, evil, and not one lie, all of it true, all of it fact checked. Shes the pinnacle of good journalism, good journalism thats not boring. Its insane and a necessity, not just for women, its a necessity for anyone who wants to learn how the media really works. It shows you how to behave in a way thats acceptable.
“I have a lot of friends that had a hard time getting through “backlash” because they get angry. I have one friend in particular who refused to read it past chapter four because it was making her too angry, and she was afraid she was going to turn into “a big feminist” - her own words! No matter what your politics are, whether you agree with me or not, its necessary reading. Editors of “Select” should definitely read this book, and anybody whos a sleezy journalist or who ever aspired to what good journalism is, should read this book.
“Meeting her was like meeting Elis Presley, I was for sure more impressed by meeting her than talking to Madonna on the phone about stuff that Madonna knows nothing about.”
Lydia Lunch
“Her work is incredibly neglected.
“when shes articulating about her life, shes incredibly profound and intense - shes such an inspiration because she absolutely changed her life. I would call her the worlds greatest pop song writer. In terms of ?, she takes the cake - that box set she released earlier this year is a total experience. You just loose yourself to this womans incredible wit and intelligence.
“I like her for the fact shes willing to go out into the street and cut off dicks and shoot with guns. For the fact that shes willing to be a voyeur rather than just sitting around, upper middle class, whining about the press. ”Shes populist enough both to use the media and be true to herself”
Janet Billig, Evan Dando - among others
“She was referred to in a british magazine as my human sponge and a wet nurse - which was kind of ironic because, at the time, she was doing all of Nirvanas publicity.
“Shes 23 years old, and shes probably one of the most powerful women in the music industry today at that age. She put Caroline Records on the map, she signed Pussy Galore to them, she was responsible for signing Smashing Pumpkins. Shes got incredibly good taste, she can just hear things - she (rest gets cut off unfortunately)
Tamra Davis
“She directed a hit movie called “CB4″, which is the ? answer to “Waynes World”, she also directed Drew Barrymore in “Gun Crazy” which was very good.
“Recently, theres been this spate of bad girl Hollywood scripts which I got to read the parts in. Theres a Sharon Stone cowgirl movie and a Julie Davis cowgirl movie - and there was going to be this Tarantino movie, “Bad Girls”, with Madeleine Stowe, Drew Barrymore, Andie McDowell. It was an epic movie, all the actresses got 1.5 million Tamara though, was given only 6 million dollars to make the movie with.
“One of the actresses, who I wont name, was very threatened by the idea that a woman was going to direct this movie, even though there couldnt be anyone sweeter than Tamra. They waited seven days and, on the seventh day, because of this actress, they fired her.
“Not only did they hire him for no reason, they gave him 20 million extra dollars. So he got to direct the movie the way it should be directed, because of the female actress who said “I cant be directed by another woman”
“I think its incredible the way Tamra stood up to that, and, furthermore, she doesnt have a bad word to say about anyone - even the actress who had her thrown off the movie.
Drew Barrymore
“She did these incredibly sexy Guess ads. Shes like a fat little girl, but shes sexy and just gorgeous, really sweet, obviously very talented. Im praising heer visual assets, but I just think that its cool that someone can be that sexy in an era of waifs.
“Shes sexy in an individual kind of way without being a bad role modelfor people. I think that if you want to sexualize yourself and youre of age, shes kind of scummy and sexy at the same time, shes not like a fucking candy box and shes not like a mid-western girl and shes not like Kate Moss.
“Shes every girl and shes very attainable. Shes got the same kind of everywoman assets about her like early Madonna had. Any girl can look like Drew Barrymore.”
Chrissie Hynde
“Because she was responsable for one of the most perfect rock records ever written by a woman, and is still writing music and executing it and writing the lyrics.
“She uses her sexuality in a weird way, and always has done. Like the time she posed on the front of NME in black leather with some glam rocker - back when she used to write for them in the Seventies.
“She wrote a great record and I dont give a shit about anything else”
Ellen vonUNWORTH
“Shes the worlds best photographer right now. Her rates are insanely high for a video shoot. And she does these Guess ads
“She wont work for just anyone - she doesnt like rock because it doesnt give her as much freedom as fashion. Shes not looking for grit, shes looking for beauty. Sometimes shell use supermodels, but often she uses really normal girls, normal women. Shes a little plastic but thats part of her job.
“She uses color incredibly. Shes a better black and white photographer than ?, which is saying a lot. I havent seen black and white photography like that since the early Echo and The Bunnymen NME days. Those beautiful U2 covers and Ian McCulloch covers.
Hillary Clinton
“For obvious reasons, I relate to her and Id relate to her no matter what.
“I was never more relieved in my life than when that woman moved into the white house. I just felt like things are gonna be okay now. But, although Hillary and Bill are living in the White House, the right wing re still getting on school boards and banning things like taking deep breathes before tests, because “its new age religion”. They reckon Halloween decorations are satanic, self esteem for girls is feminism, and feminisms been turned into a dirty word - rather than a state of being. Like Humanitarianism or whatever.
“I really want her and Bill to stay there because her health care system is the only thing thats going to keep this country from collapse. Shes spent 67 months on it, and I dont know why America thinks its crazy. Id be willing to, even if I was poor, pay an extra dollar.
“Its pathetic that she has to pretend that she, bakes cookies, its pathetic the way that the American public demands she submerges her intellect. She used to be one of the best yop 10 lawyers in the country.
“Her scapegoating is just a really easy media tactic, because shes an easy target.”
POP MUSIC : In Love With Courtney : She may be married and expecting, but Hole’s Courtney Love hasn’t toned down
(Rare? Courtney Love Interview August 16, 1992, Los Angeles Times)
An hour with Hole’s 1991 “Pretty on the Inside” album might be one of the most harrowing experiences in rock ‘n’ roll, a black, labored, twisted hour that is closer to a gruesome-sex Mary Gaitskill story than to anything you might think of as popular art, a slack, grinding hour that imprints itself on your consciousness like an extended fingernail-screech.
Most of the songs are about bad sex, bad drugs or a bad day at the abortion clinic. The most famous song from the album begins “When I was a teen-age whore… .” If “Pretty on the Inside” were a horror movie, it would be all the parts that you have to look at through your fingers.
Sometimes it is good to experience excruciating things.
On a quiet back street of Los Angeles’ Fairfax District, a quick walk from Canter’s and a stone’s throw from the hippest record stores on Melrose, Hole auteur Courtney Love sprawls in the living room of her groovy railroad-flat apartment, smoothing the week’s British music tabloids around her on the floor, listening to the new Pavement CD, tugging at her tight, black skirt.
At one end of the room, a line of well-worn books leans against the wall; on the floor by the couch, an exquisite thing in cream Atomic Age Naugahyde, is a vividly colored textbook chart of the female reproductive tract. Love looks up only occasionally, to say something snotty about the blaring music or to read a particularly juicy notice aloud. She puts down the copy of Sounds and picks up a New Musical Express.
Her new husband, Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain, has spent the afternoon straightening up. Sprawled on her clean living-room floor, Courtney Love is happy and in love. The British music tabloids have all mentioned her, she has a baby on the way, and she’s been signed to Geffen Records for a lot of dough. Love has more money than she can count and a husband the world desires, a singing voice that could crack glass, and cool pads in both Los Angeles and Seattle. She loves the British music tabloids almost as much as they love her, which is more than plenty.She reaches over to the coffee table and leafs through a packet of letters that teen-age girls have written to Sassy magazine about its recent Kurt & Courtney cover, half of which are admiring and half of which say that she’s a skank. Love is obsessed with people who are obsessed with her.
About a year ago, Everett True, the American-underground correspondent for Melody Maker, found something deep and unsettling in Love, and the English weekly ran a full-page article on Hole at a time when the band was still third-billed at small club shows in Los Angeles, its own hometown. True called Hole “the best … no, scratch that … the only rock ‘n’ roll band in the world,” and positioned Love as sort of the underground’s answer to Madonna. The rest of the British press followed suit.
Love, who does not think of herself as a beauty, was named the third sexiest woman in a recent Melody Maker readers poll, just behind Madonna and Kylie Minogue. Overseas, she is a paradigm of damaged slutty glamour. Over here, within the very glamorous world of underground rock, Love is notorious, and people who barely know her often gossip about her for hours.
But happy as she might be, at the moment Love is miffed. She shuts the latest issue of NME hard.
“All of a sudden,” she whines, “all these boys from all these papers are turning into New Man Feminists. Until they turn into something else next month, in which case they’ll take it out on Patti and Debbie and Chrissie and meeee . I was reading one of these last week, and every single article had my name in it. And it’s not like I’ve written a ‘Brass in Pocket’ or anything. It’s all because I took a couple of pictures with my eyeliner smudged.”
Love is to smudged eyeliner what Karen Carpenter was to denim leisure suits.
“This whole ‘underground’ thing is really scary,” she continues, twisting around her finger a platinum strand of hair, “because there’s such a frenzy going on right now, and the industry thinks they can purchase it and make it pay. People are offering a million dollars to these scruffy little dirty stoner bands. And–I can just see–it’s going to be like new wave: ‘Get that kid into an old sweater!’ What’s going to happen is that these underripe bands are going to put out these underripe records that nobody is going to buy, and it will ruin it for the rest of us.”
She stifles a yawn.
“I think there should be a standard, almost like socialism, where bands that deserve to get as big as the Pixies get as big as the Pixies and not any bigger because money will ruin everything. All the pomposity, all the crap … all the creme brulee.”
The phone rings, and she trips in her hurry to get to it. She says hello; her face contorts into the most remarkable fright-mask expression. She covers the mouthpiece, and yells out to her husband: “It’s Kiii -iirk from Me- tallll -ica, darling. How in the hell did he get our phone number?” before hanging up the phone and sinking back down to the floor in a slump. She puts her face in her hands.
“I’ve always been comfortable with notoriety,” she says, “but I feel like I married Bobby Sherman. It’s like that bad, you know what I mean: ‘She keeps him locked in the closet, and she doesn’t let him take his phone calls, and everybody knows they’re sitting around shooting smack.’ Y’know. Please. I’m pregnant, and it’d be my baby sitting around doing smack, my fetus, about eight inches, and it’s got little legs and hands. I am not stupid.”
(Then again, she recently admitted heroin use after she got pregnant to Vanity Fair. Or did she? See article on Page 54.)
She sighs: “You know, I think the worst thing about L.A. is how I’m somehow considered accomplished because I nailed a rock star. You know what I mean; that makes me scary, that makes me dealable with people… . Now Kirk Hammett knows who I am. And that makes me sick.”
*
Love, 25 or so, grew up near Eugene, Ore., spent some time in Los Angeles, hung out in Liverpool with cult new-wave singer Julian Cope, spent time in San Francisco and fronted an early version of Faith No More, all the while studying British music papers as if they were the Scriptures.
She auditioned for the Nancy Spungen part in “Sid & Nancy"–she ended up playing a minor role in the film–and director Alex Cox built an entire movie (the megaflop “Straight to Hell”) around her dark-star punk charisma. She heard the Replacements’ “Let It Be” and moved to Minneapolis for a while in the mid-‘80s.
Minnesota was a place that she had always thought about.
Still on the floor, Love blushes. “I had a Bob thing,” she says. “People are ashamed of their Bob things, but I grew up on Bob. When I went to Minnesota, I went to Hibbing right away. It’s right near Duluth. I totally went to Hibbing … isn’t that scary? I went to the house, they had a little museum there, a Bob museum. I went to dinner a couple times with Jesse Dylan, Bob’s son–I was about 19 at the time.
“And then his uncle, Bob’s brother, owned a theater in Minneapolis. Me and my friend Lori decided to put on a show at that theater with the Butthole Surfers and like nine bands, and we overpriced the tickets and nobody came, and we lost a whole bunch of money. Biggest disaster of my whole entire life: I got on the outs with the Butthole Surfers and the Dylan family in one evening.”
Denied a career as a rock promoter, Love supported herself as a stripper, was in a series of all-woman bands, including one in 1986 with guitarist Kat Bjelland, who went on to form Babes in Toyland, and bassist Jennifer Finch, who helped start L7.
She moved back to Los Angeles in 1989 and formed Hole, settling on the eventual lineup of Eric Erlandson on guitar, Jill Emery (formerly of the Hollywood death-goddess trio Superheroines) on bass and Caroline Rue (ex-Omelets) on drums. (Emery and Rue recently quit the group; the band is more or less on hiatus until the baby comes in September.) Hole recorded the well-regarded “Retard Girl” single on the Long Beach indie Sympathy for the Record Industry, and the harrowing “Dicknail” seven-inch for Sub Pop.
Love talked Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon into co-producing Hole’s album, thereby ensuring her entree into that in-group underground cool sort of vibe, which she surfed like an expert power-floating six-foot peelers.
After the British music tabloids got through with her, Hole became the subject of a major-label bidding war, eventually won by Geffen. Love seemed to particularly enjoy spurning a personal offer from Madonna to become the very first artist on her brand-new Warner Bros. custom label, Maverick.
(A representative for Madonna confirmed that the company did pursue Hole, among other acts.)
“Madonna has a clipping service send her everything about me,” Love says with a sneer, “and I totally figured out what it is–it’s like Madonna wants to be the goddess of everything blond. She wants to own any piece of the blond experience she may have forgotten about–in my case the rape victim/battered child persona–and she wanted to swallow me whole.
“I could never have worked for Madonna, because she’s too short, and she’s never been a fat girl, and she has like this Napoleon thing going. I could never deal with a boss that has never been fat. But Madonna has got good taste in art. And she also, like, knew some of my lyrics by heart. To me, that was amazing.”
Love lifts herself off the floor and walks over to the CD player in the next room, where she takes off Pavement and puts on the Tori Amos piano-ballad version of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”
Cobain appears from the next room, wearing a moth-eaten fuzzy sweater, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, and imitates high-voiced Kirk Hammett trying to persuade him to go on tour with Metallica and Guns N’ Roses. “We’ve gotta wipe the stage with the Gunners, maaaan ,” he whines, and then dissolves into smirking laughter.
She reads him some of the better items about them that have appeared in the week’s tabloids. He grabs Melody Maker and reads some back to her. They share a perfect, quiet media moment together, man and wife and newsprint. Then Cobain leaves to have supper with his friend Mark Lanegan of the Screaming Trees, and she takes off the Amos album and replaces it with the new one from Teenage Fanclub. “Have you heard this band?” she asks. “They’re trying to sound exactly like my husband.”
Love settles onto her Naugahyde couch.
I have this thing about me, this catalyst, that brings out hate in people, and I wonder about it,” she says. “I think I may have always worn it around me, I think it is why I was always picked on, which is why I don’t blame anybody. No matter where I go, or what context I’m in, I seem to provoke people, and I enjoy it. I was the ultimate Christ of the schoolyard. “One night at the Underworld in London, on our first English tour, there was this entire contingent of guys who kept yelling, ‘Slut, whore,’ and I dived on them, and they just shoved their … it was intense. I got (groped) by the crowd, and it was very insane. And I got back up on stage with nothing on, and then they rushed the stage and started grabbing us, and Jill and Caroline just couldn’t deal with it. That’s why they’re not in the group anymore… . I want a bass player who will be like Elvis Presley. I want a bass player who will stand on stage in front of 80,000 people with her shirt off.”
Bigger than the Pixies, then!
“A few months ago I went to Martin Luther King Day at my old junior high in Eugene, which used to be an ass-kicking, Led Zeppelin, evil, stoner high school,” she says. “Now all the girls are like Sassy readers with Nirvana shirts and little dreadlocks and nose rings. My God! No matter what has happened, no matter the order of being, if the charts were just and fair and the Pixies and Nirvana and Hole were the most … I’d probably start listening to Poison. I don’t want utopia, I want cacophony.”
POP MUSIC : In Love With Courtney : She may be married and expecting, but Hole’s Courtney Love hasn’t toned down
(Rare? Courtney Love Interview August 16, 1992, Los Angeles Times)
An hour with Hole’s 1991 “Pretty on the Inside” album might be one of the most harrowing experiences in rock ‘n’ roll, a black, labored, twisted hour that is closer to a gruesome-sex Mary Gaitskill story than to anything you might think of as popular art, a slack, grinding hour that imprints itself on your consciousness like an extended fingernail-screech.
Most of the songs are about bad sex, bad drugs or a bad day at the abortion clinic. The most famous song from the album begins “When I was a teen-age whore. . . .” If “Pretty on the Inside” were a horror movie, it would be all the parts that you have to look at through your fingers.
Sometimes it is good to experience excruciating things.
On a quiet back street of Los Angeles’ Fairfax District, a quick walk from Canter’s and a stone’s throw from the hippest record stores on Melrose, Hole auteur Courtney Love sprawls in the living room of her groovy railroad-flat apartment, smoothing the week’s British music tabloids around her on the floor, listening to the new Pavement CD, tugging at her tight, black skirt.
At one end of the room, a line of well-worn books leans against the wall; on the floor by the couch, an exquisite thing in cream Atomic Age Naugahyde, is a vividly colored textbook chart of the female reproductive tract. Love looks up only occasionally, to say something snotty about the blaring music or to read a particularly juicy notice aloud. She puts down the copy of Sounds and picks up a New Musical Express.
Her new husband, Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain, has spent the afternoon straightening up. Sprawled on her clean living-room floor, Courtney Love is happy and in love. The British music tabloids have all mentioned her, she has a baby on the way, and she’s been signed to Geffen Records for a lot of dough. Love has more money than she can count and a husband the world desires, a singing voice that could crack glass, and cool pads in both Los Angeles and Seattle. She loves the British music tabloids almost as much as they love her, which is more than plenty.She reaches over to the coffee table and leafs through a packet of letters that teen-age girls have written to Sassy magazine about its recent Kurt & Courtney cover, half of which are admiring and half of which say that she’s a skank. Love is obsessed with people who are obsessed with her.
About a year ago, Everett True, the American-underground correspondent for Melody Maker, found something deep and unsettling in Love, and the English weekly ran a full-page article on Hole at a time when the band was still third-billed at small club shows in Los Angeles, its own hometown. True called Hole “the best . . . no, scratch that . . . the only rock ‘n’ roll band in the world,” and positioned Love as sort of the underground’s answer to Madonna. The rest of the British press followed suit.
Love, who does not think of herself as a beauty, was named the third sexiest woman in a recent Melody Maker readers poll, just behind Madonna and Kylie Minogue. Overseas, she is a paradigm of damaged slutty glamour. Over here, within the very glamorous world of underground rock, Love is notorious, and people who barely know her often gossip about her for hours.
But happy as she might be, at the moment Love is miffed. She shuts the latest issue of NME hard.
“All of a sudden,” she whines, “all these boys from all these papers are turning into New Man Feminists. Until they turn into something else next month, in which case they’ll take it out on Patti and Debbie and Chrissie and meeee . I was reading one of these last week, and every single article had my name in it. And it’s not like I’ve written a ‘Brass in Pocket’ or anything. It’s all because I took a couple of pictures with my eyeliner smudged.”
Love is to smudged eyeliner what Karen Carpenter was to denim leisure suits.
“This whole ‘underground’ thing is really scary,” she continues, twisting around her finger a platinum strand of hair, “because there’s such a frenzy going on right now, and the industry thinks they can purchase it and make it pay. People are offering a million dollars to these scruffy little dirty stoner bands. And--I can just see--it’s going to be like new wave: ‘Get that kid into an old sweater!’ What’s going to happen is that these underripe bands are going to put out these underripe records that nobody is going to buy, and it will ruin it for the rest of us.”
She stifles a yawn.
“I think there should be a standard, almost like socialism, where bands that deserve to get as big as the Pixies get as big as the Pixies and not any bigger because money will ruin everything. All the pomposity, all the crap . . . all the creme brulee.”
The phone rings, and she trips in her hurry to get to it. She says hello; her face contorts into the most remarkable fright-mask expression. She covers the mouthpiece, and yells out to her husband: “It’s Kiii -iirk from Me- tallll -ica, darling. How in the hell did he get our phone number?” before hanging up the phone and sinking back down to the floor in a slump. She puts her face in her hands.
“I’ve always been comfortable with notoriety,” she says, “but I feel like I married Bobby Sherman. It’s like that bad, you know what I mean: ‘She keeps him locked in the closet, and she doesn’t let him take his phone calls, and everybody knows they’re sitting around shooting smack.’ Y’know. Please. I’m pregnant, and it’d be my baby sitting around doing smack, my fetus, about eight inches, and it’s got little legs and hands. I am not stupid.”
(Then again, she recently admitted heroin use after she got pregnant to Vanity Fair. Or did she? See article on Page 54.)
She sighs: “You know, I think the worst thing about L.A. is how I’m somehow considered accomplished because I nailed a rock star. You know what I mean; that makes me scary, that makes me dealable with people. . . . Now Kirk Hammett knows who I am. And that makes me sick.”
*
Love, 25 or so, grew up near Eugene, Ore., spent some time in Los Angeles, hung out in Liverpool with cult new-wave singer Julian Cope, spent time in San Francisco and fronted an early version of Faith No More, all the while studying British music papers as if they were the Scriptures.
She auditioned for the Nancy Spungen part in “Sid & Nancy"--she ended up playing a minor role in the film--and director Alex Cox built an entire movie (the megaflop “Straight to Hell”) around her dark-star punk charisma. She heard the Replacements’ “Let It Be” and moved to Minneapolis for a while in the mid-'80s.
Minnesota was a place that she had always thought about.
Still on the floor, Love blushes. “I had a Bob thing,” she says. “People are ashamed of their Bob things, but I grew up on Bob. When I went to Minnesota, I went to Hibbing right away. It’s right near Duluth. I totally went to Hibbing . . . isn’t that scary? I went to the house, they had a little museum there, a Bob museum. I went to dinner a couple times with Jesse Dylan, Bob’s son--I was about 19 at the time.
“And then his uncle, Bob’s brother, owned a theater in Minneapolis. Me and my friend Lori decided to put on a show at that theater with the Butthole Surfers and like nine bands, and we overpriced the tickets and nobody came, and we lost a whole bunch of money. Biggest disaster of my whole entire life: I got on the outs with the Butthole Surfers and the Dylan family in one evening.”
Denied a career as a rock promoter, Love supported herself as a stripper, was in a series of all-woman bands, including one in 1986 with guitarist Kat Bjelland, who went on to form Babes in Toyland, and bassist Jennifer Finch, who helped start L7.
She moved back to Los Angeles in 1989 and formed Hole, settling on the eventual lineup of Eric Erlandson on guitar, Jill Emery (formerly of the Hollywood death-goddess trio Superheroines) on bass and Caroline Rue (ex-Omelets) on drums. (Emery and Rue recently quit the group; the band is more or less on hiatus until the baby comes in September.) Hole recorded the well-regarded “Retard Girl” single on the Long Beach indie Sympathy for the Record Industry, and the harrowing “Dicknail” seven-inch for Sub Pop.
Love talked Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon into co-producing Hole’s album, thereby ensuring her entree into that in-group underground cool sort of vibe, which she surfed like an expert power-floating six-foot peelers.
After the British music tabloids got through with her, Hole became the subject of a major-label bidding war, eventually won by Geffen. Love seemed to particularly enjoy spurning a personal offer from Madonna to become the very first artist on her brand-new Warner Bros. custom label, Maverick.
(A representative for Madonna confirmed that the company did pursue Hole, among other acts.)
“Madonna has a clipping service send her everything about me,” Love says with a sneer, “and I totally figured out what it is--it’s like Madonna wants to be the goddess of everything blond. She wants to own any piece of the blond experience she may have forgotten about--in my case the rape victim/battered child persona--and she wanted to swallow me whole.
“I could never have worked for Madonna, because she’s too short, and she’s never been a fat girl, and she has like this Napoleon thing going. I could never deal with a boss that has never been fat. But Madonna has got good taste in art. And she also, like, knew some of my lyrics by heart. To me, that was amazing.”
Love lifts herself off the floor and walks over to the CD player in the next room, where she takes off Pavement and puts on the Tori Amos piano-ballad version of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”
Cobain appears from the next room, wearing a moth-eaten fuzzy sweater, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, and imitates high-voiced Kirk Hammett trying to persuade him to go on tour with Metallica and Guns N’ Roses. “We’ve gotta wipe the stage with the Gunners, maaaan ,” he whines, and then dissolves into smirking laughter.
She reads him some of the better items about them that have appeared in the week’s tabloids. He grabs Melody Maker and reads some back to her. They share a perfect, quiet media moment together, man and wife and newsprint. Then Cobain leaves to have supper with his friend Mark Lanegan of the Screaming Trees, and she takes off the Amos album and replaces it with the new one from Teenage Fanclub. “Have you heard this band?” she asks. “They’re trying to sound exactly like my husband.”
Love settles onto her Naugahyde couch.
I have this thing about me, this catalyst, that brings out hate in people, and I wonder about it,” she says. “I think I may have always worn it around me, I think it is why I was always picked on, which is why I don’t blame anybody. No matter where I go, or what context I’m in, I seem to provoke people, and I enjoy it. I was the ultimate Christ of the schoolyard. “One night at the Underworld in London, on our first English tour, there was this entire contingent of guys who kept yelling, ‘Slut, whore,’ and I dived on them, and they just shoved their . . . it was intense. I got (groped) by the crowd, and it was very insane. And I got back up on stage with nothing on, and then they rushed the stage and started grabbing us, and Jill and Caroline just couldn’t deal with it. That’s why they’re not in the group anymore. . . . I want a bass player who will be like Elvis Presley. I want a bass player who will stand on stage in front of 80,000 people with her shirt off.”
Bigger than the Pixies, then!
“A few months ago I went to Martin Luther King Day at my old junior high in Eugene, which used to be an ass-kicking, Led Zeppelin, evil, stoner high school,” she says. “Now all the girls are like Sassy readers with Nirvana shirts and little dreadlocks and nose rings. My God! No matter what has happened, no matter the order of being, if the charts were just and fair and the Pixies and Nirvana and Hole were the most . . . I’d probably start listening to Poison. I don’t want utopia, I want cacophony.”
Really great video on the dangers of consipracy theorists and different reasons people believe in them. Definitely applies to the Courtney love and Kurt Cobain conspiracy theories.
Courtney in Italy. November 28, 1991.
At a club called Bloom in Mezzago.
The story goes that when Courtney got to the venue she went to the offices upstairs, kissed a piece of paper with her lipstick smeared mouth and faxed it to Kurt who was also on tour in Europe at that time. Nirvana had played here ten days earlier.
💋
Follow @fkyeahcourtneylove on Instagram.
“Rosewater, diaper smell. Use your illusion. Speak in tongue and cheek. Hey girlfriend detox. I’m in my kraut box, held up here in my ink penitentiary. Kinda starving and kinda bloated. My water broke. Selling my body of water every night in a full house. Sell out in dark in bed, missing you more than an Air Supply song. Doll steak. Well done. Your milk is so warm. Your milk is my shit. My shit is your milk. I have a small man’s complexion. I’m speechless, I’m toothless. You pull wisdom from my teeth. My mom is the tooth fairy. You give me birth and dentures and fangs. I love you more than the tooth fairy.”
— A letter Kurt wrote to Courtney in 1992. (via itsmellslikegrrrl)
Courtney at 19 years old in San Francisco, as the lead singer/lyricist for Faith No More. She was in the band for about 6 months.
“In the summer when I was 18, I saw Faith No More play and they had a crap singer. And I had a wedding gown on and I looked fucking cool and I knew it. And I demanded to be in their band.” CL.
(We’ve honestly been waiting for this footage to surface for 20+ years… it was at the point that a lot of us didn’t think it even existed anymore!)
Full details at https://www.instagram.com/fkyeahcourtneylove/
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