Miss World: Courtney Love at 60
Jim Sullivan revisits his wild encounters with the Hole frontwoman
I met Courtney Love in person for the first time on the Lollapalooza tour of 1995 at an amphitheater outside Boston, in Mansfield.
This was back when Lolla was a road show, before it became a Chicago-only event. We were both backstage and the man who introduced us was Mark Kates, a longtime friend who was an executive at Hole’s label, DGC.
Upon being introduced, Love smiled and lifted her long flowing white dress up over her head and back down again. She was wearing underwear. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to be shocked or flattered, titillated or non-plussed. A little sheepishly, Kates said that’s what she always does. A stripper’s greeting. She did that upon meeting Michael Cudahy of Combustible Edison, too.
During the show, sporting a red baby doll dress, Love dissed her old nemesis, the alternative weekly the Boston Phoenix, complained about being too fat and sang ragged-but-right songs of sex and death, anger and angst. But she did not pull a nutty, crowd-surf or strip. (A previous show at Boston’s Orpheum Theatre had some of that.) It was full-tilt, cathartic grunge and even if Love didn’t have great vocal range, the turf she knew, she knew cold. Hole covered her late husband’s “Pennyroyal Tea,” singing “I’m a liar and I’m a thief … I’m anemic royalty.” (Truth?) Love bid us farewell by turning her back to the crowd, bending over, looking at us through her spread legs as her hair blew in a fan’s breeze.
Four years later, it was a still sleepy Courtney Love, whose familiar voice came over the phone line early one morning from Cincinnati. It was the first day of her band Hole’s tour and she was slated to do some interviews.
“God,” said Love, yawning, “you have me when I am so vulnerable. I just woke up. I am not all sharp and facile. I was just dreaming about having a crush on somebody and it was very inappropriate – you know, somebody you have a crush on but it’s very inappropriate. But it was such a nice dream. This was totally cerebral, absolutely romantic.”
It would have been impolite to ask whom it concerned, but before I get to ponder whether to push ahead, she said, “You cannot ask and I won’t tell, but I will tell you that it is really, really inappropriate. At least I have my social controls on. At least I have learned some boundaries. At least I can say it is inappropriate.”
That’s Love: a tease, even when she’s half asleep. If you know anything about her, you know that when she is on, she might, metaphorically speaking, bestow upon you a dozen roses or rip you to shreds with her verbal machine gun. (Ask Mary Lou Lord, quite possibly a pre-Courtney interest for Kurt Cobain in Boston. Better still, don’t ask her; she’s been asked enough.)
Love, who turns 60 on July 9th, is both a celebrity and a musician. On Hole’s album Celebrity Skin, that’s a theme, how her world is balanced or not balanced. Love started out as a rock ‘n’ roll hanger-on and moved quickly up the food chain. She became known primarily as Cobain’s spotlight-stealing drug-sharing-venom-spewing squeeze/girlfriend, and, later, wife, and the mother of their child, Frances Bean.
It was after Cobain’s suicide in the spring of 1994 that her star shot into the stratosphere, just as Hole’s second album, Live Through This – has there ever been a more inadvertently apropos album title? – came out. The album spawned a slew of hits, including “Miss World” and “Doll Parts.”
Is she a loose cannon?
“I am not a loose cannon,” Love responded. “I don’t think I have ever been much of a loose cannon.” (I can’t help but think of the snarling line “I am the girl that lies and lies and lies,” a key passage in “Miss World.”)
The Love of 1999 was the somewhat remade and remodeled figure of concert stage and screen. Onstage, she was known to drop her top – kinda like a female Iggy Pop taking out lil Iggy – and cuss like a pirate if the spirit moved. On screen, she first appeared in the 1986 movie Sid and Nancy and got an Oscar nomination for playing the drug-addled sex bomb Althea in the 1996 movie The People vs. Larry Flynt. She also became the unwilling and unsympathetic subject of Kurt and Courtney, Nick Broomfield’s film that raised serious questions about the role she may have played in her husband’s death.
I interviewed Broomfield in 1998. To cut to the chase, I asked: Does he think Love had a hand in the death of her husband?
“I think she was involved in letting it happen,” said Broomfield. “I don’t think there was a plot, but I think to a certain extent he was enabled, allowed to go on with it. It is a very specific thing to call someone a murderer. Is she capable of it? Yes. Can you prove that she did it? No.”
Love, said Broomfield, tried to thwart him at every step — from asking friends and acquaintances not to talk to him, to threatening a lawsuit, to refusing permission to use any Hole or Nirvana music. He tossed out the musicians’ interviews as he had no Nirvana music to play as a backing track or reference.
“I was surprised,” Broomfield said, of Love’s desire to shut him down. “Maybe, with hindsight, I was naive. But I thought she would have used the film in a very positive way, to have deflected the conspiracy theories, because aside from [private investigator] Tom Grant, they’re not the most credible bunch. And I think her actions with me confirmed what most people were saying about her. I think [her reluctance to talk] makes one suspicious. And it makes you think that there must be questions that haven’t been answered.”
No charges were ever brought.
What is it, I asked Love, that she brings to the rock ‘n’ roll party?
“Well,” she said, “I want to play with whatever I want to play with, whatever energies I want to play with. There is a lot of romance and there has always been a lot of romance. And there is a lot of rage, and I don’t think that people in our culture really are used to rage and romance existing inside a female body, one that’s a celebrity or a musician.
“I was thinking about it last night. I was rehearsing last night and I just thought it was really so weird. I was figuring out how to write a KoRn song and we were sort of jamming in this really easy key, and it was actually very satisfying. I was missing being able to write in a Polly Harvey ‘I like it rough / You know what I mean / Spread your black wings / I wring your neck, baby’ way. I hadn’t written one like that in a while and I really wanted to write one. But they’re really dated, like an old blues riff.”
Aside from Hole’s own shows and audience, who else might be hearing this band soon? The gentlefolk at women-centric Lilith Fair (1996-1999) co-founded by Sarah McLachlan. No lie. Finally, a brash in-your-face band on Lilith’s main stage! For two shows.
“I know, right!” says Love. “We’re doing five dates for sure.” (Didn’t turn out that way and in fact they dropped out entirely.) But before that happened, Love said her new pal Sheryl Crow turned her on to the idea. “I think it’s wonderful and it should be a really fun, interesting crowd to mess with. I will make them take to us. I can make anyone take to us, but it is about acclimation, what energies you want to play with.” Love threatened noisy 10-minute reworkings of Hole songs and Sonic Youth covers.
Hole, which had been co-headlining a tour with Marilyn Manson, left the tour a month before we talked. Problems ranged from staging difficulties to unresponsive audiences to Love and Manson sniping at each other in public. Love says she thought the tour might work, given that the two bands played together – and got on well – in Australia in 1998.
“It was a nightmare, horrible and negative,” says Love.
“It’s smart, if you know it’s not working, to stop while you’re ahead before you destroy yourselves or lose tons of money,” added Hole guitarist Eric Erlandson, on the phone a few days after I talked with Love. “It was presented to us in a way it looked good – we were friends with them, still are, we’ll run into each other and it’ll be fine – but it was a weird mix, like R.E.M. opening for Twisted Sister.”
Said Love: “I only believe in romantic comedy. I don’t know why I was forced into what I want to call this lowbrow melodrama, but it was even less than that. It was much more burlesque. I believe in drama, but I have never believed in wrestling, and, somehow through different circumstances and different people’s agendas, I found myself in this wrestling circus.”
The males – and a Manson audience is largely male – did not fully appreciate Hole’s less theatrical, more punk-inclined, female-centric rock. They came, says Love, “to see the crosses burn, to see a spectacle, to see the DRUGS sign [that Manson employs], and to see his butthole. I have no problem with that crowd, except there is nothing I can do to help them.” They see Hole and “all they do is go, ‘She’s prettier than I thought and, um, they kind of rock and they remind me of Lita Ford. I think that she is probably pretty cool.”’
With Love, you never know if she’s going to sing, rant, make a joke, or lift her shirt. “I like to play with an audience,” said Love. “I like to find out what the key to the audience is, although I am sort of sick of manipulating audiences – maybe the audience needs to manipulate me.”
She’s flashed more than a few audiences, “The first few times, I did that,” she says, “there was actually an organic reason. [Recently] during ‘Northern Star’ I took off my shirt so I was, like, you know, bare-breasted singing this really bare song – saying there is nothing evasive, there is no manipulation, there are no pop hooks. I thought it was a confluence.”
Said Erlandson of Love’s stage style: “When she swerves, I think it’s a good thing. If she’s emoting that’s always good. So many front people don’t have much of that spark; they just walk onstage and play. Sometimes, lately, with Courtney, I’ve been going, ‘Hmmm, where am I?’ But that’s fine. We want to create our own riptide.”
Hole formed in 1989. Before fame came a-knocking, Hole’s sound was defiantly rough and grungy on its debut disc, Pretty on the Inside.
“We were playing Joni Mitchell and Journey covers and Fleetwood Mac covers on our first album,” said Erlandson. That’s not true, but what he means is this: “I always thought there were these well-crafted pop elements, but we weren’t skilled enough to pull that off at the time, and we were more into deconstructing things. [Over time] it’s been a process of peeling away the layers. A pop core has always been there, but it had this muck on top of it.”
Celebrity Skin was a cleaner record – still cynical at times, but certainly with more hope than on Live Through This. It took a lot of work in the studio and helping hands from Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan.
Love answered a question about her motivation – be it movies or music – this way: “I get really energized when I talk to people that really have a muse, and I have a muse. If I didn’t have the ability to play music, I’d go nuts. I would be really hostile and really angry. As I said, I have a great love of romantic comedy, and I put it into this thing. I can’t explain it to you. How do people like [editor] Tina Brown – who I don’t like and for a really basic reason [Vanity Fair reported Love used heroin while pregnant, which Love disputes] – who is a boomer, who looks at a rock person and says, ‘There is no way that person can be as smart as me, there is no way that that person is bringing anything in. I picked on her a couple of seasons ago, so it’s boring, but as an example, there is no way that that person threatens my status quo, because they are from the burlesque or from Vaudeville. I don’t consider rock ‘n’ roll Vaudeville.”
I caught up with Love again in 2017. She was working memoir and had been doing so forever.
“Yeah, a really long while,” said. “Fifteen years. I’ve had to deal with Harper’s [the publisher] and I’ve gone through several writers. The voice and the tone wasn’t right and, also, I wasn’t really ready to embrace all that stuff because there are so many peaks and valleys – so many valleys, deep, deep, deep valleys. To put that out for the public to consume, it’s a heavy commitment. I always thought I would be one of those women who would go to the grave without ever writing a book. But it’s my narrative and I need to tell it, so I’ve grown into accepting that I want to tell it. I want to be alive when it’s published and I want to be in control of it.”
Two years ago, in August, she announced she’d finished it. She did so again in June of this year.
It has yet to see the light of day.
VIDEO: Hole “Violet”
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Shes a murderer that never paid for her crime. She should not be walking around free and pay for what she did to Kurt Cobainn.