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| HOLE Melody Maker 15 June 1991 by Everett True Californian band Hole sit around in my Hollywood hotel room in various degrees of drunkenness. Caroline, the drummer, is describing to us in graphic detail the rather disgusting operation a friend of hers had to have a ring put in her uterus (she was holding her hand at the time). She has a large ring through her nose, an authentic white trash article who grew up in trailer parks on a diet of Wonder Bread and gravy. She�s the one who broke an ex-boyfriend�s ribs twice. Right now, her band are able to articulate the feelings of pain, betrayal and anger better than any rock act I can recall since the early days of Lydia Lunch. Or perhaps Madonna in �Desperately Seeking Susan�. A lot of this is down to the wiles of singer, Courtney Love. She�s the one sitting by my side, dressed in my white flannel dressing gown, bare thighs prominently displaying their whiter-than-whiteness, laughing at bassist Jill (she of the panic eyes) as she grows more and more paranoid at the questions I ask. Courtney, in her long and varied history (she�s only 24) has lived through more traumas than most of you f***ing lamebrains will experience in your life. She sang with Faith No More for a while. When she was 15 and had no tits, she hung out with Julian Cope in Liverpool and got punched out by Pete Burns. When she was 18, she appeared in Straight To Hell. She�s been a case study for psychologists investigating f***ed-up children of ex-hippies. Her father used to be road manager for The Grateful Dead in the sixties. She was a self-confessed �Teenage Whore�, a slut that would sleep with anyone going. Most of this she doesn�t tell me during the interview, but a few days earlier when she�s off her head at a Buttholes concert, forcing whisky down my throat and rampaging wild. The day after the interview she has a breakdown as a direct result of my probing. There�s loads more, but I don�t think you�re ready for that quite yet. Now she�s a eunuch, channeling her sexual energy into her on-stage performance, and her frustration into the lyrics which touch on everything you�d prefer not to hear, but are morbidly fascinated by. Her celibacy is kept, by a large degree I suspect, through the auspices of laid-back Eric, who seems to act as some kind of calming force and chaperon for her and the band, generally. But Eric is the one who�ll rampage back and forth on stage, nearly hurling his guitar in frustration at our photographer when the performance doesn�t go as well as expected. He�s the one who wants to be seen as a wrinkly old fag queen when he�s old. Eric it was who wrote the B-side to the current Sub Pop single, �Burnblack� � a disturbingly jagged foray into Sabs territory. Think of a harsher, far darker Babes In Toyland and you�d almost be there � and that�s the first and last mention of a fellow American babe band I�m going to give you. Hole deserve far, far better than to be categorized by their sex. The A-side, �Dicknail�, a Courtney song, a former MM Single Of The Week, is even more wired and pain stricken, but still not a patch on some of the songs (�Teenage Whore�, the Beat Happening-esque �GoodSister/BadSister�) on their forthcoming Caroline album, produced by Kim Gordon and Don Fleming. In fact, it almost sounds cartoon-ish next to what I�ve heard so far. Which makes it a cartoon to rank alongside the nightmarish S Clay Wilson and �Little Nemo�, minus any happy endings. But we haven�t discussed Jill yet! Oh, how can we have been so cruel? Only she�s refusing to answer any of my questions, because she feels Courtney�s put me up to it. So let�s have a quote. So, Courtney, why do you write such f***ed up lyrics? �What do you mean, f***ed up? As in passionate or angry, or are you talking about the imagery? Oh, okay. But there�s also beautiful imagery and I try to place that next to the f***ed up imagery, because that�s how I view things. I sometimes feel that no one�s taken the time to write about certain things in rock, that there�s a certain female point of view that�s never been given space. Sorry if you�d prefer to hear a few more witty asides from the musicians and all that so you can conveniently pigeonhole Hole as some kind of LA trash band with a sick sense of humor and dumb willingness to flaunt themselves beyond the boundaries of decency, but I can�t emphasize this point enough. Hole are the only band in the world right now and they�re gonna be so f***ing huge, six months from now you�re gonna wonder how you ever survived without them. |
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