lat81692

LOS ANGELES TIMES/CALENDAR

Sunday August 16 1992

In Love With Courtney
She May Be Married and Expecting, But Hole�s Courtney Love Hasn�t Toned Down

By Jonathan Gold

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 slick, grinding hour that imprints itself on your consciousness like an extended finger-nail 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 with �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�s 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 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 undergrounds 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 her 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 these under ripe bands are going to put out these under ripe 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 be 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 cr�me 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-talll-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 doing smack.� You 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.�
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 Hammet 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 and 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 of 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-women 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 entr�e 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 had 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 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 Hammet trying to persuade him to go on tour with Metallica and Guns �N� Roses. �We�ve gotta wipe the stage with the Gunners, ma-a-a-an,� he whines, and then dissolves into smirking laughter.
She reads him some of the better items about them that have appeared in the weeks 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 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 on the 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 onstage 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 Zepellin, 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.�

THE RUCKUS OVER THE VANITY FAIR PROFILE

Los Angeles Times August 16 1992 by Steve Hochman

The 20 words that shook the record business are found near the end of Vanity Fair magazine�s eight page profile this month on rock provocateur Courtney Love.
Talking about a day last January when her husband Kurt Cobain�s band Nirvana, appeared on �Saturday Night Live,� the 26 year-old singer is quoted as saying, �Then we got high and went to SNL. After that I did heroin for a couple of months.�
The shocker is that Love, the lead singer of the group Hole, was pregnant at the time.
Could she have knowingly put her future child at risk by taking drugs, especially heroin?
No, she told Calendar regarding the behavior that had been widely rumored in the rock world before the Vanity Fair article (see story on page 54)- and she reaffirmed that the answer last week in response to the magazine profile.
In a statement by Love and Cobain that was released through the couple�s management company, they declare:
�The Vanity Fair article�contains many inaccuracies and distortions and generally gives a false picture of both of us, including our attitude about �drugs.�
Addressing the allegation that she was using heroin after knowing she was pregnant, they continue,
�We unequivocally deny this�
As soon as Courtney found out she was pregnant, she immediately contacted an obstetrician and a doctor specializing in chemical dependency and has been under their care since then and has been assured that she can expect to have a healthy baby.�
In addition, the statement says:
�Because we were stupid enough to do drugs at one time, we realize that we opened ourselves up to gossip by people in the rock world who want desperately to pretend they have some �inside� information on famous people.
�We never dreamed that such gossip would be reported as if it were true without us even having the ability to comment on it, especially when the gossip reflects on such a personal and important event as the birth of our first child.�
Nonsense, responds Vanity Fair.
The magazine is standing by its story, written by contributing editor Lynn Hirschberg, who is a former contributing editor of Rolling Stone magazine.
�We quoted Courtney Love�s comments, which we have on tape,� says VF spokeswoman Maurie Perl. �And before the story went to print, Hirschberg informed several of Courtney and Kurt�s representatives about the quotes on drugs and at the time there was no further clarification.�
So, what will this controversy do to Love�s burgeoning career? Is the public going to be fascinated by this outspoken young rebel, or repulsed?
Some industry observers questioned feel Love � who loves attention � has been walking on the wild side when it comes to media titillation.
�She got exactly what she wanted and now they don�t like it,� says an insider, referring to Love�s stance as a rock �n� roll bad girl.
But several feel that Love has certainly become a household name overnight.
�For a person who has built her career more on scandal than actual musical worth, the story is a major plus,� says another music publicist.
�I don�t think it is going to harm her career at all. It will make everybody very curious about her music. Then it is up to the music to do the slam dunk.�
Love certainly wasn�t shy in the photo session for the Vanity Fair spread, titled �Strange Love.� Living up to her bad girl image, the very pregnant singer went as far as to pose in a revealing negligee and bra, holding a cigarette in her left hand.
Don�t, however, expect to see all that in the magazine. Editor Tina Brown apparently thought the photo was in bad taste � and had the offending element airbrushed out.
You won�t find the cigarette in the photo.