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deconstructing courtney
by Carla A. DeSantis Talking to Courtney Love is a wild roller coaster ride. One moment she is quiet, almost whispering, and the next she is making grand, sweeping statements. She goes from zero to sixty instantly, peppering her rapid-fire, carefully crafted sentences with equal doses of cuss words and look-em-ups like "rapacious" and "archetype". She is all about extremes... When we were on the phone one afternoon, she asked if I knew that Shawn Colvin's song, "New Thing Now" is about her, I replied that I'd heard that. She then launched into a typically fascinationg Courtney story about how she was listening to the radio one day and heard five songs in a row either written directly about her or inspired by her. How many of us ever get to stake that much claim on a radio play list? With the release of Hole's third album,Celebrity Skin, Love is destined to claim even more of the radio's bandwidth. Utilizing a backdrop of the later '70s and its instrumental touchstone of the later '90s as it's lyrical one. Celebrity Skin is hole's musical deconstruction of, and tribute to, the state of California. Love has a special relationship with California---having spent many Hollywood years as a stripper, rock star and movie star. Although she aws raised in Portland, Oregon, she descended on LA's underground punk rock scene at an early age and later landed in San Francisco where she made movies with director Alex Cox and sang in an early incarnation of Faith No More. No other rock star in recent memory has been under such constant scrutiny as Love. Even before the sucide of her rock star husband, Kurt Cobain (an event for which conspiracy-theory mongers have made futile attempts to indict her), Love was making headlines in her legendary feud with Vanity Fair magazine. And now everything has escalated. She's not simply a fixture in the music press, but the mainstream press as weell: a recent issue of In Style magazine featured Love either quoted or pictured five times. In the four and a half years since Hole's critically-acclaimed last album, Live Through This, Love has been overhauling her life. She relocated herself, her daughter, and her band to Los Angeles, and made major headway in her burgeoning movie career with The People vs. Larry Flynt, Feeling Minnesota, and the not-yet released 200 Cigarettes. She will also be starring with Jim Carrey in the soon-to-be filmed Andy Kaufman bio-pic, Man in the Moon, directed by Milos Forman. Love compares her highly anticipted album, Celebrity Skin to James Cameron's epic movie, Titanic in terms of the energy, money and time it took to finally come to fruition. But unlike the massive ship, it will still be afloat may months from now, thanks to it's plentiful hooks and catchy melodies. In this very special interview, Love speakins candidly, describing her ascension from playground outcast to one of the decades most compelling celebrities. How did you get what you wanted when you were a kid? I didn't get what I wanted. I would like. I was very socially retarted. I was a scapegoat. It was always in the cards that I was going to get beaten up. That's how it was with everything from the minute I socialized, from getting expelled from the first school I ever got expelled from (for showing my butt to the boys in the bushes for quarters, an early pattern), to being picked on for no real specific reason. I'd be asked to leave because I was weird and I would talk to myself and I'd tell weird lies and I'd pee in my pants. This is no because of incest or abuse, particularly. This is just me and I'm a freak. So how did I get what I want? I didn't. I just told people I was going to be a movie star and then the minute I learned what a rock star was, I decied I was going to be that. And then I just planned. Even Melissa [Auf der Maur, Hole's bassist], for all of her physicality was a freak. She was a weird politician's daughter who went to school with all the other freaks. Now greanted, she was the prettiest freak, but she's still a fuckin' freak. She's Canadian. She's comfortable in her skin. They teach that up there. I don't know what that's about, but it happens. It's some weird Canadian thing. How old were you when you started writing songs? When I was nine or ten I used to write song lyrics with my friend Spering at her house. I remember walking home from her house with this big sheath of lyrics that were really stupid. We wrote shit like "We're gonna go down to the shady lake/Where you and me are gonna make/Sweet, sweet love." That was my Neil Sedaka phase. I remember looking at my lyrics and thinking, "This is what's gonna get me out of here." And I was always going to talent shows, entering myself into the Rose Princess beautiful contest where I had absolutely no business being. I just wanted out and I wanted ot be famous. I didn't know why I needed a platform. I wanted to be on The New Mouseketeers. Now I didn't intellectualize it when I was that young. But that god I didn't get it early. I started a band in sixth grade at Laurelhurst in Portland. We were called The Galaxies. I wrote a letter to Kim Fowley [who put together and produced The Runaways] in 5th or 6th grade, which is funny because Michael Stipe, who is not from a dyfunctional family, wrote a ltter to Kim Fowley the same year. I ran away to Hollywood when I was 14 to find him. So this is a hard-won fuckin' thing for me. This is what was in my DNA to do. How did your adolescence contribute to your ambitiousness? I had no American adolescence experienence so I did not go through the rite of passage that kills girls. What kills girls is double sex American high school. That's all I can tell you because I was in an institution with tough bitches for the entire time. So I didn't know anything about anorexia or popularity or boys. I knew that you fucked boys in the back of Camaros while AC/DC was playing and I didn't want to do that. And I knew that you could get pregnant and you could be a felon, which I knew I was way to bourgeois to be. That's all I knew. As you got older, what steps did you take to become successful? It took a lot of discipline and really, really hard work and a natural sensibility to get up in the morning to pursue what I need to pursue. It's not a Madonna thing. I don't like bing called a Leo and I don't like being called rapacious because I'm not; I'm a snob. If I were rapcious I would take any fame thrown my way, which of course I did when I was young. But I attraced it like fuckin' flies! I was a fat girl with a big nose. I walked in off the street and Mr. hip, young, film director fell in love with me for no reason. When I saw Faith No More play, I walked in and said, "Kick you your lead singer. He's an idiot. You need a chick." Have you always preferred having women in your band? Yes. I found [Hole guitarist] Eric [Erlandson] through a classified ad I put in The Recycler. When I listed influences I remember putting the Stooges era and the best I thought I could do was somsone who knew who the Stooges were. I also listed Fleetwood Mac. The ad said "prefer female." I should have said "only female." Eric answered and that's his curse in life. One of the dancers at out video shoot for "Celebrity Skin" was this really interesting girl with a lot of charisma. Her name was Tracy and they were calling her Number Eight. I kept yelling "It's Tracy!" through my bullhorn. I went up to her and asked, "Do you play guitar?" And I realized that I've probably asked a thousand females that in my life. It's been my pick-up line since I was in 6th grade! Every time I thinking somebody is interesting I ask, "Do you play guitar?" Do you play piano? Do you play bass? Do you play guitar?" Always! It's nothing new. Do you think something like Lilith Fair creates positive image and role models for women musicians? One of the problems with the whole Lilith phenomenon is that you're talking about music becoming such a comfortable middle-class way to make a living. It's like, "Let's get Lisa Loeb a guitar for her birthday and maybe she'll become a professional musician. Wouldn't that be kooky?" You're talking about girls that are really, really well-adjusted whereas the male rock star archetype that you and I are attracted to is because we were freaks and whatever in high school. That's what's fun about rock. I actually know people who have quit their jobs as stock brokers to become musicians! You are the only person I can think of that has evolved from the punk underground to become embraced by and succed in the mainstream. I'm certainly not the first female to come from where I come from. From Joan Crawford on there are plenty of peasant girls that have rise. But I think I'm the first one in this culture, from this era and I'm not embarrassed by it. You know what I mean? I'm not embarrassed by Rozz [Rezabek, an old boyfriend from Portland] and Dylan [Carson, Kurt's best friend] being in Nick Broomfield's film [Kurt & Courtney]. I'm embarrassed that I'm biologically related to amonster [father, Hank Harrison], but I'm not embarrassed that people can tell stories about doing drugs with me in a bathroom with piss up to their ankles. It doesn't bother me. I went to a Bauhaus reunion show recently. There were a lot of people I hadn't seen for a long time because I haven't been amongst the punkers for awhile. Everyone in the place was in their thirites, deep in their thirties, some of them. There were all these people who had been in bands that didn't make it for whatever reason. I even saw some ex-members of Celebrity Skin in the crowd. It was just this old, old fuckin' crowd of people reliving something for themselves. I was watching them and I just thought "they probably think of me as some ambitious, ruthless person." But I wish they knew that I am relaly proud of where I come from. I am really proud of them and that they're part of me. You seem much more comfortable with yourself now. That's because now I know what I'm good for. I don't go home and walk around with my head up my ass about this stuff. I don't fuckin' think i'm better than people. I think I'm tougher than people. And I think I'm more predestined than some people that I'm looking out at over the crowd at the Bauhaus show. To be frank with you, I'm more fuckin' talented in the end. And that's just it. |
