Circus April '95 Article

"Someday you will ache like I ache!" Courtney Love’s lyrics, written before Kurt Cobain’s suicide last April, resonate through the Hollywood Palladium with tragic irony. Yet even though many in the over-sold audience for Hole’s homecoming Los Angeles concert have come largely to patronize rock’s reigning widow, what they’re getting is one of the greatest rock shows ever staged.

To Love - who surprised the rock community by hitting the road just four months after Cobain’s suicide and three weeks after the Hole bassist was found dead of a heroin overdose - the stage is her psychiatrist’s couch. Pumped by the inspiring riffing of guitarist Eric Erlandson, drummer Patty Schemel and new bassist Melissa Auf der Maur, Love delivers an emotional roller coaster of soul-baring sadness and blood-curling climaxes as she ravages her way through "Plump," "Miss World" and other songs from Hole’s major label debut Live Through This.

"Someday you will ache like I ache!" Love repeats the chorus from "Doll Parts" in a raw voice drained of hope.

That Courtney Love should win Best Female Rock Star in the CIRCUS Annual Readers’ Poll is no more surprising than her late husband winning for Best Male Rock Star and Best Band. Fate has all but guaranteed that literally millions would be transfixed-for a while anyway - by anything the widow Cobain says, sings, or does.

What is surprising - as anyone in the Palladium would testify - is how much Love squarely deserves the honor. Courtney Love took the inevitable Nirvana fascination and, rather than milk it for sympathy, used it to wail her message even harder into the ears of non-believers.

"I would like to think that I’m not getting the sympathy vote," Love told Rolling Stone recently, "and the only way to do that is to prove that what I got is real."

Proving that she’s real must be especially difficult for Love, who long before Kurt’s death was accused of Yoko-Onoing her way up the career ladder. Critics found it hard to believe, for example, that she landed on her husband’s label, Geffen, coincidentally. Even before Cobain, Love’s celebrity attachments included Smashing Pumpkin Billy Corgan and a rumored tryst with Guns N’ Roses’ Axl Rose. (Post-Cobain she’s been linked with Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails.)

Her eccentricities seem to offer credence to the Ono comparison, especially after Courtney began posting bizarre messages to her fans on the computer service America Online. Blunt and profane enough to embarrass even Howard Stern, the computer missives paranoiacally attacked both critics and celebs, including Nine Inch Nails, Madonna and the singer Mary Lou Lord, whom Love incidently chased down Sunset Boulevard after her Palladium concert. According to the L.A. Times, Lord had been bragging about a fling she’d had with the pre-Love Kurt.

And yet, Courtney is far from the musical no-talent Mrs. John Lennon proved to be after her 15 minutes in the tragedy spotlight. Love’s voice is tremendous, and she writes course yet melodic tunes literally bleeding with disappointment and disillusionment. Songs like "Credit in the Straight World" (from Live Through This) vividly detail the plans and hopes of childhood that inevitably shatter when then intersect reality.

The back sleeve of Live Through This underscores this theme. It shows a snapshot of Love at about age 10, taken while she was living in a teepee in a commune in Springfield, Oregon. Barefoot, brunette and full of dreams, here is a little girl unsullied by the complexities of adulthood, a little girl that still lives inside Courtney Love.

"In real life, REAL real life, I’m supersensitive," Love said later in the same interview. "But people tend to think I’m not vulnerable because I don’t act vulnerable."

Courtney Love was clearly vulnerable not so very long ago. She was born 29 years ago into the hippie lifestyle of her parents Hank Harrison - a minor Grateful Dead associate - and therapist Linda Carroll. They split when Courtney was five and the child shuttled between her father’s San Francisco digs and her mother’s wild environs, including the Oregon commune and a New Zealand farm.

Love was introduced to music by her mom’s Joni Mitchell records, but her real rock n’ roll resume began at 12, when she found herself in reform school for shoplifting a Kiss t-shirt from Woolworth’s. Within four years she was out on her own, hanging with punk rockers and living on a small trust fund. (When the money ran out, Courtney stripped in seedy L.A. bars like Seventh Veil and Jumbo’s Clown Room.)

Through classifieds in a fanzine, Love linked with Jennifer Finch (of current L7 fame) in 1983 to form her first band. After two years, a lack of success doomed the all-girl Sugar Babylon (which was later called Sugar Baby Doll and featured Kat Bjallad, cureently of Babes In Toyland). Undaunted, Love continued to build her punk credentials, singing briefly for Faith No More and portraying Nancy Spungen’s best friend in the movie, Sid and Nancy.

Love began Hole with guitarist Eric Erlandson in 1990, playing their first gig at L.A.’s Jabberjaw coffeehouse. Love’s charisma and raw sound placed Hole at the forefront of punk’s "foxcore" scene, so dubbed for its sultry but hardcore female singers (also represented by bands like the Nymphs, L7 and Babes In Toyland).

Two popular underground singles (1990’s "Retard Girl" and ‘91’s "Dicknail") and an indie album (‘91’s Pretty on the Inside) led to financial interest from Madonna’s new record label which, in tandem with the burgeoning romantic interest of Kurt Cobain, sparked a bidding war so intense and immediate that industry insiders seriously doubted if all the labels had even heard Hole’s music.

Love enlisted drummer Patty Schemel and bassist Pfaff in ’92, but essentially put Hole on a back burner for two years, as a result of her marriage to Cobain. While the press generally regarded their union as a boring retread of Sid and Nancy, Love found it an arduous full-time job to deal with a baby and the soap-opera histrionics of Kurt. (The day Frances Bean was born, for example, Cobain brought a gun into the hospital to discuss a possible suicide pact.)

Somehow, Love got it together enough to record Live Through This, which ironically was released a week after Cobain’s death.

And now time has runs its course to the present, and she’s doing her gig at the Palladium, launching herself into the audience for a little body surfing. When she emerges from the mass of fans, her grungy baby-doll dress is missing at least one shoulder strap. Yet the largely adolescent male audience doesn’t even hoot. After baring her soul to the degree she has, one breast doesn't mean a hell of a lot to Courtney Love or her fans.

Email: frankie_82@yahoo.com