1994 April 4 - April 10 1994 (Interview April 4 1994) The Trials of Love : Just when Courtney Love should be focusing on Hole and her career, she can't help worrying about her husband, Kurt Cobain - Los Angeles Times
1994 April 4 - April 10 1994 (Interview April 4 1994) The Trials of Love : Just when Courtney Love should be focusing on Hole and her career, she can't help worrying about her husband, Kurt Cobain - Los Angeles Times
On Tuesday, Geffen Records releases the album that Love hopes will change
her reputation from a curiosity to a respected artist. And she has just moved
into a new lakefront house in Seattle with her husband, Kurt Cobain, and
their 19-month-old daughter, Frances Bean.
But the new album, “Live Through This” (see review, Page 72) is strong
enough to break through the stereotypes. It’s the boldest in a series of
outstanding records written and sung by a new wave of gifted female artists.
So why did Love suddenly break into sobs last week in a Beverly Hills hotel
room, in her first interview since Cobain suffered a near-fatal drug overdose
last month in Rome?
Love is haunted by the incident and the aftermath, and though she won’t
speak about them on the record, the rumors last week were nonstop:
Cobain’s band, Nirvana, has broken up . . . he has had another overdose . . .
she has had an overdose . . . he has checked into a recovery program.
She pauses and lights a cigarette. For once, the woman known for her biting
sarcasm and savage wit in marathon interviews is speechless.
For all her cockiness, she now seems frightened and fragile. “Off the record,”
she says repeatedly before describing the tensions of recent weeks, mostly
involving her concerns over her husband. She wonders how she can go on
the road if he needs her in Seattle.
‘I don’t care about ‘Lollapalooza,’ ” Love says when asked about the
situation. “I just don’t ever want to see him on the floor like that again. . . . He
was blue.”
All that talk can turn you into a bore or a star, depending on the level of
intelligence and wit--and Love has both. Her conversation is peppered with
the latest gossip and savage commentaries on pop culture, jumping from the
profound to the frivolous without signal.
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Above all, she knows the art of being provocative. No wonder a film agent
once described her as a cross between Madonna and Bette Midler--a
comparison she hated.
To many, Courtney Love smells like rock hype. Reviewers may be excited
about her, but the rock audience may be skeptical of the credentials of
someone who is more famous for her interviews and her spouse than for her
music. Hole’s debut album, on the small independent Caroline Records, sold
only 60,000 copies.
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“We felt that pressure when we were recording,” says Pfaff in a separate
interview. “I think we all knew it had to be really good (to) get over the
Courtney personality thing . . . the wife-of-the-rock-star thing and the girl-
band thing.”
The new album shows there is more to Love than an ability to titillate and
amuse. It combines the naked intimacy of Leonard Cohen with the rock self-
affirmation of Patti Smith. Rolling Stone labels it “excellent.” Newsweek calls
it a “bracing album shot through with real sadness and candor.” Love, the
magazine continues, “sounds like a young Chrissie Hynde, not Mrs. Kurt
Cobain.”
For her part, Love is confident the band will get a fair hearing.
“I believe in the music and I think it will be heard,” she says, lighting another
in a parade of cigarettes.
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While Hole got mostly glowing reviews when it previewed material from the
album on a recent West Coast tour with the Lemonheads, she says the
crowd in Vancouver, Canada, seemed more fascinated with her than with the
music.
“There were 3,000 people there and you could sense everyone talking while
we were on stage,” Love says. “You could feel this swirl of energy and talk . . .
a group over there talking about what I’m wearing and a group over there
saying something about me and Madonna.
“Finally about 15 minutes into the show, I just stop playing and go to the
microphone. ‘Oh, I get it. You guys don’t know it’s cool to like us yet.’ I said,
‘You know what? I’ll just come back in six months when the word (gets up) to
Canada. I know you are a little behind.’ ”
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“It was something that was interesting and rare,” she says, rubbing her hand
through her hair, with its peroxide blonde highlights and dark roots, as she
sits in a chair in her suite’s living room. “It was a challenge--sort of hard to
achieve, but not that hard.”
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Nothing appears to delight Love more than a good story--and some of those
she tells about her background are so good that you wonder if she isn’t
above fabricating a few to make her background more interesting. Didn’t
Dylan do that?
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Besides, shouldn’t a reporter be on guard when the subject includes this line
on her album:
Asked about the lyric, Love says teasingly, “It’s just admitting that I can be
dishonest, that I can be a liar.”
With a smile that summarizes the contradictions in her personality, she adds,
“At least I’m honest about that, right?”
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Her mother is Linda Carroll, the therapist of Katherine Ann Power, the ‘60s
radical who surrendered last year in connection with a murder/bank robbery
after 23 years in hiding. Her father is Hank Harrison, a writer who authored
some books on the Grateful Dead.
She describes her parents as hippies and says that they were divorced when
she was quite young. Her childhood travels took her from New Zealand to
England to Oregon, where she lived in a tepee near Eugene. A photo on the
back of the new CD shows a young, barefoot Love from that period.
Seeing child star Tatum O’Neal win an Oscar for “Paper Moon” made her
obsessed with show business at age 9.
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“I said, ‘Yeah, OK, that’s cool,’ and I started doing commercials and children’s
theater,” she says, pouring a cup of tea. “I owned the Pacific Northwest when
it came to the children’s slot in radio jingles and voice-overs.”
But there were dark times. She says she was in and out of foster homes in
her early teens and was sent to a juvenile detention center after stealing a
KISS T-shirt from a department store.
By 15, Love had discovered rock ‘n’ roll, and began a journey that took her
over the next decade from New York to San Francisco to Minneapolis in
search of the right musical partnership. She hooked up briefly with the
bands Faith No More and Babes in Toyland. Somewhere along the line, she
appeared in Alex Cox’s film “Straight to Hell.” On the side, she danced in strip
joints.
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By the end of the ‘80s, Love was drained. She headed for Alaska, where she
went into virtual isolation while she tried to figure out her future.
“I was turning 24 and had been wanting to have a band since I was 15, 16
and I still hadn’t succeeded,” she recalls.
Her vow was to move to Los Angeles to give rock one more try--this time
searching for her own inner voice as a musician.
Like thousands of other young rock hopefuls each year, Love put an ad in the
Recycler in June, 1989, looking for musicians who, like her, were interested in
such bands as Big Black, the Stooges, Sonic Youth and Fleetwood Mac.
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Eric Erlandson, a guitarist who grew up in the same San Pedro neighborhood
as Black Flag’s Greg Ginn, responded to the ad.
“She called me back about two weeks later and talked my ear off at 3 in the
morning,” he says in a separate interview. “I was pretty scared off right away
when I first met her. She was kind of overbearing. But I sensed there was
something I could bring to the band.
“Even though she had that strong personality, I felt she needed some focus
and discipline, which I had. I had a lot of patience. We played off each other.”
The first Hole lineup made its stage debut three months later at Raji’s in
Hollywood, opening for the L.A. female quartet L7.
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Erlandson didn’t feel that the band was ready to play a club, but Love
believed in learning in public, he says. She enjoyed the chaos and the
challenge.
Hole--which then included Jill Emery on bass and Caroline Rue on drums--
released its debut album in 1991 on tiny Caroline Records.
The album downplayed the pop instincts of both Erlandson and Love,
reaching instead for an aggression and Angst that was typical of the punk-
influenced alternative scene at the time.
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“I told myself, ‘I’m going into this level of anger that is going to be beyond
wretched and I’m going to just spew it out,’ ” Love says. “I had some jangly
songs at that time because I was a big fan of R.E.M. and Fleetwood Mac, but
I just didn’t use that sound. I kind of regret that now, but I was intimidated by
the scene.”
The pop press, especially in England, crowned Hole the Next Big Thing and
the band’s leader was flattered by all the attention.
Within months, she was dating Cobain. When the superbly crafted tales of
youthful alienation on Nirvana’s breakthrough album “Nevermind” led critics
to call Cobain the voice of a new rock generation, it set up Love as the Yoko
Ono figure to Cobain’s John Lennon--someone who was perceived to have
hooked on to a star.
But rumors of drug use led to a more troubling comparison: Love and Cobain
as Generation X’s Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen.
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As Nirvana got more popular, the rumors about the couple became more
widespread. The most infamous moment was when Love was quoted in
Vanity Fair as saying that she took heroin while pregnant with Frances. (Love
insists she didn’t know she was pregnant at the time).
In a 1992 interview with The Times, Cobain admitted using drugs, including
heroin, but said that he was then drug-free. He made the announcement, he
said, because he didn’t want his daughter to be told by someone else that
her parents were junkies.
But Cobain had another reason for saying he was through with drugs: He
and Love were privately battling attempts by a Los Angeles County agency,
apparently alarmed by the Vanity Fair report, to take custody of their
daughter.
The couple prevailed and the drug issue faded. Until Rome.
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Love had flown to Rome early last month to spend a few days with Cobain
after he canceled part of a European concert tour because of illness. She
woke in their hotel room to find him unconscious, having taken some of her
prescription tranquilizers and alcohol, she says.
“He was dead . . . legally dead,” she says. “He was in a coma for 20 hours . . .
on life support. They thought he was never going to come out of it.”
On the new album Love declares, “I don’t believe in God,” but the singer, who
was raised a Catholic, purchased Rosary beads and prayed for her husband
at the Vatican.
When Cobain came out of the coma, he was transferred to another hospital.
The move attracted hordes of photographers.
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“I wish Kurt could have seen (a photo of himself) because if he had, he never
would get into that situation again. . . . He has such a great gift. . . .”
Love has been talking nearly three hours now and she’s trying to be
optimistic. A copy of Hole’s new CD sits on a table, near a Narcotics
Anonymous handbook. Frances is in a room down the hall with a nanny.
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Love speaks about the early reaction to the album . . . the news that the
group may appear on “Saturday Night Live” next month . . . the start of a
concert tour.
Picking up the handbook, she says, “I accepted the fact I was a drug addict
and I go to the (expletive) meetings and I chant (an outgrowth of her interest
in Buddhism). I am aware I am not above it. I realize drugs can floor me.”
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“I know this should be the happiest time of my life--and there have been
moments (over the last year) where I felt that happiness,” she says, wearing
a soft pink sweater over her trademark baby-doll white dress. “But not now. I
thought I went through a lot of hard times over the years, but this has been
the hardest. . . .”