Courtney Love -- The Hole Story -- The Seattle Grunge Rocker Talks Candidly About Her Life, Her Music And Her Pain

Jun 15, 1995

Amy Raphael

The writer caught up with Courtney Love while she and her band, Hole, were on tour this spring in Europe. This Los Angeles Times Syndicate article is edited from the original for length and language.

Last Sunday, medics were called to Love's Seattle home. She was taken to Harborview Medical Center, treated for a reported prescription-drug overdose and released. She is expected to perform in Los Angeles this weekend.

ZURICH - The public face of Courtney Love Cobain is that of the brave widow getting on with her life, enjoying watching her daughter grow up and proving that she's willing to tour constantly, if that's what it takes to make her band successful.

The private Courtney Love is barely coming to terms with the suicide last year of her husband, Kurt Cobain of Nirvana - with the haunting memories of his disembodied face, with a future alone.

The interview starts at 1:30 a.m. in her hotel room. After half an hour, Courtney takes off her dress and gets into bed in her bra and knickers. She is a superslob. There are clothes and bottles of pills and messages addressed to Blanche DuBois (fixated with "A Streetcar Named Desire," she currently uses Blanche's name as her hotel pseudonym) scattered all over the floor and on the bed. She lights a second cigarette before the first is even out, spills ash all over the bedding and herself, and only stops smoking once to eat a banana sideways.

Courtney is supposed to be talking about her band Hole, the tour, Lollapalooza and the next album. Instead she wants to discuss Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, English rocker Julian Cope, Michael Stipe of R.E.M., the Oscars, AIDS, self-mutilation and Kurt. She is obsessed by rejection and asks time and again why Michael Mooney, the former Psychedelic Furs guitarist, whom she says she lost her virginity to in Liverpool, and Reznor, with whom she has had a two- or three-month affair, both publicly refuse to acknowledge their relationships with her.

"It's kinda weird when someone denies knowing you intimately, and two men have done it in the course of 18 months. Like excuse me, am I the gross one? Is it because I'm repulsive? Is it because I'm a widow? Do they want to go where Kurt's been?"

Although Courtney has fallen out with plenty of people over the years, she recently convinced herself that she was about to die and decided that she wanted to make up with some of her enemies.

"When I talk about making up, I don't mean with people like Lyn Hirshberg, who I'll never forgive for writing that Vanity Fair piece." (The article claimed that Love was using heroin while pregnant.) "I went to the Oscars . . . and (Quentin) Tarantino was sitting between me and Lyn. Not killing her was a milestone for me. I could have hit her with Tarantino's Oscar . . .

"But when I was on tour in Japan, I thought I had AIDS because a certain person lied on their application form and I went out without my raincoat, only to find that this person had (done) the whole Western world.

"I had my blood test, I was fine and I got this thing about making truces with people I'd quarreled with in my life. I don't want to have a lot of enemies when I die."

If Courtney held onto her crown after the king of grunge's death, giving America its own eccentric brand of royalty, her band has no interest in blue blood or - with the exception of guitarist Eric Erlandson's starlet girlfriend Drew Barrymore - Hollywood. They aren't interested in gossip or the tabloids but music. They provide Courtney with the essential backbone of the band, and while they may be reluctant to be publicly judgmental of Courtney during their individual interviews, they all make it very clear that they've had enough of constantly being overlooked.

The other three - Erlandson, drummer Patty Schemel and bass player Melissa Auf Der Maur - may be keen to talk about music, but it is Courtney who knows what she wants on the next album. When she finally talks about it, she lies back on her pillow, closes her eyes, takes a drag on her cigarette and talks quietly:

"I have a total vision for the record. I have the title. I want to call it `Use Once And Destroy' or `Celebrity Skin.' I think I'm gonna call it `Celebrity Skin' because I've touched so goddamn much of it. I love that title: It's very poignant. There was this total loser band in L.A. called Celebrity Skin. And in the States there's this bootleg nudie mag called Celebrity Skin which shows photos of any celebrity who has had a nipple or a vagina coming out during an event: like a gown which gave too wide.

"I know exactly how I want it to sound: I built it in my mind, like a circle. The top end I want to be warm, Crazy Horse, `Harvest' - not lo-fi like Pavement, but like the old '70s lo-fi. If you imagine this circle, the top is like balsam wood. The middle strip is really floral, really Alan Moulder, like that 4AD thing but with strong song-writing. Like what Billy (Corgan) did with `Siamese Dream,' but more so and less so. Textured, super-textured. The bottom part I want to be the most gnarliest . . . Black Sabbath meets sampling. And I'm thinking about approaching Moby to produce it."

Courtney had been wandering around all day with rumpled sheets of lyrics poking out of her handbag. She agrees to read some of them, then spends five minutes rummaging around the floor, trying to find them among abandoned dresses and Wonderbras. There are half a dozen sheets of paper with lyrics written at all angles across the page and some lines have stars by them, where Melissa has indicated the ones she prefers. Courtney has written these lyrics over the past month and claims most of them to be overworded and some to be lousy. She gets back into bed, lights another cigarette, swigs some mineral water and looks deadly serious. "This is not going to be the Kurt Cobain record."

She reads all the lyrics aloud, often with enough pathos to win a part in a Hollywood weepie. There are songs about abortions, about slashing her arms with razors, about imagining her own funeral in New Orleans, rock stars cheating on their wives and sex.

Reading out the lyrics triggers memories and after she's finished, Courtney talks about Kurt in a stream of consciousness.

"I might talk about my private life, my sex life, whatever, but I'm not going to tell you about Kurt. That was our secret. . . . I have all these home movies. . . . Unfortunately on some of them we're wasted, but on others we're not. When I watch them, the essence is there. His shoes are at home. He wore the same shoes for seven years and never changed his socks - that stink will never go away . . ."

As dawn approaches, Courtney's conversation veers increasingly toward Kurt. She is quietly tearful and still full of disbelief.

"Strange things have disappeared in the last year. When we first got together, there was this bird dying outside our hotel room window. Kurt tried to save it but it died. He took three feathers and said: `This one is for you, this one for me and this is for the baby we are going to have.' He had a precious box, a heart-shaped box, which he put the feathers in. And one of them is gone. . . . The last thing he bought was flowers. He left lilies on the bed for me and they were wilting . . . and his patch pants have gone, too."

She suddenly gets angry, wipes her eyes and makes black lines down her cheeks with her running makeup. "You know we had a deal that if one of us did it, then the other one would. It is lame of him to have welshed on a deal. . . . He knew that his wife picks the worst men in the world. . . . Kurt treated me like a lady."

She has run out of matches and spends a few minutes rooting around on the floor and in bags before she finds a lighter. Back in bed, she pulls the sheets up around her chin and continues.

"What I understand about suicide at this point is that you and I are comfortable in our bodies. I need my . . . Prozac and Valiums and whatever to get by but generally I'm comfortable. But Kurt was not comfortable in his body. He had eating disorders and seizures in his stomach. It wasn't some . . . excuse to get drugs, because he could have faked anything. I've gotten good drugs from doctors by faking it - please.

"He planned and plotted it for years. He got so weird and malicious and crazy toward the end and he wanted to drive everybody away and his body was a prison. I have a medical textbook called `Suicidology' and this doctor found a cache of about 60 suicide notes in a coroner's office in L.A. from the '60s and '70s and they are all similar to Kurt's. They were completely irrational, a lot of them were addressed to a childhood imaginary friend or to themselves.

"Sixty or 70 percent of suicides don't leave notes. Out of those who do, more than half leave really mean ones. Lots of them are about contradictions: I hate everybody, I love everybody; I'm too empathic, I can't feel a thing. You cannot sit here and say he was in a rational state of mind when he did it.

"He eroticized his suicide, which is like falling in love. When you've plotted it - those photos in France with the gun and why . . . did he wait 'til Rome to take those pills? That night in Rome he wrote a suicide note but I was so much in denial. Why did he wait 'til I was there? Because he wanted an audience? Because he wanted to be saved?"

For Courtney the reality is not only that she has to live with images of his ghosts but with the fact that her dead husband is public property. She says that the person who stole the suicide note and put it on T-shirts is being sued - "he's dead meat" - and explains how someone took 20 Polaroids of Kurt's destroyed face in the morgue with the intention of putting the images on T-shirts. She cries hard when she mentions the Polaroids, then tries to find something more positive to talk about.

"I'm gonna have a public ceremony in Seattle at Calvary Cemetery. I'm gonna put his remains and some of his favorite stuff in and bury it deep. No cemeteries wanted to take him because all the pilgrimages . . . would be problematic. But I'm sick of the pilgrimages to my house: I have a guard with a gun 24 hours a day. Then I got the price for the beautiful angel on his tombstone and they wanted $50,000. Kurt would die! He'd say: `Go to Safeway, get a tombstone, write my name in marker and put the Black Flag marks on it.' "

Courtney may joke about Kurt as she remembers his reluctance to play the millionaire - "He always saw himself as a bum and a janitor" - but ultimately she feels betrayed by him. He not only let her down by not keeping to their suicide pact, but she is sure that they were soul mates and that she will always be alone, no matter who she is with.

Although she has cut herself since his death - "After every tragedy, some people get tattooed while others have plastic surgery. When I got through a lot of pain, I take a razor and cut my arms. It's more for effect than anything. And yes, it's a cry of help" - she is unwilling to go any further. "Rolling Stone had a new category of rock stars most likely to die within the year. No. 1 was, of course, moi. No. 2 was Eddie and No. 3 Trent. The joke is that all of us would outlive a nuclear war."