Highlights - Muses

Courtney Love

In the way that Yoko Ono can never be mentioned without the thought of John Lennon, Courtney Love will be forever tied to Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain. Yet Love’s confrontational stage presence with her band Hole, as well as her gut-wrenching vocals and powerful punk-pop songcraft, have made her a rock star in her own right.

 

Love’s father, an early, minor Grateful Dead associate, and mother, a psychotherapist, divorced when she was five. As a child, she lived on a commune in New Zealand with her mother. When she was 12, she did time at an Oregon reformatory after she got caught shoplifting. Dropping in and out of college, and living off a trust fund, Love moved from place to place, working as a stripper in Japan, Alaska, and Taiwan, and hanging out with mope rockers in Liverpool, England. Back in Los Angeles, she became friendly with director Alex Cox and scored small roles in a couple of his films, including Sid & Nancy.

By the time Love formed Hole with Eric Erlandson in 1990, she had already appeared as a vocalist in San Francisco in an early incarnation of Faith No More and the all-girl band Sugar Baby Doll, with Babes in Toyland’s Kat Bjelland and L7’s Jennifer Finch.

Hole began garnering attention on the U.S. underground via the band’s incendiary live performances and two early singles, "Dicknail" and "Retard Girl." Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon and Gumball’s Don Fleming coproduced the acerbic debut album, Pretty on the Inside. These recordings and English tours made Hole the darlings of the U.K. music press. Hole was seemingly put on hold, however, during Love’s courtship with and eventual marriage to Cobain (on February 24, 1992). The band, which had been courted by several major labels, signed a lucrative contract with Nirvana’s [see entry] label Geffen.

After giving birth to a daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, Love and her husband became involved in a battle with the local children’s services agency over custody of the baby, due to charges in the press that Love had done heroin during her pregnancy; the couple won the right to keep their child.

In 1993 Love began recording Live Through This with Erlandson, Patty Schemel, and Kristen Pfaff. One week before its release, Cobain was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Amid the tragedy, the album won rave reviews. Tragedy struck again on June 16, 1994, when bassist Pfaff overdosed on heroin. Vowing to keep Hole alive, Love enlisted Canadian bassist Melissa Auf Der Maur and the band embarked on a tour, first opening for the Lemonheads, then for Nine Inch Nails. Live Through This (#55, 1994) made steady progress in the charts (going platinum a year later), yielding the singles "Miss World," which got modern-rock radio airplay, and "Doll Parts" (#65, 1994). The album and its singles won numerous 1994 critics’ polls, including those conducted by ROLLING STONE and the Village Voice.