Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, September 30, 1994 TAG: 9410140007
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARK MORRISON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The she-devil of Generation X. Alternative rock's Yoko Ono. Half the modern-day reincarnation of Sid and Nancy. And a household name for all the wrong reasons.
Perhaps more accurately, she is all of the above.
Or none of the above.
Whatever, in the last three years there is no denying that Love has become one of the most controversial and talked-about figures in rock music. She will perform in concert with her band, Hole, Saturday at Virginia Tech's Squires Student Center in Blacksburg.
Of course, much of the reason for Love's celebrity status stemmed from her marriage to the late Kurt Cobain, the leader of the alternative rock group Nirvana, who killed himself earlier this year.
Their union set her up immediately for the hack comparisons. She was the opportunist Yoko Ono figure to Cobain's John Lennon voice of a new rock generation. Or as reports of their drug use spread, she became the Nancy Spungen to his Sid Vicious - a troubled poster couple for the 1990s.
But there is more to Love than being the widow Mrs. Kurt Cobain.
A bizarre figure in her own right, she already had made a mark for herself in the music underground before her involvement with Cobain. And arguably, their pairing was both the best of career moves for her, as well as the worst.
Like Cobain, Love came from a broken home, the product of a divorce, and a past more checkered than her working-class husband's. She was born in San Francisco. Her father owns a small California publishing company, and he has authored several books on the Grateful Dead.
Her mother, the daughter of a wealthy eyeglasses manufacturer, is a psychologist in Oregon who made news last year as the therapist for '60s radical Katherine Ann Power, who surrendered to police after 23 years in hiding.
Growing up, Love bounced between boarding schools in New Zealand and Australia, and her mother's care in Oregon. At age 12, she was caught stealing a Kiss T-shirt from a Woolworth's and sent to reform school.
By 18, she was in Los Angeles, living off part of a multimillion dollar inheritance from her grandfather, working as a stripper, and dreaming of stardom. "I didn't want to sell drugs," she told Vanity Fair in 1992 about her life 10 years before. "I didn't want to steal cars. I didn't want to be a prostitute. So I stripped."
In L.A., she became a fixture on the punk rock scene. She tried acting, landing roles as Nancy Spungen's best friend in the film "Sid & Nancy," and as one of the leads in the art house spaghetti western, "Straight To Hell." But acting didn't suit.
"I just couldn't pull it off," she once explained. "I'd get zits."
She turned to music instead. In 1989, Love ran an ad in an L.A. music magazine. "I want to start a band. My influences are Big Black, The Stooges, Sonic Youth and Fleetwood Mac." Guitarist Eric Erlandson responded.
"She called me back about two weeks later and talked my ear off at three in the morning," Erlandson told the Los Angeles Times last April. "I was pretty scared off right away when I first met her. She was kind of overbearing."
Joined by a woman bass player and a woman drummer, they formed Hole and started playing the L.A. club scene. With Hole's 1991 debut album, "Pretty on the Inside," released on an independent label, the critics hailed Love as the punk Joni Mitchell and the new beauty queen of underground rock.
A major label bidding war ensued, the first ever for an unsigned, mostly female band. Madonna's management company even came calling, much to Love's disliking. "Madonna's interest in me was kind of like Dracula's interest in his latest victim," she has said.
Geffen Records, Nirvana's label, prevailed, signing the group for a reported $1 million. At the same time, Love started pursuing Cobain after her one-year marriage to another musician, James Moreland, ended in divorce.
Cobain had not yet been crowned the spokesman for Generation X.
Love always made that fact clear when later confronted with the Yoko Ono comparisons. She once told Rolling Stone magazine: "There's nothing in my past to indicate that I've gone out with anything but losers - that's my pattern anyway. So it was a nice surprise that my husband turned out to be successful."
Still, after Nirvana and Cobain rocketed to fame, skeptics said Love's career smelled like rock hype as she became more famous for her wide-open interviews and her spouse than for her music. (After all, "Pretty on the Inside," had sold only 60,000 copies.)
They married in Hawaii in February 1992 when Love already was pregnant with their daughter. Cobain planned to wear a dress for the ceremony, then switched to pajamas. She wore a dry-rotted, see-through dress.
Rumors of drug use dogged them throughout Love's pregnancy. A now-infamous Vanity Fair article reported that she used heroin while knowing she was pregnant, a report the couple vehemently denied.
Frances Bean was born healthy, but Los Angeles social services moved quickly to place her in the custody of Love's sister. It took Cobain and Love several months, a good-faith trip into de-tox and $240,000 in legal fees to win their daughter back.
Meanwhile, predictions about their self-destructive Sid and Nancy lifestyle persisted. Last April, the predictions, in part, came true when Cobain killed himself with a shotgun blast to his head in their Seattle home.
Characterisic of her candor, Love has talked about his suicide openly and often in the months since, to MTV, in a taped message to his fans, through interviews, and the America On-Line Rocklink electronic bulletin board.
Four days before his death, he called her in L.A., where she was promoting Hole's Geffen debut, appropriately titled, "Live Through This," which was set for release two weeks later. Love said he told her: "Courtney, no matter what happens, I want you to know that you made a really good record."
And he said: "Remember, no matter what, I love you."
That was the last time they spoke.
On America On-Line in July, Love said that he tried to call her once more the following morning, but couldn't get through to her hotel room because of a mix-up in her instructions to the hotel operator. She asked that her calls be blocked except his.
"For over six minutes he tried to get through my block," she said. "If you knew him, trust me, it's hard to imagine Kurt arguing with anyone for six minutes, but he did, and he failed, and all I can think is that he thought my block was for him - that I blocked HIM. I imagine him sitting on our bed, just thinking, 'She's not even taking my calls, OK, that's it. I'm gonna do it.' And he did."
On top of his suicide, Hole's bass player, Kristen Pfaff, died this summer of a heroin overdose. The deaths have not stopped Love from working, however, despite criticism that she should be in seclusion and in mourning.
But in the rock world, the show goes on. "Live Through This" garnered Love and Hole another round of good reviews. "A scorched-earth blast of righteous indignation as feral and convincing as anything in Johnny Rotten's bark-and-spittle repertoire," Rolling Stone called it.
So, Pfaff was replaced and Hole is now on a 40-city U.S. tour.
As for the future, Love likely will remain a perplexing figure. "I hope I'll be dignified," she said earlier this year. "...I'd like to have a brood of children and a good garden, and I'd like to grow great hybrid roses and have a lot of dogs and cats and have a...nice house."
Or she'll end up at a bar, she said, "asking some guy to get me another martini. Still bleaching my hair at 59."
Keywords:
PROFILE
by CNB