Courtney Love is late. She’s nearly always late, and not just ten, fifteen minutes late, but usually more like an hour past the time she’s said she’ll be someplace. She’s late for band rehearsals, she was late when she used to strip, she was even an hour late for a meeting with a record-company executive who wanted to sign her band, Hole. Courtney assumes that people will wait. She assumes that they will forgive her as they stare at the clock and stare at the door and wonder where the hell she is. And they do forgive her. Until they can’t stand it anymore and then they get mad, fed up, and move on. But by that time Courtney is gone—she’s off keeping someone else waiting.
When she does show up, she shows up. When you’re an hour late, you can really make an entrance. She’s tall and big-boned and her shoulder-length hair is cut like a mop and dyed yellow-blond. The dark roots show on purpose—nothing about Courtney is an accident—and today she’s attached a plastic hair clip in the shape of a bow to a few strands. She’s wearing black stockings with runs in them, a vintage dress that’s a size too small, and a pair of black clogs. Her skin, which has been heavily Pan-Caked and powdered to cover an outbreak of acne, is pasty-white, and her lips are painted bright red. She has beautiful round blue-green eyes, which she has carefully made up, but the focus is on her mouth. She’s all lipstick.
And talk. From the moment Courtney sits down at a table in City, a restaurant near her home in Los Angeles, the verbal pyrotechnics begin. You get the sense that she has a monologue going twenty-four hours a day and that sometimes she includes others. When she’s not talking, she doesn’t seem to be listening exactly but, rather, absorbing: Who is this person? What is his context? What can I learn/get from him? are the thoughts coursing through her brain. With Courtney, it’s not so much scheming as it is focus. She has always known what she wanted and what she wanted was to be a star. More precisely, Courtney always thought she was a star. She was just waiting for everyone else to wake up.
It looks as if, after a few false starts—an acting career that didn’t quite take, some stints in other bands that didn’t work out—Courtney is having her moment. She and Hole were just signed to a million-dollar record deal; she is married to Kurt Cobain, the lead singer of Nirvana, and within the realm of the alternative-music scene, Courtney is now regarded as a train-wreck personality: she may be awful, but you can’t take your eyes off her.
Her timing is excellent: in the wake of the huge success of Nirvana, an extremely talented rock band from Seattle that surprised everyone in the industry by selling (so far) seven million records worldwide, there has been a frenzy to sign other bands in the punk-grunge-underground mode. The music ranges from almost pop to loud thrashing—the only real unifying link is that most of the bands are on independent labels and appeal to college audiences. “No one can get a seat on a plane to Seattle or Portland now,” says Ed Rosenblatt, president of Geffen Records, Nirvana’s label. “Every flight is booked by A&R people out to find the next Nirvana.”
Last August, Hole, which is much more extreme and less melodic than Nirvana, released Pretty on the Inside on Caroline Records, an independent that is a subsidiary of Virgin. The record is intensely difficult to listen to—Courtney’s singing is a mix of shouting, screeching, and rasping—but her songwriting, which has been compared to Joni Mitchell’s, is powerful. “ ‘Pretty on the Inside,’ ” writes Elizabeth Wurtzel in The New Yorker, “is such a cacophony—full of such grating, abrasive, and unpleasant sludges of noise—that very few people are likely to get through it once, let alone give it the repeated listenings it needs for you to discover that it’s probably the most compelling album to have been released in 1991.”
Courtney’s postfeminist stance (she has the power—she just wants to be loved) echoes throughout her songs. Her chosen topics—rape and abortion, to name two—are extremely provocative. “Slit me open and suck my scars,” she sings about sex. “Don’t worry baby, you will never stink so bad again,” she intones about a botched abortion. In her strongest song, “Doll Parts,” she turns introspective: “I want to be the girl with the most cake / He only loves those things because he loves to see them break / I think it’s all true—I am beyond fake / Someday you will ache like I ache. ”
Even before Nirvana’s massive success, Hole was lumped with Babes in Toyland, L7, the Nymphs, and other femaleled underground groups. Although these bands were quite different from one another, and wildly competitive, they were all dubbed “foxcore.” And when Nirvana’s album Nevermind started to sell like mad, the so-called foxcore bands suddenly seemed commercially viable. “There’s a pre-Nirvana record-industry perception of this kind of music,” says Gary Gersh, the Geffen Records A&R person who signed Nirvana. “And there’s a post-Nirvana record-industry perspective. But if you’re out there and trying to sign the next Nirvana, you’re chasing your tail. The game is not finding the next Nirvana, because there won’t be a next Nirvana.”
It is somehow appropriate that Madonna’s new company, Maverick, was the first to be interested in signing Courtney Love to a major record deal. In mid-1991, Guy Oseary, an enthusiastic nineteen-year-old who was working for Madonna and her manager, Freddy De Mann, at their then unnamed company, told his bosses about Hole. He also contacted Courtney’s lawyer, Rosemary Carroll, and Hole-mania began. “Courtney had been orchestrating this game plan from the beginning,” says Carroll. “She was always very aware of the business, of her place in the business.”
Courtney claims she never wanted to sign with Maverick. “Freddy would have me riding on elephants,” she says. “They don’t know what I am. For them, I’m a visual, period.” Madonna’s presence worried her even more: she did not want to share the spotlight with the premier blonde goddess of the last decade. “Madonna’s interest in me was kind of like Dracula’s interest in his latest victim.”
But Courtney, who is nothing if not shrewd, knew that one offer could spur other offers. Besides, she had another ace to play: by late ‘91 she was dating Kurt Cobain. When Hole went to England, she wasn’t shy about either Madonna’s interest or her new boyfriend. She gave lots of interviews and the notoriously fickle British music magazines, who adored her grunge-rock sound and her torn thirties tea dresses, proclaimed her their new genius. “The British tabloids called me ‘leggy’ and ‘stunning,’ ” she recalls. “The best article was about Madonna. It had a really big picture of me as a blonde and a really small picture of her as a brunette. I cut that one out.”
