Thursday, June 3, 1999 | 10:21 a.m.
I'll be retelling my Courtney Love anecdote long after I'm dead. For your convenience, I'll have it engraved on my tombstone, along with a small "target" area where mourners can spit and say, "Dumb (expletive) rock critic ... you don't know nothing."
Until that time I'll tell you about driving the Hole vocalist from the Huntridge Theater to the Aladdin in November 1995. I'll talk about how she planted one leg on my windshield and stuck the other out the window, a split worthy of a Romanian gymnast; how she wryly (and accurately) predicted that "all these hotels will be filled with grunge acts 10 years from now"; how she smoked, stuffed her face with chocolates and dissed Trent Reznor. That done, she returned to the Huntridge at her own speed (slow), played exactly four songs and walked off the stage with the parting shot, "You're more of a Nine Inch Nails crowd, anyway."
Yeah, I think it's fair to say I appreciate Courtney Love, even without liking her all that much. I'm not supposed to; that's her shtick. She is Lucy Van Pelt, pulling the football away from Charlie Brown at the last second; she is Lucy Ricardo, sabotaging Ricky's nightclub act from the inside. The girls do these things because they're too compelling not to do, because they're too easy and just too much fun. That's how I feel about Courtney Love. That's how I feel about Hole, the band she fronts with her chain-smoking, breast-flashing, crotch-grabbing bad behavior.
And it's a good thing I feel that way, because to tell the truth -- and at this point why fudge? -- she doesn't do a damn thing for me musically. Cripes, she sounds like Lucille Ball putting the screws to Desi Arnaz: "Daaaaaaaaah, Ricky." Hole's Tuesday performance at the Hard Rock Joint was a lot of things -- inflammatory, sexy, cool -- but "musically sound" wasn't one of them.
The sound mix was awful. Her vocals were little more than trained bleats -- she aimed at a lyric and shot it down. The rest of the band -- guitarist Eric Erlandson, bassist Melissa Auf Der Maur and drummer Samantha Maloney -- played a sharp line, but there's only so much you can do when your vocalist sounds like she's got a full set of flatware lodged in her vocal cords.
So why did I stay? At first I wanted to see if she was going to storm off the stage again, status quo. But little by little I warmed to her routine -- the cussing, the cigarettes, the sequins. Before I knew it an hour had passed and my friend Debi sidled up to me: "Ain't she great? It's like watching a car wreck. Completely unpredictable."
That comment not only sums up Courtney -- who, for the record, was pretty damned personable this time out, even encouraging fans to jump onstage with her -- but the whole Hole experience: from the crusty headbangers and Bebe-garbed hotties mixing it up in the crowd to the air cannons that shot glitter over the auditorium floor to the drunk girl doing (what honestly looked like) an aerobics routine, back by the bar. Courtney could have come out and passed gas and still gotten the same reaction, still been as genuinely entertaining.
So that, as they say, was that. I saw my first real Hole show, and even though she had no need of my taxi services this time out, I still feel like I can add another layer to the story, give it some depth. That's all she did at the Hard Rock -- opened the abyss and let the fans stare or jump in, whichever suited their mindset. And I'll go see Hole again, someday, even though the old tramp didn't offer me any candy.
archive
