I don’t think I could ever do a solo thing, the Kurt Cobain Project.
Doesn’t have a very good ring to it, either.
No [laughs]. But yes, I would like to work with people who are totally, completely the opposite of what I’m doing now. Something way out there, man.
That doesn’t bode well for the future of Nirvana and the kind of music you make together.
That’s what I’ve been kind of hinting at in this whole interview. That we’re almost exhausted. We’ve gone to the point where things are becoming repetitious. There’s not something you can move up toward, there’s not something you can look forward to.
The best times that we ever had were right when Nevermind was coming out and we went on that American tour where we were playing clubs. They were totally sold out, and the record was breaking big, and there was this massive feeling in the air, this vibe of energy. Something really special was happening.
I hate to actually even say it, but I can’t see this band lasting more than a couple more albums, unless we really work hard on experimenting. I mean, let’s face it. When the same people are together doing the same job, they’re limited. I’m really interested in studying different things, and I know Krist and Dave are as well. But I don’t know if we are capable of doing it together. I don’t want to put out another record that sounds like the last three records.
I know we’re gonna put out one more record, at least, and I have a pretty good idea what it’s going to sound like: pretty ethereal, acoustic, like R.E.M.’s last album. If I could write just a couple of songs as good as what they’ve written . . . I don’t know how that band does what they do. God, they’re the greatest. They’ve dealt with their success like saints, and they keep delivering great music.
That’s what I’d really like to see this band do. Because we are stuck in such a rut. We have been labeled. R.E.M. is what? College rock? That doesn’t really stick. Grunge is as potent a term as New Wave. You can’t get out of it. It’s going to be passé. You have to take a chance and hope that either a totally different audience accepts you or the same audience grows with you.
And what if the kids just say, “We don’t dig it, get lost”?
Oh, well. [Laughs] Fuck ’em.
COURTNEY LOVE
by David Fricke
December 15, 1994
After everything that has happened to you this year, does it feel weird—or right—to be on tour playing rock & roll?
It was easier than staying home. I prefer this. I would like to think that I’m not getting the sympathy vote, and the only way to do that is to prove that what I’ve got is real. That was the whole point of Live Through This.
It feels normal to me. You just put one foot in front of the other. I don’t think about all the stuff that’s happened all the time. I don’t even know if I’m supposed to think about it—or if I’m not—or what I’m supposed to do. There’s no rule book or guide to what I’m supposed to do.
What goes through your mind when you’re onstage?
When the lights are blue and there are two of them in front of me, often they will symbolize Kurt’s eyes to me. That happens a lot. That happened to me when I used to strip. I had a friend who died, and he had almost-lavender eyes. There’d be these lights on, and I’d see that when the big purple lights came on.
So there’s that. The energy is reaching in. I know that wherever he is—whatever is left, whether it’s part of one egoless divinity or what—his energy is concentrated on me and on Frances. And it’s also concentrated on the cause and effect he’s had on the world.
Do you feel vulnerable in front of an audience, especially now?
I had this theory that the persona people project onstage is the exact opposite of who they are. In Kurt’s case, it was “Fuck you!” And ultimately his largest problem in life was not being able to say, “Fuck you.” “Fuck you, Courtney. Fuck you, Gold Mountain [Nirvana’s management firm]. Fuck you, Geffen—and I’m gonna do what I want.”
My thing is “Don’t fuck with me.” In real life, real real life, I’m supersensitive. But people tend to think I’m not vulnerable because I don’t act vulnerable.
It has been a year, almost to the day, since I interviewed Kurt. At the time, he told me he was happier than he’d ever been. And frankly, I believed him.
He probably was—at that moment. But his whole thing was “I’m only alive because of Frances and you.” Look at his interviews in your magazine alone. And everything in between. In each and every one he mentions blowing his head off.
He brought a gun to the hospital the day after our daughter was born. He was going to Reading [the Reading Festival, in England] the next morning. I was like, “I’ll go first. I can’t have you do it first. I go first.” I held this thing in my hand. And I felt that thing that they said in Schindler’s List: I’m never going to know what happens to me. And what about Frances? Sort of rude. “Oh, your parents died the day after you were born.”
I just started talking him out of it. And he said, “Fuck you, you can’t chicken out. I’m gonna do it.” But I made him give me the gun, and I had Eric [Erlandson, Hole guitarist] take it away. I don’t know what he did with it. Then Kurt went to some hospital room; he had some dealer come. In hospital, he almost died. The dealer said she’d never seen someone so, dead. I said, “Why didn’t you get a nurse? There’s nurses all over the place.”
And yet Kurt never lost faith in his ability to make music, even during the week before he died.
I never really heard him put that down. That was the one area that he wouldn’t touch like that. I got to sit and listen to this man serenade me. He told me the Meat Puppets’ second record was great. I couldn’t stand it. Then he played it to me—in his voice, his cadence, his timing. And I realized he was right.
The only time I asked him for a riff for one of my songs, he was in the closet. We had this huge closet, and I heard him in there working on “Heart-Shaped Box.” He did that in five minutes. Knock, knock, knock. “What?” “Do you need that riff?” “Fuck you!” Slam. [Laughs] He was trying to be so sneaky. I could hear that one from downstairs.
What kind of mood was he in on the European tour before he overdosed in Rome? Was that a genuine suicide attempt?
He hated everything, everybody. Hated, hated, hated. He called me from Spain, crying. I was gone forty days. I was doing my thing with my band for the first time since forever.
Kurt had gone all out for me when I got there [Rome]. He’d gotten me roses. He’d gotten a piece of the Colosseum, because he knows I love Roman history. I had some champagne, took a Valium, we made out, I fell asleep. The rejection he must have felt after all that anticipation—I mean, for Kurt to be that Mr. Romance was pretty intense.
I turned over about three or four in the morning to make love, and he was gone. He was at the end of the bed with a thousand dollars in his pocket and a note saying, “You don’t love me anymore. I’d rather die than go through a divorce.” It was all in his head. I’d been away from him during our relationship maybe sixty days. Ever. I needed to be on tour. I had to do my thing.
I can see how it happened. He took fifty fucking pills. He probably forgot how many he took. But there was a definite suicidal urge, to be gobbling and gobbling and gobbling. Goddamn, man. Even if I wasn’t in the mood, I should have just laid there for him. All he needed was to get laid. He would have been fine. But with Kurt you had to give yourself to him. He was psychic. He could tell if you were not all the way there. Sex, to him, was incredibly sacred. He found commitment to be an aphrodisiac.
Yeah, he definitely left a note in the room. I was told to shut up about it. And what could the media have done to help him?
What happened after he came out of the coma and returned to Seattle?
The reason I flipped out on the 18th of March [Love summoned the police to the house after Cobain locked himself in a room with a gun] was because it had been six days since we came back from Rome, and I couldn’t take
it anymore. When he came home from Rome high, I flipped out. If there’s one thing in my whole life I could take back, it would be that. Getting mad at him for coming home high. I wish to God I hadn’t. I wish I’d just been the way I always was, just tolerant of it. It made him feel so worthless when I got mad at him.
The only thing I can call it was a downward spiral from there. I got angry, and it was the first time I ever had. And I’m sorry—wherever the hell he is. And when people say, “Where was she, where was she?” I was in L.A. because the interventionist said I had to leave. Interventionist walks into the house: “Dominant female, get rid of her.” I did not even kiss or get to say goodbye to my husband. I wish to God . . .
[Long pause] Kurt thought I was on their side because I had gone along with them. I wasn’t. I was afraid. “It was in the L.A. Times that you’re not going to do Lollapalooza. Everybody thinks you’re going to die. Could you just go to rehab for a week?” “I just want to see Michael [Stipe]. You think I’m going to do dope in front of Michael? No, I won’t.”
I should have just left there, flown up to him. Peter Buck lives next door. Stephanie [Dorgan, Buck’s girlfriend] had the tickets [to Atlanta]. I wish I’d just drove him to the airport. Let him go. He worshiped Michael.
Guns were a big issue in the arguments you had with Kurt, and the police were constantly taking them away. Yet when I pointedly asked him about guns in our interview, he started talking about target practice.
He totally fucking lied to you. He never went shooting in his life. One time he said, “I’m going shooting.” Yeah. Shooting what? He never even made it to the range.
Yeah, it was an issue in the house. I liked having a revolver for protection. But when he bought the Uzi thing . . . “Hey, is that a toy, Kurt?” Yeah, it’s dangerous when you’re dealing with two volatile people—one is clinically depressed and the other one is suicidal at moments and definitely codependent.
Did Kurt’s suicide note make any sense to you—that he’d found any kind of peace in what he was going to do?
He wrote me a letter other than his suicide note. It’s kind of long. I put it in a safe-deposit box. I might show it to Frances—maybe. It’s very fucked-up writing. “You know I love you, I love Frances, I’m so sorry. Please don’t follow me.” It’s long because he repeats himself. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’ll be there, I’ll protect you. I don’t know where I’m going. I just can’t be here anymore.”
There’s definitely a narcissism in what he did, too. It was very snotty of him. When we decided we were in love at the Beverly Garland Hotel, we found this dead bird. Took out three feathers. And he said, “This is for you, this is for me, and this is for our baby we’re gonna have.” And he took one of the feathers away.
What about Frances? On the tour bus today she seemed like a happy, bouncy, normal toddler. But how much does she really know about where her father is?
I don’t know. On some nights she cries out for him, and it freaks me out. And I thought she didn’t know anything. [Long pause] So every couple of days I mention him. But it’s when she’s gonna be six and seven. . . . People are gonna make fun of her, make fun of her dad, and she’s gonna feel like she’s not good enough for him, and she’ll probably feel ugly.
He thought he was doing the right thing. How could he fucking think that? In his condition he was so fucked up to think that. If I could have just spoken two words to him . . .
And then he would have OD’d when he was about thirty-four or thirty-five. But at least he would have had those seven years to make his decision to be a heroin addict forever. Or whatever the hell it is he wanted.
Let’s go back to your life before Kurt. On the tour bus today you were talking about Frances growing up on the road, how she thinks everybody plays in a band. What do you remember about your childhood environment?
Guys in stripy pants in a circle around me, and my mother telling me to act like spring. Then to be summer and fall. Interpretive dancing.
People in tents with wild eyes, painting my face. I remember a really big house in San Francisco and all my real father’s exotic girlfriends. We’d drive down Lombard Street in a Porsche my father probably borrowed from the Dead.
We went to Oregon pretty quick, and I was in Montessori school. Then things got a little more straightened out. Mother remarried and went to college in Eugene [Oregon].
What was your relationship with your mother like?
A lot of it was—I believe in my heart—a projection that my mother made on me because of a repulsion she felt for my father, for which I don’t blame her. But it is something she denies to the death. If I had a child, and I was repulsed by the father, I would have a difficult time. Knowing the history of my father, I don’t know if I would try and make up for it.
There is some irony in the fact that given your own very public problems, your mother is a well-known therapist.
When Newsweek found out she was my mother in the middle of the Katherine Ann Power thing, she was just mortified. Because people have met me who were her clients: “If that’s your product, my friend . . .” The only advice she ever gave me in my life was “Don’t wear tight sweaters. They make you look cheap.”
But I’m not out to make a public forum of my relationship with my mother. It is what it is. She didn’t have an abortion, and that’s what counts. I’m here. I’ve survived.
Where was the picture of you as a barefoot young girl on the back cover of ‘Live Through This’ taken?
It was taken in Springfield, Oregon, when I was living in a tepee in a communal environment. There was an outhouse. And I had to go to school just like that that day. I know it’s very Freudian narcissism to use pictures of yourself. But my purpose was to say, “Well, that’s who I am.”
When I talk about being introverted, I was diagnosed autistic. At an early age, I would not speak. Then I simply bloomed. My first visit to a psychiatrist was when I was, like, three. Observational therapy. TM for tots. You name it, I’ve been there.
Who were your early musical inspirations?
I recall growing up with Leonard Cohen records and going, “I wish that was me he was writing about.” I wanted to be Suzanne, I wanted to live down by the river. Not being old enough to know what I wanted to do, I just wanted to be the girl in the Leonard Cohen song. Or the girl in [Bob Dylan’s] “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat.” Or the girl in “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” All these girls riding the Jersey highway in a Bruce Springsteen song.
And then I came around. “No, no, no. I don’t want to be the girl. I want to be Leonard Cohen!” We had Blue, the Joni Mitchell album, when I was growing up. That was very helpful. Once I was on PCH [Pacific Coast Highway], and Joni was smoking Newports in front of me, getting a protein pickup at the 7-Eleven in Malibu [California]. I was just like [her jaw drops]. I didn’t say anything. I was just, “Oh, my God!”
What happened once you got turned on to punk rock?
My grand plan was to write this intensely primal record—go into my room and learn Led Zeppelin I through V, play all those things perfectly, and then come out and make the perfect rock record. That was my plan, if I’d been alone, utterly masculine and totally oriented.
I was into Brian Jones, the type of person who would start a band and kick everyone’s butt. But all through the Eighties, it was a goddamn nightmare, hearing things from other women like, “Well, I can borrow my boyfriend’s bass. We can open for my boyfriend’s band. I can’t make practice tonight because I have to meet my boyfriend.” Ugh!
How much of your early music with Hole, especially that version of Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” [a.k.a. “Clouds”] on ‘Pretty on the Inside,’ was your revenge against dysfunctional hippie parents?
It is interesting that you’ve picked up on “Both Sides Now.” Because we used to be forced to sing that in the fucking Volvo in unison. I felt so humiliated by it. It was a major dis at my mother, as much as I love Joni Mitchell.
But just lik
e the baby boomers had to grow up with Dean Martin touting booze, we had to grow up with this idealization that was never going to fucking come true, and it turned us into a bunch of cynics—or a bunch of drug addicts. None of my parents’ friends ever died from acid overdoses or marijuana overdoses. But the popularity now of IV drug use—it’s something that my generation does. And to become an icon of it is something I fear. And it was something Kurt feared most.
He called me from Spain. He was in Madrid, and he’d walked through the audience. The kids were smoking heroin off of tinfoil, and the kids were going, “Kurt! Smack!” and giving him the thumbs up. He called me, crying. That’s why he would tell people, “No, I’m not on it.” Because he did not want to become a junkie icon. And now he is.
How free of drugs are you at this point?
I take Valiums. Percodan. Don’t like heroin. It turns me into a cunt. Makes me ugly. Never liked it. Hate needles. When I did do it, it was like [holds out her arm and turns her head]. I have used heroin—after Kurt died.
The Rolling Stone interviews Page 36