In 1995, when I was living in Brisbane, Courtney Love was about as renowned a rock star as you could hope to find on this or any other planet. She couldn’t really play that well, and her voice was certainly nothing to write home about, but the songs on the Live Through This album were pretty good, so good in fact that I still to this day believe that Kurt secretly wrote most of the music on that album shortly before he took that Mexican black-tar heroin and shot himself in the face.
Hole filled an obvious gap in the market at that time. Kurt was dead but the grunge thing was still huge, with your Soundgardens and your Stone Temple Pilots and your Pearl Jams. (That was before Pearl Jam outgrew the grunge thing, hired an unbelievably great drummer, and became one of the greatest live bands in history.) Chick grunge was the obvious offshoot which required exploitation, and Hole, um, filled one.
This was also back when there were a bunch of record companies in operation that have since ceased to exist. We had Polygram, Liberation, Mushroom, Sony, Warner, EMI and BMG, who I believe Hole were signed with. I got invited to Hole’s gig at a nightclub called The Roxy. From memory it was a fairly dank room, which suited the mood created by the headline act perfectly.
Courtney looked fucked-up on stage. Dangerously fucked-up. That dark kind of completely-off-the-rails kind of fucked-up. The kind of fucked-up that makes you spend most of the gig trying to work out what she’s on. Not a pretty sight, but fascinating.
She could barely play, her singing was atrocious, and the whole thing was just barely being held together by a band who looked only marginally less out of it than Courtney herself. It was still a good gig to see, mainly for the fact that in pop culture terms being in the same room as Courtney Love was about as cool as it got in 1995. Never mind the fact that she’s screaming over an out-of-tune guitar, that’s Courtney! Right there on the stage in front of me!
I wasn’t expecting a meet and greet backstage that night. It’s honestly really uncomfortable for all concerned doing that schmoozy shit anyway. I mean, come on, what are you supposed to make small-talk about? “Great show! Aaaah… are you a dog person or a cat person?” The vast majority of people would be just thrilled to get to hang out in backstage areas, but once you become a jaded broadcaster-type the meet and greet becomes something of a wank which is usually best avoided if possible. So, having said all of that, the record company guy asked if I would like to go backstage after the show and meet Courtney. All thoughts of the whole thing being a wankfest immediately evaporated and i said yes at once.
That’s when things got interesting. There were about six of us that went backstage. A couple of record company people, a newspaper reporter, a couple of other jocks from different radio stations in town, and my sweaty self.
The first thing I noticed when we walked into Courtney’s backstage lair were the candles that had been placed all over the room. At least thirty of them. I’m guessing Courtney did not have to light these herself. The second thing I notice is Courtney Love, the queen of grunge herself, laying on her stomach on the floor in front of an old record player with the bottom half of her legs waving around in the air.
She was listening, I shit you not, to an LP of the wedding of Charles and Diana. She was holding the album cover in her hands as her legs waved about like a kindergarten kid, lying there on the floor listening to Diana take her wedding vows through the shitty old speakers on the record player. This was, as I’m sure you can imagine, quite a scene to walk in on.
“You can tell she doesn’t mean it!” she wails in response to Diana’s wedding vows as the chosen few file into the room to meet her. She is ignoring all of us as she continues listening to Diana’s vows and waving her legs around. This alone would be enough to have this night forever remain in my memory, but this was merely her introduction.
Suddenly, and I do mean suddenly, Courtney jumped to her feet, letting the LP cover adorned with Charles and Diana’s headshots hit the floor as she swung around to greet whoever happened to be there, which just so happened to be me. I had somehow managed to be at the front of our little pack of hangers-on and therefore I ended up being the only person Courtney spoke to backstage that night.
She goes “Hi I’m Courtney!” as she sticks a bony hand out. I extend my hand, shake hers carefully (‘cos she looks pretty pasty and fragile, and I wouldn’t like to rip off the hand of the rock star that’s feeding me, so to speak) and say these exact words: “Hi Courtney, I’m Gavin.”
Now, this didn’t seem like an unreasonable thing to be saying at the time, at all, actually. Her response was therefore a bit of a jolt. She sneered at me, uttered one sentence followed by the word “Security!” and left the room so fast it was as if the whole thing never happened.
The great part of this story, the bit that I have told both on and off the air so many times since then, is the last thing Courtney Love said to me, and the way she said it.
It’s impossible to adequately describe the cadence that made what Courtney said so cutting, and therefore so damn brilliant. Just know that within Courtney Love’s sentence of doom, the following words are said with complete and utter disdain: Gavin, Thanks, Radio, Whatever, and especially the word Do. The way she said Do still kills me.
So, the last thing Courtney Love said to me before she left the room was “Well Gavin, thanks for playing my record on the radio, or whatever it is you do.”
Email me at gav@patthedog.com if you have a comment, or if you are Courtney Love and you want to be friends now.