Riot Incorporated

In the druggy, angst-ridden, early ’90s, a band called Nirvana was catapulted to stardom and along with it, an outrageous, foul-mouthed rockerchick named Courtney Love. When the world first encountered her in 1991, she was merely the girlfriend of Nirvana’s front man, Kurt Cobain. The two soon married, but it wasn’t long before her brash outspokenness—bolstered by the increasing popularity of her own band Hole—would begin to capture the nation’s attention. In a music business increasingly dominated by shy, mumbling and at times incoherent male rockers like Cobain and Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder, Love’s moxie and bluntness, not to mention her abrasive stage persona, came as a breath of fresh air, and the public eventually embraced her as it had Cobain. Likewise, the media couldn’t get enough of Love’s raw in-your-face-ness and theatrical antics, chronicling her every move—the highs as well as the lows. She became a media sensation and subsequently, the master of a veritable media empire.

In 1992, Love gave birth to Frances Bean, her first and only child with Cobain. Less than two years later, Cobain took his own life. Several months after Cobain’s death, a visibly distraught Love took Hole on tour, cathartically playing out her pain through music. But grief clearly took its toll on her and contributed to her life-long struggle with drug and alcohol abuse, which eventually caused her to lose custody of her daughter from 2003 to 2005. In addition to her various felony charges (one for possession and another for assault with a deadly weapon) and arrests (one for being under the influence of controlled substances, one for reckless endangerment and another for “air rage” on a Virgin Atlantic flight), Love has racked up a series of unforgettable public moments over the years—including her emotional 1995 interview with Barbara Walters, her shocking 2004 breast-baring performance on David Letterman and her notorious hand-cuffed and gurney-strapped admittance to New York’s Bellevue Hospital, following a scuffle with medical attendants responding to a cryptic 911 call from her SoHo apartment. She entered rehab the following year and has been sober ever since.

But let’s not forget Love’s highpoints: Hole’s 1994 album Live Through This went platinum. In 1996, a fabulous-looking Love played opposite Woody Harrelson in The People vs. Larry Flynt, a performance that earned her a Golden Globe nod and a New York Film Critics Circle Award. In 1998, when Hole’s widelytouted Celebrity Skin album went multiplatinum—Both Spin and Rolling Stone declared it album of the year—she was officially a megastar.

Love was always candid about everything (she tells me she suffers from a bad case of “terminal honesty”) and has never shied away from the media spotlight. Today, at 44, she is working on her second solo album Nobody’s Daughter, which, she tells me, is the most important record she will ever make, and is preparing for an imminent move to New York, the scene of the traumatic Bellevue incident (and thus facing some old demons). What’s more, she looks hot as shit—she’s the current muse of French fashion house, Givenchy—a total fuck you in the face of her more unscrupulous critics. More importantly, she’s a doting mother to 16-year-old Frances (whose piercing blue eyes immediately conjure those of her late father) and has become more in touch with herself than ever before. Her latest persona? “Whatever I want it to be,” she tells me. For starters, she’s a self-proclaimed “Jewban” (citing some Jewish and Cuban heritage on her mother’s side), although her ties to Judaism might be as hard to decipher as her no-holds-barred stream of consciousness. She unleashed some of her thoughts to us in a recent interview.

I’m a Buddhist, but I do identify with Judaism in the sense that it’s in my bloodline. Yeah, I mean, my mother’s mother—my mother was adopted, and her real mother is a woman named Paula Fox, about whom David Foster Wallace, God bless him, wrote this ass-kissing crazy piece about how she’s the greatest novelist in the world. When she was 75 or 80, she became hugely famous in like this literati way, like The New York Times, the New Yorker, the cover of The New York Times Sunday Magazine. . .Let’s not even get into my grandfather, because that’s a fucking whole story, but it’s a whole story that involves me having to get somebody really scummy to go into someone else’s garbage can and get my DNA out. When I met her (it was on Passover), we didn’t like each other very much.

Why not?

I think she’s a frosty-ass bitch, and she said in The New York Times Magazine that she didn’t like the way I used language. I’m a lyricist. Call it whatever the fuck you want, but don’t talk about how I use language because how I use language is my bread and butter. She wasn’t talkin about cursing, either, from the way it was written in the context, it wasn’t cursing. You know what, Paula, go fuck yourself. On top of which, she doesn’t fucking talk publicly. She wrote a memoir called Borrowed Finery and never once does she talk about who she fucked or who she had babies with or any thing else. She sort of circles her way around the major topic, which is who my mother’s father is. I mean, it’s upset ting, because my brother eventually told me, and I’d already met this man on three occasions, and I had no idea he was my grandfather. . .He’s an actor, and I’d go up there with like, Edward Norton, or [Kevin] Spacey, or something, and they would always be in awe of this guy because he’s very iconic, or he was. He’s dead now and after I did find out who he was, I was in their bathroom, and I was like, there might be a rainy day where I need to fucking prove that, like, this guy’s my grandfather, and you know, the devil and the angel? But I was sitting there and I was sort of way done peeing, and I was just sort of sitting on the toilet looking at all the DNA ever ywhere and going: I don’t need your fucking DNA, dude! I don’t give a shit how fucking important you are to fucking acting. Fuck you! And then, the other side of me was like, grab it, grab it! You never know when you might need it.

And I remember, I called Warren Beatty and I said, you know, my brothers tell me I have this great grandfather, and he goes, “Well who isn’t he the grandfather of? The guy’s got more fucking, bastard fucking kids running around than anyone.” But, anyway, he’s not Jewish. I’m Jewish from Paula’s side. Anyway. . .what did you want to ask me?

I was asking you about your Jewishness, but I want to move to your relationship with the media. How have you’ve maintained your star power for so long?
It’s like when Mel Gibson said that celebrity is just like this salad dressing, and you just leave it in the fridge, and then you go make your salad, and you know, it’s just sort of like there, and you get someone professional to pour on the salad dressing so you don’t get too fat, and when you’re ready, with your product. . . .I’m very, very, very, very slow, I’m not prolific. This record that I just made, the guitars are only starting today, but the bass is done. Meanwhile, there’s like more singles than I fucking know what to do with on this record. It’s taken from rehab. I started in rehab, writing this record in earnest. My last record was a complete disaster. It sucked. It was horrible. It had horrible art and half-baked songs. There’s one song on there I actually force myself to listen to, because you know, we are measured by our failures, and it was more than a failure. I knew it sucked when I was making it, and I continued to make it, instead of just saying, “Stop.”

For this record, I was listening to Neil Young’s Rust Never Sleeps and I was listening to “Into the Black,” and I just knew I needed a band as good as Crazy Horse. This all-girl fantasy I’ve had my whole life, of you know. . .I’m going to show those Beatles, we’re going to be huge! Well, it’s not going to happen, right now, for my generation, for me. You know what I mean? Like, there are fucking riot grrrls sitting there banging on pots and pans and talking about their vaginas, and that’s all really lovely, and like the writing is great, but the music blows. I mean you have to fucking sit in your room and practice. You have to fucking learn how to play guitar, you have to learn how to play bass, you have to learn how to fucking play drums. You have to go get Zeppelin one through four, and you have to fucking sit in a fucking little room off Hollywood Blvd. for two hundred dollars a fucking month, and you have to play those goddamn drums. And for whatever reason, women just haven’t seemed to want to do that.

Anyway, I got on a plane to England that night. I heard that song, “Into the Black,” and I was like, “Fuck this. I got to get a real band.” So, I got an amazing band, three men and then the other two were chicks. I went out and I played four shows. I’m telling you, you have not lived until you’ve seen Karl Lagerfeld and Suzy Menkes and Cathy Horyn moshing in front of you, which happened at one of the shows. I mean really, moshing in front of me. Marc Jacobs, Roman Polanski, Yohji Yamamoto. It was hysterical.

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You’ve been panned, you’ve been adored, you’ve received a Golden Globe nod. . .
I didn’t really want to be a movie star, and people do not understand that, because everyone wants to be a movie star, but me. Let me tell you something, man. I can’t even stomach (although I do it sometimes) dating actors, because they’re bitches. They’re women. They’re waiting around for someone to call them. You know, part of it’s self destructive as hell, and I guess a lot of people are really shocked by, you know, that kind of conscious decision that I just don’t want to play this game. Let’s also get real about it, you have a very dark, twisted, horrible thing like a suicide happen in your life, and you’re still getting fucked by the industry, but here’s the reality: Every time you buy a Nirvana record, part of that money is not going to Kurt’s child, or to me, it’s going to a handful of Jew loan officers, Jew private banks, its going to lawyers who are also bankers, its going to sixty PAs. I asked my shrink about this—I have a Jungian analyst, but I also have a normal shrink. . . .When I was in rehab, I would watch a show on HBO called The Comeback.

I remember that.

It had one of the chicks from Friends in it?

Yeah, Lisa Kudrow

It was brilliant comedy.

No one liked it, though.
It was brilliant. I went up to [Kudrow] outside of Barney’s once and she started to cringe because she saw me, and I think she thought I was coming to beat her up. She was cowering and I was like, “I just wanted to tell you man, that fucking show is amazing.” That’s what I watched in rehab, I would watch The Comeback, and I would watch Alexander over and over and over again, and just listen to Oliver Stone talk and that’s what I would go to sleep to, Oliver Stone talking. You know, you can listen to Oliver Stone for like a million years and not get bored.

How’s Frances doing?
She’s great, She’s really into, maybe, being an artist right now. And, she’s really anti the whole being famous thing. She’s really, really grounded and really cool. You know, I’m not like “cool mom.” I’m a mother. I’m not like, “Oh, honey, if you’re going to do that, do it at home.” I’m more like, “You’re not going to do that, so, fuck off, or I’m taking your computer, and your fucking, you know, Blackberry.” But, I’m a really, really good mother, and the proof is in the pudding. She’s had some bad breaks when I was on drugs, but she never saw me on drugs. I would go to New York, or I would go to a hotel, so she never saw me in that condition.

Well, this is great. I feel like I have everything I need to piece together a really awesome interview.
Is it going to be like Spy [Magazine]? Are you going to call me a “short-fingered vulgarian”?

I wouldn’t worry. We don’t take ourselves too seriously.
Neither do I. . .I realized this the other day: I don’t have any pictures of myself. Other than a few snapshots, like with my band. I have a picture that’s on the fridge of us just getting off of the stage. I have a picture of me and Brett Ratner. I kind of don’t have pictures of Kurt around much or any images of myself. And a lot of celebrities do. I went to take my band to Paris [Hilton’s]’ house. There were images of her everywhere. I mean everywhere. And I like Paris. She’s funny. Is it the fall of civilization that Paris is famous for being famous? Not my job to speculate. I’m not a culture vulture, I’ll let Ariana Huffington fucking talk about that shit. But what’s weird is that Paris had so many pictures of herself everywhere. I mean, she has not only got a grand piano with—I swear to God—maybe a thousand pictures of herself, but I was in the bathroom, and there were, pictures of her everywhere! Everywhere! I’m just trying to pee and there’s just fucking. . .Paris. I’m not judging, understand I’m not judging, I’m just saying, I don’t choose that—but I absolutely unconsciously chose to be kind of the town bitch. That was a job that looked like something I had all the requirements for. You know what I mean? Like, I’m totally cool with being a bitch. Like, being a bitch, considering the fact that I’m actually really not.

Right.
I’m dreading moving to New York, really to be honest, it’s like I fucking hate L.A., but I’m just dreading it. What neighborhood do you live in?

I live in Brooklyn.
My grandmother lives in Brooklyn. I mean, I don’t know if you remember this, but you kind of have to live under a rock not to know that they kind of took me to Bellevue. It was just so awful, and so I just don’t feel like, last time [in New York], it ended up so well. But at the same time, you know, I made myself really vulnerable by taking drugs. So now I just don’t take drugs. That’s my big thing, I just don’t take drugs. No matter what. And if I don’t take drugs, nothing bad can happen.

So where are you going to live?
I’m looking in the West Village, but Gwyneth [Paltrow] got driven out of the West Village. She moved to another neighborhood because I guess there is Sex in the City tourism in the West Village now. Because here’s the deal, and this is the problem: the house that Frances wants the most? It’s not a co-op board. It is two old people, and they have to approve us. And I’ve tried to tell Frances that impeccable credit makes a huge difference, but [imitating Frances] “No, we’re never going to get it, with my last name, and your reputation!” And I’m like Frances? “With perfect, perfect credit, we’ll get it. If we have impeccable, particularly corporate credit, we will get it.” I’m not a tax lawyer, and I’m not going to be. I mean, you just only have so much time in life to learn about things, you know what I mean? At the time of my first album, it was called Pretty on the Inside, and it had an entity called “Dollhead, Incorporated,” and fucking Pretty on the Inside didn’t make any goddamn money, and I’m looking up all my entities. I’m saying like, “Oh my God, the Estate of Kurt Cobain has a fucking tax fucking number?” Um, you know, there’s a “Nirvana LLC,” a “Nirvana, Inc.,” a “Nirvana Corp.,” a “Kurt Cobain Corp.,” a “Courtney Love, LLC,” a “Dollhead, Inc.” Some people are like, “Oh, how could you be so stupid that you didn’t know you had 74 Visas and 29 AmEx’s?” Because I didn’t know that money existed! You know, how would I know, if nobody told me?. . .[one-time manager] Irving Azoff said to me once, “Why did you sign this thing? If so-and-so” (and I don’t remember the guys name at MCA) “offered you 20 million dollars, you’d sign any thing, too, wouldn’t you?” And I looked at him, and I said “I certainly wouldn’t.” I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I can be bought. I mean, wait: Versace, offered me $180,000. Yeah, $180,000 to go to a fashion show once, back in the day, and I thought: “This is stupid now. I could give my friend her start-up money to start a bakery, you know, I can walk down the Spanish steps, and you know, have all the supermodels climb me, and tell my daughter, you know, that I was hot enough to wear a see-through mauve caftan, right?” So, I said yes, and I did it. . . . And, you know, it really makes you think, do you have a price? And if so, what is it? I mean, do you think you have a price, Karen?

That’s a tough question.
Do you have a price where you feel, there’s something that you want so badly, that you. . .I mean, the devil obviously (and I’m not a Christian by any means), but the forces of evil in this world aren’t really that interested in people who would sell out on a dime, you know what I mean? As far as the money stuf f goes, you know, I know its Martian to you, and I understand that, but you have to understand that it’s very real to me. And, it’s just like, it’s not some strange paranoid nut job weirdness. I’m very, very sane, I’m very, very aware of who I am and where I am. You know, I saw this big pile of my history. I was reminded of where I’d been, but I don’t care about the past. I just care about moving forward and into a solution. You opened up this conversation asking me about my persona: Probably, the reason I don’t keep all of this stuff around, and I see it and I just stuff it in a vase, is because, I can choose my own persona at this point, and I think that’s a great, great privilege. And, I’m very grateful for it.

What’s funny about the Jewish thing is that I did this Barbara Walters special, and I had to watch that thing on TV, and that’s the last time I ever did drugs when I was watching that thing. Cause it Freaked. Me. Out. And, you know, I never watched Barbara Walters before. . .But, I remember telling her that I was Jewish, and I was really into it. . .and, she looked at me funny, and I remember she looked at me funny in the moment, and. . . being in Britain about half the year, I tend to spend about half the year there, because I really like it there, um, you know, the way that the people who are Jewish, you know, in L.A.? Which is completely weird to me, I mean, I grew up on the West Coast, in New Zealand, and boarding school in England, and in juvenile hall. So, what the fuck do I know? But, at the same time, you know, I came from an insanely liberal background. I mean, so insane that it’s insane. You know what I mean? I mean living in a teepee is no fun. And it’s having your father, you know, having his custody removed from me completely is no fun, and having his girlfriend testify at your custody trial, and then having her be one of the Manson family, you know, that’s kind of scary, too. All this adoption, I don’t what the fuck I am. I’m fucking Scottish, you know? It’s like, is that my grandfather, or is that my grandfather? What the fuck, you know, what’s up with all that? I don’t know what the fuck I am. I am definitely an underdog though, so that puts me in the Tribe. . . .So, Ms. Bookatz, I hope you got some good stuff out of this.

I got great stuff. I think you’re awesome.

I just have this huge mouth, and then I get all regretful and remorseful. I just wait till the record comes out, and then I can be as obnoxious as I want. You know, I read this guy from Blackbook is like: On. My. Ass. Like, the number one guy from Blackbook is on my ass to be in their magazine, and I don’t really want to do it, and you know, I’m doing this [Heeb] because I read about it and it’s really funny. . .This guy interviewed me for the Advocate before Kurt died, and I was reading it, and I was like, oh my God, I was like so fearlessly hysterical. You know, I wonder if I’m the same way. . .or I’ve been scarred, or if I’ve been damaged, or deformed, or you know. . .deformed I mean like a tree that grows up gnarly, you know what I mean? Like, I wonder if all this death and tragedy and shit has really fucked with me. I can’t say I know. You know? Why do you think I have two shrinks?. . .See, my heeb side is coming out.

That’s why we love you.
You know, I was online for like two hours reading Heeb and it was really funny.

Thanks.

Oh, and I have a question, totally off of the topic. In terms of real estate, like, a Williamsburg girl like you, what do you think about that West Village, um, thing that Gwyneth and Scarlett said? I mean, do you think that like, okay, this is going to sound retarded: Am I too famous to live in the West Village? Or, is it OK?

Um, the West Village is like, really awesome, and like really beautiful and quaint. Like who else lives there? Liv [Tyler] and Sarah Jessica [Parker]. . .

Kyle [Maclaughlin] lives there, Michael [Stipe] lived there. Now he lives in SoHo, but Julie, well she’s not famous. Doesn’t Drew [Barrymore] live there?

I thought she lived in the East Village. I lived in the East Village for three years, and I used to see Drew and Chloë [Sevigny]. . .

The East Village is so funny now. I mean, in the ’80s, the East Village was really scary. Now it’s like a trustafarian Disneyland.

Yeah, that’s why I sort of moved out. But for your purposes, the West Village is cool.
My purposes are to be safe. I don’t have to go out every fucking night.Â

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Read Karen Bookatz’s blog about her afternoon with Courtney

More of Heeb‘s exclusive interview with Courtney LoveÂ

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