My Afternoon with Courtney Love

Among the various CDs gracing my Sony 10-disc CD changer in 1994 was Hole’s Live Through This. The highly addictive track, nay, anthem, “Miss World,” might as well have been on a continuous loop—I listened to it upwards of ten times a day, every single day.

And thanks to MTV (and my parents for getting cable in 1993, surely the last house on the block), I got the opportunity to see “Miss World” and other Hole songs come to life. Parked in front of a television set in my old living room in Dallas, Texas, I watched the feisty, lipstick-smeared Courtney Love rag on feminine ideals of beauty. “I’m Miss World, somebody kill me. Kill me pills,” Love wailed. (I recall my mother, often cooking in the adjacent kitchen, sighing every time she heard a Hole video come on the tube.)

I was first introduced to Hole (and Love) two years earlier by my older sister Lauren—who at fifteen was roughly two years older than me—and whose primary means of communication at the time wavered between grunting and scowling. Decked out in Seattle’s hottest new imports (Doc Martin High tops and raggedy flannel shirts), Lauren and her trusty “band of outsiders” loafed around our house every day after school, gabbing about the latest Matt Dillon movie, testing out new eyeliner techniques, sneaking cigarettes in the backyard and, of course, listening to the latest alternative rock. (I grew up in Richardson, Texas, a northern suburb of Dallas. My sister attended the local high school, the very same one where Jeremy Wade Delle shot himself in front of his English class in 1991 only to inspire a popular Pearl Jam song. The drama stirred by Jeremy’s story and song had more than primed us for Love to enter the scene.

As much as I hated on Lauren (as all teenage sisters do) and her perpetually forlorn posse, I couldn’t help but admire them for their taste in music. One day, it was The Cure; the next day, it was Pearl Jam, Nirvana and this chick with vocal chords of steel, Courtney Love. And since Lauren and I weren’t on “normal” speaking terms at the time, I heard Pretty on the Inside, Hole’s debut album, through the thin wall separating our bedrooms. I had never heard anything like it–I was instantly hooked. It wasn’t long before I had my own flannel-infused wardrobe, raccoon-inspired eye makeup and, to be sure, a bad attitude.

Love and her music tapped into an untouched part of my personality. Years later, it was her influence that helped me reconcile the fact that I was someone who could be giving a graduate presentation on Raphael in one moment, and be in a cab headed to nowhere passed out in vomit in the next. So when it came time to interviewing Love, it was huge. I had a romanticized vision of a bonkers, outlandish, force-of-nature and I didn’t want to ruin it. I thought about that episode of Will and Grace when Jack plays six degrees of Kevin Bacon with Kevin Bacon.

Thankfully, Love is still completely nutso, which is wholly corroborated by my seemingly interminable interview with her. For two hours we chatted (well she chatted), as if she had been locked in solitary confinement and hadn’t spoken in like 10 years. She talked about anything and everything—from dating Ed Norton, sleeping with Marilyn Manson’s bassist and the innumerable self-portraits decorating Paris Hilton’s Los Angeles mansion. By the end of the interview we were like old pals: She asked me for advice on New York real-estate and schooled me in Christmas shopping websites. I almost forgot who I was speaking to and kept having to remind myself.

Today, as a struggling writer/editor (and part-time hot mess) living in New York, continuously grasping at straws while trying to maintain some level dignity in what I’m doing (or what’s left of it anyway), the lessons of Love and her simultaneously tumultuous and successful life/career–i.e., you can be a total fuck-up and still be kind of functional–still ring very true for me. After all, it was Love who wrote and chanted the famous words, “I’ve made my bed, I’ll lie in it. I’ve made my bed, I’ll die in it.”

Read Karen Bookatz’s interview with Courtney Love.

What do you think?