Hole... there was always something a little dangerous about that band.
I first heard them back in '91 when somebody at the record store played me "Teenage Whore." I remember stopping whatever I was doing and asking, "Who the hell is this?" Courtney sounded like she was either about to start a fight or fall apart in the middle of the song. Maybe both. I bought Pretty on the Inside not long after that and played the hell out of it. It was ugly, noisy and hard to listen to in places, which was probably exactly why I liked it.
I've had a soft spot for Courtney Love ever since.
Hole had started in Los Angeles a couple of years before that, with Courtney and Eric Erlandson at the center of it. That's worth remembering because somewhere along the way people started talking about Hole like they materialized out of Courtney's relationship with Kurt Cobain, which is bullshit. Courtney and Eric were making a racket together before any of that became everybody's favorite fucking soap opera. Jill Emery was on bass and Caroline Rue was on drums by the time they made Pretty on the Inside, and before the album there were already a couple of great ugly little singles floating around: "Retard Girl" on Sympathy for the Record Industry and "Dicknail" on Sub Pop. If you're the kind of person who thinks Hole started with Live Through This, go find those records.
Pretty on the Inside was produced by Kim Gordon and Don Fleming, which made perfect sense once I knew it. The whole thing sounds scraped raw. Guitars come apart, Courtney screams herself hoarse, songs collapse into noise and then somehow crawl back out again. "Teenage Whore" was the one that got me, but "Garbage Man" might be the song that best explains that version of Hole. There wasn't much separation between punk song, noise and total fucking wreckage. Eric's guitar is a huge part of why it works. Courtney was always going to get most of the attention because she was Courtney, but Hole was never just a woman screaming while three anonymous people stood behind her.
By the time I moved to Seattle in September '92, everybody knew who she was, or at least everybody I was around did. Unfortunately, by then half the conversation about Courtney seemed to be about Kurt. They'd gotten married that February, Frances had been born that summer, and the press had discovered that there was apparently no limit to how much ink you could spill on the two of them. Some of it was about music. A whole lot of it wasn't.
That used to piss me off more than it probably should have. Hole had records out before Courtney married Kurt. Pretty on the Inside existed. I'd bought the damn thing in New York before I ever moved out here. Anybody who'd actually heard that record knew she had her own thing going.
The band was changing by then anyway. Jill and Caroline were gone, Patty Schemel came in on drums, and Kristen Pfaff came over from Minneapolis and took over on bass. Kristen had been playing with Janitor Joe, and she was a hell of a bassist. That Hole lineup — Courtney, Eric, Kristen and Patty — is the one I still think of when somebody says the band's name. Not because the earlier band didn't matter, and not because Melissa didn't matter later, but because those four made Live Through This.
Before that record there was "Beautiful Son" in '93, another one of those Hole records I bought because at that point I was buying pretty much anything with their name on it. You can hear them moving away from the sheer abrasion of Pretty on the Inside without suddenly becoming polite. The songs were getting sharper. There was more room inside them. Courtney could sing something instead of just trying to tear its head off, and then tear its head off anyway.
I saw them at the Off Ramp that summer.
My memory says early July '93. Adickdid and Sourpuss were around that bill too, although I'm not going to pretend I remember the running order nine years later. I remember the room being crowded, I remember Courtney, and I remember realizing that Hole had changed a lot since Pretty on the Inside. They were still loud as hell, but the new songs had shapes to them. Hooks. Quiet parts that actually made the loud parts hit harder. Some of that material wound up on the next record, and hearing it in that room before I knew those songs from a CD is probably why Live Through This hit me as hard as it did when it finally came out.
Mostly I remember Courtney.
There are people who have spent the last ten years trying to decide whether she's a genius, a fraud, a monster, a victim, an opportunist, a feminist hero, a fucking disaster or some combination of all seven. I'm not interested in solving Courtney Love. I can tell you what I saw: when she was good onstage, she could own a room. You watched her even when you were trying not to. She had that thing where it felt like the show might get away from her at any second, except half the time you eventually realized she was the one dragging everybody else behind her.
Eric was the opposite kind of presence, and that's part of why they worked. Courtney attracted the weather. Eric helped build the songs underneath it.
They went down to Georgia later in '93 to make Live Through This with Paul Kolderie and Sean Slade. Courtney, Eric, Kristen, Patty. That's the band on that record, and I keep emphasizing it because of all the garbage that's been attached to this album since it came out. Kurt stopped by the sessions and sang some backing vocals. Fine. That's a long fucking way from writing the album for his wife.
I've heard that one for years.
"Kurt wrote Live Through This."
No, he didn't.
Or put it this way: I've never seen a reason to believe it. Hole was already playing new material in '93. Courtney and Eric have the writing credits all over the record. There are demos, earlier versions, songs developing before the thing was finished. Kurt being in the studio and singing a little doesn't magically make the album his. It's always struck me as strange how badly some people need Courtney Love to have been incapable of writing a good record.
And Live Through This is a fucking great record.
It came out April 12, 1994. Kurt had been found dead four days earlier.
There isn't any clean way to separate those two things in my memory anymore. Everybody here was still trying to figure out what the hell had just happened, and then suddenly there was this Hole record in the store. I remember putting it on and having that strange feeling you get when something you've been waiting for arrives at exactly the wrong moment.
It was everything I'd hoped that band could make.
"Violet." "Miss World." "Doll Parts." "Softer, Softest." "Gutless." I played the hell out of all of it. They'd taken the violence of Pretty on the Inside and figured out how to put melody around it without making it safe. That's the trick. A song like "Doll Parts" can sound almost fragile until Courtney opens her mouth all the way, while "Violet" sounds like somebody figured out how to turn resentment into a guitar arrangement. Eric's playing is nastier and more controlled than people give him credit for, Patty hits like she means it, and Kristen's bass is all through the thing. It sounds like a band.
And then everything around it became impossible.
Kurt was dead before the record reached the stores. Then Kristen died on June 16. Heroin overdose. She was twenty-seven.
I don't want to turn Kristen into another dead musician in a Seattle story because that's exactly the kind of shit that happens when people write about this place. She was a musician before she was a tragedy. She had Janitor Joe before Hole, she played bass on Live Through This, and she was part of why that lineup sounded the way it did. Go listen to the record instead of reading another paragraph about bodies.
The band didn't immediately run back out onstage. There was a gap, as you'd expect. Melissa Auf der Maur eventually came in on bass — the story going around was that Billy Corgan had pointed Courtney in her direction — and by late August Hole was playing again. I still don't know how you lose Kurt, lose Kristen, bring somebody new into the band and then go out and play songs from a record wrapped up in all of it. But they did.
The next year or so was Hole becoming a much bigger band while looking from the outside like they might blow apart at any minute. Live Through This kept spreading, "Doll Parts" and "Violet" were everywhere, and the shows had a reputation for being unpredictable enough that stories about Courtney sometimes threatened to become bigger than the music again. That happened constantly with Hole. You could talk about one of the best records of the decade and somehow, ten minutes later, everybody would be arguing about something Courtney had said, thrown, worn, punched, broken or supposedly done.
Some of those stories were true. Some weren't. After a while it became exhausting trying to separate the two.
The records are easier.
Ask for It came out in '95 and is worth having if you're interested in the messier edges of the band rather than just the three studio albums. Then there's My Body, the Hand Grenade from '97, which is basically catnip if you're the kind of asshole who buys singles for B-sides and then complains when somebody finally collects them. Early stuff, alternate versions, odds and ends — the kind of record that lets you hear the history sideways instead of album by album. It also makes a nice argument against the idea that Hole appeared fully formed in 1994.
There's an earlier collection called The First Session too, and the old singles are still the things I'd grab first if you're trying to figure out how they got from the first version of the band to Live Through This. "Retard Girl," "Dicknail," "Beautiful Son." Records tell the story better than gossip does.
There's also the stupid little "Rock Star"/"Olympia" thing on Live Through This, which has probably confused more people than it should. The last track is printed as "Rock Star" on the record, but what you're actually hearing is the song everybody calls "Olympia." If you've spent enough time staring at Hole sleeves and singles this sort of nonsense starts to feel normal.
By the time Celebrity Skin came out in '98 they sounded almost like a different band.
Cleaner, brighter, way more polished. I know some people hated that, but I didn't. Michael Beinhorn produced it, Billy Corgan's name turns up in the writing credits on several songs, and you can hear that somebody spent a hell of a lot more time sanding the edges than Kim Gordon and Don Fleming ever would have dreamed of doing on Pretty on the Inside. But Eric is still there, Melissa is there, and underneath all the shine it still sounds enough like Hole that I never understood the people who acted like they'd suddenly turned into the fucking Bangles.
And "Malibu" is a great song. I don't care who gives me shit for saying it.
"Celebrity Skin" is great too. So is "Awful." There are moments where I miss the dirt, but I don't need a band to make the same record three times. If anything, the weird thing about putting Pretty on the Inside, Live Through This and Celebrity Skin next to each other is realizing how far Hole traveled in less than a decade while Courtney and Eric were still the two names running through the whole thing.
The drum situation around Celebrity Skin was already confusing while it was happening. Patty is credited and pictured with the band, but she wasn't the drummer who went out on the road afterward, and there were stories about session drummers being used during the record. Samantha Maloney ended up behind the kit live. I've heard enough different versions of what happened in that studio that I'm not going to pretend I was standing there.
Melissa left in '99.
And since then... who the hell knows.
That's more or less where Hole sits as I'm writing this. They haven't made another record since Celebrity Skin. They aren't touring. Courtney has been acting and doing Courtney things, and the fight with Geffen and Universal has turned into lawyers arguing about contracts instead of a band making records. Eric's name is still tied up in all of that with her, but there isn't a working four-piece Hole out there right now that I can point to and say, "That's the band."
They haven't announced that Hole is over, either.
Maybe they'll make another record. Maybe Courtney and Eric will get back into a room and start making noise again. Maybe this is just one of those stretches where a band disappears for a while and everybody assumes the worst. I honestly don't know.
People have been arguing about Courtney Love for as long as I've been listening to her. Half the people I know think she's brilliant and the other half can't stand her. There are days when I understand both sides.
Me?
I'm still a fan.
And if I had to pick one record to explain why, it's still Live Through This.
That record has teeth.
