Courtney Love
Courtney Michelle Love (born Courtney Michelle Harrison on July 9, 1964) is an American rock musician and Golden Globe-nominated actress. Love is best known as lead singer, songwriter and lyricist for the alternative rock band Hole and for her two-year marriage to late Nirvana lead singer/guitarist Kurt Cobain. Rolling Stone has called Love “the most controversial woman in the history of rock”.
Early life
Courtney Michelle Harrison was born in San Francisco, California to a family of Irish and Jewish descent. She regards herself as “a nice Jewish girl”. Love’s biological family broke up soon after her birth. During a child custody case following Love’s parents’ divorce, both her mother and one of her friends presented letters to the court implying her father had given the child, then three years old, LSD. Harrison denies this allegation and has passed polygraph tests; however, these allegations led to full custody being awarded to Love’s mother.
Love then spent a troubled childhood with her mother Linda Carroll, as she married and divorced three times, and temporarily settled in many hippie communes in Oregon, and various schools including Nelson College for Girls in New Zealand where she boarded. Before arriving in New Zealand, Love had been left in the United States with Shirley, a friend of her mother’s, who was a therapist, while her mother, the new husband and her half-sisters settled in New Zealand without her. Shortly after reuniting with her family in New Zealand, Love was sent to the boarding school in Nelson.
While in boarding school, Love wrote poetry, joined a Bay City Rollers fan club, and, at the age of 12 (once back in the U.S., ostensibly), applied to join the Mickey Mouse Club; she was rejected after reading a poem by Sylvia Plath at the audition.
At 16, Love emancipated herself from her family and traveled around the U.S., England and the Republic of Ireland, living on a trust fund established for her by her mother’s adoptive parents. During her time in England, Love met, befriended, and moved into the Toxteth, Liverpool, home of musician Julian Cope of The Teardrop Explodes, and became a regular face at rock shows. In his autobiography Head-On, Cope doesn’t use her name, but refers to her as “the adolescent”.
Eventually, she headed back to the United States, ending up in Portland, Oregon, still avidly pursuing music. Love supported herself by working as a stripper. Love’s first rock-musician boyfriend was Rozz Rezabek of the Portland band Theatre of Sheep, who had an affair with her while she was still underage. Though the two wrote each other copious love letters, Love has said in many interviews that he did not take her virginity; she claims her first sexual encounter was a one-night stand with Michael Mooney, a guitarist for Echo & the Bunnymen and later with Julian Cope and Spiritualized.
Early musical career
Love began her professional music career with a brief stint as the lead singer of Faith No More. Keyboardist Roddy Bottum described the band at the time as “democratic”, saying that Love’s dominating personality did not fit in. The two artists have remained friends, working together in 2005 on a track for the film Adam & Steve.
At age 22, Love moved back to Portland, then on to Los Angeles in 1987 with fellow musician Kat Bjelland, beginning a period in which Love would form bands with Bjelland only to be ousted by her from each. The pair first formed a band in L. A. with Jennifer Finch called Sugar Baby Doll (alternately Sugar Babylon). During this time Love and Bjelland began to dress alike, wearing dirty Babydoll dresses, plastic girl’s hair clips, ripped stockings and overdone, often smeared makeup. An argument between the two raged over who had come up with their signature style, later dubbed Kinderwhore. Love claimed that she took the style from Christina Amphlett of 1980s Australian rock group, Divinyls, in an interview in the Los Angeles fanzine Ben Is Dead.
Love and Bjelland later formed a band called The Pagan Babies in San Francisco, with Deidre Schletter on drums and Janis Tanaka on bass. The band recorded a demo of four tracks, then ejected Love and renamed themselves Italian Whorenuns. Lastly, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Bjelland started what ultimately would become her longest-running band, Babes in Toyland. Love briefly played bass, but was kicked out of this group as well. Love had more early success as an actress, appearing as Gretchen, a friend of Nancy Spungen in Alex Cox’s Sid Vicious biopic Sid and Nancy in 1986, and in Cox’s spaghetti-western, Straight to Hell in 1987, as well as some small roles on television episodes.
In 1989, Love taught herself to play guitar and set out to form her own band. To do so, she placed an ad in an issue of Flipside, to which Eric Erlandson replied. Love and Erlandson co-founded Hole and are the only two members to remain constant throughout the band’s history. The group made their first gig in November 1989, after three months of rehearsal, and quickly started releasing singles on the Long Beach, California, independent label Sympathy for the Record Industry. The band’s debut album Pretty on the Inside was released in early 1991 on Caroline Records and was produced by Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon and Don Fleming of the band Gumball. It sold well for an independent release and received favorable reviews in the British alternative music press. During this period, she befriended many influential figures in the alternative rock scene, including Michael Stipe of R.E.M. and Billy Corgan of The Smashing Pumpkins (whom she briefly dated).
Discography
- America’s Sweetheart (2004)
- Nobody’s Daughter (2008/2009)
Filmography (selected)
Films
- Mother’s Little Helpers (2009)
Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal’s Caligula (2005)
Trapped (2002)
Julie Johnson (2001)
Beat (2000)
Man on the Moon (1999)
200 Cigarettes (1999)
The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996)
Feeling Minnesota (1996)
Basquiat (1996)
Tapeheads (1988)
Straight to Hell (1987)
Sid and Nancy (1986)