Hole, ‘Miss World’: What Courtney did next

Hole, ‘Miss World’

Song facts

Released: March 28, 1994
Highest UK chart position: #64 on April 2, 1994

1. I am the girl you know

March 4, 1994: Courtney Love is in Europe to promote Hole’s second album, Live Through This, which is due for release in April.

Her husband, Kurt Cobain, had joined her in London and followed her around the continent. After a fight between the two in Rome, Cobain swallows 50 of Love’s Rohypnol tablets (which she used as prescription antidepressants) and falls into a coma. He’s rushed to hospital in critical condition.

March 11, 1994: Kurt is released and the couple prepare to fly home. Courtney phones Select magazine to complain about the unsympathetic press coverage they’ve received over the past week. She says:

“I wish it’d been Eddie. They’d have had a fuckin’ candlelit vigil for him.”

March 28, 1994: ‘Miss World’ is released as the first single from the Live Through This. Almost immediately, rumours start to spread that Cobain has written most of the new album.

April 1, 1994: Back in America, Cobain had faced a tough-love intervention and agreed to go to rehab. Love returned to her touring duties. On April 1st, Cobain escaped from rehab and began making his way back to Seattle.

April 3, 1994: ‘Miss World’ enters the UK charts at Number 64.

April 5, 1994: Kurt Cobain dies of a self-inflicted shotgun blast at his home in Seattle.

April 7, 1994: Courtney has a suspected heroin overdose in a Beverley Hills hotel. She claims it’s an allergic reaction to prescription drugs; police arrest her on possession charges.

April 8, 1994: An electrician, Gary Smith, visits the Cobain home to install a new security system. He discovers a man’s body and notifies the police. At 3.30pm Seattle time, police confirm that Kurt Cobain is dead.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xy01EguXucU

2. Can’t look you in the eye

April 12, 1994: Live Through This is officially released.

The media is filled with Live Through This coverage, most of which was written before Kurt’s death. A lot of it reads badly in this new context. In a The Times interview, Love compares herself and Kurt to Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen. NME’s review of Live Through This asks, “Is she the only reason a very weak man is alive today?” Worst of all, Select prints the headline, “COURTNEY: Why couldn’t it have been Eddie?”

April 10, 1994: At an emotional public gathering under Seattle’s Space Needle, Love reads extracts from Cobain’s suicide note (“more like a letter to the fucking editor”). She encourages the crowd to call him an asshole. Some people find this distasteful, others find it cathartic.

April 15, 1994: Seattle journalist Richard Lee broadcasts a special episode of his show, Now See It Person to Person, called “Was Kurt Cobain Murdered?”. Lee will devote his life to this theory, and change his show’s title to Kurt Cobain Was Murdered.

April 19, 1994: Hole’s bass player Kristen Pfaff announces that she’s leaving the band. Pfaff had been struggling with heroin addiction and spent much of the spring in rehab. Now clean, she plans to move back to Minneapolis and rejoin her old band, Janitor Joe.

May 8, 1994: Tom Grant, a private detective who claims he was hired by Love to find Cobain after his escape from rehab, sends a vaguely threatening letter. “I consider the circumstances of your husband’s death to be highly suspicious,” he says. Grant will become another vocal support of the theory that Love murdered Cobain. In 2015, he contributed to Soaked in Bleach, a docudrama based on Grant’s theories.

May-June 1994: News outlets run multiple stories about a spate of copycat suicides. In later years, this is shown to be untrue.

June 16, 1994: Kristen Pfaff dies of a suspected heroin overdose. She had briefly returned to Seattle to get the last of her possessions before a permanen move to Minneapolis. The last person to see her alive was Hole’s guitarist, Eric Erlandson.

June 19, 1994: The LA Times runs a story about how Courtney Love is the most prominent celebrity on this new thing called “the internet”. Other stars have been known to post on bulletin boards—Kurt shared a few messages, and Trent Reznor was banned from Prodigy because they thought he was an impersonator—but Courtney is a prolific presence on AOL. Some of Love’s posts get moderated for breaching community guidelines on bad language.

July 17, 1994: Love makes her first public appearance since Kurt’s death. She joins The Lemonheads onstage in New York and sings ‘Miss World’ and ‘Doll Parts’.

July 21, 1994: New York Post publishes a photo of Love kissing Evan Dando on a hotel bed. Love later laughs it off, saying it was a bunch of people goofing around:

It was stupid. We were just talking about something, someone had a camera, and it was “Let’s kiss!” And, yeah, we’ll see it in like five years. I saw it in five days.

Another rumour at the time says that Love will return to acting (after 1987’s disasterous Straight to Hell.) Word on the street is that she’ll play a villain in Batman Forever.

August 1994: Melissa Auf der Maur becomes Hole’s new bass player, following a recommendation from Billy Corgan. Love says:

“Billy was going on about this hot babe who could really play, and I was like ‘Yeah, right, you’re giving her the girl leeway,’ because Billy is sort of a pig,” Love says. “But I thought I would try her out, and I pursued her a little bit, and what I thought was hot was that she said no. I thought that was really cool.”

August 26, 1994: Hole warm up for their Live Through This tour with a surprise appearance at the Reading Festival. Love opens by saying to the crowd:

“Oh yeah, I’m so goddamn brave. Yeah, sure. Let’s just pretend it didn’t happen. Let’s just pretend. Is that what you’re doing, pretending it didn’t happen? Great. Well, I’m not.”

Professional Cobain hanger-on Everett True later writes:

They were shit at Reading, make no mistake about that. What did you expect? They’d been playing with new bassist Melissa for a week. Courtney was out of her head on nerves and alcohol.

John Peel praises the gig, although he also says that Love’s appearance “would have drawn whistles of astonishment at Bedlam”.

3. Watch me break and watch me burn

September 1, 1994: The Live Through This tour officially launches at The Phoenix Theatre in Toronto. A local paper reviewed with the headline, “Love’s music spoiled by sloppy antics“. This will be a recurring theme on the tour. Some people are annoyed by Love’s constant monologues and stage antics; others find her electrifying.

September 11, 1994: Hole play a benefit concert in Seattle, their first show there since Kurt’s death.

October 1994: Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl records his first full solo demo, playing all instruments himself. The first song is ‘I’ll Stick Around’ which includes lyrics like “How can it be/I’m the only one who sees/Your rehearsed insanity?”

When ‘I’ll Stick Around’ appeared as a Foo Fighters single in 1995, most people assumed it was about Kurt. But, in 2009, Grohl said:

“I don’t think it’s any secret that ‘I’ll Stick Around’ is about Courtney. I’ve denied it for 15 years, but I’m finally coming out and saying it. Just read the fucking words!”

October 11, 1994: Before Hole take the stage for an event at WFNX Boston, the station receives an anonymous call from someone threatening to shoot Courtney Love. An armed man is later ejeceted from the venue. Love says, “If someone’s gonna shoot me onstage, what a great footnote to rock’n’roll history.”

November 1, 1994: MTV Unplugged in New York is released on CD. It includes a cover of Leadbelly’s ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night’, which is one of the few songs that Love and Cobain had ever performed together (they appeared onstage in September 1993, shortly before the release of In Utero).

December 1994: Rolling Stone name Live Through This as their album of the year and run a huge cover feature on Hole. Courtney claims to be free of heroin, although she admits she’s using a lot of prescription drugs. She describes Live Through This as a B- record, explains why she’s been bringing Francis Bean onstage at Hole gigs, and reveals that Kurt wrote another suicide note which she was keeping private. Of Kristin Pfaff, she says:

I didn’t process it, man. The only time I processed it was when I spoke with her mother. I could not extend in words . . . to lose your child.

4. I’ve made my bed, I’ll lie in it

December 4, 1994: Reports on the Live Through This tour suggest that Love’s behaviour is becoming increasingly erratic. In Boston, she’s accused of racist abuse:

After another song or two, Love became angry, and between songs, began to drop “F” bombs and scream “Shit.” The crowd was shocked, and just ignored her raving. Another Tourette-like rant took place a few minutes later, and she dropped the “N” word at the top of her lungs. The crowd became a little feisty after that, and some members of the audience yelled back the “B” word and worse.

(Love has done this many times over the years. Her justification is that crowds have no problem shouting misogynistic slurs, but they won’t say the N-word.)

January 24, 1995: Love is given a good behaviour bond by an Australian court after she admitted to abusing the cabin crew on a flight to Melbourne. The judge orders her to behave herself for one month.

February 14, 1995: Hole perform an MTV Unplugged session in Brooklyn. Their setlist includes an unreleased Nirvana song that Courtney introduces as ‘You’ve Got No Right’. Nirvana’s version gets an official release in 2002 with the title ‘You Know You’re Right‘.

March 27, 1995: Love attends the Miramax Oscars party. She and a group of other people (including Madonna) get drunk and watch Forest Gump beat Pulp Fiction in almost every category.

After midnight, Courtney gets into an altercation with Lynn Hirschberg, the Vanity Fair journalist who published claims that Kurt and Courtney had used heroin while Love was pregnant, a claim that resulted in Francis Bean being briefly taken into care. According to Vulture:

When Courtney Love, in mourning for Kurt Cobain, recognized the woman sitting next to her as Lynn Hirschberg…she said, “You have blood on your hands,” grabbed Tarantino’s Oscar off the table, and tried to clobber Hirschberg with it, as the director scrambled to intervene. After Love gathered herself and left, Tarantino turned to Hirschberg and quipped, “If she had killed you with an Oscar, it would have been like a scene from one of my movies.”

April 5, 1994: Kurt’s first anniversary is low-key. Hole are in Europe, having played Toulouse the night before. Seattle’s biggest alt-rock radio station doesn’t mark the occasion.

“We just decided it wouldn’t be appropriate to celebrate or commemorate the day Kurt’s body was found,” says Marco Collins, music director for KNDD-FM. “We’d rather wait for an occasion that was more appropriate, like Kurt’s birthday. We don’t want to give this any more of the hype than it deserves.”

May 21, 1995: Washington Post reports that Hole’s AOL Folder (roughly equivalent to a Facebook Group) has been suspended due to death threats against Courtney.

June 13, 1995: Paramedics are called to the Cobain family home where Love is experiencing a suspected overdose. She tells press afterwards that it was an accidental overdose of prescription medication and claims to be drug-free, although in later years she’ll claim that Johnny Depp once gave her CPR in 1995 after she overdosed on crack at his Viper Club.

July 4, 1995: Love punches Bikini Kill singer Kathleen Hanna in the face, allegedly because Hanna made a joke about Francis Bean. Love is later convicted for assault and sentenced to anger management classes.

August 1995: Courtney begins a flirtation with Jeff Buckley. The two are photographed together in New York after attending a production of Hamlet. Love later told Rolling Stone that she was only trying to get with Buckley because she wanted to mess with Auf Der Maur, who had a crush on the singer. Buckley later spoke to Rolling Stone himself:

Buckley ends up being thoroughly freaked out by the experience — so much so that he calls me from England to try to clear his name. Buckley is a sensitive sort and more than a little naive. “Who the fuck am I?” he wanted to know. “I’m not like a Dando. I went out for one night, and I’m thrust into this weird, rock-star charade heavy thing.” He feels used.

August 24, 1995: Rolling Stone once again feature Hole on the cover. The other three seem unconcerned about the recent OD:

Many people, including some who have worked with the band, say half-jokingly that they no longer pay attention to Love’s headlines because they seem so well planned, almost military in their precision.

August 25, 1995: Hole return to the Reading Festival, sharing a bill with Smashing Pumpkins and Green Day. Their page in the festival program says “HOLE IS A BAND”, an echo of the famous “BLONDIE IS A GROUP” buttons. Caitlin Moran’s review says:

It’s hard to tell anymore what Courtney Love’s raison d’être is. That she is more than capable of writing fullblown classics is not in question; what is in question is why she feels the need to overshadow her artistic output with what is, essentially, one long, protracted breakdown on stages across the world.

She comes on apparently drunk, offers to strip, pushes a flight-case into the security pit, and then smashes her equipment before pulling the bass drum onto herself and being carried off. All of which detracts hugely from her impassioned rendition of ‘Penny Royal Tea’, the song she and Kurt wrote together; an incandescent version of ‘Miss World’; and her showcasing of newer songs: heavy, cello-accompanied Led Zeppelin stuff which should make the next album the album of 1997.

September 7, 1995: Courtney is sheer chaos at the MTV Video Music Awards, interrupting a live Madonna interview (Madonna cattily says “Courtney is in dire need of attention right now”.) Hole fail to win the Best Alternative Video (Weezer win for ‘Buddy Holly’) but they lay down a barnstorming performance of ‘Violet’.

5. You know I lie, I lie and lie

And then it’s all over. The Live Through Tour is officially ended and Hole won’t perform live again until 1997 after the release of Celebrity Skin.

In the space of 18 months, Courtney Love has released an album, experienced two deaths of people close to her, been accussed of murdering both, discovered the highs and lows of internet fame, toured the world, become the most talked-about person on the planet, and escaped several brushes with death herself.

At the start of this, I’d wanted to find some kind of narrative to tie these events together. It would be nice to reach a conclusion like “Courtney was mistreated” or “Courtney is a monster”. Even the murder conspiracies, although I don’t believe them, give her story some kind of narrative arc.

But Courtney Love doesn’t just defy narrative—she is narrative. Her whole life has been devoted to creating a myth around herself, to the point where it’s impossible to figure out where the legend ends and the woman begins. When you try to understand her through narrative, you fall into her trap. Even the murder conspiracists have been enchanted somewhat by the mythic quality of Courtney Love. Whatever you believe Courtney Love to be, you will find evidence to support your theories.

There’s only one statement I can make with any certainty: Live Through This is a terrific album.

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