Skin tight

On Celebrity Skin, Hole's first album in four years, Courtney & Co. clean up their act - in more ways than one.

From: Guitarworld, 1999-01-01
Date added: 2004-12-28

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Lurking in the corner of a Hollywood photo studio, Hole guitarist Eric Erlandson looks concerned. Courtney Love is five hours late for the band's Guitar World photo shoot. This isn't unusual behavior for Love. But the tall, taciturn and unbelievably sincere Erlandson has had far too much time to ponder his moral obligation to pose only with axes he actually played on Hole's new album, Celebrity Skin. Bassist Melissa Auf der Maur, for her part, turned up early for the shoot and is now getting a little irritable. She makes it clear that she finds the whole idea of doing guitar poses a trifle tacky. But she's decided to go with it - in an ironic, detached kind of way. The freckled, redheaded bassist is sporting leopard-skin, stiletto-heeled pumps, tight black pedal pushers and a top to match. She's brought her Danzig CDs along, too.

"This is the first time I've ever posed with my bass in all of my musical history," says Auf der Maur. "So I thought we should be as over-the-top rock as possible."

When La Love finally does make her appearance on the studio floor, the effect is not unlike that of a tornado touching down in a populous city. Love's phalanx of female assistants scatter in ever direction, hurrying to do their boss' bidding. A study in contradictions, Love demands herbal tea while lighting one cigarette after another. She clearly enjoys giving orders, enjoys being in command. Yet her handshake is gentle. She's a tactile person; very touchy-feely. Retaining possession of my hand, she leads me into her dressing room.

Selecting a clingy little top to wear for the photo shoot, she launches the fist of what will prove to be many astute, articulate, mile-a-minute tirades on the artistic, social and political agendas that went into the making of Celebrity Skin.

"I didn't want this to be a grieving widow's memoir," she says, alluding to her late husband, Kurt Cobain. "I think that's the kind of satisfaction some people would really want. But I'm not in the mood for that. This isn't Lucinda Williams. I'm not some confessional singer/songwriter. My whole history in this business has been to find the hook. I was taught very early to look for the hook, to write the hook, to find the hook."

She's found it in a very big way this time. Celebrity Skin is a masterful exercise in chrome-plated, precision-crafted, highly buffed power pop. "The revenge of power pop!" Love hoots. "The revenge of Cheap Trick." The disc is a far cry from cathartic, cacophonous grind of Hole's first two albums, Pretty On The Inside (1991) and Live Through This (1994). But for all its candygloss allure, Celebrity Skin has ample scope and depth. It is clearly one of this year's significant albums. Love's pop vision takes in everything from her grunge past to the timeless authoritativeness of classic rock.

But most of all, Celebrity Skin is Courtney Love riffing her own bad self. Her tabloid self. On her much-publicized cosmetic surgery and self-engineered image transformation from messed-up rock slut to glamour icon and movie star. She makes this much clear on the album's title track and opening salvo: "Oh, make me over," Love purrs icily between stabs of "More Than A Feeling" meets Nevermind power chording: "I'm all I wanna be / A walking study / in demonology." This is the sound of Courtney Love joyfully mooning her detractors: Heartland moms and dads shocked by her unrepentant outrageousness. Everyone who subscribes to the "she killed Kurt" theory. And all the sniveling creeps who feel betrayed by her refusal to spend the rest of her life playing the grieving widow, her "defecation" to the movies and - maybe even worse - to catchy, concise songsmithing.

In making Celebrity Skin, Love "took Los Angeles as her muse," as Auf der Maur puts it. The album was recorded in Hollywood, with Michael Beinhorn at the production helm and songwriting input on about half the tunes from Love's old flame Billy Corgan. But the concept, the big picture, is entirely Love's own. She takes off on the image of L.A. as an artificial paradise - a tropical Eden built on a barren desert with water stolen from an adjacent valley. In Los Angeles, she finds a ready-made metaphor for the manufactured glamour and con artistry of the entertainment biz - both music and films. But Love is no hypocritical moralist. Like most of us, she's both attracted to and repelled by the city's aesthetic of ease and careless pleasure.

Musically, Celebrity Skin embraces L.A.'s rich rock history - from the Beach Boys and the Byrds to the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac. (Stevie Nicks is one of Love's many curious obsessions.) "I wanted to be kind of like when the Byrds made Sweetheart Of The Rodeo," she says of her game plan for Celebrity Skin. "When they said, 'We're now going to move to Nashville and go into this country tradition.' For us it was the same kind of conceit, knowing the history of L.A. rock as we do. And it wasn't even contrived. It was coalesced, organically and truly, in terms of the theme."

Many artists have copped onto the L.A. metaphor. But few are as perfectly suited for the role as Courtney Love. In one way or another, her work has always been about the illusory nature of beauty - its false promise, its inherent betrayal, its secret collusion with ugliness.

GW: I have a theory that this record is the exact opposite of...
LOVE: ...of Pretty On The Inside?

GW: Yeah. Is this Pretty On The Outside?
LOVE: It kinda is. That's right. I think it really fits into the trilogy [i.e., Pretty On The Inside, Live Through This, Celebrity Skin]. If you can get through Pretty On The Inside - which was made for a very specific, small audience - you'll hear all kinds of pop references. You can hear "Rhiannon". You can maybe hear that I'm mad at my mom for making me learn Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now". It was before sampling, but I tape-recorded part of the Hollies' "Pay You Back With Interest" and put it on there. That's one of the best AM radio songs ever. So there's sonic information on there telling you that this record [Celebrity Skin] is gonna come. But I just didn't know how to write an album like this for a long time. Now I do.

GW: It's revealing that arguably the most dropdead gorgeous guitar pop song on Celebrity Skin is titled "Awful", and it deals with the crass and coldly calculated way that pop music gets marketed to unsuspecting teens. LOVE: Well, of course. You can't sell a statement unless you have a hook. That's the great lesson of Nirvana. You can talk about how revolutionary and important and blah blah blah Nirvana was. But you know what? Those were really catchy songs. Bottom line. I'm being objective here, not subjective, which I obviously could be. Look, even fuckin' Surgery got signed because of Nirvana. But whatever [Nirvana] meant in my personal life was also an important moment in my cultural life and my life as a musician. And they provided jobs and money for a lot of people in this industry. But ultimately what Nirvana was about was rising out of white trash through catchy songs. End of story. The great American story.

Love makes no bones about the fact that she'd be a lot happier if Eric Erlandson were a female. "I'd just like to play with all girls," she says. "I don't rue letting Eric in. 'Cause we made a great thing together. But in my 'guitarist wanted' ad I specifically said, 'prefer female'. And the reason his memoir is going to be titled Poor Eric is because he answered to that particular ad."

Erlandson accepts his role as Hole's token male oppressor with stoic good humor. "'The Amazon Planet, featuring Poor Eric', that's another band joke," he says. "Then there's the Viking thing: I'm a Viking, you're an Amazon. Fine. Vikings and Amazons can co-exist."

It was in 1989 that Erlandson answered Love's fateful ad in The Recycler, and L.A. based classified paper. Hole's only native Southern Californian, Erlandson has only recently moved to Hollywood from the outlying city of San Pedro (home of Mike Watt and the Minutemen). He'd been trying to get a band together but was having a hard time finding other people into "fucked-up New York guitar playing," as he terms it, "like Tom Verlaine and Sonic Youth." Then he met Love.

"She had a friend who lived next door to her that was going to be her bass player," Erlandson recalls. "We booked a rehearsal studio - Fortress Studios. These two girls show up dressed completely crazy. We set up and they said, 'Okay, just start playing something.' I started playing and they started screaming at the top of their lungs for two or three hours. Crazy lyrics and screaming.. I said to myself, 'Most people would just run away from this really fast.' But I heard something in Courtney's voice and lyrics. Also just her guitar playing. I said, 'Okay, I'll give this three months and then see what happens.' Our first show was three months later. We weren't ready. We had only six or eight songs. Courtney tends to like to jump the gun and force things to happen. And I'm usually pulling back and saying, 'No, we're not ready yet.' Then we fight. It's like that to this day."

Therein lies the yin/yang dynamic that drives Hole. Love and Erlandson's close, complicated and often combative relationship has survived nine years and several rhythm sections. They are the only original members of Hole still in the band. Erlandson sees their creative friction as a Jagger/Richards singer/guitarist kind of thing. "The difference is that Courtney hates the fact that I'm not a girl," he says. "That creates more tension. There's not a lot of rock bands with a male and female collaborator where the female calls the shots. Usually they start going out together, and when they break up the band breaks up, like Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart [of the Eurythmics]. Courtney and I fight, but in the end we love each other, so we can let go of a lot of stuff."

"Maybe Eric is oppressed, to be honest," Love admits. "Maybe he wants to play leads all over the place. But I trained it out of him so early. What we do is he plays them and I pick the notes that are going to go into the song. I just feel a lead should be 14 notes, maximum. It should get to the point fast. That's just my musical aesthetic. SO maybe I am oppressing him. Maybe it's a male instinct to do that. I don't know. Some of Billy [Corgan]'s leads are absurd. I think guys like to show off for other guitar players. Which is like a car magazine: It's a guy thing. But guitars are not really a guy thing at all."

"I let mt ego go a lot of times," says Erlandson. "I let my pride go. People in my life sometimes don't understand and get frustrated when I have to do that. But I know what I want. I'm not a 'yes' person or sycophant. I don't see myself as supporting somebody all the time or following them around like a puppy. I'm my own person. I can put up with a lot if I think something good is going to come out of it. Somebody recently said to me, 'It seems like you're the perfect combination of patience and obsessiveness.' In order for us to make music, I have to be patient. And at the same time, I'm very obsessive. I can't do anything else until I see a project done. That's a problem I have. I had no life for the past two years, except for working on this album. My whole life is that piece of plastic."

Back at the photo studio, Love has ousted Auf der Maur's Danzig in favor of Nuggets, the recently re-released Rhino compilation of Sixties garage rock bands whom many rock historians regard as the true forebears of punk rock. Under orders from Courtney, an assistant cues up the Count Five's "Psychotic Reaction" and cranks it loud. Love's slim hips start grinding rhythmically beneath the pink body of her signature model Squier Venus guitar. Her gaze locks onto the lens like a laser beam, radiating equal parts seduction and defiance. Love is - to use one of her favorite expressions - throwin' down.

The Nuggets bands are one of Love's current passions. Her knowledge of the subject is encyclopedic. "I'm a total record collector geek," she says. "I can throw down with Peter Buck anytime. I have. He's my neighbor. I've been studying rock since I was 14 or 15."

"She's got an IQ of 160," Love's publicist told me prior to our interview. What's fascinating is the way Love deploys her brain power: Impulsively. Compulsively. She'll devour a subject - be it feminism, Buddhism or obscure Sixties garage bands. She'll learn all there is to know about it and make it the Key to Reality. Whatever topic you discuss with Love, it ultimately ends up being about gender, class or garage bands.

"That's the real Sixties, you know," she declares. "Not what Rolling Stone chose to tell me about the Sixties, or my parents. Not the Grateful Dead, [Jefferson Airplane guitarist] Paul Kantner Sixties, but these insane American bands that drove around in hearses and tried to sing like the Rolling Stones. In the Rolling Stones vs. Beatles argument, you ultimately gotta give it up to the Rolling Stones. 'Cause the bands that were trying to imitate the Rolling Stones - as most of the Nuggets bands were - definitely came off better as a whole. The oeurve is better."

Love's grudge against the "official" Grateful Dead counterculture Sixties is a personal one. Her father worked for the Dead and her mother was a psychologist with close ties to the hippie scene. Raised by her mother and several different step-fathers, Love is very much the product of freethinking, itinerant hippie upbringing. She vehemently rejected all of that, running away from home for the first time at age 13. She started travelling, working as a stripper in Asia and Alaska, attending the prestigious Trinity College in Dublin, participating in hip, post-punk rock scenes in Liverpool, New York, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Vancouver and, of course, Seattle. Love played in an early incarnation of Faith No More and helped formulate the riot grrl scene, playing with Kat Bjelland (Babes In Toyland) and Jennifer Finch (L7) in a variety of bands, including her own group, Sugar Babylon, which later evolved into Sugar Baby Doll. Then she entered the more well-known phase of her life as Hole's leader and Kurt Cobain's spouse. But now that Hole have made their first full-on mainstream album, Love finds herself confronting issues that, for her, trace back to outmoded hippie values.

"There's a huge problem, handed down from the Sixties generation, about what selling out is," she says. "And it's caused a great fear, in a number of my fellow musicians and peers, of writing good hooks or making good recordings, even when they're perfectly capable of it. They'll sign to a major label and then they'll make an anti-major label record. They won't participate. They won't even stay true to their act. I can't tell you how many times I've seen this. A hook is emerging in a rehearsal space and someone will kill the hook, saying it's too cheesy. But when I was 14 or 15, I was playing guitar in order to learn how to write hit songs like I heard on the fucking AM radio in Portland. Before Hole made Pretty On The Inside, I'd already been thrown out of three bands for being too pop. I was thrown out of Babes In Toyland for liking R.E.M. too much - for playing the Peter Buck D chord with the pinkie. I wasn't writing songs to not participate. Although, later on, I did get into some subcultures where I genuinely didn't want to participate. I genuinely did feel antisocial, and the first two Hole albums reflect that.

"But now I'm into mainstreaming. I'm just into mainstreaming correctly. There's a way to do it and a way not to do it. The way not to do it is to have Reebok and Nike running around asking you to do what they're into and then using that to sell shit to kids. The boomers who own ad agencies - the Jann Wenners [Rolling Stone's publisher] and Paul Allens [Microsoft honcho] - tried to target Generation X. But during grunge and during metal they couldn't sell shit to us because we were too cynical. But they can sell to teenagers today, and I don't want any part of that. There's a way to mainstream things with integrity."

GW: In "Awful" you sing, "I was punk; now I'm just stupid." How autobiographically are we to take that? LOVE: From the perspective of a 15-year-old punk-rock-girl, that can be very literally, I suppose. That's fine. Anyway, it's a lie. I was never punk. I was always a new-wave poseur. By the time the Pixies were out, I was already in my twenties. So I grew up thinking that the Plimsouls' 'A Million Miles Away' was just the best song ever written and that the first Cheap Trick album was the best record ever made. I wasn't very much into that Black Flag kind of maleness punk: Sabbath, Priest, Maiden. You can say that for all the punk bands from GBH to Minor Threat. So from the perspective of a 15-year-old girl, that line, as applied to me, is probably very true. Because that's what grownups do. They sell out. No grownups understand me either. Only Manson, who's my age, can save me.

GW: Is it pure coincidence that both you and Marilyn Manson have made records that not only somehow reflect the Hollywood experience but were also produced by Michael Beinhorn at Conway Studios with songwriting input from Billy Corgan? LOVE: I think Brian [Warner, a.k.a. Marilyn Manson] is trying to steal from me, actually. We were doing it first! No, I don't really think that. Manson have their own deal and they have to defer to me somehow because I've been around longer. But in a lot of ways, Brian was a scene jerk for a thousand years. He's been in bands for a long time. He has paid his dues. I don't have any issues with that band. I think they're nothing but good for the world. They shock people's parents. Halle-fuckin'-lulia. On top of it, he's kind of intellectual about it. He can do a good discourse. If he doesn't become a big, huge drug addict, he'll probably survive in a way that theatrical rockers, such as Alice Cooper, usually don't. As for Michael [Beinhorn], he was just around. Billy [Corgan] met Michael. I think Billy hangs out with Manson [the band] more than anything. Billy and Michael like each other. So I guess it was like, "Courtney did it. Let's do what Courtney did." We all do this to each other. I just used Manson's video director yesterday. It's nice to be in a continuum with somebody new for a change. I've been in a continuum with a lot of other girls. I've been in a continuum with a lot of the grunge bands. It's nice to be in a continuum with somebody new to the cycle.

GW: You're very different from Manson, musically. LOVE: We're going for more of a Joshua Tree vibe on this album. We're going more for grownups. 'Cause we are grownups. And even if some of the members of Marilyn Manson are my age and older, they don't have my life experience. I mean, they've got their first rock girlfriends now, and their little drug habits. How cute. It's the same thing over and over and over again, year in, year out. Only the names change.

GW: Do you feel like you're outside that cycle, the fame and all? LOVE: I'm real bored of fame. I like power better. Fame is just a trailer-park way to get to ownership. It's also the way to manifest creative desires in hopes of reaching other like-minded people. If you're a passionate Marxist, a passionate feminist, a passionate artist, you want to take your world view and impose it on the skyline. For whatever reason. Maybe it's Darwinism. Maybe it's the fact that, by including my people, my tribe, in the culture, we then thrive and we can procreate more. I'm not quite sure. I do know that 10 years ago, me and Melissa were freak dates. Now we're trophy dates. I think it's so hilarious that the straightest, squarest agents want to go out with me now. And go out with Melissa. Yeah, 10 years ago you'd want to go out with me and not tell your friends. So something's shifted in the culture with women, which is good. It doesn't mean I respond. Good God. It's just like, "Oh wow, that's funny."

GW: Is it necessarily a gender-related shift? People like Mason are at the cultural forefront now, too. There was a time when he probably wouldn't have been allowed into the mainstream either. LOVE: But there's always room for outcast boys. Whereas a lot of women that have been successful in music in the last five years are girls that were popular in high school. And male tradition is about having been the outcast, the misfit, the freak, the faggot: too small, too fat, too short, too crippled, too crooked to fit in. That's what rock is. That's what rock was. And then you get these incredible things happening, like Elvis fuckin' Presley, who was a beauty. But he was considered a girl. Called a fairy. But, I mean these girls in music now, it's almost like a middle-class occupation. And I have nothing but respect for the craft that goes into somebody like Shawn Colvin's writing. It does nothing but impress me. But culturally, I'm more interested in advocating a lot more rage, a lot more romance, a lot more passion.

Melissa Auf der Maur joined Hole late in 1994, replacing bassist Kristen Pfaff, who died of a heroism overdose in June of that year, just two months after Kurt Cobain's death. Before joining Hole, Auf der Maur had only played seven gigs in her life, with the only other band she was in prior to Hole, Tanker. The last of these gigs was an opening slot for the Smashing Pumpkins. Billy Corgan was impressed with Auf der Maur and recommended her to Hole when they needed a new bassist.

"Billy's kinda like a big brother to me," she says. "I don't want to give him too much credit, but he's been around most of my musical endeavors."

So the relatively inexperienced Auf der Maur found herself in the profoundly bereaved band, whose album Live Through This was in the process of going through the roof, thanks in part to the morbid spin put on the disc by Cobain's death. "I'd only known them two weeks, and our first show was at Reading [the British rock festival], in front of 65,000 people," Auf der Maur marvels. "I just said to myself, 'Forget everything you know, Melissa. Nothing you've ever done before is going to be like this.' I just kicked my heels up and went with it. And it was good. It's continued to be a little weird."

"It's good having Melissa in the band," says Love. "We can go trolling together after a show. I'm not gonna go trolling with Eric. He'll want to go to a strip club."

Auf der Maur is the secret ingredient in Hole's new power pop direction. Celebrity Skin is her first studio project with the band, and it was she who sang many of the gorgeous pop harmonies that adorn the album.

"I do love making harmonies, from singing in choirs all my life," she says. "Basically, the thing that made me fall in love with music was singing the Mozart Requiem with children's choirs. And the choir girl training voice that I have been, I think, an influential addition to Hole. But, as a bass player, I've always wanted to be in more of a Sabbath/Zeppelin rhythm-oriented kind of band. So in my old band, I never sang. I figured, 'Why would pretty voices go over rock music?' But when I joined this band, my pretty voice ended up complimenting Courtney's, which inspired us to do more duetty, poppy stuff. For example, 'Boys On The Radio,' which is one of the poppiest songs on the album, came out of the first jam we ever did, during out first two weeks of rehearsal. I hardly even knew them musically or personally and we just, off the cuff, started singing this song that used to be called 'Sugar Coma,' but now it's 'Boys On The Radio.' I guess what I'm trying to say is I'm not the Queen of Pop in my heart, musically. But I have the tools to inspire that."

Eric Erlandson explains that Hole threw themselves into touring as soon as possible after Cobain and Pfaff's deaths, partly as a means to putting their grief behind them. They didn't stop until '95, when the band settled down in New Orleans to begin writing what would become Celebrity Skin. "We decided to hop into a studio down there and rent a house together and try to be a real band," Erlandson explains. But the darkness hadn't quite passed. "From the first day in New Orleans, there was a cloud over my head," says Erlandson. "I just couldn't get away from it. I would wake up at two in the afternoon just feeling groggy. That probably affected what we were trying to do down there. Plus, we were working in a Masonic temple, with all this crazy energy in it. And stuff happened. The house caught on fire. But we did do some stuff that ended up on the record."

"Lyrical things of Courtney's, like 'Hit So Hard,' were developed down in New Orleans," says Auf der Maur. "Musical and lyrical bits were being born, but there wasn't enough cohesion. There wasn't until we all settled in L.A., and Courtney came up with the idea of participating in that rock tradition, that it all came together."

It was Erlandson who'd first moved back to L.A. in the wake of Cobain and Pfaff's deaths, he felt a need to get away from Seattle, where he'd been living. He'd hoped the band would join him in L.A. and record their new album there. And although New York and even Ireland were under consideration at various points, this is exactly what came to pass.

The band considered several producers, including Ric Ocasek, who had worked with Melissa and Billy Corgan on his own solo album of 1997, Troublizing, and who'd produced Hole's cover of Fleetwood Mac's "Gold Dust Woman" for the soundtrack to The Crow. Brian Eno's name also came up. "But he wasn't into rock music anymore," says Erlandson. "He's already done The Joshua Tree. Why should he go back and do it again?"

The band finally opted to work with Michael Beinhorn and began cutting tracks at Conway Studios. Apart from all other considerations, Erlandson says that Celebrity Skin's pop sound also stems from "Courtney's desire to actually sing and be more melodic and work her voice in ways that she'd never worked it before. She's still discovering new voices. It's pretty amazing."

Actual, Billy Corgan was first called in as a vocal coach for the album. "With Billy," says Love, "it was like, 'Are you gonna help me with my vocal phrasing? I'm in a fucking rut. I'm singing like Iggy Pop and I can't get out of it.'" The situation developed from there. "Billy and I always kind of wanted to write together," Love continues. "He did some writing on about half the songs. We sat and wrote them together in a really pure way. Billy wrote some of the verses on 'Petals.' The song was originally a duet we made, which was kind of cool. Writing in the room with Billy and Eric was so weird. 'Cause Billy stole me from Eric. And Kurt stole me from Billy."

What really bothers Hole is the implication that Corgan somehow masterminded the whole album. "He was there for only 12 days," says Melissa. "And I wasn't really around for much of it. Twelve days out of the three years it took us to write this - that's not very much. Billy was really just a friend who helped us get to that next place."

It was fairly late in the recording process when Erlandson brought in the acoustic ballad "Northern Star" and the blissful pop wet dream "Heaven Tonight. "I thought the album was a little too mid tempo," he says. "Just pop rock songs. Not enough ups and downs. So I came in at the last minute with those two songs. Those were the missing elements. You won't believe it but 'Heaven Tonight' started out as an industrial song."

From its title to its closing note, the tune is rife with pop quotations - from Cheap Trick to the Beatles. "When we were writing it, a lot of that stuff started popping into Courtney's head," says Erlandson. "She went back and tried to rewrite the song, but it became too word-heavy, too thought-heavy. The most charming part of it was that she was singing this stuff that just came out of her. I think it's one of the moments she's more embarrassed about."

Love, for her part, denies that the title is a deliberate reference to Cheap Trick: "Cliff Burnstein [Hole's co-manager] said, 'Let's call it "Heaven Tonight."' 'Cause it was called 'The Pony Song.' And I acquiesced on the name. He said, 'No one will notice' [that it is also the title of a Cheap Trick album]. I said, 'Whatever.' Actually, it's more of a Buckingham/Nicks thing for me: a tambourine, campfire kind of song. I make reference to about 10 different things in a minute of songwriting. And if I told you what they were you'd go 'What?' 'Cause you can't hear them anymore in the end product. They're long gone."

The influence that everyone seems to focus on in discussing Celebrity Skin is Joan Jett. But it's Auf der Maur who shrugs this one off.

"I don't think so. Not for me. I mean, she's cool as anything. But Blondie was my main thing on this album, and that's a lot poppier than Joan Jett."

Love's take on Jett seems mainly political: "What Joan Jett went through a whole generation before me makes the shit that people throw at me look like nothing. [whining voice] 'She murdered Kurt. She did this, she did that. She stole my grand-mother's ring and then she poisoned my kittykat. That bitch.' All that is nothing compared to what Joan Jett went through. People would tell her that she had a penis. They would throw shit at her in concert. They would try to shave her head. She could not get through an interview like this without getting asked if she was a slut. It was a war. So if Joan Jett fought a fucking war, imagine what Janis Joplin went through, when there was no precedent for white women in rock."

Love tells me she recently turned down an offer of eight million dollars to play Janis Joplin in one of the two upcoming films on the great Sixties singer. "And you know why?' she says. "I'm a snob about the music. The great tragedy of Janis Joplin, I think, is that she never had the right band at all. I don't think she had any real true peers. She was always in bands where some man was calling the shots. She had a two-octave voice. She could have done anything. She had incredible pipes. And she got stuck doing this one thing, and guys playing this one way."

But even in a world run by women - as Hole's definitely is - things still do go wrong. One sad byproduct of the Celebrity Skin sessions was the estrangement of Patty Schemel, Hole's drummer since 1991. Some of her tracks on Celebrity Skin ended up being replaced by a session drummer. After the project was completed, Schemel announced that she wouldn't be touring with Hole. "Patty put a lot of time into [Celebrity Skin] and put a lot of drum tracks down," says Auf der Maur. "Some were usable and some weren't, I guess, in the eyes of the producer. But Patty wrote all the drum parts. We did three months of preproduction with her, and some of those songs were years old. So she was the creative force behind the drums. That's for sure. She's a wonderful friend, but we've kind of gone in different directions."

Hole's new drummer is Samantha Malone. "She's everything a drummer should be," Auf der Maur enthuses. "Sports-oriented, young, fresh, healthy, so eager, big muscles. She's from Queens, New York."

"Sam's a complete prodigy," Love adds, "I told her, 'I can't play guitar that well. But the way I play is what can fuck with an audience. So watch my body.' If Samantha doesn't follow me it's going to sound like lame power pop shit. What I am is an incredibly sloppy rhythmatist. But within my weird sloppiness there's a real gift, a sort of sexiness. Like when I was off doing a movie, the rest of them were rehearsing without me. I walked in and I was like, 'My God, this is perky power pop. You guys need to go out and get fucked!'"

Love seems to relish Samantha's bold ambition as much as her playing. "She's only 22 and she's like, 'I wanna play with Madonna and Michael Jackson.' So I introduced her to Madonna. I told her, 'Okay, that's easy. 'Cause if I have you into play, then Madonna will want you. So, Sam, that door's open. You can walk out anytime. You'll come back. 'Cause it's cold out there!' They all come back. My stylist worked for Madonna, my manager...back in a month."

Madonna is another one of Love's obsessions. She seems to harbor a sense of both admiration and rivalry when it comes to this other strong woman who can cross effortlessly from records to films and back again.

LOVE: I think I walk in Madonna's shadow, sometimes. People see that she's a blonde and I'm a blonde, and she's super-famous and I'm super-famous, and I feed the fuel that makes a person super-famous, for whatever retarded reason. 'Cause, believe me, I know it's stupid. It's not like I don't know. But you know what? Leave me out of the pop music thinking. Don't think about us like we're a pop band. Yes, this record is pop. But it's rock, first and foremost.

GW: Well, pop's a nebulous term.
LOVE: Yeah, In the Cheap Trick/Beatles/Rolling Stones sense, it could be pop, but you know it ain't pop that you could...

GW: It ain't pop in the Michael Jackson sense.
LOVE: No, sir.

GW: Of course not.
LOVE: I know, I know. But because of my fame I get mixed in with that.

GW: Unlike Madonna, you really come from the rock scene.
LOVE: When I did that Rolling Stone cover shoot with Madonna and Tina Turner, they wouldn't let me play rock. They wouldn't let me play Exile on Main Street! I tried to keep it really tame: Tom Petty and Bowie. And they were like, "Where's the groove? We gotta go for the groove." And they put on disco. For me, it was like the whole "disco sucks," FM radio Eighties thing all over again. And I said to [Madonna] something like "You are so not rock." And she was like, "I'm from Pontiac, Michigan. Bob Seger's from Pontiac. I know rock. Don't tell me about rock." Not that's she's not progressive. I liked some of the stuff she was playing - Nellee Hooper or whatever. But I'm a rock chick.
"There's this weird anger and spooky, terrifying energy that rock music can unleash. Even playing the MTV Video Music Awards, I was crazy afterwards. I made out with someone in Marilyn Manson. It was like, "What are you doing that for?" I ate seven pieces of fried chicken. I went into the Beastie Boys' dressing room and told all their friends they were cynical cunts. All in less than 40 minutes. I was so crazy. And I wasn't drunk or anything. It was just from doing one three-minute song.

Of all the unflattering things that have ever been said about Courtney Love, the one thing that seems to piss her off the most is the inference that she stole song ideas from Kurt Cobain, or that Cobain outright wrote her songs for her. This may even bother her more than the rumors that she murdered her husband.

"It really, really bugs me," she admits, "Because I would just never. I wouldn't stoop to it. I asked Howard Stern, 'Do you really believe that? Come on.' 'Cause I always think that nobody really believes it. I was raised in, like, a teepee, in subcultures. I squatted. And I didn't know that mainstream America really thought like that, and that people really, really believe this shit. If you ever run across Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic, you really need to ask them what Kurt wrote on Live Through This. 'Cause Kurt didn't write a note, and they know that. They should be throwing down. If I died tomorrow, Patty and Melissa would know every note that I'd written. A musicologist would know. I fucking gave some lyrics to Nirvana. They didn't give me a note. Kurt had his thing and I had mine. We wrote one song together called 'Thinking of You,' but I'll probably never whip it out because I'd have to credit him with it. And then he wrote kind of a crappy song called 'Old Age,' which had no verses. I needed a B side at three in the morning once, so I used that. It had a nice structure, and then I made the structure much different. I could have made it a triumph if I had worked on it more."

GW: Tell me some lyrics that you contributed to Nirvana.
LOVE: The title In Utero was mine. I couldn't use it myself. And just different things. Secret things. I don't need to take credit for them.

GW: What did you learn about guitar playing from Kurt?
LOVE: Contrary to popular belief, I didn't play a lot with him. Our stuff was pretty separate. He was more of a songwriting talent than a guitar talent, anyway. He could take two chords and really make a thing happen. He had no sense of the fourth wall, in melody. He knew how to phrase classically. Which my daughter can do - I think it's genetic. Because my daughter possesses everything from a contralto to a soprano. I don't have that. When she's not conscious of other people being around, she sings and makes up songs constantly. If I have any regrets... [launches into "My Way"] "and I've had a few. But then again, too few to mention"... one of them is that, when I was first learning guitar craft, I didn't do what all the boys do. Like Kurt, Billy and possible Jeordie White [a.k.a. Twiggy Ramirez of Marilyn Manson]: Misfit boys go into their rooms, sit there for eight hours and get chops. I started to do that. But then I went on all these adventures. I have a propensity for adventures. And that took away any real hope of my ever being Nancy Wilson. I wish I'd stayed in my room a year or two more. But you know what? I didn't have a fuckin' room to stay in. I'm sorry. I don't think they would have let me have my guitar at my hostel.

GW: You began traveling.
LOVE: I didn't live anywhere. I didn't have a place to live.

GW: It's a suburban thing: sitting in your room, practicing guitar.
LOVE: You gotta have a room, a basement.

GW: It's kind of a male, onanistic thing.
LOVE: Yeah. I got a picture of Kurt that's amazing; it's the ultimate boy picture. I've seen this picture of Billy, of Jeordie - just every guy in every band. You know, his hair's too long. He's obviously been smoking pot. The room's gross. There's flyers from, you know, really bad punk band. Any flyer he could get. And he's got a fucking flying V and wearing big headphones. And he's made his own Rockman. He was a good engineer. That's one thing he was.

GW: Kurt or Billy?
LOVE: Kurt. Billy's a good engineer, too. They were both lefties as well. But you know, there's a picture of Eric like that too. Everyone's future is foretold by their childhood pictures. There's a picture of Eric looking like Paul Stanley. And now he's wearing eyeliner and sucking in his cheeks. And he has a propensity for models, you know? If I was a guy maybe I'd have a propensity for models too. Nah. I wouldn't. I could go out with really cute boys who are 18. But I don't.

Among all the other factors that contributed to Celebrity Skin's sharper pop focus is the fact that the record is also the product of a happier, healthier Courtney Love. She has reportedly given up drugs and seems to have settled into a cozy, single-mom kind of existence with her daughter, Francis Bean.

"I'm a good mom," she says. "I have this whole life. I go to soccer every Saturday. I have a great home. My daughter's really sheltered in a good way. She knows all the shit, but at the same time I protect her. She's normal. She's her own person. So I've got my thing. I'm mom, and then I'm dad/mom."

Although Love says she doesn't practice Buddhism as rigorously as she once did, she still engages in Yoga practice every morning and has begun attending a Baptist church every Sunday. "Me and my friend go there," she says. "I was never into the Christ thing. But I go there on Sunday night and scream and shout, and if I've had a bad day I get it all out and no one fucking looks at me. Oooh, it's just great. So productive. So fucked up."

"But I like being bad too. That's me. What can I do? I don't care. I came from shit. I came from nothing. I picked berries. I was a stripper - in bad bars. I'm happy and lucky to be doing what I'm doing now. Very lucky. I'll take the crap. I'll make it easier for the next one down the line. It wasn't as hard for me as it was for Chrissie Hynde and Joan Jett. And it wasn't as hard for them as it was for Janis Joplin. And it wasn't as hard for Janis Joplin as it was for Joan Crawford. When you're working class and you come from crap, man or woman, it's a hard road."

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