Courtney Love

• 1. Introduction

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  Courtney Love walked on stage at the Reading Festival on the 26th of August 1994 as the singer of Hole. It was her first public performance since the death of her husband, the Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain. MTV called the set "by turns macabre, frightening and inspirational." John Peel wrote in The Guardian that her dishevelled appearance "would have drawn whistles of astonishment in Bedlam." He added that her performance "verged on the heroic." He also felt a tension from that stage that he could not remember from any other.

  Love is an American singer, songwriter, guitarist and actress whose career has spanned four decades. Before that night she had lived in juvenile hall, danced in clubs on several continents, and played small parts in cult films. How does a childhood spent crossing oceans and institutions produce a performer who could hold a festival crowd in such a state? Why did her music, her marriage and her screen work keep colliding in public? And what did she leave to the guitarists, singers and rock stars who came after her?

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• 2. Unsettled Years

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  Courtney Michelle Harrison was born on the 9th of July 1964 at Saint Francis Memorial Hospital in San Francisco. Her father, Hank Harrison, was a publisher and road manager for the Grateful Dead. Her mother, the psychotherapist Linda Carroll, had been adopted at birth and was the biological daughter of the novelist Paula Fox. The Dead's founding bassist, Phil Lesh, became her godfather. By her own account, her first name came from Courtney Farrell, the heroine of Pamela Moore's 1956 novel Chocolates for Breakfast.

  In 1970 her parents divorced. Her mother and one of her father's girlfriends testified that Hank had given the toddler LSD, and Carroll also alleged that he threatened to flee abroad with the child. Hank denied the allegations, but his custody was revoked. Carroll moved her daughter to Marcola, Oregon, where she married the schoolteacher Frank Rodríguez, who legally adopted the girl. Love struggled at a Montessori school in Eugene. She says she began seeing psychiatrists at about the age of three, and at nine a psychologist noted signs of autism, including tactile defensiveness and nonverbal behavior.

  In 1972 the family moved again, this time to Nelson, New Zealand, where Love was soon expelled from Nelson College for Girls. A year later she was sent back to Portland, Oregon, to be raised by her former stepfather and family friends. At fourteen she was arrested for shoplifting at a Woolworth store at Lloyd Center and held at Hillcrest Correctional Facility in Salem. Foster placements followed, and in 1980 she became legally emancipated. She stayed staunchly estranged from her mother afterward.

  Emancipation sent her far from home. She spent two months working as a topless dancer in Japan before being deported when her passport was confiscated. Back in Portland she worked as a DJ at a gay disco and danced at Mary's Club under the surname Love. She says the gay clubs and the drag queens she befriended taught her the social skills she lacked. She also briefly studied English and philosophy at Portland State University.

  In 1981 a small trust fund left by her maternal grandparents paid for a trip to Dublin, where her biological father lived. There she audited theology courses at Trinity College. At a concert she met Julian Cope of the Teardrop Explodes, who let her and a friend stay at his Liverpool home. His roommate, the musician Pete de Freitas, hesitated but relented because the girls were, in his words, "alarmingly young and obviously had nowhere else to go." Cope later wrote about her often in his 1994 autobiography Head-On, calling her "the adolescent."

  She returned to the United States in July 1982. That winter she persuaded the members of Faith No More to let her sing for them. The band recorded with her and then fired her, because, according to keyboardist Roddy Bottum, they wanted a "male energy." Love went back to dancing abroad, in Taiwan and then at a taxi dance hall in Hong Kong. By her account she first used heroin there, believing it was cocaine. A wealthy client asked her to follow him to the Philippines, and she spent the money he gave her on a flight home to the United States.

  At nineteen she took a job through her boyfriend's mother, the film costume designer Bernadene Mann. The work meant cleaning vintage pieces in the wardrobe department at Paramount Studios.

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• 3. Forming Hole

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  In 1984 Love met the guitarist Kat Bjelland at the Satyricon nightclub in Portland, and the two started a band called the Pagan Babies. Love played little more than keyboards at that point. Bjelland has said she transcribed Love's musical ideas onto guitar for her. They moved to San Francisco in June 1985 and recruited bassist Jennifer Finch and drummer Janis Tanaka. The group played house shows and recorded a single four-track demo before splitting in late 1985.

  In late 1988 Love taught herself guitar and moved to Los Angeles. She placed an ad in a local music zine that read: "I want to start a band. My influences are Big Black, Sonic Youth, and Fleetwood Mac." By 1989 she had gathered guitarist Eric Erlandson, her neighbor Lisa Roberts on bass, and drummer Caroline Rue, whom she met at a Gwar concert. The name Hole came from two places. One was a line in Euripides' Medea, "There is a hole that pierces right through me." The other was her mother's warning that she could not live her life "with a hole running through her."

  On the 23rd of July 1989 Love married James Moreland, the singer of Leaving Trains, in Las Vegas. The marriage was annulled the same year, and she later said they had married as a joke. Meanwhile she kept working at Hollywood strip clubs, including Jumbo's Clown Room and the Seventh Veil. The wages paid for backline equipment and a touring van. The Red Hot Chili Peppers lent her a Hollywood studio for rehearsals.

  Hole played its first show in November 1989 at Raji's, a rock club in central Hollywood. The debut single, "Retard Girl," came out in April 1990 on the Long Beach label Sympathy for the Record Industry, and the disc jockey Rodney Bingenheimer played it on KROQ. The Los Angeles punk fanzine Flipside put the band on its cover. A second single, "Dicknail," followed on Sub Pop in early 1991.

  The debut album, Pretty on the Inside, arrived in September 1991 on Caroline Records. Love had met Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth in November 1990, when Hole opened for Sonic Youth at the Whisky a Go Go. Early the next year Love wrote Gordon a personal letter asking her to produce the record, and Gordon agreed. The result drew on no wave, noise rock and grindcore. Q described its lyrics as "confrontational and genuinely uninhibited."

  Spin named it one of the twenty best albums of the year, and it reached number 59 on the UK Albums Chart. Its lead single, "Teenage Whore," entered the UK Indie Chart at number one. Many people filed the band under riot grrrl because of the album's feminist slant, though Love did not identify with that movement. Hole toured Europe as headliners alongside Mudhoney, then opened for the Smashing Pumpkins in the United States and played CBGB in New York City.

  On that tour Love briefly dated the Smashing Pumpkins singer Billy Corgan, and then she met someone else.

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• 4. Marriage and Loss

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  Nobody agrees on when Courtney Love first met Kurt Cobain. The journalist Michael Azerrad places it at the Satyricon in Portland in 1989. The Cobain biographer Charles Cross gives the 12th of February 1990 and says Cobain playfully wrestled her to the floor after she told him he looked like Dave Pirner of Soul Asylum. Love remembers a Dharma Bums show. Erlandson recalls a parking lot after a concert at the Hollywood Palladium on the 17th of May 1991. Late that year Love's friend Jennifer Finch reintroduced them, and by 1992 they were a couple.

  They married on Waikiki Beach on the 24th of February 1992. Love wore a satin and lace dress once owned by the actress Frances Farmer, and Cobain wore plaid pajamas. Their only child, a daughter named Frances Bean Cobain, was born in Los Angeles on the 18th of August 1992. The family moved to Carnation, Washington, and then to Seattle. While pregnant, Love recorded a cover of "Over the Edge" for a Wipers tribute album and the single "Beautiful Son," released in April 1993.

  A September 1992 Vanity Fair profile by Lynn Hirschberg, titled "Strange Love," gave Love her first major media exposure. Her manager had urged her to take part. The couple had both developed heroin addictions the year before, and the piece suggested Love had used heroin while pregnant. The Los Angeles Department of Children and Family Services investigated, and custody of Frances went temporarily to Love's sister Jaimee. Love said she was misquoted and had quit heroin in her first trimester. She later said the article seriously damaged her marriage and Cobain's mental state, and suggested it contributed to his suicide.

  The couple made one public appearance together, at the Rock Against Rape benefit in Hollywood on the 8th of September 1993. They performed two acoustic duets, "Pennyroyal Tea" and "Where Did You Sleep Last Night." Love also played electric versions of new Hole songs "Doll Parts" and "Miss World." In October Hole recorded its second album, Live Through This, in Atlanta with a new lineup of bassist Kristen Pfaff and drummer Patty Schemel.

  In April 1994 Cobain killed himself at the Seattle home he shared with Love, who was in rehab in Los Angeles at the time. She stayed mostly out of sight for months. She divided his ashes, keeping some in a teddy bear and some in an urn. In June she took a portion to the Namgyal Buddhist Monastery in Ithaca, New York, where monks blessed it. Another portion was mixed into clay and shaped into memorial sculptures.

  Live Through This came out a week after Cobain's death on DGC, a Geffen subsidiary. On the 16th of June, Pfaff died of a heroin overdose in Seattle. For the coming tour Love recruited the Canadian bassist Melissa Auf der Maur. The album went platinum by April 1995, and Love appeared on Barbara Walters' list of the 10 Most Fascinating People that year.

  The attention was not all kind. At a Boston show in December 1994, one journalist reported, Love broke off the music to talk about her dead husband and to rant. In January 1995 she was arrested in Melbourne for disrupting a Qantas flight. On the 4th of July 1995, at the Lollapalooza Festival in George, Washington, she threw a lit cigarette at the musician Kathleen Hanna and punched her, then pleaded guilty to assault and was sentenced to anger management classes. Love later said she remembered little of 1994 and 1995, because she had been using large quantities of heroin and Rohypnol.

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• 5. Screen Presence

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  In 1985 Love sent an audition tape for the role of Nancy Spungen in the Sid Vicious biopic Sid and Nancy. She had studied film at the San Francisco Art Institute under the experimental director George Kuchar and appeared in his short film Club Vatican. She had also taken theater classes in Oakland taught by Whoopi Goldberg. Director Alex Cox gave her a small supporting part. After filming in New York City she worked at a Times Square peep show and squatted at the ABC No Rio social center and the Pyramid Club.

  Cox then cast her in a leading role in Straight to Hell (1987), a spaghetti western shot in Spain in 1986 with Joe Strummer, Dennis Hopper and Grace Jones. Critics disliked it, but it caught the eye of Andy Warhol, who featured Love in an episode of Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes. In 1988 she appeared as a bride among the party guests in the Ramones video for "I Wanna Be Sedated."

  The fame felt like a trap. Love disliked being a "celebutante," quit acting in 1988 and went back to stripping in Oregon. A customer recognized her at a bar in the small town of McMinnville, and she fled to Anchorage, Alaska. There she lived for three months in a trailer with other strippers, worked at a club frequented by local fishermen, and described the whole episode as a "sort of vision quest."

  She came back to film in 1996, first in small roles in Basquiat and Feeling Minnesota. Then came Miloš Forman's The People vs. Larry Flynt, in which she played Flynt's wife, Althea. Forman insisted that she get clean, and Columbia Pictures ordered supervised urine tests during filming, which she passed. The studio had hesitated to hire her because of her past. The performance earned a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress and a New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Supporting Actress. Roger Ebert wrote that she was "not a rock star pretending to act, but a true actress." She also modeled in ad campaigns for Versace and in Vogue Italia, and she dated her co-star Edward Norton until 1999.

  Bigger productions followed. In Man on the Moon (1999) she played Lynne Margulies opposite Jim Carrey, and in Beat (2000) she played Joan Vollmer, the wife of William S. Burroughs, alongside Kiefer Sutherland. She dropped out of John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars after injuring her foot. In Julie Johnson (2001), opposite Lili Taylor, she played a woman who begins a lesbian relationship, and she won an Outstanding Actress award at Outfest in Los Angeles. The thriller Trapped (2002), with Kevin Bacon and Charlize Theron, was a box-office flop.

  Television brought her back in 2014, with parts in Sons of Anarchy, Revenge and Lee Daniels' Empire, where she played the recurring character Elle Dallas. Her track "Walk Out on Me" appeared on the Empire soundtrack, which debuted at number one on the Billboard 200. In January 2015 she starred in the New York stage production Kansas City Choir Boy. In June 2017 she appeared as Kitty Menendez in the Lifetime film Menendez: Blood Brothers. Her supporting role in James Franco's The Long Home was her first film part in more than ten years, and as of 2022 it remains unreleased.

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• 6. Celebrity Skin and After

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  In September 1998 Hole released Celebrity Skin, its third album and a sharp turn toward power pop. Love said she wanted a record where "art meets commerce," with no compromises. She cited Neil Young, Fleetwood Mac and My Bloody Valentine as influences, and Billy Corgan co-wrote several songs. Rolling Stone called it "accessible, fiery and intimate." The album went multi-platinum and topped best-of-year lists at Spin and The Village Voice. Its title track became Hole's only number-one single on the Modern Rock Tracks chart, and the band earned three Grammy nominations at the 41st ceremony.

  Before the record appeared, Love had worked with Fender to design a low-priced Squier guitar called the Vista Venus. Its shape drew on a rare Mercury guitar, the Stratocaster and Rickenbacker solid bodies. It had one single-coil and one humbucker pickup and came in six-string and twelve-string versions. Love wanted something warm and pop-sounding that needed just one pedal to turn dirty and that a beginner could use as a first band guitar.

  In 1999 Hole joined Marilyn Manson on the Beautiful Monsters Tour but left after nine shows. Love and Manson disagreed over production costs, and an Interscope Records agreement had forced Hole into the opening slot. Love later added that she objected to how Manson and Korn treated teenage girls in their audiences, some of whom she said were as young as fourteen or fifteen. That same year she received an Orville H. Gibson award for Best Female Rock Guitarist.

  Hole then went quiet. In March 2001 Love started a "punk rock femme supergroup" called Bastard with Schemel, Veruca Salt's Louise Post and bassist Gina Crosley. They recorded a demo, but by September Post and Crosley had left, and Post cited unhealthy and unprofessional working conditions. In May 2002 Hole announced its breakup amid ongoing litigation with Universal Music Group over its record contract.

  Love began writing with the songwriter Linda Perry and signed with Virgin Records in July 2003. Her first solo album, America's Sweetheart, was recorded in France and released in February 2004 to mixed reviews. Charles Aaron of Spin gave it eight out of ten, and it sold fewer than 100,000 copies. Soon after its release she told TRL, "I cannot exist as a solo artist. It's a joke."

  A second solo record, How Dirty Girls Get Clean, never appeared under that name. In June 2009 NME reported that Love planned to reunite Hole and release an album called Nobody's Daughter. Erlandson told Spin that no reunion could happen contractually without him, so the album would be a solo record. Love answered on Twitter that "Hole is my band, my name, and my Trademark." Nobody's Daughter came out as a Hole album on the 27th of April 2010 with a new lineup of Micko Larkin, Shawn Dailey and Stu Fisher. It reworked songs from the shelved solo project and leaned toward polished folk rock, and reviews were mixed.

  She toured the album into late 2012, then continued as a solo act. She sang on "Rio Grande" with Michael Stipe and co-wrote "Rat A Tat" for Fall Out Boy. In May 2014 she released "You Know My Name" and "Wedding Day" on her own label, Cherry Forever Records, with Tommy Lee on drums. She also told the BBC that she and Erlandson had reconciled and were rehearsing, though she would not confirm a Hole reunion.

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• 7. Trouble and Recovery

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  On the 17th of March 2004 Love appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman, lifted her shirt several times and stood on his desk. Hours later she was arrested in Manhattan for allegedly hitting a fan with a microphone stand at an East Village concert. She was released within hours and played the Bowery Ballroom the next evening. On her 40th birthday in July she was arrested for missing a court date and taken to Bellevue Hospital, where she was placed on a 72-hour watch. Doctors judged her mentally sound and sent her to a rehab facility two days later. In October she pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct.

  The trouble had started the year before. In February 2003 Love was arrested at Heathrow Airport for disrupting a flight and was banned from Virgin Airlines. In October she was arrested in Los Angeles after breaking windows at the home of her producer and then-boyfriend James Barber, and she temporarily lost custody of her daughter.

  August 2005 brought her appearance on the Comedy Central Roast of Pamela Anderson, where she looked intoxicated and disheveled. Six days after it aired she was sentenced to a 28-day lockdown rehab program for violating her probation. To avoid jail she accepted a further 180 days that September. She left in November 2005 on the condition that she complete outpatient treatment. Love has named prescription drugs, cocaine and crack cocaine among her addictions. She says she has been sober since 2007 and credits her Soka Gakkai Buddhist practice, begun in 1988.

  Writing kept her afloat. In rehab she wrote the anti-cocaine song "Loser Dust." She told Billboard that her hand-eye coordination had been so poor that she barely remembered chords and that she never thought she would work again. Between 2004 and 2006 she co-created three volumes of the manga Princess Ai with Stu Levy, and in 2006 she published a memoir, Dirty Blonde. A British documentary, The Return of Courtney Love, followed the making of her next record.

  Her words online brought lawsuits. In March 2009 the fashion designer Dawn Simorangkir sued over a post on Love's Twitter account, and the case settled for $450,000. In January 2014 Love's former attorney Rhonda Holmes sued for $8 million. It was the first alleged Twitter libel case in the United States to reach trial, and the jury found in Love's favor. A second suit from Simorangkir in February 2014 ended with Love ordered to pay $350,000.

  The business of Nirvana also became a fight. In 1997 Love, Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl formed Nirvana LLC to manage the band's affairs. In June 2001 Love sued to dissolve it, which blocked the release of unreleased Nirvana material and delayed the compilation With the Lights Out. Grohl and Novoselic countersued, calling her "irrational, mercurial, self-centered, unmanageable, inconsistent and unpredictable." Love replied in a letter that "Kurt Cobain was Nirvana" and that she and his family were the "rightful heirs."

  In December 2018 Love won a restraining order against Sam Lutfi, her manager of six years, alleging verbal abuse and harassment. Her daughter and her sister won orders as well. A Los Angeles County judge extended hers to five years in January 2019, citing his tendency to "prey upon people." In September 2019 Love said she had relapsed into opioid addiction in 2018 and had recently marked a year of sobriety. In March 2021 she revealed that acute anemia had hospitalized her in August 2020 and nearly killed her. She made a full recovery.

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• 8. Voice and Legacy

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  The first album Love ever owned was Leonard Cohen's Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967), which her mother gave her. She loved how lyric-conscious and morbid it was, and she called herself a pretty morbid kid. At fifteen she saw the Virgin Prunes in Dublin, a show she credited as pivotal. In 2021 she pushed back on the idea that she was stuck in punk and 1995. She said post-punk and new wave mattered more to her, named Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart" her favorite song, and said Echo and the Bunnymen affected her even more than Cohen or Bob Dylan.

  Love has said lyrics matter most to her, and that they have to look good on the page. She has named T. S. Eliot and Charles Baudelaire as influences, and her songs refer to Shakespeare, Kipling and Anne Sexton. Critic Simon Reynolds judged her songs to cover "the full spectrum of female emotions, from vulnerability to rage," and called her style "emotional nudism." Early themes included body image, rape, suicide, pregnancy and death. Later records, notably Celebrity Skin and America's Sweetheart, turned toward celebrity life, Hollywood and drug addiction.

  She has a contralto voice and says she never wanted to be a singer at all. She wanted to be a skilled guitarist but was the only person with the nerve to sing. David Fricke of Rolling Stone called her voice "a corrosive, lunatic wail," and in 2023 Rolling Stone ranked her number 130 on its list of the 200 greatest singers. From 1989 to 1991 she mostly played a Rickenbacker 425 because she liked its three-quarter-length neck, until she smashed it at a 1991 concert opening for the Smashing Pumpkins. A vintage 1965 Fender Jazzmaster she owned is now on display at the Hard Rock Cafe in New York City.

  Her causes have included music-industry reform. In a 2000 letter published by Salon she argued that the real piracy was committed by company executives who made side deals with label lawyers, not by fans swapping songs online. She has long supported LGBT causes, working with the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center on its "An Evening with Women" events. She has also supported amfAR, the RED Campaign and the Sophie Lancaster Foundation. In 2011 she donated six of Cobain's vinyl records to a Joyful Heart Foundation auction. In 2021 she and Julie Panebianco launched From Her To Eternity, a collection celebrating women in popular music. Its first project, a photography exhibition, stood in Chicago's South Loop in summer 2023. Love named it in tribute to the late singer-songwriter Anita Lane.

  One famous remark sums up her influence: "I want every girl in the world to pick up a guitar and start screaming." Hole sold more than three million records in the United States, making it one of the most successful female-fronted rock bands. The look critics dubbed "kinderwhore," with babydoll dresses and smeared lipstick, became hers. Kurt Loder described her as looking like "a debauched rag doll." She said her angle was irony. Patti Smith, one of her own heroes, said she had never heard a girl sing the way Love did. Florence Welch, Lana Del Rey, Avril Lavigne and Brody Dalle of the Distillers have cited her as an influence. In 2020 NME gave her its Icon Award, calling her one of the most influential singers in alternative culture of the last thirty years.

  A 2005 video of Love warning young actresses about Harvey Weinstein went viral in October 2017, after the Weinstein abuse cases became public. She later said she was banned by Creative Artists Agency for speaking out. In 2022 she announced the completion of a new memoir, The Girl with the Most Cake, after nearly a decade of writing. On Petrichor, a 2024 album by the rapper 070 Shake, she sang on "Song to the Siren." In December 2025 it was announced that a documentary about her, Antiheroine, would premiere at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. It follows her sobriety and the recording of her forthcoming album after her 2019 move to London.

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