Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [105]
COURTNEY LOVE (singer/guitarist for Los Angeles’s Hole; Kurt Cobain’s widow; Frances Bean Cobain’s mother; actress) In any scene I’ve been in, whether it’s Minneapolis or Liverpool or Seattle or Portland or L.A. or New York, I’ve always been the fucking most ambitious one in some weird way. And I’ve always been the one that didn’t really fit in with what everyone else was doing, and I’m pretty proud of that. We were not grunge. The bands that were labeled that were Mudhoney and Nirvana, Soundgarden, TAD, that shit. Sometimes, when it was all “grunge this” and “grunge that,” I wished we were a grunge band, because we would maybe sell more. At the same time, the name was always retarded and I knew it would date, and that’s the last thing a prodigious person needs.
But Hole wasn’t grunge. I wasn’t allowed to be then, why should I be ghettoized now? No, I’m asking you, it’s not a rhetorical question. You find me one fuckin’ article that says that Hole was a grunge band in 1991, ’92, ’93, ’94, or ’95 and I’ll give you a hundred bucks.
ERIC ERLANDSON (guitarist for Los Angeles’s Hole) First we were called “foxcore” by Thurston Moore, and then we started to be lumped into Riot Grrrl. With the grunge thing, I always thought we weren’t really a part of it, but the press wanted a label, so eventually you’d start seeing in a magazine, like, “Grunge Rock: Hole.”
MEGAN JASPER Courtney would call all the time, and I would try not to talk to her all the time. There was nobody who wanted to talk to Courtney for the 48th time. Except we had this kid Rob who started at Sub Pop and had worked at Doctor Dream Records in Southern California. So we called him Doctor Dream, because he was kind of a nerdy kid. He was more than happy to talk to Courtney.
COURTNEY LOVE The two times I went to Seattle previous to being successful as a musician were really frightening. The first time there was a guy named Vinny up on Capitol Hill with a huge abscess in his leg, and then when I came down from Alaska, after I went up there to gather my thoughts, because I was 24 and if I hadn’t succeeded by the time I was 25 I was pretty much gonna jump off a roof. I spent three fuckin’ months in Alaska in the dark, in a trailer writing lyrics and working a fuckin’ six-hour shift at PJ’s, a strip club that fishermen go to.
I got off the bus in Seattle and saw a U-Men poster and a Mudhoney poster, and I got one block from the Greyhound station and went, “No way. They will throw me out of town or I will die.” So I got back on that bus. Why? Just instinct, man. Just instinct. I felt like it was a dangerous place. It’s got death in it. For someone like you, it probably appears to be a nice town. Like it’s all holistic and trees and arboretums. Bullshit! What I know about Seattle is dark, dark drug stuff, dark, dark money stuff. Fuckin’ lumber, fuckin’ corruption, fuckin’ heroin, fuckin’ scary!
MEGAN JASPER We told Courtney that Bruce and Jon weren’t doing A&R anymore, that Doctor Dream was doing it, and we would just direct her calls to him. I really got the sense that he enjoyed chatting with her. She is bright and funny. It’s not like she was horrible and screaming at us. That came afterwards, when thankfully I wasn’t there.
NILS BERNSTEIN The heart of Sub Pop was always the receptionist. It was Megan for a while, and then it was Kim Warnick from the Fastbacks. When I think of Sub Pop back then, I think of Megan. Megan and Kim have similar styles, as