Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [180]
DANNY GOLDBERG I remember visiting Courtney in the hospital after Frances was born, and the article had just come out. She was sobbing. She said, “Things will never be the same, this is terrible. Don’t give me your optimistic shit!”
The social services got involved and there was a question of whether they were fit parents, and Courtney had to go to the welfare office a few times and show that she wasn’t on drugs. Her sister had to be flown down to temporarily help look after the baby. It was three or four weeks of tremendous anxiety.
JANET BILLIG Courtney never shared drugs with me; I never saw her doing drugs. I don’t know. She was pregnant, she had her baby. I have no idea. I know she smoked in front of people when she was pregnant.
When Franny was like two and three and developing, whenever she dropped a pencil, we were like, “Oh, my God, was Courtney doing drugs?!” You’d question. But Franny’s fine. She’s smart. She’s a great kid.
AMY FINNERTY The Lynn Hirschberg article came out, and the MTV News department was going to run a piece on it. I took it to John Cannelli, who at that point was my boss, and I said, “We can’t run this. You have to bury this. This is not a story about music, it’s a gossip story, and this is gonna be detrimental to the relationship between us and this band.” He said he would talk to Dave Sirulnick, who was running the news department at that point, and see what he could do. The story ran, and it made them mad. MTV just rereported what was in the Vanity Fair piece, but it was on MTV, which all the band’s fans watched, so it made the story bigger than it initially would have been.
Now I look back and realize that, of course, my position was skewed by my personal relationship with the subject, but at the same time, my position was always, “This isn’t a music-based story.” If we decided not to run it, it’s not like we were gonna miss the biggest music story in the world. At that point, I don’t think that Kurt Cobain understood that Kurt Loder didn’t really make those decisions, and so he placed the blame on Kurt Loder.
KURT LODER (MTV News anchor) I read somewhere that Kurt hated Lynn Hirschberg and me more than anyone else in the world, and I got that book, his notebooks, and I just didn’t find that in there. I know Lynn Hirschberg. She’s a really good reporter, and maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not, but Lynn Hirschberg’s not some hack. You can’t just say, “I’m not gonna cover this because Nirvana might be mad.” And, you know, it could have happened—let’s be honest.
COURTNEY LOVE It’s not about the paragraph about the heroin. I don’t give a fuck. Forget that I did heroin in the first trimester of my pregnancy, because I did, that’s no big deal. I didn’t do it knowingly, of course. That would be a pretty vile thing to do. I don’t think I’d be capable of it. I did it within the first trimester, until I took a pregnancy test. After that, I did not do it again. It’s that simple.
I don’t give a fuck, but the rest of it involves fucking my child, it involved fucking my husband. The tone of it was irresponsible, that tone was incorrect, and that tone emasculated a man. Read it. It makes Kurt look like a fucking two-foot-tall, small-cocked beta male. I would have never married a beta male. Do I sound like the kind of bitch that would fuckin’ marry a beta male? I don’t like somebody that I can boss around. If I’m gonna fuck you, throw me around the fuckin’ room. If you can’t do that, then sorry, son, you’re out.
I don’t know what would happen if I ran into Lynn Hirschberg in polite society. I’m very, very good under pressure and in polite society, and generally I can’t even remember who I hate. I don’t hate that many people. But I mean, I’d knuckle-sandwich her if I saw her. She wouldn’t be able to walk.
EVERETT TRUE Reading ’92 was a very big deal. Sunday was Grunge Day. It was one of grunge’s high points for sure. It probably started to spiral downhill