Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [228]
COURTNEY LOVE I’ll tell you this, if you go and you watch a Hole show—and this happens to this day—after we get offstage, there’s this little contingent of boys. They’re wearing fuzzy little sweaters and somebody at their school has told them that they look like Kurt, and they stand there and they stare at me. I don’t know what they want. They don’t want to fuck me. But it is one of the strangest phenomena you’ll ever see. They’re like wounded children and they just want a hug or something. I don’t understand the cult of that, and I’ve asked my guitarist Micko, because he’s English and he grew up with the NME, “What is it about Kurt that you fucking think is so great?”
“ ’Cause he’s just fuckin’ really cool, man.”
I’m like, “What, because he killed himself? That’s cool? I have a daughter who’s fucking never known her father and you think that’s cool?”
But there’s a part of rock journalism, like possibly yourself, that thinks that’s really cool. In fact, the NME had Kurt on the cover very recently, with fucking free color-poster pullouts of dead rock stars.
Well, it’s not fuckin’ cool. It is a cult of death.
KEVIN MARTIN Our album came out in July ’93, and it exploded that summer. We first met Madonna at a dinner in New York in March of ’94. We went to Sfuzzi, an Italian place by her apartment on Central Park West. She was 30 minutes late. All she talked about was sex.
The rest of the band was there, but she just talked to me the whole time. She goes, “Are you a good dancer?” She was sitting right next to me. “You can tell a lot about how somebody fucks by the way they dance.”
I’ll never forget her saying that. She was very much a provocateur.
SCOTT MERCADO It was weird because she was actually kinda quiet. But then Kevin was talking, and he tends to dominate the conversation. And one point, he poked fun at her for a brief second—I wish I could remember what it was about—and I remember her smiling and saying, “Don’t quit your day job,” in reference, of course, to the fact that she owned the record label.
KEVIN MARTIN Afterwards, she invited us back to her apartment. We all went. Her place was fucking incredible: Degas, Chagalls, Monets, Picassos—you name it, it was all there, hanging on the wall. She had a Steinway in the main living room. It was immaculate.
SCOTT MERCADO I was so naive and I’d never seen a bidet before, so I said, “What’s this for?” And at the top of her lungs, Madonna goes, “IT’S A PUSSY WASH!”
BARDI MARTIN The thing that struck me the most was she had a really tiny painting on one of her walls by Dalí, maybe six by eight inches. I just remember spending quite a bit of time just looking at it, and it was beautiful.
KEVIN MARTIN At the end, she said, “Okay, I’ll see you guys tomorrow. And you, stay”—or “Why don’t you stick around for a little bit?” It could have been for a cup of coffee, but you know exactly what she was talking about.
BARDI MARTIN I didn’t witness any of that. I was staring at that painting.
SCOTT MERCADO There was a little bit of flirtation there, yeah. I mean, it was all in good fun; it wasn’t serious. She’s very personable that way.
KEVIN MARTIN I said, “Look, you know I can’t stay. I’ve got a show at Madison Square Garden tomorrow”—we were opening for Rush—“that I’m nervous as hell about. I’m going to bed.” If I’d have been single I would’ve been like, “Sure,” but the girl I was dating at the time I was crazy about—and she happened to be Madonna and Freddy’s assistant at the label. She ended up becoming my wife. Did Madonna know about me and Renee then? Oh, yeah. Did Renee ever get wind of this? Yep.
At the time, the other assistant who was there was looking at me like, What are you doing? It was very strange. It’s very Italian, like a “You don’t tell