The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [151]
And what if the kids just say, “We don’t dig it, get lost”?
Oh, well. [Laughs] Fuck ’em.
COURTNEY LOVE
by David Fricke
December 15, 1994
After everything that has happened to you this year, does it feel weird—or right—to be on tour playing rock & roll?
It was easier than staying home. I prefer this. I would like to think that I’m not getting the sympathy vote, and the only way to do that is to prove that what I’ve got is real. That was the whole point of Live Through This.
It feels normal to me. You just put one foot in front of the other. I don’t think about all the stuff that’s happened all the time. I don’t even know if I’m supposed to think about it—or if I’m not—or what I’m supposed to do. There’s no rule book or guide to what I’m supposed to do.
What goes through your mind when you’re onstage?
When the lights are blue and there are two of them in front of me, often they will symbolize Kurt’s eyes to me. That happens a lot. That happened to me when I used to strip. I had a friend who died, and he had almost-lavender eyes. There’d be these lights on, and I’d see that when the big purple lights came on.
So there’s that. The energy is reaching in. I know that wherever he is—whatever is left, whether it’s part of one egoless divinity or what—his energy is concentrated on me and on Frances. And it’s also concentrated on the cause and effect he’s had on the world.
Do you feel vulnerable in front of an audience, especially now?
I had this theory that the persona people project onstage is the exact opposite of who they are. In Kurt’s case, it was “Fuck you!” And ultimately his largest problem in life was not being able to say, “Fuck you.” “Fuck you, Courtney. Fuck you, Gold Mountain [Nirvana’s management firm]. Fuck you, Geffen—and I’m gonna do what I want.”
My thing is “Don’t fuck with me.” In real life, real real life, I’m supersensitive. But people tend to think I’m not vulnerable because I don’t act vulnerable.
It has been a year, almost to the day, since I interviewed Kurt. At the time, he told me he was happier than he’d ever been. And frankly, I believed him.
He probably was—at that moment. But his whole thing was “I’m only alive because of Frances and you.” Look at his interviews in your magazine alone. And everything in between. In each and every one he mentions blowing his head off.
He brought a gun to the hospital the day after our daughter was born. He was going to Reading [the Reading Festival, in England] the next morning. I was like, “I’ll go first. I can’t have you do it first. I go first.” I held this thing in my hand. And I felt that thing that they said in Schindler’s List: I’m never going to know what happens to me. And what about Frances? Sort of rude. “Oh, your parents died the day after you were born.”
I just started talking him out of it. And he said, “Fuck you, you can’t chicken out. I’m gonna do it.” But I made him give me the gun, and I had Eric [Erlandson, Hole guitarist] take it away. I don’t know what he did with it. Then Kurt went to some hospital room; he had some dealer come. In hospital, he almost died. The dealer said she’d never seen someone so, dead. I said, “Why didn’t you get a nurse? There’s nurses all over the place.”
And yet Kurt never lost faith in his ability to make music, even during the week before he died.
I never really heard him put that down. That was the one area that he wouldn’t touch like that. I got to sit and listen to this man serenade me. He told me the Meat Puppets’ second record was great. I couldn’t stand it. Then he played it to me—in his voice, his cadence, his timing. And I realized he was right.
The only time I asked him for a riff for one of my songs,