By now, you probably heard that Courtney Love took some shots at Taylor Swift and Beyoncé.
In case you missed it, in a much re-reported interview with British publication The Standard, Love took aim at Swift, saying she "is not important" and added she "might be a safe space for girls, and she's probably the Madonna of now, but she's not interesting as an artist."
As for Beyoncé, Love applauded her "for doing a country record because it's about Black women going into spaces where previously only white women have been allowed, not that I like it much. As a concept, I love it. I just don't like her music."
I seriously doubt that Love's comments gave Taylor and Beyoncé a moment of pause, even if she is "Miss World" and the "girl with the most cake," they're two of the most successful artists of all time who are in the middle of thriving careers while Love has been mostly forgotten. But I still remember Courtney because I like her and her band Hole, and I too have been the victim of her wrath.
Not that I was the focus of her attention, but just collateral damage as she went off in a taped answering machine message to writer Victoria Clarke, who at the time was considering writing a book about Love and Kurt Cobain that both were quite upset about. Cobain threatened to kill her in a voicemail, according to Clarke.
As for Courtney, her message that briefly namechecks me was released on a CD in 1998 called Celebrities...At Their Worst! Bitch Bitch Bitch (Volume 2.9), though I didn't find out about it until a few years later.
Ken McCullagh knows me from my late best friend Joel Oberstein. They both worked at one point for the San Fernando Valley record store chain Tempo (which also employed Todd Sullivan, who signed Weezer to Geffen; Benji Gordon, who brought Soul Asylum to Columbia; and Mike Inez, who became the bass player in Alice in Chains). McCullagh taped the snippet of the phone message from that CD over a cassette single of Weezer's "Hash Pipe" and gave it to me. I'd pretty much forgotten about it, but I happened to come across it recently while looking for some cassettes of old interviews.
In the message, which has been uploaded to YouTube, Love uses explicit language to go off on Clarke as well as Lynn Hirschberg, the writer whose 1992 Vanity Fair piece claimed that Love was shooting heroin while pregnant with Frances Bean Cobain.
"What, Lynn Hirschberg has such a hot God damn interview?" Love fumes. "She didn't have any different interview than Everett or Jonathan Gold or f---ing Craig Rosen or anybody else."
The "Everett" Love mentioned is the British journalist who went by the name Everett True and wrote extensively for NME about the Seattle scene and later penned the book Nirvana: The True Story. The late Jonathan Gold covered music for the L.A. Weekly and other publications before he went on to become a Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic for the Los Angeles Times prior to his death in 2018. And then there's me. I'm in good company. I'm not sure why I got the f-bomb, but it was probably just for emphasis. I don't think Love has any ill will towards me (though I did quote the then-seven-months pregnant singer saying, "I just feel fat and hot, like I'm a bowling ball") and I'm not even sure if she'd remember the phone interview I did with her, but I do.
She had Frances Bean in utero and she and Cobain were watching Shakes the Clown, the 1991 film starring his friend Bobcat Goldthwait. After a brief chat, Love told me she'd have to call me back. She wanted to get some ice cream. I agreed but thought it would likely be the end of the interview, but Love called me back. I liked her. I felt empathy for her then, and after Cobain's suicide. I had a similar feeling when I interviewed Yoko Ono about John Lennon's death (whom, of course Love has been compared to) and Madonna, when she spoke about her breakup with Sean Penn.
The interview I did with Love was part of an October 1992 feature for the now defunct Musician magazine that paired Love with the Los Angeles-based all-female band L7 (Unfortunately, it's not available online). It was published with the headline: "Sisters Under the Grunge: L7 and Hole and the Future of Rock 'n' Roll." Love was not the lead of the story because I had to go with the more explosive L7, who threatened to find out where I lived and blow up my toilet after discovering that I planned to pair them in the feature with Love. They felt it was another dreaded "L.A. women in rock" piece (By the way, this was no secret. I had informed their publicist prior to the interview).
Which brings us back to Courtney, Taylor and Beyoncé. I like Taylor and Beyoncé. In a 2009 concert review, I wrote that Swift's song "Fifteen" "manages to split the difference both emotionally (and numerically) between Big Star's lost classic 'Thirteen' and Janis Ian's 'At Seventeen.'" That's high praise, but truth be told, Hole's 1984 album Live Through This probably means more to me than anything recorded by Swift or Beyoncé. Courtney's a true rock star and did a fine job acting in the 1996 film The People vs. Larry Flynt. I also enjoy her interviews and her strong opinions, yet if I had her ear, I'd ask her to hold off from slagging today's female superstars until she finally releases some new album. After all, it's been 14 years since Hole's Nobody's Daughter. As Joe Perry once sang -- with and without Aerosmith -- "Let the music do the talking!"
WARNING: THE CLIP BELOW INCLUDES EXPLICIT LANGUAGE
