FOLLOW US ON:
GET THE NEWSLETTER
CONTACT US
Courtney Love, then just 20, fronting Faith No More in 1984
09.28.2017
07:59 am
Topics:
Tags:


Courtney Love performing with Faith No More in 1984.
 
I’ve said it before—the 80s were a weird fucking time man. A perfect example of the WTF the 80s routinely served up to us is the time that Courtney Love became the vocalist for Faith No More for approximately six months beginning sometime in February of 1984.

According to Billy Gould, one of the founding members of Faith No More, Love was very “extroverted” and had no problem getting confrontational with the band’s fans during live gigs—which according to FNM’s bassist, was one of the reasons people hated her. But the band didn’t hate it, they ate it up and let that rage coagulate with their music to achieve a more aggressive sound. Here’s Gould on Love’s time with FNM:

“We really wanted to be aggressive, make ambient music that was totally aggressive. This girl Courtney came along, and she saw us play and made the huge pitch about knowing what we wanted and being able to do it. She stayed for about three or four shows, and she was good because she was annoying as hell and really aggressive.”

That all sounds about right, doesn’t it? Here’s more insight on the FNM era of Courtney Love from keyboardist Roddy Bottum who also dated Love for a brief time:

“She sang with us for probably six months. She was an awesome performer; she liked to sing in her nightgown, adorned with flowers. We were switching around singers a whole lot at that point, but she was really good. She did a lot of screaming stuff, and we had a lot of slow melody stuff too. When she sang with us, she was punk rock: now she says she’s always been punk rock, which is not true at all. After she left our band (Faith No More) she was totally into—I mean, with a sense of humor, but really hardcore pop sorta stuff. We all were at that point. I mean, we used to do a cover version of Van Halen’s “Jump.”

Well, there you have it, whether you want it or not. Following Love’s departure from FNM San Francisco musician Paula Frazer joined the band for what is said to be a total of two shows and was then replaced by Chuck Mosley who stuck with the FNM until 1988 when he was fired following a string of incidents involving booze and bare-knuckle brawls. Now that we cleared all that up, let’s address what Courtney Love sounded like fronting FNM when she was just twenty? As you know, I have many thoughts on many things, and this topic is no exception. Even though I’ve heard through the grapevine that Love is NOT a fan of her work with FNM, I’m going to keep my opinions to myself for a change and leave the final verdict up to our DM readers who are brave enough to hit “play” after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Cherrybomb
|
09.28.2017
07:59 am
|
Sugar Baby Doll: The best or worst ‘supergroup’ that never happened?
07.14.2016
12:31 pm
Topics:
Tags:

Sugar Baby Doll
 
It is no secret that there is a long history between Courtney Love of Hole and Kat Bjelland of Babes in Toyland. Today we would call them frenemies. The two women met in Portland in the early 1980s, hit it off immediately and decided to play music together. In 1985 the pair recruited Jennifer Finch (an old friend of Love’s from LA) and started a band called Sugar Baby Doll. While that is a lot of strong personalities packed into one band, grunge and kinderwhore fans would freak out at the thought of seeing these three women live on stage together.

However, apparently the band was quite the opposite of legendary. Love was quoted in Courtney Love: The Real Story by Poppy Z. Brite as saying this about the supergroup that wasn’t:

“We were going to make the most obnoxious music in the world… However, I had a doctor who gave me a hundred sedatives a week. So we ended up making this sort of faux Cocteau Twins music but I didn’t really have the voice, and I was singing in a register way too high for me.”

Sounds kinda terrifying coming from the queens of 90s grunge, doesn’t it?

The band was short lived, mostly it appears due to Love’s drug consumption. Kat Bjelland said on VH1’s Behind the Music about working with Love:

“Every time she would do (drugs) she would take all of her clothes off, walk in circles, talk about stuff, not play music.”

These disruptive band practices and fighting among the group ended the project. This is probably a good thing because Courtney Love went on to form Hole, Kat Bjelland started Babes in Toyland and Jennifer Finch joined L7. We got three great bands when we would have been stuck with just one. And of course, the “War of the Schmatte” began when Love and Bjelland argued over who created the kinderwhore look or who stole it from whom.

More after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Izzi Krombholz
|
07.14.2016
12:31 pm
|
This isn’t a ‘shred’ video: Hear Courtney Love’s horrible isolated vocal and guitar track
09.09.2014
09:55 am
Topics:
Tags:


 
Here’s Courtney Love performing “Celebrity Skin” in 2010 live at Don Hill’s in NYC and holy WOW WOW…. this is just truly awful. Love’s vocals aren’t the worst here, but that guitar! Was it not tuned properly before she played? Or does she just not even know how to make a bar chord?

According to YouTube uploader J.M. Ladd:

“I was hired through the venue to record this show (including many others throughout that week) and was then left standing with a hard drive and an invoice no one seemed to want.”

He then goes on to write:

“To address the most obvious, inevitable question that I will be asked… this is not fake. Whether you think she’s the worst or this just makes her all the more “punk rock” is for you to decide. I’m merely presenting the facts as they are. Make of them what you will.”

She’s no Linda McCartney that Courtney, eh?

 
via Noisey

Posted by Tara McGinley
|
09.09.2014
09:55 am
|
Career R.I.P. T-shirts


 
What a brilliantly nasty concept, a Tumblr with T-shirts announcing when Macaulay Culkin or Harrison Ford started, and more importantly stopped, being relevant. I’m not real clear if there are actual T-shirts to be purchased yet, if you “get in touch @CareerRIP” you’ll get “details on how to get your hands on a T-shirt.” 

As it says on the Tumblr, “CareerRIP is a tribute to our passed heroes whose careers have sadly left us. We celebrate their brightest hours through a series of limited edition T-shirts.”
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
via Das Kraftfuttermischwerk

Posted by Martin Schneider
|
08.25.2014
09:45 am
|
Debbie Harry, Ramones, Nick Rhodes, Courtney Love and more on MTV’s ‘Andy Warhol’s 15 Minutes’


 
In December of 2010, I visited the Andy Warhol Enterprises exhibit then being held at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. It was an excellent full-career retrospective, loaded with rare goodies, and generously tilted toward his early, pre-Factory commercial work, which I prefer to his more famous silkscreens (commence calling for my skull on a pike, I don’t care). But as much as I was enjoying the early books and the blotted-ink drawings of shoes, I was surprised by a trip down amnesia lane that came at the end of the exhibit, a video installation of one of Warhol’s last projects, the show he produced and co-hosted (with Debbie Harry) for MTV called Andy Warhol’s 15 Minutes. The name of the show referred to Warhol’s famous quip “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” Episodes of the program were actually 30 minutes in length. #themoreyouknow
 

Warhol with Debbie Harry, dressed by Stephen Sprouse.
 
I was an arty kid, so I knew perfectly well who Warhol was (some of my friends only learned of his existence from that show, believe it or not), and so I never missed it. Though it wasn’t too hard to catch them all—as the series was prematurely ended by Warhol’s 1987 death, there were only five episodes, the last of which was mainly a memorial. But while it was on, it was glorious. Although the program featured lots of marquee names, befitting Warhol’s obsession with celebrity and celebrities, it also highlighted NYC downtown fashion, art, and music phenomena. Mind-expanding stuff for a midwestern kid, and stuff which would have otherwise been entirely inaccessible, since Warhol’s previous television ventures, Fashion and Andy Warhol’s TV, were limited to NYC cable.

And unless you visit the Warhol Museum or a traveling retrospective, the program itself is now pretty well inaccessible. Few things have been more damnably hard to find streaming than episodes of 15 Minutes, and to my complete bafflement, the Warhol Museum store doesn’t offer a home video. Much of what little can be found is fuzzy VHS home recordings, but it gives an adequate taste of how deep the show could go—and remember, this was on MTV.
 

 

 
It gets a good bit better with this clip of Duran Duran’s Nick Rhodes taking the viewer on a tour of Manhattan nightclubs The Palladium and AREA (note future Twin Peaks actor Michael J. Anderson as the garden gnome.)
 

 
KONK were an amazing dance-punk band of the era. You may recognize the drummer, Richard Edson, an original member of Sonic Youth, and co-star of the Jim Jarmusch film Stranger Than Paradise.
 

 
This Ramones interview ends with a live, not lip-synced, performance of “Bonzo Goes To Bitburg.”

 
The last bit footage I’ve found is a jaw-dropper—an interview segment with a 21ish, pre-fame Courtney Love!
 

Posted by Ron Kretsch
|
06.25.2014
09:49 am
|
Has Courtney Love found Flight 370???
03.17.2014
04:52 pm
Topics:
Tags:


 
Courtney Love posted this to her Facebook page 11 hours ago. I’ve got nuthin’ else to add.

I’m no expert but up close this does look like a plane and an oil slick. http://www.tomnod.com/nod/challenge/malaysiaairsar2014/map/128148 … prayers go out to the families #MH370 and its like a mile away Pulau Perak, where they “last” tracked it 5°39’08.5"N 98°50’38.0"E but what do I know?

Courtney Love on Facebook

Via METRO

Posted by Tara McGinley
|
03.17.2014
04:52 pm
|
Andy Kershaw: The Rolling Stones Guide to Painting & Decorating

image
 
Andy Kershaw is a writer, a multi-award-winning broadcaster (he once shared an office with John Peel for 12 years, and has won more Sony Radio Awards than any other broadcaster, and was one of the presenters on Live Aid). He is also a foreign correspondent, who eye-witnessed and reported on the Rwandan genocide. His fearlessness as a reporter saw him banned from Malawi under the dictatorship of Dr Hastings Banda.

But that’s only part of this Lancastrian’s incredible story.

Kershaw has worked for Bruce Springsteen; was Billy Bragg’s driver, roadie and tour manager; went on a blind date with a then unknown Courtney Love (to see Motorhead); was propositioned by both Little Richard and Frankie Howerd; spent a week riding out with Sonny Barger and the Oakland Hell’s Angels; went with Red Adair and Boots Hansen to the burning oil well-heads in Kuwait in 1991; and was immortalised by Nick Hornby in High Fidelity, which was later filmed with John Cusack.

This has made Andy Kershaw a bit of a legendary figure—a kind of distant British relative to Hunter S Thompson. This and much more can be found in Kershaw’s excellent autobiography No Off Switch, which I can thoroughly recommend.

But let’s go back to 1982, when Kershaw was working for The Rolling Stones, as Andy explains by way of introduction to this extract from No Off Switch:

I had been, for the past two years, the Entertainments Secretary of Leeds University, booking all the bands and organising and running the concerts, at the largest college venue in the UK. Although non sabbatical and unpaid, I devoted all my time and energies to the job. We enjoyed a reputation - among bands, booking agents and management companies - as a highly professional operation with a long and rich history of running prestigious gigs. I had built up a good working relationship with the major UK concert promoters and, with my Leeds University stage crew, I was often hired by those companies to work on big concerts elsewhere. In the spring of 1982, I took a call in the Ents Office in the Students’ Union, from Andrew Zweck, right-hand man to Harvey Goldsmith, the UK’s biggest concert promoter at the time. “Andy,” said Andrew. “Would you like to work for the Rolling Stones this summer? And could you bring Leeds Uni’s stage crew with you?” Al, referred to in this extract, is Al Thompson, my friend and right-hand man in running the Leeds University concerts. Now read on…

The Rolling Stones Guide to Painting & Decorating

Already the size of an aircraft carrier, the stage was only partially built when we arrived.

Members of Stage Crew, like the remnants of a rebel patrol, were threading their way down through the trees, into the natural bowl of Roundhay Park, and gathering behind the vast scaffolding framework.

A couple of dozen articulated lorries, and a similar number of empty flat-beds were parked up in neat lines. More were rumbling into the park.

We squinted up at the riggers, chatting and clanking, swinging and building, climbing higher on their Meccano as they worked.

“Fuck,” said Al. And we all concurred with his expert analysis.

It was an impressive erection, even for Mick Jagger. And, at that time, the biggest stage that had ever been built, anywhere in the world.

Roundhay, in Leeds, in front of 120,000 fans, was to be the final date on the Rolling Stones European Tour, 1982, which broke records, set standards and established precedents on a scale never seen before. The logistics alone were mind-boggling.

If the scale of the infrastructure being unloaded before our eyes in Roundhay was extraordinary, there had to be - for the Stones to play a handful of consecutive dates in new locations - three of these set-ups on the road, and leap-frogging each other, at the same time: one under construction, a second ready for the gig; and a third being dismantled following the previous performance. We were just a fraction of the total operation.

To meet the backstage requirements at Roundhay, I was to be in charge of those logistics and grandly titled, for the next three weeks, Backstage Labour Co-ordinator.

It was reassuring to find a couple of familiar and friendly faces in the Portakabin offices which had been plonked down overlooking the grassy slope of what would become the backstage area. Andrew Zweck from Goldsmith’s office, and Harvey’s earthly representative during the build-up at Leeds, is a bluff, blond Australian with a reputation for getting things done. Uncommonly, for the music business, Andrew is good-humoured and devoid of self-importance. Similarly, Paul Crockford – Andrew’s assistant for the Roundhay gig.

Dear old Crockers was about the only bloke in the music industry that I actually considered to be a pal. Just a few years old than me, and a former Ents Sec at Southampton, he was now working in a freelance capacity for Harvey Goldsmith’s concert promotion company.

A tour of the Rolling Stones magnitude had required the UK’s biggest promoter to be co-opted as the British servant of the the overall mastermind of the enterprise, the legendary hippy impresario and pioneer, Bill Graham. In fact, this Rolling Stones adventure – taking in Europe and the States over two years - was the first time one promoter had staged a whole tour, globally. Graham’s experiment with the Stones, in 1981-2, would become the model for the industry in years to come. For the moment, however, in this previously uncharted territory, Graham and Goldsmith were making it up as they went along.

Crockers - even when he was ripping me off, selling me bands for the University - is always huge fun. Like Andrew Zweck, he doesn’t know how to be pompous. And like me, Crockers is amused most by the ridiculous and the absurd. This was to be a quality we would find indispensable over the following couple of weeks.

“That’s your desk,” said Andrew, pointing to a freshly-acquired bargain, in simulated teak finish, from some second-hand office supplies outlet. My position was in the middle of our HQ, handily by the door, and with a window overlooking the side of the stage and the slope leading down to where the dressing rooms and band’s hospitality area hadn’t yet been built. I could keep an eye on everything.

Crockers dumped in front me a telephone, a heavy new ledger and a cash box containing five hundred pounds before briefly outlining the mysteries of double-entry book keeping.

It started to rain.

A stocky, bearded little bloke soon popped up at the door.

“Hey, you,” he said. “Who’s the guy around here in charge of all the purchases.” The accent was American.

“Me,” I said. “Mine name’s Andy. Who are you?”

“Magruder,” he snapped, as though he was a brand. And one that I should recognise.

“What’s your job here?” I asked.

“Site Co-ordinator, Rolling Stones.” It crossed my mind it was unlikely he’d have been there for The Tremeloes. “Get me fifty pairs of Hunter’s boots and fifty waterproof capes,” he snapped.

And he was gone.

 
image
 
More from The Rolling Stones Guide to Painting & Decorating, after the jump…
 
With kind thanks to Andy Kershaw
 

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
|
02.08.2013
04:18 pm
|
The Fall’s Mark E. Smith does his Courtney Love impersonation, 1994
11.05.2012
11:43 am
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
From Mick Middles’ 1994 documentary on The Fall’s early years.

I nearly spit out my coffee when I watched Mr. Smith’s spot-on impersonation of Courtney Love.

I don’t think the perpetually drunken Mancunian elf-lord had much love for Los Angeles, either.

 
With thanks to Xela Ttun!

Posted by Tara McGinley
|
11.05.2012
11:43 am
|