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Weekend Music Review: Guitarist talks about Courtney, Kurt, Marilyn and a brighter new sound
Friday, May 14, 1999 By Ed Masley, Post-Gazette Pop Music Critic
It's a Friday in April and Hole guitarist Eric Erlandson is counting down the hours to the launch of this year's second "Celebrity Skin" tour.
Where: I.C. Light Amphitheatre, Station Square.
With: Imperial Teen.
When: Tonight at 7:30 p.m.
Tickets: $24.50; 412-323-1919
The first one was doomed from the start -- a co-headlining nightmare pitting Courtney Love against the Antichrist Superstar, Marilyn Manson.
If you're reading this, you've no doubt heard at least one of the rumors floating around as to what caused Hole to bail on the tour in March after nine shows.
Was it the Manson family drugs? The kids in Manson makeup taunting Love? The unfair cost of sharing production expenses with an act whose stage show makes a Kiss tour look like Pavement?
The money was certainly part of the problem.
It was, says Erlandson, "a situation where personally I would probably have lost $100,000 on the tour. And that's for all the work of putting together an arena show."
And then, of course, you had the Manson audience.
"A lot of our audience, the younger kids, couldn't come to see the show," he says. "Their parents wouldn't let them go because we were playing with that band. So we ended up playing in front of a little bit more of their audience, which wasn't a good fit. It was kind of a schizophrenic show. And it was also like going backwards in time for us. It was like being thrown back into the wrestling world, where people have clown makeup on and people are coming to see the two clowns battle it out. And what we were trying to do with this new record was to separate ourselves from that, to move on and have some hope and positivity and light to what we're doing. And that put us right back into the darkness. A little darkness is OK, but that was a little too much."
Free of Manson, they're out on the road with Imperial Teen and a set list drawn primarily from their latest four-star effort, the poppy yet poignant "Celebrity Skin." Supporters from back in the day can also expect to hear their heroes blow the dust off a number of classics from their 1994 commercial breakthrough "Live Through This" and maybe even a song or two from "Pretty on the Inside," a sonic assault that arrived in 1991 to make good on the promise of two acerbic singles, "Retard Girl" and "Dicknail."
Only Erlandson and Love remain from the days of "Retard Girl."
They met, as is often the case, through the free-paper classified ads.
"It was almost 10 years ago now," says Erlandson, "at a time when it was all Guns 'N Roses and Poison and glam-type stuff in LA. Her ad was something like, 'Fleetwood Mac, Abba, the Stooges, Big Black,' or something, a weird mix of bands. It said 'female preferred,' but I just ignored that, because I got it right away. I understood it. So I had to answer it, no matter what they were looking for. And somehow, we hit it off."
By that point, Love had already asserted her presence on the San Francisco scene as a vocalist in Faith No More and the all-girl Sugar Baby Doll with Babes in Toyland's Kat Bjelland and L7's Jennifer Finch.
It took Hole, though, to make her a star.
The band was all the rage in England by the time the singer met her match in Kurt Cobain of Nirvana.
They married in 1992, the same year Hole was signed to Geffen.
Somehow, in the midst of the media circus surrounding the personal trials and tribulations of Love, Cobain and daughter Frances Bean, she and Erlandson settled down to work on "Live Through This" in 1993 with new arrivals Kristen Pfaff on bass and Patty Schemel on drums.
A week before the album hit the streets, in April, 1994, Cobain was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a room above the garage of the couple's home.
Pfaff died two months later of a heroin overdose, replaced in time to hit the road by current bassist Melissa Auf Der Maur.
The aptly titled "Live Through This" went on to sell more than a million copies, winning countless critics' polls. But through it all, the band was forced to deal with accusations that Cobain had had an uncredited hand in the writing, despite the fact that the songs were audibly building on the strengths they'd shown on "Pretty on the Inside," written long before Cobain was even in the picture.
"Whenever you're in a relationship with somebody who has the skills and the talent he had, it's gonna effect you," Erlandson says. "But before 'Nevermind' came, I think we had sold more of 'Pretty on the Inside' than he had sold of 'Bleach.' So don't forget that Courtney had a life before that, and there was a band, and we were making a natural progression into the songs on 'Live Through This.' It was less to do with him than where we were going originally anyway."
Erlandson blames the ghostwriting rumors on old-school rock 'n' roll sexism.
"It's pretty ridiculous," he says, "but I think a lot of times, people think a woman can't write her own songs, so they just presume that somebody else wrote them."
When the band returned in '98 with "Celebrity Skin," the presumptions resurfaced, this time fueled by the outside involvement of Smashing Pumpkin Billy Corgan.
As Erlandson says, "We worked with Billy Corgan, so there was another person there for some of the songs, just to help with a couple ideas. Courtney wrote all the lyrics, you know, so when we sat down and wrote songs with him, it was just more like bouncing ideas off each other. But his involvement was only like 12 days out of a two-year period."
In addition to suggesting that she couldn't write without a man to hold her hand and walk her through it, Courtney-bashers pointed to the singer's starring role in "The People Vs. Larry Flynt" as proof that Love had turned her back on rock 'n' roll for movie stardom -- that and the fact that she actually had the nerve to wear Versace to the Oscars.
Erlandson doesn't get it.
"People have this misconception of movie-making that people go off and make movies for a whole year or six months or something and you can't find them," he says. "But the fact is, you can go off and make a movie in a month and come right back. It doesn't take a whole lot of time. And I think anything that anybody does outside the band to help them grow as a person is a positive thing, you know? There's nothing that says 'You're in a rock band; you're supposed to be doing this.' "
"Celebrity Skin" is their poppiest effort, by far, but as Erlandson sees it, "People think it's a big departure, but it's just a natural progression for me. 'Pretty on the Inside' had little snippets of Fleetwood Mac in it and we did a cover of Joni Mitchell's 'Both Sides Now.' And then 'Live Through This' got a little poppier. And then, this album comes along. And they're all leaps, but you can tell it's us. Each album is us. You can tell that we're trying hard to grow with each new effort."
On the eve of the album's release, they lost Schemel.
"I think she just said that it wasn't right for her and went off in another direction," Erlandson says. "If you listen to our album, it's a lot more polished and thought-out and studied and I think she just decided that that wasn't for her."
He describes her replacement, Samantha Maloney, as "really great and young and fresh and excited by it all."
As a result, he says, "I think we're at our strongest now."
As for weathering all the controversy and backlash of sharing a stage with Courtney Love, the quiet guitarist -- a George to Courtney's John -- says, "Nothing really touches me... It's not that I'm that protected or anything. It's just that it doesn't faze me. I'm too busy just trying to make this work and keep everything going, because I think our band is needed, especially now. There's not that many female-driven bands where the women play their instruments right now. So there's that positive role model thing. And this record is worthy of being supported in a big way. Those are the more important issues than, like, the gossip and the ephemeral celebrity stuff that goes on."
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