Rock and Hard Places (40 page)

But Los Angeles is, as advertised, a city where miracles happen. On my first afternoon in Hollywood, as I’m walking, jetlagged and blinking, along Sunset Strip, a car screeches to a tyre-scorching halt on the road next to me. For a second, I wonder if I’ve just been discovered or if I’m about to get shot. Then Barry gets out of the car. Barry is a friend of mine from Sydney who was staying with me in London three months ago before going off to drive round America. He is possibly the only person in the entire North American continent who’d recognise me. When he left my flat, he forgot his leather jacket, which I have been borrowing regularly since. In fact, I realise, as he walks towards me looking like someone who’s just found a pterodactyl in his broom closet, I’m wearing it right now.

“There you are,” I say, handing him the jacket. “You forgot this.”

It is, yes, just like a movie.

“We’ll always have Paris,” says Barry.

 

COURTNEY SAYS THAT her band couldn’t have come from any city but Los Angeles, though she knows that Hole are not a Los Angelean band, at least not a proper one. Courtney seems to be one of those people who need to define themselves against what they’re not, and if she’s trying to define herself as against shallowness, complacency and inexorable idiocy, then she’s come to the right place.

“When I first moved here and started this band,” she explains, “I lived a block away from Hollywood Boulevard.”

On Hollywood Boulevard, there are shops that sell “Rock Star Accessories.” They are not joking. Nobody in Los Angeles ever is. I bought a new leather jacket in one of these shops, because Barry wanted his back. The man in the shop told me that the jacket I’d bought would “look real cool with maybe one of these portraits of Axl Rose or the dude from Skid Row airbrushed on the back.” He wasn’t joking either, though I definitely laughed.

“Yeah,” continues Courtney. “Right near those shops. Anyway, the building my apartment was in was near this thing called the Guitar Institute of Technology. It’s this school, a college, it’s really expensive, and it’s full of kids with trust funds from all over America learning how
to play heavy metal guitar like Steve Vai. So, in every other fucking apartment in my building, there was a guy from G.I.T.”

I maintain that this is the only city in the world where nobody among the school’s founders would have noticed the initials.

“And so all day and all night it was like freeeeeeeowwww bwam bwam bwam widdly widdly skreeeeee widdly widdly, like really fucking loud. Anyway. We, I mean, Hole, my band, we had a couple of practices in my room, and in seconds, all these heavy metal kids would be banging on the door yelling ‘Hey! What the fuck are you doing?’”

This can only be a recommendation.

The first song Courtney ever learned to play was Iggy Pop’s “I Wanna Be Your Dog.” Eric’s was “Rock’N’Roll All Nite” by Kiss. Jill first made her parents wince with the riff from The Sex Pistols’ “God Save The Queen,” and Carolyn first hit things along to The Psychedelic Furs’ “Sister Europe.” Hole’s debut album,
Pretty On The Inside
, sounds a bit like all of these without sounding quite like any of them.

“What do you mean?”

I have no idea. Actually, Hole remind me mostly of The Go-Go’s, whom they sound nothing like at all. Something to do with being Californian but not taking it seriously.

“We used to play ‘This Town’ live.”

That was always my favourite Go-Go’s song. It was about being Californian but not taking it seriously.

“I’m pleased you mentioned them,” says Courtney. “I like it when people say we do good pop songs. I’m really getting into songwriting as a craft, so maybe our next album will be more like a tribute to The Beach Boys. Or maybe not. But I do know that we are still evolving, and that there’s a pop consciousness out there that I really don’t know anything about. But it’s nice of you to say that.”

I didn’t. She did. We’ll let it go. I wonder if I should pursue The Go-Go’s analogy further, through the fame and the drugs and the split-ups and breakdowns, and tell Courtney that I think it’d be just great if, in ten years from now, she was all respectable and designer-clothed and married to a besuited Republican party drone and plaguing the world’s airwaves with anodyne radio ballads.

“I know this record is really bilious and black-hearted in a lot of ways, but there’s a lot of other shit in us . . .”

Courtney gets up and goes outside to get some more coffee. A slight blonde bloke with red eyes and black and grey stubble comes in, says something to Eric, then nods at me and asks after another writer at
Melody Maker
. I have half an idea that I know this guy from somewhere, but I can’t place him, so I just assure him that our mutual friend is fine, or at least was last time I saw him.

“Well, tell him hello,” he says, and leaves.

Courtney reappears.

“Was that Kurt?” she says.

 

ON HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD, next to that stupid Chinese theatre thing that looks like a suburban Chinese takeaway that has been at the Chinese swimming team’s medical kit, sad little men in sun visors sell maps of where the stars live. Barry and I buy one, determined that we cannot live another day without seeing Zsa Zsa Gabor’s letterbox or the front gate of that bloke in
Star Wars
who wasn’t Harrison Ford, whatever his name was. Mark something, we think.

We spend an afternoon driving through pristine private suburbs with their own fences and police forces, filled with houses so big we wonder if the front and back porches have different postcodes or, in a couple of cases, if they’re even in the same time zone.

Mostly, we wonder why anyone with enough money to buy one of these places would choose to live in Los Angeles.

 

COURTNEY CHOSE TO live in Los Angeles. It was convenient. It seemed like a good idea at the time. And anyway, to judge by her thus far modest but already riotously entertaining press file, she’d already lived everywhere else. The details vary according to Courtney’s mood at the time and the imagination of whoever’s writing it all down, but there’re a few things we can be reasonably sure of.

She moved around a lot as a kid, even being dragged as far afield as Australia and New Zealand. She was the singer in an early lineup of Faith No More. She lived in England for a bit, where she appears to have done or said something to annoy Julian Cope, which is another entry on the credit side of her ledger. She has almost been a famous actress, having been considered for the starring roles in
Sid And Nancy
and
Last Exit To Brooklyn
, though how seriously she was considered is
open to argument. She very definitely made a brief appearance in Alex Cox’s point-free spaghetti-western farce
Straight To Hell
, about which she says, “Yeah, well.”

Courtney Love, already, is a lot better known than what Courtney Love does.

“It’s really weird,” she says. “I mean, it’s your life, and your life is being used to sell papers, or records, or . . .”

And that’s just the stuff that’s actually happened. Perhaps calling a song “Teenage Whore” was asking for trouble.

“A lot of that is fictionalised. I mean, no offence to Everett, but . . .”

Everett True, the journalist that Kurt Cobain was asking about earlier, was the first to write about Courtney—or Kurt, for that matter—for a British paper. He may well have gotten a little carried away, but then he does.

“Well, you know, he just decided he was bored and that England needed a new American character. There’s things he wrote that were true and things that were absolutely not true. Some of the quotes he attributed to me were just amazing.”

Anything in particular?

“Well, like that I had a profession based on a song I wrote, you know, a noble and ancient profession, but not one that I ever went to school for. I mean, when I read the last piece, I hit him.”

She did, as well. Poor old ET was eating junket through a straw for a week. People get the songwriter mixed up with the song, though. It happens.

“But it’s . . . narrative. Neil Young writes narrative, and nobody thinks . . . you know what I mean. The songs still feel like catharsis, still feel like exorcism, still feel really good to sing, but on the other hand, a lot of it is narrative. I’m not a character actress. I’m a songwriter.”

It’s only going to get worse.

“Oh, I know,” she sighs. “I mean, I went to lunch with this corporate weasel from some major record company the other day, and he just said ‘Courtney, what do you want to do?’ Well, I told him I wanted to go and see Nirvana in Chicago, so he gave me a thousand dollars. I keep telling the other three they should be going out to lunch as well . . . I mean, we’re talking here about restaurants I’ve never even seen the outside of. It’s great. They buy me martinis and talk to me about money and it’s, like, totally interesting . . .”

This is the first sarcasm I’ve heard since I arrived in California.

“We’re just not ready,” she decides. “For a band like us, with our ideology, the only reason to have a corporate label is better distribution. So if we sell enough records that we need that, then I’ll think about it. They just want to buy something that they think is honest. But it’s my life, you know?”

 

LATER THAT NIGHT, Hole open for Nirvana at the Palace. The crowd looks like a casting call for the next series of that MTV real-life soap where they stick six attractive young people in a house and see how long it takes for them all to wish each other dead. Axl Rose and Slash from Guns N’ Roses are here, as is Perry Farrell of Jane’s Addiction. Everybody else here looks like they either want to be them, or be very good friends indeed with them. There are at least half a dozen women in here wearing bikinis.

When Hole take the stage, Perry Farrell charges down the front, and stands still in the middle of the moshpit, head and shoulders above the melee. “Hey, bitch!” he calls between songs. “Suck my fuckin’ dick!” Courtney, who appears to be in on whatever the joke is, smiles back. Perry’s date for the evening has a disarming habit of unzipping the front of her dress at anyone she suspects of staring at them. Needless to say, she ends up doing quite a bit of this. Hole, meanwhile, are great, as noisy and chaotic as a train wreck but considerably more tuneful, and Courtney looks and plays like the lost lovechild of Angus Young and Kim Gordon.

After Hole have played, and after Nirvana have played, I experience the rare pleasure of strolling backstage past a purpling Axl Rose, who is getting the your-name’s-not-down-you’re-not-coming-in routine from bouncers. As I head for Hole’s dressing room, I can hear his multi-platinum squawk squawking, “Well, why has that motherfucker got a laminate?” after me.

Courtney gives me a glass of wine, introduces me to someone to talk to and apologises, but she has to go and find another of her corporate weasels, to buy her drinks.

“The thing to remember,” she says before she vanishes, “and this is important, is that I’m driven. I really am. I’m driven, for some reason. But I don’t know where I’m going.”

 

 

 

T
HE IDEA ANIMATING this story, originally written for
The Independent
, was to illuminate the reality of making a budding British pop group big in Japan. The group in question, Alisha’s Attic—a pair of genial sisters from Essex—ended up doing okay, in Japan and elsewhere, without quite broaching the stratospheres. Which is to say they ended up doing a street better than 99 percent of pop groups ever founded. They packed it in shortly after the turn of the century and embarked on separate careers, Karen writing for The Sugababes and Kylie Minogue, among others, Shellie—who seems to have changed her name to Shelly—making solo records under her own name.

I can only hope now, as I could only hope then, that this story does, in some way, illuminate the reality of making a budding British pop group, etc., etc. Because I’m as certain as I can be that it illuminates absolutely nothing—beyond one hungover, food-poisoned hack’s total bewilderment at his surroundings—about the nation in which it is set. I have, in the course of my journalistic peregrinations, dropped in on more than seventy countries. Japan is the only one that I have left feeling absolutely none the wiser about for having visited it. Everywhere else I’ve been, however briefly, I’ve flown home feeling like I’ve acquired some idea of what gets the people there laughing, crying and generally out of bed in the morning. I spent a week and
a bit in Japan on this story, went to four cities, and met, I’m sure, dozens of local people. However, when I collected my thoughts as the homebound flight prepared for takeoff at Tokyo’s Narita airport, I realised that they could, pretty much, be summarised thus: “Huh?”

THE PROMOTIONAL TOUR is a peculiar ritual, in which rock’n’roll performers are coerced into performing in as un-rock’n’roll a manner as can be imagined. On a promotional tour, the workaday touring creeds of riotous excess, grand debauchery and glamorous disdain are sacrificed in favour of restraint, modesty and affability. To participant and witness alike, the process is scarcely less disorienting than the prospect of senior members of the British royal family embarking on a vice-regal visit that saw them obliged to drive Rolls-Royces into swimming pools, cavort with ladies-in-waiting in baked-bean-filled gold bathtubs and heave bejewelled television sets out of palace windows.