The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic (11 page)

Courtney Love: 
[Cobain biographer] Charlie Cross found this document—it’s credited as Kurt’s drum map, except it’s not Kurt’s handwriting, it’s mine. It’s Kurt’s studio drum map, the mics to use and Billy’s [studio drum map]; I combined the two of them.

Sean Slade:
About when we started getting the drum sounds Courtney called Butch Vig. She had been hanging out at Pachyderm, where Nirvana had just finished
In Utero
with Albini. And Albini is very opinionated about drum sounds. [
Laughs
.] I guess Courtney really wanted Butch for
Live Through This
, but he was unavailable, and the only time she ever really got involved with what we were doing was when she came in when we were setting up drums and said, “What mics are you using?” I explained that we were using this on this drum, this mic on this drum. “Well, what’s on the snare?” “We’re using a Shure 57.” And she says, “Albini says Shure 57’s suck.” I had heard that, but everyone uses a goddamn Shure 57 on the snare drum, okay? But Albini had to say it was for hacks, as if it was an insult to art. And so I said to her, “No, that’s not a regular 57, that’s a Turbo 57.” I made it up. So, she calls Butch and tells him the mics we’re using “and a Turbo 57 on the snare.” And [I] wasn’t privy to his side of it, but he told her those were all great, that we knew what we were doing. There was never any technical issues beyond that. We thanked Butch later for covering for us.

Eric Erlandson:
 It was the first time Hole had worked with real producers. I was really happy to have somebody outside the band helping [
laughs
] because I was having my ideas shot down.

Sean Slade:
We never really talked about any kind of grand artistic vision of
Live Through This
with Courtney. The only memory I have of any kind of goal she had was when she walked into the control room almost crying and said, “This album
has
to go gold.”

Sean Slade:
That Hole hadn’t become stars yet was much to the advantage of the project. They were very focused and very ambitious. The whole world was trying to figure out what Courtney and Hole were gonna come out with on their first major label album. They knew that this had to be a maximum effort.

Eric Erlandson:
I was there the most out of everybody. After we recorded the basic track, I set up this wall of amps and would just go in and plug in different ones to different guitars. I remember feeling like a kid in a candy shop.

Patty Schemel:
I got my own drum tech, Carl Plaster, who came out and tuned all my drums, perfectly, to notes on the scale, which was
huge
for me. Just different snare drum options was a big deal; just having the resources to have different drum sounds was cool. I remember getting “Jennifer’s Body” on the second take because I loved playing that song so much.

Sean Slade:
Kristen was just amazing. She’s such a natural talent, knew exactly what to play, played totally tight with Patty. I have to give her credit—and this has never happened on an album that we’ve done in all these years—every single bass track on
Live Through This
was from the basic tracks. There was no bass overdubs because there was no need to because they were perfect. It was an exceptional performance on her part. That’s like a singer doing an album’s worth of vocals in just one take. It just doesn’t happen.

Paul Q. Kolderie:
Kristen is the secret ingredient; she made the whole thing gel and happen. It’s criminal she didn’t get to make any more records because it would have been great to see what came down the road.

Courtney Love:
Half the fucking songs were written in the studio.

Sean Slade:
We witnessed “Asking for It” from when it didn’t exist to when it got finished. It was fascinating. There was a certain magic going on.

Paul Q. Kolderie:
I always bring that up whenever people say “Kurt wrote the songs”—I can say he didn’t because
I watched it happen
.

Sean Slade:
At one point Courtney was working out lyrics and she came up with a line that I thought wasn’t that good and I said, “Ah, that’s not happening,” and she goes, “Sean, you’re not my English teacher.” And I looked at her and said, “But, Courtney, I
am
,” and she laughed. It’s rare to ever get someone with that level of lyrical talent. I stand in awe of that. When you are able to work with someone who is on that level, that literary level, who stands as a writer—it’s an honor.

Courtney Love: 
We collaborated really well. I just think we had really good chemistry, to be honest. 

Paul Q. Kolderie: 
You know those cartoon things where when people are fighting and there is a dust cloud with sparks and stars flying out? That’s how I think of it. There was always a fight about something. There were ashtrays flying. But they were never fighting with us. We would shut the control room door. We’d send them home and just work.

Eric Erlandson: 
There was a lot of tension going on. There’s tension in the room whenever we got together.
And
 there’s tension between Kristen and I because we had been living together and seeing each other and then she moved out. We were having this difficult, on-and-off relationship, and we go to Atlanta to record and we have to room together.

Sean Slade:
Kristen and Eric had just broken up, so there was interpersonal weirdness there. But when they were in the studio they were focused on getting the work done. Despite all of Courtney’s idiosyncrasies, she’s really, really smart and she was there to work hard.

Patty Schemel:
During basic tracks, me and Courtney ended up leaving and going to New York to see Nirvana on
Saturday Night Live
. I was so drunk that I could not see straight. It was so fucked up. RuPaul was there. And I remember coming back and then having to do more recording and being completely wasted for that. When I got back, I was like, “I gotta pull it together.” So that’s when I did a bunch of crystal meth. We pretty much finished up our basic tracks and then we were kind of imbibing.

Paul Q. Kolderie:
The studio was in the middle of an office park in suburban Atlanta. The only place you could get anything to eat was a Fuddruckers or TGI Fridays. There was nothing else to do but work on the record.

Mark Kates:
I remember Courtney staying at the Hotel Nikko, and I was driving her to the studio one day and we passed a billboard for Hooters, which I think was still a regional chain, and she goes, “Hooters? Is that like a strip club for the whole family?”

Courtney Love:
We recorded all the time. We’d go to this one club called Heaven and Hell and I think we debuted some of the songs there, and people were screaming, “Shut up!” It’s like, “Fuck you, you little fucking punk rats.” But I came to this conclusion a long time ago: “Selling out” means there are no more tickets at Madison Square Garden.

Sean Slade:
The label put us up in a crappy corporate condo with rented furniture and no art on the walls next door to a coke dealer; it was almost deserted.

Mark Kates: 
The studio was in a strip mall next to an insurance place.

Courtney Love:
Me and Patty shared a room and Kristen and Eric shared a room in this apartment complex. We went to work every day and had something to look forward to. We were making good music in a good studio. It was fun.

Sean Slade:
We got the basic tracks in about four or five days, so from that point on our schedule revolved around accommodating Courtney’s approach to the studio. We quickly discovered that if you ask her to be at any place at any given time she would always be two hours late. But two hours late
to the minute
. And she couldn’t be fooled, either. Knowing she was going to be two hours late, if you wanted her to be there at 4, if you told her to be there at 2, she would show up at 6.

Paul Q. Kolderie:
Nirvana was on tour and Kurt would call and ask us to hold the phone up so he could hear what was going on. There were a lot of crazy distractions. We kept our heads down and kept working.

Patty Schemel:
Courtney ended up moving into a five-star hotel for the rest of the time we were there. I was like, “Uh, I’m cool where I’m at.” But she’s like, “Well, come over and have room service.” One morning, I was with her and she got a phone call and was like, “Oh my god: River Phoenix died last night.” So, that was a full day of her talking to people on the phone.

Sean Slade:
They rarely brought the weirdness into the control room. And occasionally I would wander out and hang out with them, I would experience it, but it never really bugged me—what we were coming up with had such emotional force.

Eric Erlandson:
Sean and Paul were good at pep-talking me like, “You don’t realize that if you just relaxed, and just accepted that you’re good and not be insecure about it, then you’d be better.” I felt like everything I was playing was pretty much horrible. I had never played acoustic guitar, but I knew I had to use it on “Doll Parts.” So I’m playing this 12-string acoustic and I can’t even press down on my strings. “What is this? What am I supposed to do with it?”

Sean Slade:
Eric was like Eeyore. I told him it wasn’t very rock ‘n’ roll—the spirit of it is really about reckless confidence and going with your gut instinct, not about wringing your hands.

Paul Q. Kolderie:
It wasn’t an easy band to be in if you weren’t Courtney; she expected a lot from them. She sometimes expected them to know what she wanted even when she had not been real clear about it. She wouldn’t say what to do; more what not to do. Eric took it personally.

Sean Slade
: We set up every evening for Courtney to do vocals and she would sing two or three songs, multiple takes of each song. And she put in a lot of intensity and emotion. Then, at a certain point, maybe about 10 or 11, she was done. So, the next day Paul and I would come in each morning and spend three or four hours editing and putting them together. We did that every day for about two and a half weeks until we had tracked the album that way, very methodically.

Paul Q. Kolderie:
She didn’t talk about competing with Kurt. The Pumpkins were at their peak and Nirvana was the biggest band in the world, but she was feeling like she was as good as either of those guys.

Courtney Love:
I think it’s pretty flawless for what it is, for the time. For going from
Pretty on the Inside
, which is atonal and has really brilliant lyrics, to fucking songs you can sing along to? I just gave it my best. I gave it 100 percent.

Sean Slade:
Paul and I had different ideas about what was going on. He was very depressed; he thought the album was coming out awful. Whereas I thought that it was coming out great. I came to terms with, or accepted, Courtney’s idiosyncrasies a lot better than he did. I thought her craziness was somewhat of a put-on, a defense mechanism to keep the world at bay.

Paul Q. Kolderie:
Kurt showed up during a break from tour, got in late and then came to the studio the next morning. We chatted for a bit, he wanted to hear the record and we played him all the tracks. He was complimentary; he liked the drum sounds, thought the songs were great. Then Courtney said, “Let’s go in,” and they’re both sitting in front of the vocal mic, and she said, “I want you to sing some harmonies.” And he said, “I can’t sing harmonies until I hear the songs; I don’t even know the songs.” We played the song through a few times; he may have been loaded, but I had just met him so I don’t know what he was like. He put a few things on. If you listen carefully, maybe you can hear it.

Courtney Love:
Kurt came to Triclops and he sang on one song, and I mixed it up and released it, so you can hear him sing on one song. But that’s it.

Eric Erlandson:
Kurt showed up; he’s not in any good condition at that point. He was not in a good place.

Patty Schemel:
I remember he was on so much Klonopin, too, and it was like “
What
is going on?” I remember he did some stuff on “Asking for It.” They were just messing around.

Eric Erlandson:
He didn’t know any of the songs, there were drugs involved, and Courtney’s like, “Change something on this.” Mainly just to get some harmonies, I guess. Not anything about the writing of the songs, not anything with even the vocal melodies. Everything was already done. He was going in there mumbling harmonies over a couple songs. Those things were not used on the album; they turned up in a mix later. You can hear him on top of whatever song that was—I think “Softer, Softest”—but he was never actually
involved
.

Sean Slade:
I had one conversation with Kurt when we were mixing it. Courtney called and said, “Kurt wants to talk to you.” And I remember looking at Paul and Paul giving me a look like, “You’re gonna do this one.” I got on the phone and Kurt starts going, “I got these mixes, and here’s what you gotta do—you gotta make the snare sound huge, and you gotta double all of Courtney’s vocals.” And I said, “Sorry, Kurt, but we’re not gonna do that. That’s not the album we are making here, that’s not the approach we’re taking.” What Kurt was saying, basically, was make it sound like my album, make it sound like
Nevermind
. And I told him, straight up, no way, we’re not going to do that. I probably pissed him off, but I didn’t care.