Love In Bloom

By Christopher John Farley/Los Angeles

Teenage whores and broken dolls. Petals torn from flowers and baby's milk gone sour. These are her subjects. "I don't really miss God/ But I sure miss Santa Claus," she sings. "I'm Miss World, somebody kill me." And further, "I want to be the girl with the most cake/ I love him so much it just turns to hate/ I fake it so real I am beyond fake/ Someday you will ache like I ache."

Her thoughts, her words, her world. Courtney Love: rocker, movie star, Hard Copy moving target. She enters a suite at the Chateau Marmont. Tall, lean, with pale, muscular arms and bare, nicked-up legs. She clears her throat as she strolls in, clearing it in a louder-than-she-needed-to, public-announcement way. Courtney Love: head turner, showstopper, superstar. Her band mates in her group Hole--guitarist Eric Erlandson and bassist Melissa Auf der Maur--have been waiting, relaxing on couches. Hole has a terrific new CD out, Celebrity Skin, the band's third release. The group has gone through many changes since it formed in 1990--musical changes, philosophical changes, personnel changes. The band's last bassist, Kristen Pfaff, died of a heroin overdose in 1994. Hole's current drummer, Patty Schemel, is on leave for unspecified personal reasons. "If she can deal with her problems, she can come back," says Love obliquely. "I can't be responsible for that again."

Love's all about professionalism, maturity and responsibility now. Yeah, sure, sometimes she'll go on MTV and rattle on about Trent Reznor's testicles. But the old Love, the bratty, tattered tart, is so over, so early '90s. Love started her image shift when she became a rock mother (daughter Frances Bean is six). She continued it when she became a movie star. She drew raves for her role in the 1996 film The People vs. Larry Flynt, and is set to star with Christina Ricci, among others, in the forthcoming indie film 200 Cigarettes.

But you'll never hear a guy in a mosh pit yell, "This band rocks! They're so professional!" You'll never attend a concert in Madison Square Garden and hear a chant go up: "Responsibility! Responsibility!" Now that Love's focusing on music again, she needed a sound that fitted her new values while accessing her old passion. A sophisticated sound that still rocked.

And Love wants Skin to have an impact, a deep impact, a meteor-slamming-into-the-earth impact. She admits she has criticized other successful musicians in the past out of commercial envy: "I was pissy about Alanis Morissette because I was jealous that she got to sell so many records and make such a cultural impact."

So during the making of Skin, Billy Corgan, leader of the alternative band Smashing Pumpkins and the man behind this year's half-brilliant album Adore, was invited by Love to give Hole musical pointers. Corgan and Love later had a falling out over credit, but Hole's ragged punk sound was altered, patched up, rewoven. The group's new sound has the sharp, clean lines of an Armani suit.

Love calls Skin "a monument" and says it will "alter the skyline." She hopes it will show younger female musicians that they can aspire to more than coffeehouse acoustic strumming and that they too can be rock stars. "What we're really interested in is who we restart, who comes up," says Love. "Because the female musician, the girl that is, like, playing rock in the garage, she's not around anymore, she's been taken out, she's been killed, she's not encouraged."

Born Love Michelle Harrison in San Francisco in 1964, Love has led a rootless life. Her parents divorced when she was young, and her mother later gave her the new first name Courtney; she eventually started calling herself Courtney Love. She has lived in Liverpool and Dublin; she has slogged through reform schools and stripped in strip clubs. Skin starts off self-consciously, with Love reveling in her notoriety. "I'm all I wanna be," she wails. "A walking study/ In demonology." Certain images repeat: angels, stars, heaven. "I'm a cancer," Love explains. "I recycle." Death is on her mind. A number of songs mourn the failing spirit of alternative rock. She sings, "Oh the boys on the radio/ They crash and burn." Other songs are haunted by the 1994 suicide of her husband, Nirvana's Kurt Cobain. Love sings on Reasons to Be Beautiful, "When the fire goes out, you better learn to fake."

Love is still dogged by questions about Cobain. Earlier this year, filmmaker Nick Broomfield released a documentary titled Kurt and Courtney that portrayed Love as controlling and abusive toward Cobain and even suggested that his death may not have been a suicide. "I don't feel that anyone's in a position of saying Courtney was responsible for doing anything directly in terms of murdering or having Kurt murdered," says Broomfield. "I do believe that there's a lot that we haven't been told, and that all was not well in their relationship, and he was pretty much left to get on and do it."

Love refuses to answer any questions about the film. "You think it's important and I don't," she says. "This is America, so we can disagree." Love can also be testy about questions that concern her late husband. When asked about Cobain's unreleased songs, she replies, "I'm not the keeper of his f______ flame."

It's hard to blame her for wanting to move on. She's a rocker herself, with her own songs, her own band, her own life. And so she's getting on with them. She describes herself as "more together. I mean I don't take drugs." Instead, she's on a spiritual high: she says she's a Buddhist.

But makeovers are about surface; bleached hair has dark roots. Skin's polite production might win listeners, but Love's displays of rude beauty, of a sad radiance that seems to come from a place beyond contrivance--those are the moments that make this CD spectacular listening. Just hear her morose, lyrical ramble over Erlandson's spare guitar on Northern Star; or the line in the enchanting Malibu when she breaks the song's sweet spell, growling, "And I knew/ Love would tear you apart/ Oh and I knew/ The darkest secret of your heart." This CD has pop skin, but it bleeds punk.

And, yes, Love is still a believer in attitude. "Just once in your life you need to have thrown a TV out a window," she says. "Or wear leather pants or get called a faggot or get called a freak or get called deranged or have insane rumors floated about you. Every single decent rock star I've ever met has had this." A word of advice: don't stand beneath her window.