The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic (10 page)

Patty Schemel:
Eric and I were practicing all the time; we set up out in Carnation, Washington at Kurt and Courtney’s house out in the woods. We worked while Courtney was pregnant and having Frances and going through that whole drama with
Vanity Fair
. That was a tense time; I was drinking a lot. So there was party time and there was also the time that me and Eric spent re-learning the back catalog.

Courtney Love:
The songwriting process was really easy. We started at [defunct L.A. punk club] Jabberjaw. I wrote “Violet” there. Then we moved to Seattle in the middle of that. “Miss World” was written in Seattle, if I remember correctly. Look, I don’t even remember who I don’t like anymore. My brain is a little addled in terms of my long-term memory. It could be PTSD, which is everyone’s excuse for everything. But anyway, Jabberjaw was the salad days of it all. I wrote “Doll Parts” in Cambridge, Massachusetts in a woman named Joyce’s bathroom. That one was easy.

Patty Schemel:
Me and Courtney came up with “She Walks” in the laundry-room studio in their house and put it together when we went to Rockin’ in Rio [with Nirvana]. [Nirvana was recording demos with their sound engineer Craig Montgomery] and when they were done working on ideas for
In Utero
, Courtney and I went in and worked on stuff. We did the idea for “Miss World” and “She Walks.” Big John from [U.K. punk band] The Exploited came up with the middle section of “She Walks.” He was the guitar tech for Nirvana, and he was like, “Why don’t we go at half-time, at that part?” Me and Courtney went up to San Francisco when Kurt was working with the Melvins on
Lysol
. We went in and messed around, and came up with “Jennifer’s Body.”

Courtney Love:
We had this great rehearsal space [in Seattle]: It was just perfect, up on Capitol Hill, near the Urban Outfitters. Everyone got really close. There was just a great flow. This all came about after the whole
Vanity Fair
thing and all the stuff with the baby. Those rehearsals were a really great escape from all that shit; the only way to escape it was drugs and music.

Eric Erlandson:
It was a refuge. It was an emotional time for Courtney and Kurt. I was involved in their drama and was trying to hold it together and replace members and get a record together. So how did I feel emotionally? I was a wreck.

Patty Schemel:
Courtney would come in and add vocals and her guitar ideas—which were great—and Eric would fine-tune her ideas and make them amazing. But her initial guitar ideas were really, really cool. That’s what Hole is: that sound of Eric’s guitar and Courtney’s vocals. Hole isn’t Hole without those two together.

Eric Erlandson:
Even if it was just the three of us playing, you could tell something was happening that was bigger than all of us.

Courtney Love:
The rehearsals just flowed. On this record, we didn’t really need anyone to help us.

Mark Kates:
It’s one of my clearest memories ever from doing A&R, going up to see them rehearse in Seattle, and I thought, “There’s an album here.” I think it was always going to be great—it was just a question of how great.

Courtney Love:
I put a lot of energy into the music because it was the place I could put my energy. And the title of the record is not a prediction of the future. It’s, like, fucking live through what I already lived through, you motherfuckers! It wasn’t meant to be about anybody dying. It was about going through fucking media humiliations like this. You try it—because it ain’t fun.

Patty Schemel:
Being a wife and being a mother, and all the drama that came with that; being a feminist, and then being known as Mrs. Kurt? I think a lot of all of that frustration and competitiveness went into lyrics, went into the force behind that record.

Eric Erlandson:
I found Kristen [Pfaff, bassist] in L.A. and said, “Come with me to meet Courtney and Patty when you get to Seattle.” She joined the band, she moved to Seattle, and that’s when all the songs came to life, literally. She was the star of her band and so she was bringing that to Hole and that created sparks in everybody; we all saw an even greater potential than before.

Mark Kates:
I remember sitting in that very small rehearsal room, watching them and thinking, “No one knows how great this is. No one I work with has any idea how great an album this is going to be.” That was really special. I knew it would blow people away.

Patty Schemel:
She was in a band called Janitor Joe. We saw her play, and she was
amazing
. She was just cool. Her playing was heavy, and she was knowledgeable, and she had command of her instrument. When she played, that was it: We knew.

Sean Slade, engineer and producer:
When we got the
Live Through This
demos, I realized very quickly that Hole had gotten a new rhythm section—it was much more musical.

Courtney Love:
Kristen was just really, really, really good. She had studied music, studied cello. She couldn’t do backup vocals. And that was okay because her playing was like,
you know
.

Eric Erlandson:
I kept on making her listen to the Beatles to expand out of that driving, aggressive boy-rock that was big in Minnesota at the time. Kristen was very into that. We got into fights over it. And I’d be like, “I like that, too, but you’ve gotta pretend you’re Paul McCartney playing a country song right now.”

Patty Schemel:
There was such a confidence in her playing that it just all happened, as soon as she started to play. It was really natural for her. “Plump” was one of her ideas.

Courtney Love:
I was really anti-heroin while we were working. And everyone did heroin anyway. If you recall.

Patty Schemel:
Kristen became Eric’s girlfriend, so they were tight. They had each other. Then there was me and my addiction with alcohol and drugs. Kristen and I would get together, and we were always trying to keep the amount of drugs we were doing secret. “Don’t tell Eric.” There were so many secrets. We were all frustrated, and we all had a lot of downtime. And so to deal with that, there was a lot of “hanging out.” I was frustrated. I wanted to play. I wanted to record.

Eric Erlandson:
Kristen came on tour with us in Europe [in 1993] and we did a few festivals and a few shows, and there’s people going nuts for a song that’s not even on record yet.

Patty Schemel:
At the Phoenix Festival, we were playing all these brand new songs and there was just this sea of people moving up and down. It was amazing. Kristen was so great live. That was the one tour that we had Kristen on, but it was a glimpse of what was to come.

Mark Kates:
I went to England with them in July of ‘93, and saw them at the Phoenix Festival and I remember walking backstage after this show and saying, “It really doesn’t matter who’s gonna produce your record because it’s gonna be great.”

Courtney Love:
I wanted to be better than Kurt. I was really competing with Kurt. And that’s why it always offends me when people would say, “Oh, he wrote
Live Through This
.” I’d be proud as hell to say that he wrote something on it, but I wouldn’t let him. It was too Yoko for me. It’s like, “No fucking way, man! I’ve got a good band, I don’t fucking need your help.”

Eric Erlandson:
I knew there was that competitiveness inside Courtney. Because he’s so talented, but at the same time,
not
wanting him involved. She had that conflict inside her. I had the same problem, I had the same desire. Wanting to work with him and also not wanting him to touch our art. It’s so different than Nirvana: our energy, Courtney and my—our thing that we had been building. It’s so different from Nirvana. I didn’t want that inside; I didn’t want the wrong influences to come in.

Courtney Love:
I’m listening to the Breeders’
Pod
24/7 and I’m listening to the Pixies 24/7 and I’m listening to Echo & the Bunnymen and Joy Division. I come from a different place [than Kurt]. It wasn’t like I was just taking from Billy [Corgan, Smashing Pumpkins frontman] and Kurt. I was taking from my own influences, hugely.

Eric Erlandson:
We never finished writing; we were writing the whole time, trying to come up with more and more songs because even though it looked like we had a good, solid album, we knew we were missing some pieces. We were still writing intensely and frantically putting songs together. It wasn’t like, “Oh we have these 12 songs, they’re done, and we’re going to go in and record now.” It’s never been like that with this band.

Sean Slade:
There were only a handful of songs on the
Live Through This
demo—four, five at max. We liked to hear as many songs as we can before we say yes or no to an album. But, in this case, the four or the five songs we heard sounded good enough.

Paul Q. Kolderie, producer and engineer:
Early on in the process, we got a demo from Mark Kates and it completely blew my mind. A lot of times in my career, you hear something and you just know. When I heard the lyrics to “Doll Parts,” I just thought, “This is going to be big.”

Courtney Love:
I don’t know why we picked Paul and Sean. Because [Hole manager] Janet Billig told me to? Because they’d produced The Lemonheads? I didn’t really think much about producers at the time.

Eric Erlandson:
We picked Paul and Sean because Kurt would just sit there and watch MTV all day, and he’s like, “Get the guy that did the Green Day album.” [
Laughs
.] Those were the videos that were on all the time then. It was Radiohead’s “Creep,” and then Green Day. I remember him saying, “Get the Green Day producer or get the Radiohead guy.” I don’t know what happened with the Green Day guy, but for some reason we got Sean and Paul.

Patty Schemel:
I don’t know why we picked them; I guess maybe because of that Radiohead record, I’m not sure.

Mark Kates:
Courtney was kind of obsessed with getting either Brendan O’Brien [producer of Pearl Jam’s
Vs
.
] or Butch Vig to produce the album and neither was really responding. People who had done multi-platinum records.

Courtney Love:
I didn’t go to [Smart Studios, in Madison, Wisconsin] with Butch. I didn’t want to go down that road and copy Kurt.

Paul Q. Kolderie:
I was at [Boston-area recording studio] Fort Apache and I got a call from Butch Vig’s manager, Shannon O’Shea, and she said, “You don’t know me, but I did you a favor.” I asked, “You wanna tell me any more about what it is?” And she says, “No, let’s leave it at that and see what happens.” Courtney and Kurt were meeting with Butch to see if he wanted to do it, since Butch did
Nevermind
, but Butch was tired after doing
Siamese Dream
and he wanted to work on what turned out later to be Garbage. He wasn’t up for a Courtney record. Shannon said, “Why don’t you get the guys that did ‘Creep?’” And Mark Kates said, “I can get you those guys.”

Sean Slade:
Courtney was aware of us probably because of the Dinosaur Jr. connection, because Kurt was not only a fan of Dinosaur Jr., but at one point J Mascis was considering playing drums in Nirvana. I remember her referring to us as the “Boston guys.”

Paul Q. Kolderie: 
We had a phone conversation with Courtney that went pretty well. She didn’t really ask us about anything, we just talked about the Lyres and bands from Boston that she was obsessed with. I remember, embarrassingly, she was talking about 
Let It Be
 and how she loved that record, and I said, “Oh, yeah, the Beatles are cool.” And she was like, “No, I’m talking about the Replacements.” I thought I had lost the gig right there.

Mark Kates:
I remember it vividly. It was my idea. One day we were on a conference call: me, Courtney and Janet Billig. Those guys were old friends of mine. I mentioned them tentatively, I didn’t know if anyone knew who they were, but I knew that the first Radiohead record was popular in Kurt and Courtney’s house. And I mentioned Sean and Paul, and Courtney goes, “Wow, Boston. The Lyres.” I mean, it wasn’t even a band they had worked with, but she was very aware of the lineage of the music she was part of. The next thing we did was put them on the phone. And then it happened.

Courtney Love:
Went to [Triclops Sound Studios, in Marietta, Georgia] because Billy made 
Siamese Dream
there. And I loved the way that it sounds.

Paul Q. Kolderie:
I went out to Seattle and did pre-production with just the band; Courtney wasn’t around. They had already hired us at that point. Courtney told us that she felt like she was getting two guys for the same price and she liked that. We picked the studio because Butch had been there with the Pumpkins and Courtney was convinced that we had to have a Neve board and Studer tape recorders, which were top of the line. We were thinking about Muscle Shoals, but she called Billy or Butch and talked to them about it and that’s how we wound up in Atlanta.

Eric Erlandson:
Kurt had just made
In Utero
, he got all these notes about mics and guitars and the studio set-up and everything. He mapped out this whole diagram and it said, “This is what you should do in the studio.” Of course, that all went out the window. The one thing that made it was this all-metal guitar that I borrowed from some guitar shop in Washington—Kurt suggested that one guitar.