Girl in a Band (18 page)

BEFORE THE INTERNET
was born and if you weren't a mainstream band, it was nearly impossible to get your music heard on the radio. Sure, there was public radio and lots of little college radio stations, but it was mostly a winners' game. Touring was the only way to get a label to market your music. It may sound simple and obvious, but unless you were making commercial music, outlets like radio were beyond your control. Your band lived and died by the road.

In the nineties, people liked to talk about how American bands were so much better live than English bands. Why? Because the U.S. was and is a huge fucking country with no single focused media outlet—forcing
American bands to tour constantly. England, by contrast, was a little island with three weekly music papers covering majors, indies, and faux-indies backed by major labels. The U.S. had
Rolling Stone,
a biweekly that even back then sold copies by plastering sexy female entertainers on the cover and whose big progressive moment was to release a “Women in Rock” issue highlighting pop singers like Madonna. If I ever appeared in
Rolling Stone,
it was to answer questions like “What do you think of women in rock, like Madonna?”

Because I'd written about art in the 1980s, the
Village Voice
asked me to do a tour diary. I called it “Boys Are Smelly.”

Before picking up a bass I was just another girl with a fantasy. What would it be like to be right under the pinnacle of energy, beneath two guys crossing their guitars, two thunderfoxes in the throes of self-love and male bonding? How sick, but what desire could be more ordinary? How many grannies once wanted to rub their faces in Elvis's crotch, and how many boys want to be whipped by Steve Albini's guitar?

In the middle of the stage, where I stand as a bass player of Sonic Youth, the music comes at me from all directions. The most heightened state of being female is watching people watch you. Manipulating that stage, without breaking the spell of performing, is what makes someone like Madonna all the more brilliant. Simple pop structures sustain her image, allowing her real self to remain a mystery—is she really that sexy? Loud dissonance and blurred melody create their own ambiguity—are we really that violent?—a context that allows me to be anonymous. For many purposes, being obsessed with boys playing guitars, being as ordinary as possible, being a girl bass player is ideal, because the swirl of Sonic Youth music makes me forget about being a girl. I like being in a weak position and making it strong.

After that, I started doing an occasional rock review for
Spin
magazine, at the time a hipper, more college-oriented alternative to
Rolling Stone
. No doubt it came about courtesy of our PR person, even though Bob Guccione Jr., the publisher and son of the owner, hated Sonic Youth. Aside from articles being written about the band, it was a sidelong way for us to get our name out there.

Riot Grrl, the underground feminist punk rock movement that got under way in the early nineties, maintained a media blackout, and for good reason, too. Bikini Kill and other female bands didn't want to be co-opted, exploited, and turned into products they couldn't control by a corporate, white male world. Later on, Courtney Love would take up the role that the press was always fishing for—a punk princess, thrilling and dark, refusing to play by the rules. No one ever questions the disorder behind her tarantula L.A. glamour—sociopathy, narcissism—because it's rock and roll, good entertainment! “Doll Parts”—great lyrics! Having survived a childhood with Keller, I have a low tolerance for manipulative, egomaniacal behavior, and usually have to remind myself that the person might be mentally ill. That isn't to say you don't get sucked in, at least at first, which is how I came to produce Hole's first album.

Joe Cole took Thurston and me to see Hole play in L.A. Joe was an author and a roadie for Black Flag and Rollins Band. He, along with Dave Markey, was one of the people Thurston and I always hung out with when we visited my parents in California. I can't really tell you what Hole's music was like—
messy
is the best description—but Courtney surely had charisma.

Joe, who wrote a book called
Planet Joe
and appeared in a few Raymond Pettibon films, was later murdered. He and Henry Rollins were sharing a house in Venice, which in the early nineties was still a ghetto, with one street gentrified and the next a war zone. One night, as they were getting home, they were ambushed by robbers, and after telling them the truth, that they only had fifty dollars between the two of
them, one shot Joe point-blank in the head. Henry managed somehow to escape by running out the back door of their house. When Henry called to tell me about Joe, I burst into tears. I didn't get over it for a couple of years, to be honest. The senseless, random act of violence against someone so full of life and innocence was mind-blowing, and I hated Los Angeles for a long time after that. I wrote the song “JC” about Joe, while Thurston wrote “100%.” It was hard to sing without tearing up.

WHEN OUR ALBUM
Dirty
came out, the band made a video for “100%” with Tamra Davis directing again. It was intended to be a celebration of Joe. Thurston had seen a skateboard video that a young director named Spike Jonze had shot, where skaters drive the old car they're riding in over a cliff, and decided to ask Spike to shoot the skate material. Tamra then showed Spike how to edit for a music video, and, after that, Spike's career really took off. Jason Lee made an appearance in the video as the skater, and I also met Mark Gonzales, the skater-artist, who showed up at the shoot and opened his car trunk to show us painting after painting on brown paper bags. “Take whatever you want,” he said, but despite his generosity I took only one.

Later during that same shoot, Keanu Reeves showed up. He was good friends with the producer and had let me use his bass rig. Thurston and I had seen Keanu's band play the night before at the Roxy in Hollywood. The audience seemed to be mostly made up of hookers with fake breasts and stilettos angled exclusively on Keanu, who spent most of the show with his back to the audience. Until then I didn't know that so many hookers hung out at the Roxy. Keanu was incredibly sweet, and I had a huge crush on him.

In the video for “100%” I wore a bootleg Rolling Stones shirt that said “Eat Me.” As a result, MTV, which showed any number of videos of naked women grinding away, was reluctant to run ours. They felt my shirt sent a bad message to viewers.

After the band signed with Geffen, a story came out about an executive there who had sexually harassed his secretary. That was the inspiration for “Swimsuit Issue.” I found it strange that Geffen, like a lot of companies, had a “Secretary's Day,” but secretaries never seemed to get promoted to anything above that level. The song was meant to spotlight that hypocrisy.

I'm just here for dictation

I don't wanna be a sensation

Bein' on 60 Minutes

Was it worth your fifteen minutes?

Don't touch my breast

I'm just workin' at my desk

Don't put me to the test

I'm just doin' my best.

Shopping at Maxfields

Power for you to wield

Dreams of going to the Grammys

Till you poked me with your whammy

You spinned the disc

Now you're moving your wrist

I'm just from Encino

Why are you so mean-o?

I'm just here for dictation

And not your summer vacation

You really like to schmooze

Well now you're on the news

I'm from Sherman Oaks

Just a wheel with spokes

But I ain't giving you head

In a sunset bungalow

Hhh, hhh . . . Roshuma, Judith, Paulina, Cathy, Vendela, Naomi,

Ashley, Angie, Stacey, Gail . . .

For the “Dirty” promo we participated in an MTV-sponsored event, inviting people to submit videos anonymously. Our friend Phil Morrison's was the best—it showed a parade of shirtless guys smoking cigars in a living room, slinking toward the camera—but when MTV found out it was his, and, worse, that he was a friend, they wouldn't crown him the winner.

We also did a big-budget video for “Sugar Kane,” directed by Nick Egan and involving a lot of people who would later make big names for themselves. It was Chloë Sevigny's film debut, for one thing. At the time she was working as an intern at
Sassy,
Jane Pratt's magazine, and my friend Daisy asked Andrea Linett, who would later go on to cofound
Lucky
magazine, if Andrea knew anyone who could play the part of a girl disrobing during a catwalk fashion show. Nick, it turned out, knew Marc Jacobs—Marc had just released his “grunge” collection for Perry Ellis—and Marc agreed to let us use his showroom and his clothes, and also helped score models and fashion-world people to appear in the video. It was pure coincidence that it was Marc's “grunge” collection—I don't think we even realized it at the time.

Nick shot a lot of the “Sugar Kane” video on Super 8, and in the end, rather than keeping it normal-scale, we perhaps made the mistake of
reducing it so the finished video on-screen looked like Super 8, which made it less commercial and airplay-friendly. Still, that was the beginning of Thurston's and my friendship with Marc as well as Chloe.

In the early nineties, before social and online media, people still read newspapers and magazines and watched MTV, and the word on the street mattered more than anything. In 1990 my old friend Mike Kelley had a series called
Arenas,
where he would set down crocheted blankets on the floor, populated by used, thrift-store stuffed animals or dolls. Mike called them “Gifts of Guilt,” referring to the fact that the many hours it takes to crochet something makes the person receiving it feel the heaviest possible obligation to cherish it, and they're stricken with guilt if they get rid of it. For the cover of
Dirty,
we used one of Mike's images, which he'd titled
Ahh . . . Youth!
Inside the leaflet was the rest of the photo series taken from that time. They were a perfect symbol of American culture, where newness replaces the old, messy, fragrant, real, humanized form of anything, lest we ever be reminded of dying.

SOON AFTER THURSTON
and I met Courtney at her L.A. gig, Courtney wrote me a letter—people wrote letters then—asking if I would produce her band Hole's first album.

At first I said no. I could tell she was either a borderline personality or had some other kind of crazy, contagious energy, and I try to avoid that kind of drama in my life. I didn't have much experience as a producer, either, having only done Julie Cafritz's band STP's record, alongside Don Fleming, who was best known for working with the Scottish alternative band Teenage Fanclub on their breakout record
Bandwagonesque
. But then I changed my mind, reasoning that she
had something interesting going on and, well, it can be hard to say no to things.

Hole had a very small budget, and the record had to be finished in a week. Luckily Don agreed to coproduce with me. Hole consisted of Eric Erlandson on guitar, Caroline Rue on drums, Jill Emery on bass, and Courtney on vocals.

From the beginning, I had a feeling that Courtney, who was cunning, smart, and ambitious, asked me along only because she wanted my name associated with the record. Courtney was the kind of person who spent a lot of time growing up staring in the mirror practicing her look for the camera. Some people are just born that way, and in the studio I felt she was performing for us. But Courtney put her all into her singing, and when she felt the band wasn't up to her level, she would do something extreme to motivate them, like throw a glass bottle or shatter something against the drum set—all for the good of the record.

Hole recorded everything in four days, and we mixed it over the next three. Eric Erlandson was a really good guitar player, serving as the dissonant backbone of the band. If it weren't for his playing, the record would have been nothing. I'm sure Courtney was after a more polished sound for her entrée into the music world, but the end result was raw. She had a great punk rock voice, and the song titles and lyrics were pure provocation: “Pretty on the Inside” and “Teenage Whore.” Her early career as a stripper gave her great material to work with, and she had an instinct for commanding attention. She was always sweet to Don and me because we were going to take her somewhere new and better, she hoped, but she yelled and screamed at everybody in her band.

If Courtney wanted something from you, she would use 100 percent of her charm and persuasion to get it. Back then Courtney had a ragged scar across her nose, as if her roommate tried to give her an impromptu nose job. In an otherwise charismatic face, it was hard not to notice. Years later, at Lollapalooza she described to me all the plastic surgery she planned to get. She said, “You probably didn't know this, but I had a nose job once.” I think by then she'd had a couple.

At one point during the recording, Courtney told me she thought Kurt Cobain was hot, which made me cringe inside and hope the two of them would never meet. We all said to ourselves, “Uh-oh, train wreck coming.” She also asked us for advice about her “secret affair” with Billy Corgan from Smashing Pumpkins. I thought,
Ewww,
at even the mention of Billy Corgan, whom nobody liked because he was such a cry-baby, and Smashing Pumpkins took themselves way too seriously and were in no way punk rock. (It was a debate as old as time, who was “punk rock” and who was “alternative.”) Sure, everybody took their music seriously, but there was something grating about Billy Corgan and Smashing Pumpkins—were they too pretentious? too image-conscious and acting?—that rubbed people the wrong way.

That Courtney was attracted to Billy came as a surprise, as she was clearly so punk rock. But she was also ambitious and manipulative, as Don and I learned well during the recording process. Courtney could be honest and real, too—you just never knew which direction she would go—but knowing she could turn on me at any moment, I always kept her at arm's length.

Over the years, Courtney has said plenty of awful things in the press about me, and about Thurston, too, though he was practically the only person nice to Courtney after she punched Kathleen Hanna in the face on the first night of Lollapalooza in 1995. This happened as Kathleen stood on the side of the stage, watching our set, minding her own business. Courtney and Kathleen had never met before. Thurston wasn't attracted to Courtney, but in hindsight I see that he's drawn to that level of darkness.