Love & Death (5 page)

It was during this period that Courtney became, in her own words, a “demon child.” The brash young delinquent proved unmanageable for her surrogate mother, therapist or not, and she was soon shipped off to join Linda in New Zealand. She didn’t last long there. Linda quickly sent Courtney off to test the compassion of another friend in the region, who in turn ended up banishing her to a Catholic boarding school in Australia. It was the first of a series of schools over the next few years that would expel her with dizzying alacrity. Courtney then headed back to Oregon, where she was shuttled from one of her mother’s friends to another—each time overstaying her welcome when she was caught shoplifting, stealing money or smoking pot.

By 1977, Linda and her husband had tired of sheep ranching and returned to Oregon, where Courtney went back to live with them, mainly because Linda could no longer find anybody willing to take her in. But when she was caught shoplifting from a local Wool-worth’s at the age of twelve—stealing either a 49-cent lipstick or a Kiss T-shirt, depending on Courtney’s mood when she tells the story—her mother instructed the police to teach Courtney a lesson. Instead of the usual warning, she was brought before a judge and placed on probation. When Courtney ran away from home a few days later, Linda asked the authorities not to bring her home, but to a reform school called Hillcrest. In an interview with her biographer, Melissa Rossi, Courtney recalled arriving at the school in handcuffs, leg shackles and a David Bowie haircut. Years later, she would describe the dissolute period of freedom leading up to this stint in juvenile hall. “I was a runt—no tits, no period, no puberty—so I get picked on, and I realize that I can fight really well if I just pretend I’m going to murder the person. I started hanging around the mall and running with this crowd of teen whores.”

She fit right in among the bad girls at Hillcrest. In a letter she sent to her father at fourteen, full of chatty references to the crush she had on Kurt Russell and the fact that
Lord of the Flies
was her favorite book, she brags that she has read her personal file and found herself described as “the most shrewd, cunning, devious person” her caseworker had ever seen. In another letter, written the same year, she writes, “I went out and knifed a girl because I didn’t like her looks.” It was at Hillcrest that Courtney claims she discovered punk rock for the first time after an intern working at the school returned from England and noticed her resemblance to British punk musicians. After he lent her a copy of the Sex Pistols’
Never Mind the Bollocks,
Courtney claims, she decided she wanted to be a rock star. This account is dubious because her friends would later say she always despised punk music. But there is no doubt that it was during this period that Courtney began writing poetry, some of which would form the lyrics of her later music. Harrison still has a stack of harrowing poems Courtney wrote between the ages of fourteen and sixteen. One of the most revealing is called “Future Date” and includes the lines:

I’ll destroy anyone in my way

I’ll kill every lousy lay—Coz I got my eye on a Future Date

By 1980, Harrison hadn’t seen his daughter for several years. They corresponded frequently, however, and in each of her letters, Courtney begs him to “get me out of here.” Finally, when she was fifteen, he successfully convinced the state of Oregon to release her into his custody. She moved in with her father for more than a year, the first period of relative stability that she had probably ever experienced. His second book,
The Dead, Volume
2—chronicling the Haight-Ashbury scene from an anthropological perspective—had been released to great acclaim. (One academic reviewer described him as the “Jane Goodall of rock and roll.”) Now Harrison was planning to embark on a two-year study of the monuments of ancient Ireland. For Courtney, the British music scene beckoned. She desperately wanted to go overseas with him but had settled for her father’s promise to send for her once he was established in Dublin after completing a six-month research odyssey. She was to spend the interval in a Portland foster home. Harrison takes out a letter he received from Courtney while he was in Ireland in which she writes, “You’re the only person who ever understood me.”

As bizarre as it seems, Courtney’s version of what happened next appears to be fairly close to the truth. Only sixteen, she was approached by a representative of the Japanese underworld, who promised her a lot of money to come to the Far East and strip. For more than six months, she disappeared. When she was deported back to the States, she told friends lurid stories about working in the white slave trade.

Using her newly acquired skills, she soon landed a job stripping at a Portland club until the establishment was raided by police a few weeks later, and Courtney was carted off to yet another reform school. This time she happened to mention to a school social worker she had befriended that she was an heiress. When her confidante suggested she sue for legal and financial emancipation from her mother, Courtney gleefully took action. At the age of sixteen, the child who had been passed from hand to hand so many times finally took matters into her own. Just as important, she gained access to her trust fund. She now had the freedom and the money to pursue the life she had only read about in the fanzines. Her first stop was Dublin, where she hooked up with her father. But Ireland didn’t really appeal to Courtney, who saw bigger fish just a ferry ride away. She headed for Liverpool, a city undergoing a musical renaissance twenty years after the Beatles left town. In her backpack were a thousand hits of acid that she had brought with her from the States, intending to use the drugs as her entrée into the local music scene.

Before long, she was a fixture in the entourage of the neopsychedelic Liverpool band The Teardrop Explodes and was soon known as the band’s most loyal groupie, latching on to the notoriously eccentric front man, Julian Cope. Later Courtney would claim that Cope took her virginity, but she has made similar claims about at least three other rock stars, so it is difficult to know if this is just another one of her wild tales. She has also claimed that, during her stay in England, she took photos for the Irish music magazine
Hot Press,
shooting the Pretenders, U2 and other big-time rock bands. But
Hot Press
editor Niall Stokes claims that, like much of Courtney’s storied past, this is pure fiction. “It’s fairly typical Courtney behavior to lie or exaggerate anyway,” the magazine wrote in a 1995 profile. “Throughout her career, she has continually proffered colorful stories—often with several conflicting versions—about her past life to the media in order to increase her mystique and punk rock credibility.”

One story that she simply chose not to address is what suddenly happened to force Courtney’s abrupt return to Oregon in 1982. It was clear that she was no longer welcome in Liverpool, but the details are sketchy. “I took a lot of acid in Liverpool and basically I never recovered,” she later explained cryptically. Whatever the case, Cope’s band had harsh words for her in the years to come, claiming her time with them was a “destructive” one. Years later, after Courtney took up with Kurt Cobain, Julian Cope took out a large ad in the music press stating, “Free us from Nancy Spungen–fixated heroin A-holes who cling to our greatest rock groups and suck out their brains.” He also told an interviewer, “She needs shooting, and I’ll shoot her.”

Courtney’s next stop was Portland, and it was our next destination as well. This was the city she was referring to when she told
Spin
magazine, “Years ago in a certain town, my reputation had gotten so bad that every time I went to a party, I was expected to burn the place down and knock out every window.” Although it’s been more than a decade since she left town, there are people here who are clearly still afraid of her. Portland scenester Todd Curran remembers Courtney from the city’s notorious gay dance club the Metropolis, where drag queens mixed with new-wave bohos. “She was totally outrageous,” he recalls. “She was always causing a scene. The Metropolis wasn’t exactly a likely setting for barroom brawls, but when Courtney was around, it was chaos.” He said she popped pills like candy—barbiturates, speed, tranquilizers, painkillers.

Virtually everybody we talked to in Portland refused to be interviewed or asked that their names be changed, even though many said they actually liked her style and admired her take-no-prisoners attitude. “She was fun to watch as long as you didn’t get in her way,” said one former doyenne of the club scene who, although she hadn’t really dissed Courtney at all, begged us not to use the video of her interview, lest it “awake the beast.” But Rozz Rezabek has no such compunctions talking about Courtney for the record.

“Don’t believe the hype. A kinder, gentler Charles Manson is still Charles Manson.” This is the first thing he says about the woman who he claims “stole” his career. Rezabek was the front man for an up-and-coming Portland new-wave band called Theater of Sheep when Courtney swept back into town in the early ’80s after her sojourn in Liverpool.

“She latched on to me right away,” he recalls. “She claimed she was going to make me a star. At the time, she was always saying she thought the world was dominated by men and the only way she would make it was through a man, and I guess she chose me. She had just got back from England, where she was supposedly fucking all these rock stars. She would talk with this really phony British accent all the time. Then she started dressing me in Julian Cope’s clothes and was trying to make me into some kind of British rock god.” Eventually, Rezabek says, he quit music because of what he calls Courtney’s incessant attempts to mold him into her image of a rock star. “If I hadn’t,” he says, “I would have ended up just like Kurt, with a gun down my throat. Man, I can identify with what he must have gone through.” The last time he spoke to Courtney, he claims, she had just called to tell him how she had “bamboozled Barbara Walters” during her TV interview.

At some point during these Portland years, Courtney apparently decided that being a groupie would take her only so far. She would later state, “I finally said, ‘I’m not on this earth to fuck a rock star, I’m here to
be
a rock star.’ I would create myself.” Rezabek, who ended up dating Courtney on and off for nine years, still has a box of her old poetry, journals and more than fifteen hundred letters from that period. One particularly revealing note, written by Courtney to herself when she was about nineteen, gives an early hint of an ambitious, driven woman who knows what she wants and knows what it takes to get it. The note is titled “Here’s How Courtney Will Make It”:

A new breed of female rocker was just beginning to attract attention on the American punk scene, singing angry, feminist-laced, fiercely political lyrics to driving, hard-edged musical beats. This was music by and for Courtney’s type of woman. Before long, she had sought out and befriended two women rockers who were already attracting considerable attention on the foxcore scene—Kat Bjelland, a brash young L.A. stripper turned punk rocker, and Jennifer Finch, the lead singer of a band called Frightwig. Within a few years, the three women would form the genesis of what would soon be known as the riot grrrl movement. From the outset of their disastrous musical partnership, however, that possibility seemed extremely unlikely.

One day, apparently at Courtney’s suggestion, the three decided to form a band, which was known as Sugar Babylon and later renamed Sugar Baby Doll. Courtney had recently taken up the bass but still couldn’t play, so she was designated the lead singer. From the start, it was a fiasco. According to Kat, Courtney hated punk and wanted a more melodic new-wave sound while her bandmates wanted to play strictly hard-core punk rock. Tantrums followed and, within five months, the band had broken up. Soon Courtney moved to Minneapolis to join Kat’s new group, Babes in Toyland, but it wasn’t long before Courtney was thrown out of that band, reportedly for a lack of talent on the bass.

Depressed at yet another bump in her sputtering musical career, she decided she needed a change of scenery and headed off to San Francisco to live with her father once again and take some college courses. It was here that she discovered her magical elixir for the first time. In Portland, pills and acid had always been her preferred high. Now she appeared to take her drug use to a new level.

Hank Harrison’s partner, Triona Watson, remembers Courtney during this period: “She would live with us for a few weeks at a time and then spend extended periods hanging out at junkie pads and never coming home…. She could be really sweet one moment and then turn into a monster. Once she started doing heroin, she was unbearable. I remember once she threatened to burn our house down. We just couldn’t take it anymore.”

For Courtney’s father, the turning point came when he found syringes littering the floor of his house, remnants of a party Courtney had thrown in his absence. “When I realized my daughter was a junkie, I was stunned,” says Harrison, who claims his own drug use had never progressed farther than LSD and pot. “I had done a lot of drug intervention work during the sixties, and I tried to help her, but she told me to mind my own business and kept up her habit. She was stealing from me to buy more smack, so I finally threw her out.”