Love: It's a futile ... it's almost a stupid conversation at this point. And it's a conversation you're gonna have with every young musician that walks in the room that's coming from a certain place. You might not have it with somebody put together by a record company or some Hootie that's just so damn happy to be here. But anybody that comes from a history is gonna have this problem. They're gonna have this problem. They're gonna be whoever ... your Scorpio. And they're gonna go in the room and they're gonna say, "We don't wanna write the hook 'cause that's selling out. And we're not gonna try for the hook." And they're just conflicted, there's a tension there. I more looked at directors. I looked at somebody like Quentin Tarentino. He built a building, he didn't compromise his vision. It's great. We all love it. We all understand it. It operates on many, many, many levels and it's organic and real. Do you know what I mean? Or look at Milos. And I can look at songwriters and see that too. I can look at Neil Young and whatever, but commercially, I don't know. Auf Der Maur: Commercially, it's also the stubborn people probably hoping that the times will adjust to them and they're kinda sitting tight without being willing to meet halfway or look at what's actually going on around them and try and take from that. Love: We have that too. We have that narcissism. We think that people are going to acclimate to this record. And I think any great record or change, whether it's Guns 'N' Roses or Alanis or Nirvana or whatever, the world comes to it. Erlandson: But she's talking about somebody... Auf Der Maur: You're referring to 30 years ago, not just the past five years where I've been playing music or the past 10 years since I've been in a punk-rock band, you know what I mean? Erlandson: Somebody stuck in their style, in their little world... like if we were still playing our 1991 stuff. Love: You're saying two things though. You're saying people that don't want to change their persona or sound. But what you're saying is... it interests me because I want to know what you mean. Like take the band I was just referring too. You know who I mean. Auf Der Maur: See, one's world broadens. I'd say that... Love: Are they that ambitious, though, that they think that the world-view is gonna come to them? 'Cause that's admirable! Auf Der Maur: I'm just interpreting it that way. They have evolved within their genre. They had a peak and then they grow. But they're not referring to Cheap Trick. They're not referring, in terms of their world view, they're only willing to get so far... Love: But they refer to the Stones. They must refer to some things that sound good or else what's the point of music? Auf Der Maur: Yeah, who knows. Well, if you're stuck in your generation or you're... Love: What do you think? They just sit there and listen to Atari Teenage Riot over and over again? Auf Der Maur: Maybe. Oh, come on. jazz maybe, but in terms of rock... Erlandson: But growth as a band -- maybe they're too democratic or something. You never know. Auf Der Maur: Too democratic! Love: No, it's good, it's good. Erlandson: Growth as a band, like on this record, you can't compare it. We're not... Love: I'm just sort of talking about the follies of our generation and how this small little generation, which if we don't gain control and power -- the Tina Browns and the Paul Allens -- the boomers will influence the minds of all 16-year-olds. So there's got to be ambition in this generation, real ambition. Not like I want to take over the world, but I want to take over the world on my terms and make a building that people can actually go to. That there's a toilet in, instead of a port-a-potty outside. Auf Der Maur: But there might be a serious short-sightedness going on in general. Love: You know what it is? Too many boys on the side of the good and too many girls as product right now. Sort of. Auf Der Maur: There's an imbalance. Love: It's really imbalanced. It's tragic about the girl thing right now, but I think it'll be fixed. Auf Der Maur: That's also a good sign, because it's getting to the next side... Love: Renewal. Yeah. You can't be a drummer and get rewarded as a girl now. Like all the Sleater-Kinneys and the Babes in Toylands and the L7s, all the people that were like our peers -- gone. If they're not gone, they refuse to write hooks. And they could. You listen to Sleater-Kinney. God, these girls have good voices. They have talent, they have a pop sensibility. I hear it. I hear it. Where is it? Where is it? Never comes, never comes. ATN: They still have some time, don't you think? Love: I don't think they do, politically, because I think they've been hypnotized and their souls have been stolen by the males around them in their punk-rock scene. Their souls have literally been stolen. They've been told, 'You can't sell out, you can't sell out, you can't be ambitious.' God bless Bikini Kill for sticking with it and then breaking up and moving to North Carolina to be a lesbian or whatever. Peace. At least they stayed on that one side. You can't just be a fence-sitter, you can't have all this talent, you know you have talent, and then not develop it. Auf Der Maur: Yeah, they do have time. They're young girls, certainly, but what if it takes them a little while to catch up on... Love: But they live in Portland and they hate... Did you see them at the Troubadour? They were mean, they were pulling that whole old-school riot shit, they weren't being an entertainer. I swear to God, I saw Beck a couple of years ago just come out with a white glitter Nudie yarmulke. And like be an entertainer! Which is what it is, just deal with it! And as much as that's entertainment back in the day, a brown T-shirt and a flannel was entertainment. Those guys, unfortunately -- and even I -- didn't know that was entertainment. We thought we were affecting change. We didn't know we were in costumes. I, of course, knew that I was in a costume because I was wearing makeup. It's all showbiz, really, and how much of an ass you're willing to make of yourself and how much you're willing to say words out of your mouth that you don't mean. That's a whole other deal. I'm not gonna do that. ATN: The lyrics on this album ... when you read them and you listen, they feel real. The sound may be much more accessible than ever. But you're delivering sentiments that ... Love: That's the goal. I've always wanted that my whole entire life -- to marry great hooks with a dense vision. The other stuff is tertiary next to that desire. I want to be as perverse as I'd like to be and therefore subversive while making you hum along with it. And then you realize what you say. And then I've built my building or we've built our building. ATN: This album does exactly that. And there are lines on this album that are as punk from '76 as anything. Love: I got the words "riot," "punk," "royalty rate." I was gonna have "icky" in there, but a Standells reference anyway, and "sixteen," which is one of my favorite words, in one song. That's really a great pop song. That was kind of the goal. There's so much power and language. Boys, a lot of time people say "the lyrics don't really matter." I have had some friends that are boys and people I've been close to that have really tried and gone there with lyrics and done it. And once in a while they'll merge a great hook with a great lyric and that's when it's great and it's better than anything else you could possibly do for a living or for fun. ATN: Probably one of the main reasons that people related to your last record was that, again, the lyrics and the music and the whole thing connected. It wasn't like the song sounded good, but the lyrics were boring. It was all there, and all good. Erlandson: Or just a singer/songwriter with good lyrics but just a bland ... the music's flat all the way through. Love: Or a great singer/songwriter like Joni Mitchell who'scompletely eccentric and individualistic but is not rock, is not pop. Erlandson: It's hard. There's not a lot of rock music with thatmixture of density and lightness that makes things accessible. Love: It's kind of a nice paradigm, or not paradigm... paradox. There's a better word for it. I forget the word. It was in my head. It does start with a "p," but I forgot what it was. ATN: When I was talking about some of those different things in thesongs relating to showbiz or the record biz or the music business, it just seems like there's a fair amount of things where you're talking about the business taking advantage or using, robbing, taking the innocence away from people -- those sorts of ideas. Love: Well, that's maybe the stuff I am personally embittered about in life. Yeah, it's a theme. One of the problems, though, with me, is that I can become -- if I allow myself -- I can low-ball myself and just become a pundit, you know what I mean? And just be some sort of commenter. And that's my way of being defensive and not actually getting to the meat of the matter or down to brass tacks emotionally. So that sassiness... I have this theory if you get to the point where you're so cynical about everything, you can actually do this quantum black-hole thing and come through on the side of innocence. Seriously! I had that theory for years. That if you watch out for it, you know it's a part of you, you know your cynicism is just everywhere around you, everything you look at can be put in quotes, you know. And that's sort of the way we've been raised with all our data. And if you're an intelligent person and you're raised in this environment of too much television, too much this, too much that ... you just naturally, your body and your soul become cynical, so what are you gonna do about that? How are you gonna find God? Where are you going to get your Frank Capra ending? In that moment, you've got to keep the core of you safe psychically. In "Awful," I go on and on and on. That song was 10 minutes long. And it was just about guest lists and fucking -- the whole thing. The "Teen Spirit" answer song or something, you know what I mean? And now this is the last song of this genre that will ever be written and I'm going to write it. Actually, Melissa and Patty brought it in. But we're going to write it. And who better, frankly? And then we got to the end and it was so bitter. And I was like, all right, if they bought it all, you just build a new one, just build a new one. 'Cause I wanted to give a happy ending 'cause it was just dour. You're all sold out. There's one song, "Playing Your Song," which is completely cynical and nasty from beginning to end. And that's the only one that doesn't really offer any hope, but I was pissed off about something, so I wrote it. ATN: I interpret that song as being about all these other copycat kind of bands that have showed up... Love: It is and it isn't. It is and it isn't. It's kind of a bit of a generational address. It's kind of me being a pundit. It's not really about the copycat bands, but it is a little bit... I don't know what it's about. ATN: You know what it's about. Love: No I don't. I don't know. This is the fun part of making a record. You guys all... Erlandson: It's the last grunge song ever written. Love: That's the last grunge song ever written. I took it upon myself to write it. And no more should they now be written. You have to have a sort of sense of yourself to pull this off. So what? I don't fucking care. I just started a fight with Tina Brown. ATN: You seem like you don't really want to talk about what some of the lyrics mean. Love: Because I don't a) know 'cause it changes all the time. 'Cause I wrote one song about one boy, then next week it was about another boy or not next week. I wrote one song about one boy and then recently it became about another boy. And years ago, I wrote a song about one boy and then it became about another boy. They change; they mutate. We were mixing "Malibu" and I was like, "Oh, now I know what this is about." 'Cause I never knew what it was about. I don't know. Auf Der Maur: Just because there's literal writing, that doesn't make it... Love: It isn't literal, really. Some of it's narrative. Auf Der Maur: No. Just 'cause words are words doesn't mean that... Because I know from my own ... everything from photography to any art form ... I use like a riff, and then only a week, or a year or whatever, later do I see the clarity of where it came from. When it comes, it just comes. Later you start putting the pieces together. I always think that lyrics are misinterpreted as obviously about something. Just 'cause they're words, and it's more obvious than a photograph or music, but it's not. Love: It's not. Auf Der Maur: It's the exact same thing as a non-specific feeling. Love: Or a Francis Bacon. Or something. Or a building. I don't know. I honestly don't. ATN: I saw "Malibu" as being about either you making a decision, or maybe people around you helping you and then you made a decision and said whatever... I want to go forward, I want to live. Love: Wow. I don't know. I don't know what it's about. It's not about a rich, white, upper-middle-class enclave, which I realize is what Malibu is. ATN: No, of course not. Love: It's an idea of Xanadu, Nirvana, bliss, this place that when I was younger, made me feel safe. And even now, when I drive out to Malibu, I feel safe. My first boyfriend I ever had, I lived out there with. It's always been a special little place for me. And we were poor, white trash in the trailer, don't get me wrong. There is such a thing in Malibu. It's just way up in the canyons. I thought it was a rehab boy song. And then I thought, I don't know what. Some boy that needs to get away, some girl that needs to get away, I don't know. Auf Der Maur: [I don't write the lyrics] but I have insight in terms of lyrical interpretations. Being a bandmember and having watched the birth of a lot of those songs and seeing everything from the editing process to off-the-cuff whatever, I know having been there from throughout a lot of it that my interpretations are probably way off from hers. Love: But I love to hear them 'cause then they make sense. Auf Der Maur: Right. Your interpretation of a friend or a stranger or artist, whatever, is gonna be different from the other guy next to you. And we have freedom to read into it whichever way we want. Love: That's why if you guys want to project all that stuff onto these songs and it does something for you to do that, I'm not gonna tell you not to do that just because I don't wanna exploit things that are mine. You know what I mean? You can do that. And if it helps understand something, go ahead. That doesn't mean that that was the intent. When we wrote "Northern Star," I had this Melville thing in my head. And I wanted a Seattle thing. It wasn't balanced. There's no Seattle. I know "Northern Star" is grammatically incorrect, so I wondered where I got it from. Then the other day I listened to [Stevie Nicks'] "Bella Donna," and she says "Northern Star." So I obviously stole it, subconsciously too. So whatever. I saw a boat ... I saw Moby Dick on a really frozen night, and I wanted to make you feel cold and I wanted some fear. You see what happens when I go off? I get all Sylvia Plath. Twisting my hair, forget it, I'm not talking about it, I don't even know. Auf Der Maur: Even me just realizing now that even though I have no idea what Courtney actually thinks, I'm not kicking myself in the head going, "Oh, but I want to know what she really thinks they're about," because I'm just happy to have... Love: But I don't know. Auf Der Maur: Exactly. I'm saying that people who want to ask you that sort of thing... Love: Maybe if you don't write a lot of poetry that you don't know. So people think that there's an intention and the intention is carried through and there's always a narrative and the narrative is always dense. Erlandson: A lot of more trained songwriters... Love: They have a theme and they go with it. "Playing Your Song" is a linear song. There's a linear song there. Erlandson: A lot of your songs ... they just flow out in little bits and pieces, and then you put them together. It comes together so organically like that, but so chaotically too. Love: I'll tell you bits that I know for sure about these songs. I can't get into every single thing 'cause I don't know. ATN: So tell me a bit that you know about "Malibu." Love: [picks up a copy of the lyrics and looks at them] Well,Melissa was doing this thing lyrically at the end of it where she was doing background vocals and she was doing this weird lullaby of "down by the sea, down by the sea," which I wasn't doing. Sort of Yeatsy, so I picked that up. There's my little star-is-born moment, where he walks into the ocean, is he gonna die, is he gonna live? Oh, there's a nice Joy Division reference here, which we have a lot of. We have a P.I.L. reference. We have a Pavement reference, we have a Standells reference, and Nick Cave. In the very last part, the outro, I felt like this sort of maternal, I felt like this big sister, I felt like this person that needed to take care of someone weak and I needed to rescue them -- maybe. And then I saw a beautiful sort of spiritual love at the very end, light-radiating thing. So pompous to talk about it. It makes me feel like English 101. I don't know. I don't know that one. I don't know that one. It's one of the ones I just don't know, I never figured it out. ATN: Do you think that the media is gonna give this album a fair shake? What do you think? Love: I think you guys are really desperate for a good record, so I don't really care if you give it a fair shake or not at this point. The context of the media is so soul-destroying in this country in the past five years with the rise of so many tabloid shows, so much synthetic talk, it's not even celebrity gossip anymore. It's just like what we chatter incessantly about because we've just been destroyed by television. And frankly, the only media I care about is Modern Maturity [a magazine for senior citizens], because it sells 20 million. I don't give a shit. Erlandson: Modern Maturity? Love: Y'all like it or you don't. I did what I wanted to do, and you can take it from there. I don't care. Auf Der Maur: Hopefully the record-buyers will just like it. Love: I know that you work within the media context, so nothing personal. But ultimately, nobody gives a shit. People are gonna buy Celine Dion records whether we like them or not. They're gonna go see "Armageddon" whether we want them to or not. They're not gonna go see "Boogie Nights." And they're not gonna go see "Larry Flynt" ["The People Vs. Larry Flynt," which Love starred in]. And once in a while they're gonna buy a Nirvana record or they're gonna go to "Pulp Fiction" and we're gonna be happy about that. Do you know what I mean? 'Cause we like it and they like it if there's a separation, although I've gone to "Armageddon" and enjoyed it. 'Cause I'm a cheeseball. Erlandson: You always go to bad movies. Love: As an elitist bourgeois faux wannabe intellectual, whatever, fuck Tina Brown. Let me re-phrase that. Do I think the media's gonna give it a fair shake? Do I care? No. Is that something I've thought about ever? No. [whispers] I'd work on my sex appeal more if I wanted the media to like me. ATN: Does it bother you when a reporter like Barbara Walters... there you are and she asks you... ? Love: I did that to myself. It's no one's fault but my own. It's not her fault. It's her context. I entered her context. Like a Gran Guigol idiot, that was me. Erlandson: When you do Barbara Walters, you know what you're getting. Love: I didn't know what I was getting 'cause I don't watch TV. But somebody should have locked me in my damn room for about six months is what someone should have done, and no one did. I entered that. It's my own fault. I'm accountable for that. ATN: But you live and learn. Love: You do. And I see Barbara Walters out and she's awfully nice to me. I can hang with that, on that side of the street. I'm fine. I know what it is and it can be so fun. Totally can. The other night, I had dinner. I had to go to dinner with Jim Carrey and they went to Brentwood, a fancy Brentwood restaurant with Jim Carrey and he sang "Happy Birthday" to me. It was all very fabulous and Hollywood. But you know, I felt really something was missing. So I had to go to the Bauhaus show and see all my ex-punk-rock boyfriends down on the ground, the ones that go on "Hard Copy" now, too. And then I felt balanced because I'd gone to where I really come from, and I'd gone to Brentwood. I had to have dinner with him because I'm gonna be in a movie with him. It wasn't like... anyway. ATN: I'd have dinner with him. Love: He sang "Happy Birthday" to me. It was nice. Bauhaus didn't sing happy any bloody birthday to me. ATN: "The Truman Show," that's an awesome movie. Love: It was good. I'm gonna go kiss him. We're gonna make out in this movie. So I wanted to check out what I was getting into. ATN: You have this line: "If the world is so wrong/yet we can break them all with one song/if the world is so wrong/yeah, with one song, you can take it all." Do you believe that? Love: Yeah. Yeah, that's the beauty of it all. Yes I do. That's why I put it there. It's an absolute conviction. ATN: Is there a song you were thinking of, or songs you were thinking of? Love: Yeah, there was, but I'm not telling you what it is. There were a couple, in fact, world-changing great songs. ATN: But you don't want to share your personal world-changing great songs? Love: Does that make me a bad interviewee? God, I talk so much. No. ATN: OK. Ten years from now, is Hole gonna still be together? What do you think you'll be doing? Erlandson: Hmmm. As long as we're not doing retro tours... Love: I think I'm gonna do this until my fire runs out and that might happen at any second. That's one of the things about rock that's kinda cool, is that if you keep going when your fire's gone, you're silly. Maybe you've shouldered yourself with responsibilities and children, whatever, so I'm not blaming anybody. "Silly" is the wrong word. It's tragic if you have to keep going when you don't want to anymore. So when I don't feel it and it's not in me, I'm gonna stop. And I think we all feel the same way. Auf Der Maur: There's lots of things other than rock to do in the world. Love: Sure is. Lots of stuff. Cool stuff. ATN: What do you two do when Courtney's working on a movie? Love: Well, I've worked on two movies. Auf Der Maur: Yeah, she hasn't had that much time away from us. But we spend a lot of time apart when we're not working. We all live our own creative lives. Erlandson: Yeah. I went and bought a studio. Love: He produced some 14-year-old girls. Erlandson: Learned how to record a little bit and do a lot of things that I never really had the time to explore. I'm always constantly working on keeping this album going. Auf Der Maur: This has been the priority for the last few years. Erlandson: Keep us going and just keep it happening and learn how to write songs. Love: And Melissa goes out and is a world-class rock star and wears fabulous leather pants and takes really great pictures and trails of boys follow her wherever she goes. Auf Der Maur: But I also play music on the side, too. Love: [laughs] Auf Der Maur: I was 22 when I joined this band, and I had played eight live shows in my life. So I'm still living and learning. Love: [shouts] But we picked so good. You're such a Beatle! I was so proud of you last night! Auf Der Maur: So I played on Ric Ocasek's record and did the Cars reunion-type tour. Love: Which she learned a lot about. Auf Der Maur: Yeah, I learned a lot. I sing a lot. Anytime anybody needs a backup singer I'll be there. I just like playing with as many people... Love: My Hollywood stuff is not really what takes up time. I've gone to like, what? Three movie premieres in my life really and made them [the rest of Hole] come to the "Batman" one 'cause I had to go. It takes a while to get dressed up and be fabulous for those. Being fabulous is so fun. It's one of the great, fun, vain perks of the whole business that you get. But it really doesn't take that much time. We get asked that question frequently, so I think it's just sort of silly. Literally, last film I did took four weeks. When I did "Larry Flynt" way, way before that, they came to Memphis. It was a disaster. But we tried to play. This movie I'm doing now, I'm going to go get some really great empathy therapy because I'm just playing the soul of empathy, I have no problems in this movie. I just have mousey brown hair. It'll be really good for me, take away all the bad, arrogant stuff, clean me out. And then we'll be ready to rock. ATN: Why did it take so long to make this record? Well, let's put it this way. The last record was four years ago. Love: OK. Think about my life, me in particular, in four years. Some intense personal habits that had to be dealt with to do with health and mental capacity. Some intense stuff that happened to my life. I don't even know why I'm here. An incredible, beautiful child that I am the mother of. So there's all that. And we toured for a year and a half of that period. So while I'm trying to deal with all this crap, I'm in this Gran Guigol state, burning up at both ends. And we're making this tour. Then, Eric, you go from there -- the last two years. Erlandson: Yeah, so all we did was we wrote for a year. After we got off the tour, we wrote for a year. Love: We didn't write every day for a year. Erlandson: Yeah, but we took the time that we needed to grow and took our time writing, instead of writing on the road, and then hopping into the studio like a lot of bands do. And then releasing a really sublevel record because they didn't take the time to grow and put out something that means something. So we took the time to do that. Then took a year making the record with a producer who's really into details, and who really takes a long time, and who likes to spend a lot of money. Love: And extravagant. An extravagant producer who's really, really good. But extravagant. Erlandson: Yeah. So that took a lot of time. That took a lot longer than we expected. We thought we were gonna be able to make a record in three months, but this record has a life of its own. And that's what happened. We wanted to get it out at a certain time, but now we're realizing hey, it's coming out at the perfect time. Maybe some people are over it. But it's right now, we didn't rush it out before it was done. It's still not done but... it'll be done by tomorrow. Love: Back to directors. Some directors make a movie every eight years. There's no schedule. What is there -- a rule? You have to keep feeding the market? Erlandson: We've already gotten so far away from the Beatles. When it was all a singles market... Love: You have to put out a product... Erlandson: You put out a product, yeah. Love: Product, product, product. Erlandson: In England, it's weird 'cause that mentality still exists there. And it's really weird to watch that. Somebody's getting a little success and their career's starting to take off, and instead of just doing what a lot of American bands would do, start touring a lot, they'll tour a lot, but then they're also in the studio, bam, every chance they get. They're in the studio working on songs for the next record. Love: And we sold enough records last time to earn this time. ATN: One thing that I'd like you to get on the record and sort of deal with so it's there. There's been speculation over the last two years or more about the writing. There was all this stuff that appeared about oh, Kurt wrote the songs but didn't put them on. I'd like it if you could address this whole songwriting issue. Love: You would like it, wouldn't you? A lot of people would like that, wouldn't they? I wonder if I should. The reason I don't address it is it's so fucking retarded that it's beneath me. It's beneath me. My ego is just far too huge to allow somebody to write songs for me. It's retarded. So I don't address it because it's gross. Speculation. Go make your fucking speculation. Have your website. I don't give a shit. It's a free country. It's low-balling, it's disgusting. ATN: I'm not saying that ... Love: Of course you're not. You want the quote that I won't give. ATN: Let me make sure that you understand. I'm not saying that people are saying that you didn't write the lyrics. But what I've seen out there is... Love: I'm not even gonna get defensive. That's disgusting. It's disgusting. It's retarded. I'm not gonna answer it. It is false in the most pathetic sense of the word. It's sexist. It's spiritually bankrupt. It's beyond that, insulting to him. Because if he was gonna write songs for me, they'd better have been better than my skill level at the time, which his was certainly better than mine back then. I'm way, way too narcissistic to allow some boy to come in and fucking tell me what to do. There's just no way. Billy was bad enough for 12 days. And I learned a lot. We got a lot out of it. But you know, I've been with him for a long time. I've been with her [Auf Der Maur] for four years. I've been with Patty for a long time. I already have discussed it, so you got what you wanted. ATN: And I appreciate you doing it because... Love: Yeah, but now that's the thing that's gonna go out on Reuters -- I've just given away. I feel like ewww. I don't know. I feel like stuff's coming out of me or something. No. I won't talk about that. It's just gross. People are gross and if you pander to the lowest common denominator in the human spirit, which we all have, you're not elevating anybody. Duh. Figure it out, assholes. Whatever. You know what I mean? Just figure it out. Stupid. Erlandson: [looks over and laughs] ATN: The reason that I brought that up was because since it had been, I thought, raised in a lot of different situations... Love: But why? Because the male is dominant over the female? What the fuck is that? Why? If you knew the even truth of that, if I even went into the details of that, it's so out-of-balance it's sick. And I'm not gonna go there because the Dionysian hero has to have a fucking succubus. I don't want to get into this sort of cultural mythology crap. It's bullshit. Let me just say, on the record, it's bullshit, it's boring. Yawn. Goodbye, darling. I have wars to start with Tina Brown now. - Addicted To Noise, 1998 Previous Page - - - - - - - - - - - - -