THE LESSONS OF LOVE - COURTNEY'S GOT THE HOLE WORLD IN HER HANDS It is a still-sleepy Courtney Love whose familiar voice comes over the phone line early one morning from Cincinnati. It's the first day of her band Hole's tour, a swing that stops Sunday night at the Orpheum Theatre for a sold-out-in-a-day show. "God," says Love, yawning, "you have me when I am so vulnerable. I just woke up. I am not all sharp and facile. I was just dreaming about having a crush on somebody and it was very inappropriate - you know, somebody you have a crush on but it's very inappropriate. But it was such a nice dream.... This was totally cerebral, absolutely romantic." It would be impolite to ask whom it concerns. "You cannot ask and I won't tell," she says, "but I will tell you that it is really, really inappropriate. "At least I have my social controls on. At least I have learned some boundaries. At least I can say it is inappropriate." Courtney Love: a tease, even when she's half asleep. If you know anything about her, you know that when she is on, she might, metaphorically speaking, bestow upon you a dozen roses or rip you to shreds with her verbal machine gun. Love, 33, is both a celebrity and a musician. On Hole's latest album, "Celebrity Skin," that's a theme, how her world is balanced or not balanced. Love started out as a rock 'n' roll hanger-on and moved quickly up the food chain. She became known primarily as Kurt Cobain's spotlight-stealing drug-sharing partner, girlfriend, and, later, wife, and the mother of their child, Frances Bean. It was after Cobain's suicide in the spring of 1993 that her star shot into the stratosphere, just as Hole's second CD, "Live Through This," came out. The album spawned a slew of hits, including "Miss World" and "Doll Parts." People say she's a loose cannon. "I am not a loose cannon," she says. "I don't think I have ever been much of a loose cannon." Reference point: the snarling line "I am the girl that lies and lies and lies," a key passage in "Miss World." Today's Love is the remade and remodeled controversial figure of concert stage and screen. On stage, she'll drop her top and cuss like a pirate if the spirit moves. On screen, she first appeared in the 1986 movie "Sid and Nancy" and got an Oscar nomination for playing the drug-addled sex bomb Althea in the 1996 movie "The People vs. Larry Flynt." She also became the unwilling and unsympathetic subject of "Kurt and Courtney," Nick Broomfield's film that raised serious questions about the role she may have played in her husband's death. Romance and rage What is it, she is asked, that Hole brings to the party? "Well," says Love, "I want to play with whatever I want to play with, whatever energies I want to play with. There is a lot of romance and there has always been a lot of romance. And there is a lot of rage, and I don't think that people in our culture really are used to rage and romance existing inside a female body, one that's a celebrity or a musician. "I was thinking about it last night. I was rehearsing last night and I just thought it was really so weird. ... I was figuring out how to write a Korn song and we were sort of jamming in this really easy key, and it was actually very satisfying. I was missing being able to write in a Polly Harvey `I like it rough/You know what I mean/Spread your black wings/I wring your neck, baby' way. I hadn't written one like that in a while and I really wanted to write one. But they're really dated, like an old blues riff." Aside from the Hole audience packing this string of shows, who might be hearing this band soon? The gentlefolk at Lilith Fair. No lie. Finally, a brash in-your-face band on Lilith's main stage. "I know, right," says Love. "We're doing five dates for sure." It's uncertain whether the Tweeter Center date will be part of it. Love says her new pal Sheryl Crow turned her on to the idea. "I think it's wonderful and it should be a really fun, interesting crowd to mess with. I will make them take to us. I can make anyone take to us, but it is about acclimation, what energies you want to play with." Love threatens noisy 10-minute reworkings of Hole songs and Sonic Youth covers. Road warriors Hole, which had been coheadlining with Marilyn Manson, left the tour last month. Problems ranged from staging difficulties to unresponsive audiences to Love and Manson sniping at each other in public. Love says she thought the tour might work, given that the two bands played together - and got on well - in Australia last year. "It was a nightmare, horrible and negative," says Love. "It's smart ... if you know it's not working, to stop while you're ahead before you destroy yourselves or lose tons of money," explains Hole guitarist Eric Erlandson, on the phone from Kansas City, Mo., a few days after we talked with Love. "It was presented to us in a way it looked good - we were friends with them, still are, we'll run into each other and it'll be fine - but it was a weird mix, like R.E.M. opening for Twisted Sister." Says Love: "I only believe in romantic comedy. I don't know why I was forced into what I want to call this lowbrow melodrama, but it was even less than that. It was much more burlesque. I believe in drama, but I have never believed in wrestling, and, somehow through different circumstances and different people's agendas, I found myself in this wrestling circus." The males - and a Manson audience is largely male - did not fully appreciate Hole's less theatrical, punk-inclined, femalecentric pop-punk. They came, says Love, "to see the crosses burn, to see a spectacle, to see the DRUGS sign [that Manson employs], and to see his butthole. I have no problem with that crowd, except there is nothing I can do to help them." They see Hole and "all they do is go, `She's prettier than I thought and, um, they kind of rock and they remind me of Lita Ford. I think that she is probably pretty cool."' Hole, Erlandson says, has been getting a blast out of this theater tour (the other members are bassist Melissa Auf Der Maur and new drummer Samantha Maloney): "We're having a great time. The audience is incredible. There are a lot of young girls that are totally into it; the whole vibe is completely different. We're able to be a little bit looser; we can play any song at any time, whip out a cover. (Listen for the Beatles' "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away" and the Standells' "Dirty Water," among others.) With Love, you don't know if she's going to sing, rant, make a joke, or lift her shirt. "I like to play with an audience," says Love. "I like to find out what the key to the audience is, although I am sort of sick of manipulating audiences - maybe the audience needs to manipulate me." "Courtney," says Erlandson, "is probably one of the greatest front people in the history of rock." Celebrity skin Spirituality and sexuality are on Love's ever-active mind. She's flashed more than a few audiences, Boston ones among them, over the years. "The first few times, I did that," she says, "there was actually an organic reason. [Recently] during `Northern Star' I took off my shirt so I was, like, you know, bare-breasted singing this really bare song - saying there is nothing evasive, there is no manipulation, there are no pop hooks. I thought it was a confluence." Says Erlandson, of Love's stage demeanor: "When she swerves, I think it's a good thing. If she's emoting that's always good. So many front people don't have much of that spark; they just walk onstage and play. Sometimes, lately, with Courtney, I've been going, `Hmmm, where am I?' But that's fine. We want to create our own riptide." Hole formed in 1989. Before fame came a-knocking, Hole's sound was defiantly rough and grungy on its debut disc, "Pretty on the Inside." "We were playing Joni Mitchell and Journey covers and Fleetwood Mac covers on our first album," says Erlandson. That's not true, but what he means is this: "I always thought there were these well-crafted pop elements, but we weren't skilled enough to pull that off at the time, and we were more into deconstructing things. [Over time] it's been a process of peeling away the layers. A pop core has always been there, but it had this muck on top of it." "Celebrity Skin" is a cleaner record - still cynical at times, but certainly with more hope than on "Live Through This." It took a lot of work in the studio and helping hands from Smashing Pumpkins' Billy Corgan. "We wanted get this pure, well-crafted sound," says Erlandson, "but we didn't want to lose the edge. We're not studio musicians. I'm not like a guitar player's guitar player, a muso guy. I have this quirky rough way I play. But for me to force myself into that [studio role] helped us out. Same with Melissa. We overreached. It's still us, but it's slicker 'cause we were trying hard to play that way."Love answers a question about her motivation - be it movies or music - this way: "I get really energized when I talk to people that really have a muse, and I have a muse. If I didn't have the ability to play music, I'd go nuts. I would be really hostile and really angry. As I said, I have a great love of romantic comedy, and I put it into this thing. I can't explain it to you. How do people like [editor] Tina Brown - who I don't like and for a really basic reason [Vanity Fair reported Love used heroin while pregnant, which Love disputes] - who is a boomer, who looks at a rock person and says, `There is no way that person can be as smart as me, there is no way that that person is bringing anything in. I picked on her a couple of seasons ago, so it's boring, but as an example, there is no way that that person threatens my status quo, because they are from the burlesque or from vaudeville. I don't consider rock 'n' roll vaudeville." - Jim Sullivan, Boston Globe, May 14, 1999 - - - - - - - - - - - - -