All You Need Is Love: Face To Face With Kurt And Courtney

Interviewers: Everett True | Photography: Stephen Sweet

Date of Interview: October 19, 1992 | Location: Los Angeles, CA, US

Original Publication: Melody Maker (Dec 19-26, 1992 & Jan 2, 1993)

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The Scene at the Apartment

Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love are the most controversial rock couple since Sid and Nancy. Critics of their relationship have cast Courtney as a scheming, parasitic bitch who’s ruthlessly exploited her feeble, unwitting husband, whose career she seems determined to f*** up. In this exclusive interview with EVERETT TRUE, the couple come out fighting in defence of their marriage and lay into their detractors with a vengeance.

“This is the hardest job I’ve ever had,” reluctant star begins. “I can’t believe it…” He pauses. “I like it, though!” he exclaims. “I’m thoroughly enjoying myself. It’s just a lot more demanding than I expected.”

He pauses again. “You know, she can fart as loud as I can…”

“Oh Kurt!” his wife interrupts, offended.

“And burp as loud as I can,” he finishes unabashed, smiling his mischievous little smile.

“Keep it down,” his wife scolds him. “It’s not feminine.”

But she’s a baby. Babies are allowed to fart.

“Oh, okay,” the protective mother says, mollified, looking proudly at the wide-eyed sproglet by her side.

Does having a baby make you see life in a different way?

“Definitely,” replies Courtney. “Yeah…” She stops, distracted by the look in her husband’s eyes. He’s rolling ’em. “Stop it! Why do you do this?” she shouts.

“Do what?” he asks, innocently, as Frances Bean reaches out for his hand.

“Switch off when the tape recorder switches on.”

“I’ve pretty much exhausted the baby opinions,” Kurt Cobain – America’s most successful “punk rock” star – says, defensively. I just don’t have anything important to say. I mean, duh, it’s fun, it’s great, it’s the best thing in my life.”

Silence falls over the bedroom. We go back to watching the latest “Ren And Stimpy” cartoon, the new cult favourites of young America. Frances Bean Cobain’s nanny appears, ready to take the little ‘un – a bouncing, almost nauseatingly healthy, blue-eyed child (Kurt’s eyes, Courtney’s nose) – downstairs for her nap.

Silence. Courtney takes a sip of lukewarm strawberry tea, I take a gulp of vodka. Kurt belches. We all have appearances to keep up.

Kurt and Courtney’s new apartment is prime LA: near the top of a hill overlooking West Hollywood, surrounded by palm trees and winding pathways lined with foliage and security fences. You need an elevator – with a private key – to reach it.

Inside, one room is set aside for Kurt’s paintings – strange, disturbing collages and images (he used to paint headless babies when his wife was pregnant, now he paints angels and dolls). There’s a large, old-fashioned kitchen with a mirror running along the length of its outside wall, sundry quest rooms up top. Upstairs, Courtney’s wardrobe, is crammed with antique “baby doll” dresses. It’s larger than some flats I’ve lived in. (Well, almost.)

Pizza crusts and half-full doughnut containers litter the spacious main room. There’s a telescope, guitars, old rock books, clipped photos, baby things scattered everywhere – prime space is even given over to a tasteful pink crib, bedecked with ribbons. A stereo in one corner blares out Mavis Staples. The place has an air of being only half-lived in, as do most LA residences.

As I arrive, the couple are lying on the double bed in the master bedroom with Frances Bean (“Frances! Say hello to your uncle Everett!” – Courtney.) She: wearing a nightie. He: in pyjama bottoms and the ubiquitous scruffy cardigan and tee-shirt. On the TV screen, three huggy male rock musicians in dresses surreally smash instruments, regardless of the backing track. It’s the new Nirvana video for “In Bloom”.

Courtney’s sifting through a coloured box-load of Nirvana letters, sent to Kurt by just one girl. There are about 30 or 40 of them, all painstakingly hand-coloured, hand-lettered with audio tape accompaniment.

“Look, Kurt!” Courtney picks on one particularly lurid specimen. “She’s spelt out your name over these envelopes… oh, there’s a picture of her (pause)… oh, she’s got a muscular wasting disease… we have to write her back! We’ve got to! She’s an outsider, just like me!”

Kurt grunts affirmation. We pour over her scribblings with renewed interest, grateful that we’ve never been thus afflicted. Someone puts her name down on the Christmas Card list.

The High School Years

Kurt decides he wants to tell us about his high school days, but then dries up.

“That’s because you’re a stoned retard,” Courtney teases him. (It’s well-known that Kurt spent a fair few hours at school partaking of the demon weed.)

“Go on!” Courtney urges her husband. “I always talk! I’m sick of it.”

Another pause. Frances gurgles slightly, a happy thought obviously striking the Bean. There’s no sign of the “Diet Grrrl” graffiti her father had wickedly drawn on her stomach earlier. Kurt sighs.

Kurt ‘n’ Courtney (or “Kurtney,” as they’re collectively known) have only ever given two joint interviews before this – both to American publications. They wanted to speak to The Maker to clear up certain matters – mostly arising from a profile of Courtney which appeared in the September issue of Vanity Fair, an up-market fashion magazine.

Clearly, we’ll have to tread carefully. Courtney mumbles something from where she’s sitting, behind the bed by the ghetto-blaster. Sorry?

“You were wrong,” she says. “I should have been sullen and demure.”

What?

“When I asked you that question a couple of years ago,” she explains. “In a bar. In LA”

You can’t hide your personality – well, maybe you can.

“I Wouldn’t have minded,” she whimpers. “I used to be sullen and demure.”

She’s referring to when she first met me, last year, when she asked me how she should behave in relation to the press.

“I used to be really loud and obnoxious,” Kurt interrupts. “And then I stopped hanging out with people.”

Why?

The singer shifts from where he’s lying, sprawled out on the mattress. Courtney moves to switch the TV off.

“Because I was tired of pretending that I was someone else just to get along with people, just for the sake of having friendships,” he replies. “I was tired of wearing flannel shirts and chewing tobacco, and so I became a monk in my room for years. And I forgot what it was like to socialise.”

But didn’t you drink?

“Yeah, I drank,” he agrees. “And I was obnoxious when I drank too much. Then there was a period during the last two years of high school when I didn’t have any friends, and I didn’t drink or do any drugs at all, and I sat in my room and played guitar.”

Then, when you formed Nirvana, you started drinking and hanging out with people, and you were back to where you were a few years before…

“Not really,” responds Kurt, stretching. “I still have the same best friends I had a few years ago. The scale of social activity that I have is so f***ing minimal – nothing, my entire life – so the little bit of socialising I did at parties when I was loud wasn’t much more than when I started socialising again in Seattle.

“I started hanging out with people like Mudhoney,” he continues. “Mainly they were just other people in bands. I wasn’t really part of a thriving Seattle social scene. Both Chris and I thought of ourselves as outsiders – we wrote that song, ‘School,’ about the crazy Seattle scene, how it reminded us of high school.

“It hasn’t got any different. I just…” He pauses, choosing his words carefully. “I guess living in LA makes me more reclusive,” he says, “because I don’t like LA at all. I can’t find anything to do here. It’s pointless going out and trying to make friends, because I don’t have these tattoos and I don’t like death rock.”

“Axl wants to be your friend,” Courtney reminds him, sitting back down again. “Axl thinks that if I wasn’t around, you and him could be backstage at arena rock shows f***ing self-hating little girls.”

“Well, that was always my goal,” replies Kurt, sarcastically. “To come down to Hollywood and ride motorcycles with Axl on the Strip – and then you came along and ruined it all.”

“That’s what Axl says,” Courtney explains. “Did you hear about that show where he got on stage and started saying something like, ‘Nirvana’s too good to play with us. Kurt would rather be home with his ugly bitch…’?”

Well, it’s true, isn’t it. (Not the “ugly” part.) Kurt would rather be home with you, bathing Frances Bean, wandering around in your nightie, than out bonding with Axl and the boys. Why should he act any differently? It’s weird how some famous people seem to want to hang out with other famous people, just cos they’re all famous.

The Move to LA and the Mainstream

Do you like it here in Hollywood, Courtney, or are you fed up with running? From what I know of your past life – as much as anyone can know – it seems to me you’ve been running for a very long time.

“I just always ended up back here,” she muses. “Jennifer [L7] lives here, and she’s always been a pretty good friend. I’d call her and say, ‘This town didn’t work out!’ And she’d go, ‘Oh, come back to LA!’. It’s so big, it can just absorb you. People here are so…” She pauses, struggling to find the right words.

“We thought it might be easy to live here because people are trained to deal with fame,” she says. “The thing is, however, it’s not really like that. They don’t stare, but they know who you are and the second you leave the store, they’re on the phone to friends.”

She pauses again. “It’s not even that,” she corrects herself. “I wouldn’t have got nearly as much trouble if I hadn’t chosen to live here. I just thought it would be interesting to go into the mainstream and f*** things up because people always say they’re going to, but no one ever does – and I didn’t have any choice really. It’s weird here: nurses calling Cowboy Capers (a Hollywood delivery firm) for their valium subscriptions. It’s scary, because everybody wants the fame. They all want fame.”

“Fame is more of a reality here,” her husband agrees.

“See, here’s where it started, too,” she adds, “before I became the prisoner of my husband, before I occupied this position I’m now in. But until we started going out, I never realised that’s how people in LA really are.”

Do you feel poisoned by Courtney, Kurt?

“By Courtney, or by Courtney’s stigma?” he replies. “Poisoned by… the whole f***ed-up misconception of our relationship. Everyone seems to think that we couldn’t possibly love each other, because we’re thought of as cartoon characters, because we’re public domain. So the feelings that we have for each other are thought of as superficial.”

“It’s not everybody that thinks that, though,” Courtney adds. “It’s a couple of has-been, pontificating, male rock stars and, mostly, women who work in the American music industry. I think that’s because, in the early Eighties, if you were a woman and you wanted to play music, there was a real slim chance you would succeed. So a lot of women who wanted to empower themselves within rock without being self-loathing joined the music industry – and these are some of the most vicious women I know.

“I’ve heard industry women talking about how horrible L7 are, I’ve heard industry women talking about how unattractive PJ Harvey is, which is ridiculous… I just think these powerful women have this real competitive, jealous nature which manifests itself like this. And when I married Kurt, they went into overload.

“It’s insane, this real complex issue… It’s an attempt to create something out of nothing – the whole superstar thing. They at least try to take away my intellect, and take away my ethics, and create…” She pauses again, jumbled.

The thoughts are pouring out of her too fast for coherent speech now. Spend even five minutes in Courtney’s company, and you’ll be overwhelmed by the sheer torrent of words and ideas that pour from her. Courtney is rumoured to spend 12 hours a day on the phone. To her, to think is to be.

The Perceptions of Kurt

You must find it annoying, Kurt, that people perceive you to be this stupid hen-pecked husband, because that’s implied in the whole image of Courtney Love’s devious and evil nature.

“Yeah, there’ve been quite a few articles like that,” he growls. “I don’t know how to explain what happens to me when I do an interview, because I usually shut myself off. It’s really hard to explain. I just don’t like to get intimate. I don’t want anyone to know what I feel and what I think, and if they can’t get some kind of idea of what sort of person I am through my music, then that’s too bad.

“I don’t see how people an get the idea that I’m stupid,” he continues, “because I know my music’s semi-intelligent. I know it takes a bit of creativity to write the kind of music I do, it’s not just a wall of noise. I know there’s a formula to it, and I’ve worked really hard at it.

“I’ve always been the kind of person that if I think someone thinks of me a certain way – like I’m stupid – then I’ll act stupid in front of them. I’ve never felt the need to prove myself. If someone already has a misconception about me, then fine, let them have it all the more. I’ll be happy…”

The Madonna Conflict and Vanity Fair

“A little bit?” Courtney interrupts him, angrier than ever. “Social workers coming to take your baby because of something you didn’t do and you didn’t say is not judicial, and it’s not justice… That article,” she spits. “The whole drug thing…”

She’s floundered because she’s so riled. “We did drugs and it was really fun, and now it’s over. Anybody who knows me knows I’m way too paranoid to get wasted all the time…”

She pauses again, searching for the right words. “It’s just so insane,” she cries, “what it’s done and who it’s hurt because of one woman’s vendetta. When you look at it, Everett, I think the end of rock is pretty damn near when Madonna is trying to buy Pavement for a million dollars and put out Xerox fanzines. When Madonna thinks that I am the cutting edge – that’s how you can judge how out of it she is.”

The Vanity Fair also dwelt shortly and harshly in Courtney’s claims that Madonna was vampiric, ready to take from Courtney what she wanted and leave the rest of her for dead. “Who,” Madonna was quoted as saying, “is Courtney Love?”

She should know. It was Madonna who asked her manager to sign Courtney’s band to her label last year. It was Madonna herself who phoned Courtney to arrange a meeting. Wanna know why I’m so sure? I spoke to Courtney immediately after the call – and nobody makes shit like that up.

“I wish I’d never come in her eye-line,” Courtney cries. “Isn’t there any punk rock value in the fact that I turned her down and she then sent one of her toadies to execute me? The Vanity Fair piece would never have happened if I hadn’t turned her down.”

“It’s twice as bad for Courtney,” explains Kurt, “because she hasn’t even had the chance to prove herself like I did. It’s one thing for me to be subversive at this point, because I can afford to be. I can pretty much get away with ripping up a picture of the Pope on television and it wouldn’t create so much of a stink as someone commercial like Sinead – or Courtney, who doesn’t have the security of having sold lots of records…”

On Riot Grrrl and Success

The baby cries. Courtney interrupts her husband, excited. “How did it go so fast,” she asks, sounding genuinely bewildered, “from having a record of the year in the Village Voice and being perceived as an artist, to being Nancy Spungen in three months?”

There’s something I’d like to get down on tape now. I’d forgotten that Hole were one of the original inspirations for Riot Grrrl. When Cathi of Bikini Kill saw Hole, it was pretty much what inspired her to form a band.

“Cathi wrote me a letter saying she wanted to start a band and what should she do,” recalls Courtney. “And I wrote back and said she should find the biggest slut-bitches in her town that everybody hates. I thought if there were three people who were like the town bitch in one band, that would be f***ing amazing. I don’t know if that really happened, but it turned out to be…”

(Cathi actually recounted this event in her fanzine, Bikini Kill, about the formation of her band, adding that when she saw Courtney, it was like, “the guitar went into flames – almost a religious experience.”)

“I’m very supportive of them, on a personal level,” she adds. She then moves on to talk about because (a) Kurt Cobain whines a lot, and (b) Nirvana slag off corporate rock bands, even though they’re one themselves.

“Oh, take it back from him, the ungrateful little brat!” mocks Courtney.

“What I really can’t stand about being successful is when people confront me and say, ‘Oh, you should just mellow out and enjoy it,'” explains her husband, interrupting her. “I don’t know how many times I have to f***ing say this. I never wanted it in the first place.

“But I guess I do enjoy the money,” he relents. “It’s at least a sense of security. I know that my child’s going to grow up and be able to eat. That’s a really nice feeling, that’s fine, but you know…”

But Frances will only be treated nice to her face: people will kiss her butt and stab her in the back at the same time.

“Yeah, but she’ll know about it, because she’ll come from us and she’ll be cynical by kindergarten,” Courtney answers, looking fondly at the empty crib. “She’s already cynical.”

“I don’t mean to whine so much,” continues Kurt. “There are just so many things that I’m not capable of explaining in detail.”

“I am,” Courtney interjects.

“But people have no idea of what is going on,” her husband complains. “The sickening politics that are involved with being a successful, commercial rock band are real aggravating. No one has any idea.”

“It doesn’t matter though,” Courtney almost shouts. “The whole thing with you is that you’ve got your success and been victimised by it and, at the same time, I still haven’t proven myself to myself.

“I remember last year Kat came up to Chicago and we went to this bar and they started playing ‘Nevermind’ – this was just when it was starting to get really big. So we sat there and drank and drank, and got really mad. Because we realised that no girl could have done that. I want to write a really good record and I haven’t done it yet.”

This is where I disagree with you, Courtney. ‘Nevermind’ was a great record. But so was ‘Teenage Whore’. ‘Nevermind’ was made by a bunch of blokes. Why should it have been made by a bunch of girls?

Commercialism and the Mix of Nevermind

“I didn’t think on those terms when I was doing my record,” Kurt says, stirring. “Although, at the end, I did allow the record to be produced cleaner and more commercial than I wanted it to be. I don’t know what the reasoning for that was, besides just being dead tired of hearing the same songs. We’d tried remixing it three times and we rang this professional mixologist to do it and, by that point, I was so tired of hearing the songs, I said, ‘Go ahead, do whatever you want.'”

“You say you didn’t think in those terms, cos you‘re more punk than me?” Courtney asks him, affronted.

“No, I’m not saying I’m more punk than you,” snaps Kurt. “Actually, I’m wondering right now if I wasn’t subconsciously thinking that I did want success, because I did.”

“Is it such a sin to say that you wanted to be in Billboard?” she asks him. “That you knew you were going to be popular, or that you were going to be rock stars?”

“I knew we were going to be popular, but I didn’t know we were going to be this popular,” he says. “I’m so tired of saying this. I’m so tired of saying, ‘Oh, we thought we were going to be as big as Sonic Youth’, and all that shit. It’s so f***ing boring at this point.”

“But isn’t there another part of you, that personality who wrote ‘Aero Zeppelin’ that…?” starts Courtney.

“Right!” her husband exclaims. “There is! And maybe, because I allowed the record to be mixed commercially enough that any song could get on the radio, maybe I was thinking it would be kinda hilarious to see how far we could push it, how popular we could get.”

“Well, that was my excuse until this marriage thing happened,” Courtney shrugs, “that it would be really funny and kinda hilarious, and now I don’t think it’s either of those things. Yet the desire is still there. And I’m not the Yoko Ono of Nirvana – I’m the one who lost two band members, not Kurt.”

“You didn’t lose any band members over this,” Kurt shoots back, annoyed.

“Not over this,” Courtney replies. “But my band lost two members. You can make what you want out of it, and say talk about. Ten different variations on the some question every interview.”

“‘You funny little boy!'” Courtney squeals, mocking his tormenters. “‘You didn’t set out to be successful! What an angle! Cinderella!'”

“It’s a fine scam, it’s a fine image,” he says, sarcastically. “I’m getting really f***ing bored with it.”

“Why don’t we switch?” Courtney says, bringing the interview full circle. “I’ll be demure and sullen and you’ll be loud and obnoxious.”

Then you’d be Axl Rose.

“No, then I’d be his codpiece,” she corrects me. F*** me Kurt, f*** me Julian, f*** me Julian’s drum tech, make me feel my worth! It’s ridiculous. And, for $50,000, I have to buy this image of a really pregnant woman with a garland in her hair smoking a cigarette, this whole fertility image with a cigarette. As if I did it deliberately, as if I did it to provoke!”

She’s off again. “Someone called up my manager after the Vanity Fair article, saying, ‘Does Courtney think she’s being that whole Seventies cool shock rock thing?’ – as if I had planted this whole drug, cigarette sensationalism!

“Ask Kurt,” she continues. “I didn’t want to talk to Vanity Fair, because I knew it was based on the Madonna thing and our marriage. They don’t even do rock people – I sell 60,000 records, what the f*** do they want with me? But I did it anyway, because I was so sick of industry women talking and saying terrible things about me.

“I thought, if I was in Vanity Fair, it would shut their f***ing mouths and they’d leave me in peace,” she laments. “But that was my mistake and I just shouldn’t have done it. I should have known more about the mainstream press and how they operate. Also, the whole thing where it made me seem to be so competitive with Kat [Bjelland] is just like… I was totally provoked. I was mad with Kat about something, and I got provoked into gossiping about something off the record.”

According to Vanity Fair, Kat and Courtney were embroiled in a bitter argument over who first started wearing the “baby doll” kinderwhore dress both are famous for. Kat was quoted as saying, “Last night I had a dream that I killed her [Courtney]. I was really happy.”

“And then she provoked Kat into saying things about me, by telling her what I said,” Courtney continues. “If you notice, Kat hasn’t gone on record as saying anything shitty about me, and I certainly didn’t mean to go on record saying anything shitty about her. We’re not best friends anymore, but we don’t hate each other. It’s ridiculous that it’s been turned into something where you have to choose
between one of us. We’re different. We write differently.

“But that’s why it’s so competitive,” she adds.
“That’s why this whole foxcore/Riot Grrrl thing is so competitive. It’s like rap music. There’s a void, and there’s only room for one of
you in the void.”

The tape switches off. Courtney decides that she’s said enough. Kurt nods in agreement. Time to view the new Nirvana video once more, and discuss whether to go out tonight (Therapy? Are playing the Whiskey).

Courtney decides to accompany me – the first time she’s been out in LA since
giving birth.

Kurt prefers to stay in, and mind the baby.

© Jerry Thackray, 1993