POP MUSIC : In Love With Courtney : She may be married and expecting, but Hole’s Courtney Love hasn’t toned down

An hour with Hole’s 1991 “Pretty on the Inside” album might be one of the most harrowing experiences in rock ‘n’ roll, a black, labored, twisted hour that is closer to a gruesome-sex Mary Gaitskill story than to anything you might think of as popular art, a slack, grinding hour that imprints itself on your consciousness like an extended fingernail-screech.

Most of the songs are about bad sex, bad drugs or a bad day at the abortion clinic. The most famous song from the album begins “When I was a teen-age whore. . . .” If “Pretty on the Inside” were a horror movie, it would be all the parts that you have to look at through your fingers.

Sometimes it is good to experience excruciating things.

On a quiet back street of Los Angeles’ Fairfax District, a quick walk from Canter’s and a stone’s throw from the hippest record stores on Melrose, Hole auteur Courtney Love sprawls in the living room of her groovy railroad-flat apartment, smoothing the week’s British music tabloids around her on the floor, listening to the new Pavement CD, tugging at her tight, black skirt.

At one end of the room, a line of well-worn books leans against the wall; on the floor by the couch, an exquisite thing in cream Atomic Age Naugahyde, is a vividly colored textbook chart of the female reproductive tract. Love looks up only occasionally, to say something snotty about the blaring music or to read a particularly juicy notice aloud. She puts down the copy of Sounds and picks up a New Musical Express.

Her new husband, Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain, has spent the afternoon straightening up. Sprawled on her clean living-room floor, Courtney Love is happy and in love. The British music tabloids have all mentioned her, she has a baby on the way, and she’s been signed to Geffen Records for a lot of dough. Love has more money than she can count and a husband the world desires, a singing voice that could crack glass, and cool pads in both Los Angeles and Seattle. She loves the British music tabloids almost as much as they love her, which is more than plenty.

She reaches over to the coffee table and leafs through a packet of letters that teen-age girls have written to Sassy magazine about its recent Kurt & Courtney cover, half of which are admiring and half of which say that she’s a skank. Love is obsessed with people who are obsessed with her.

*

About a year ago, Everett True, the American-underground correspondent for Melody Maker, found something deep and unsettling in Love, and the English weekly ran a full-page article on Hole at a time when the band was still third-billed at small club shows in Los Angeles, its own hometown. True called Hole “the best . . . no, scratch that . . . the only rock ‘n’ roll band in the world,” and positioned Love as sort of the underground’s answer to Madonna. The rest of the British press followed suit.

Love, who does not think of herself as a beauty, was named the third sexiest woman in a recent Melody Maker readers poll, just behind Madonna and Kylie Minogue. Overseas, she is a paradigm of damaged slutty glamour. Over here, within the very glamorous world of underground rock, Love is notorious, and people who barely know her often gossip about her for hours.

But happy as she might be, at the moment Love is miffed. She shuts the latest issue of NME hard.

“All of a sudden,” she whines, “all these boys from all these papers are turning into New Man Feminists. Until they turn into something else next month, in which case they’ll take it out on Patti and Debbie and Chrissie and meeee . I was reading one of these last week, and every single article had my name in it. And it’s not like I’ve written a ‘Brass in Pocket’ or anything. It’s all because I took a couple of pictures with my eyeliner smudged.”

Love is to smudged eyeliner what Karen Carpenter was to denim leisure suits.

“This whole ‘underground’ thing is really scary,” she continues, twisting around her finger a platinum strand of hair, “because there’s such a frenzy going on right now, and the industry thinks they can purchase it and make it pay. People are offering a million dollars to these scruffy little dirty stoner bands. And--I can just see--it’s going to be like new wave: ‘Get that kid into an old sweater!’ What’s going to happen is that these underripe bands are going to put out these underripe records that nobody is going to buy, and it will ruin it for the rest of us.”

She stifles a yawn.

“I think there should be a standard, almost like socialism, where bands that deserve to get as big as the Pixies get as big as the Pixies and not any bigger because money will ruin everything. All the pomposity, all the crap . . . all the creme brulee.”

The phone rings, and she trips in her hurry to get to it. She says hello; her face contorts into the most remarkable fright-mask expression. She covers the mouthpiece, and yells out to her husband: “It’s Kiii -iirk from Me- tallll -ica, darling. How in the hell did he get our phone number?” before hanging up the phone and sinking back down to the floor in a slump. She puts her face in her hands.

“I’ve always been comfortable with notoriety,” she says, “but I feel like I married Bobby Sherman. It’s like that bad, you know what I mean: ‘She keeps him locked in the closet, and she doesn’t let him take his phone calls, and everybody knows they’re sitting around shooting smack.’ Y’know. Please. I’m pregnant, and it’d be my baby sitting around doing smack, my fetus, about eight inches, and it’s got little legs and hands. I am not stupid.”

(Then again, she recently admitted heroin use after she got pregnant to Vanity Fair. Or did she? See article on Page 54.)

She sighs: “You know, I think the worst thing about L.A. is how I’m somehow considered accomplished because I nailed a rock star. You know what I mean; that makes me scary, that makes me dealable with people. . . . Now Kirk Hammett knows who I am. And that makes me sick.”

*

Love, 25 or so, grew up near Eugene, Ore., spent some time in Los Angeles, hung out in Liverpool with cult new-wave singer Julian Cope, spent time in San Francisco and fronted an early version of Faith No More, all the while studying British music papers as if they were the Scriptures.

She auditioned for the Nancy Spungen part in “Sid & Nancy”--she ended up playing a minor role in the film--and director Alex Cox built an entire movie (the megaflop “Straight to Hell”) around her dark-star punk charisma. She heard the Replacements’ “Let It Be” and moved to Minneapolis for a while in the mid-’80s.

Minnesota was a place that she had always thought about.

Still on the floor, Love blushes. “I had a Bob thing,” she says. “People are ashamed of their Bob things, but I grew up on Bob. When I went to Minnesota, I went to Hibbing right away. It’s right near Duluth. I totally went to Hibbing . . . isn’t that scary? I went to the house, they had a little museum there, a Bob museum. I went to dinner a couple times with Jesse Dylan, Bob’s son--I was about 19 at the time.

“And then his uncle, Bob’s brother, owned a theater in Minneapolis. Me and my friend Lori decided to put on a show at that theater with the Butthole Surfers and like nine bands, and we overpriced the tickets and nobody came, and we lost a whole bunch of money. Biggest disaster of my whole entire life: I got on the outs with the Butthole Surfers and the Dylan family in one evening.”

Denied a career as a rock promoter, Love supported herself as a stripper, was in a series of all-woman bands, including one in 1986 with guitarist Kat Bjelland, who went on to form Babes in Toyland, and bassist Jennifer Finch, who helped start L7.

She moved back to Los Angeles in 1989 and formed Hole, settling on the eventual lineup of Eric Erlandson on guitar, Jill Emery (formerly of the Hollywood death-goddess trio Superheroines) on bass and Caroline Rue (ex-Omelets) on drums. (Emery and Rue recently quit the group; the band is more or less on hiatus until the baby comes in September.) Hole recorded the well-regarded “Retard Girl” single on the Long Beach indie Sympathy for the Record Industry, and the harrowing “Dicknail” seven-inch for Sub Pop.

Love talked Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon into co-producing Hole’s album, thereby ensuring her entree into that in-group underground cool sort of vibe, which she surfed like an expert power-floating six-foot peelers.

After the British music tabloids got through with her, Hole became the subject of a major-label bidding war, eventually won by Geffen. Love seemed to particularly enjoy spurning a personal offer from Madonna to become the very first artist on her brand-new Warner Bros. custom label, Maverick.

(A representative for Madonna confirmed that the company did pursue Hole, among other acts.)

“Madonna has a clipping service send her everything about me,” Love says with a sneer, “and I totally figured out what it is--it’s like Madonna wants to be the goddess of everything blond. She wants to own any piece of the blond experience she may have forgotten about--in my case the rape victim/battered child persona--and she wanted to swallow me whole.

“I could never have worked for Madonna, because she’s too short, and she’s never been a fat girl, and she has like this Napoleon thing going. I could never deal with a boss that has never been fat. But Madonna has got good taste in art. And she also, like, knew some of my lyrics by heart. To me, that was amazing.”

*

Love lifts herself off the floor and walks over to the CD player in the next room, where she takes off Pavement and puts on the Tori Amos piano-ballad version of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

Cobain appears from the next room, wearing a moth-eaten fuzzy sweater, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, and imitates high-voiced Kirk Hammett trying to persuade him to go on tour with Metallica and Guns N’ Roses. “We’ve gotta wipe the stage with the Gunners, maaaan ,” he whines, and then dissolves into smirking laughter.

She reads him some of the better items about them that have appeared in the week’s tabloids. He grabs Melody Maker and reads some back to her. They share a perfect, quiet media moment together, man and wife and newsprint. Then Cobain leaves to have supper with his friend Mark Lanegan of the Screaming Trees, and she takes off the Amos album and replaces it with the new one from Teenage Fanclub. “Have you heard this band?” she asks. “They’re trying to sound exactly like my husband.”

Love settles onto her Naugahyde couch.

“I have this thing about me, this catalyst, that brings out hate in people, and I wonder about it,” she says. “I think I may have always worn it around me, I think it is why I was always picked on, which is why I don’t blame anybody. No matter where I go, or what context I’m in, I seem to provoke people, and I enjoy it. I was the ultimate Christ of the schoolyard. “One night at the Underworld in London, on our first English tour, there was this entire contingent of guys who kept yelling, ‘Slut, whore,’ and I dived on them, and they just shoved their . . . it was intense. I got (groped) by the crowd, and it was very insane. And I got back up on stage with nothing on, and then they rushed the stage and started grabbing us, and Jill and Caroline just couldn’t deal with it. That’s why they’re not in the group anymore. . . . I want a bass player who will be like Elvis Presley. I want a bass player who will stand on stage in front of 80,000 people with her shirt off.”

Bigger than the Pixies, then!

“A few months ago I went to Martin Luther King Day at my old junior high in Eugene, which used to be an ass-kicking, Led Zeppelin, evil, stoner high school,” she says. “Now all the girls are like Sassy readers with Nirvana shirts and little dreadlocks and nose rings. My God! No matter what has happened, no matter the order of being, if the charts were just and fair and the Pixies and Nirvana and Hole were the most . . . I’d probably start listening to Poison. I don’t want utopia, I want cacophony.”