NME
March 4th, 1995
Excerpt from article "While My Guitar Gently Wees":
It’s around 10:30 pm on Valentine’s Day and Hole are about to begin taping MTV Unplugged at the Brooklyn Academy Of Music. Standing in a dimly lit doorway behind sheets of plastic hung with naked dolls, Courtney Love-Cobain lights one cigarette from another half-smoked one.
She inhales deeply, tugs at a stocking and seems to be muttering something to herself over and over. Her whole body looks impossibly tense. “I was so nervous that I was doing Buddhist chanting,” she says the next day. “And I was holding in my pee before going on stage, so that I’d have more ‘grrr’.”
The small audience – no more than 300 people crammed around a low stage at the front of the cavernous building – is a mix of fans, competition winners, critics and celebrities. One box has been put aside for local royalty: Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore sit alongside MTV VJ and Radio 1 presenter Kennedy, waiting to be impressed. Drew Barrymore, guitarist Eric Erlandson’s girlfriend, appears from backstage with Patricia Arquette minutes before the show begins, and both take a seat on the floorspace near the stage.
The atmosphere is full of anticipation: can Courtney carry this off? Will she be straight or out of it? Will she heckle and abuse the audience? Are Hole together enough, or even good enough, to do an Unplugged, where the sound is so stripped down any musical misjudgement is magnified a hundredfold? Have Hole finally been accepted by the American mainstream? Will this prove to be as historic an event as Nirvana Unplugged?
THE AUDIENCE has been practicing clapping and cheering for the last ten minutes, and when the MTV man yells, come-on-down style, “Courtney Love and Hole!!!” they clap and cheer accordingly. Courtney sucks on her cigarette but doesn’t move. For a brief moment, it seems she’s lost her nerve. Then she takes a deep breath and teeters to the stage. The audience stares at her curiously but she concentrates her gaze on the floor. She slings her acoustic guitar around her neck, sits astride a low black stool and finally looks around her.
“This is MTV Unglued. Stop being nervous, man, pull yourself together.”
The rest of the band – including three extra members who play harp, cello, oboe, flute and harmonica – take their places and she looks back at them for reassurance. “Do you guys have to pee?” she asks them, but gets no response. She turns back to the audience, grins sheepishly and says: “Hi.”
Courtney strums on her guitar and sings gently: “I am the girl you know can’t look you in the eye/ I am the girl so sick I cannot try / I am the one you want, can’t look you in the eye/ I am the girl you know I lie and lie and lie.” There is a second’s pause, the band join in and Courtney smiles as she raises her voice: “I’m Miss World, somebody kill me.”
When ‘Live Through This’ was released a few days after Kurt’s suicide, it seemed a strangely prophetic title and the lyrics took on sinister meanings, but tonight, with all the words naked against an acoustic backing, they sound more disturbing than ever.
Courtney introduces ‘Best Sunday Dress’ as “sort of new…and really old” and beings: “Put on that best Sunday dress/ Walk straight into this mess…” Though the band looks at home in the intimate setting, Courtney still looks nervy, even as she shouts the “Watching you burn” climax of the song. She says they are all feeling ill and explains that ‘Pee Girl’ (originally ‘Softer, Softest’ – what is this urine fixation?) is “about the girl that always smelt like pee in your class”. It begins shakily then quickly gains momentum, with Courtney’s hoarse rasp emphasizing the words “Burn the witch/ The bitch, she’s dead”. She becomes so passionate that she snaps a guitar string.
As with the best Hole songs, ‘Pee Girl’ is seductive because it builds from a gentle and melodic introduction to a harsh, punky climax. Even unplugged, the band have a coarse edge and, surprisingly, it is not the acoustic instruments or the mini-orchestra which lend the show a much-needed subtlety but bassist Melissa Auf Der Maur’s backing vocals. An octave higher than Courtney’s, they complement and soften her rough, nasal voice.
Without huge monitors to stridently lean a leg on, without a big crowd to dive into or to develop an aggressive rapport with, Courtney can’t be the exhibitionist she has been at recent shows, but she still gives a full-on performance – the woman’s still a knowing tease. When someone in the audience shouts out: “Courtney, you’re beautiful!” she retorts: “Did you say, ‘Hey Sinead’, ‘cos I said ‘f—‘ on an aeroplane recently?” She then turns to Eric: “Your guitar sounds like you peed on it. Is this a guy thing?”
At one point Courtney leaves her stool and swaggers in the audience to accept some flowers. “Yeah,” she says, “I got some Valentine’s cards… I was really surprised… wouldn’t you like to know from whom?”
As she eases into the show and realizes that she’s in control, Courtney becomes more relaxed. She is readily distracted between tracks – when Frances Bean appears wearing yellow industrial ear protectors and shouting “Mommy! Daddy!”, Courtney gives her daughter a huge smile and shouts “Hi!” – but totally focused once a song begins. The mood swings reflect Courtney’s erratic personality, moving from defiant to emotional to flippant. She refers to The Crystals’ “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)” as a “really sick song” then sings the masochistic lyrics as though they were her own. Then on ‘Asking For It’ she throws her hair about before suddenly stopping, looking straight ahead and almost whispering, “I don’t care anymore… Live through this with/ I swear that I will die for you”, and her voice is barely audible by the end, as she shuts her eyes and sings: “Live, live, live…”
At times Courtney is almost apologetic, introducing ‘You Got No Right’, one of the last songs Kurt wrote, by saying: “We can’t do this very well, but it’s Valentine’s Day, so maybe he can hear it. If we get it right, it’s decidicated to my mother-in-law.” The music sounds more like punky Nirvana than poppy Hole and the song is way too awkward and self-conscious, which Courtney acknowledges by saying, “Sorry about that” at the end. They do a more successful and compelling version of ‘Drunk In Rio’ – “Me and Kurt wrote this in Brazil when we were drunk … and stuff” – followed by a cover of Donovan’s ‘Season Of The Witch’.
Just as things get serious with a near perfect version of ‘Old Age’ (it begins a cappella, moves into a deep, vibrant cello, then discordant guitars begin; Courtney sings, “It’s OK to kill your idols” with a sarcastic smile before tailing off sighing “I’m sorry”), Courtney looks at the cellist and jokes: “This will really blow your cred. And ours.” They launch into Duran Duran’s ‘Hungry Like The Wolf’ and Courtney is all smiles as she pretends to look earnest. She stops abruptly, says, “Forget it, it’s over,” and looks at Melissa. “Go join a cool band,” she warns. A defiant, ballsy version of ‘Doll Parts’ follows, Courtney demands more lipstick and they finish the set with ‘Sugar Coma’, a beautiful folky song with delicate harmonies.
In a mad release of nervous energy and relief at having survived, Courtney leaps up and down on the monitors, takes her guitar and hits Eric until he tumbles off his stool. For a brief moment, no-one can tell if she’s joking or how far she will take the joke. She scowls, kicks her own stool over then suddenly her face is full of an angelic smile as she looks over to the mini-orchestra and says, “No, not the harp.”
She walks off, her tentative, nervous movements from earlier on replaced with a triumphant stride. The audience clap and shout for more, but, feeling very aware of being in a TV studio, they remain seated. Thurston Moore is smiling, but Kim Gordon sits perfectly still and shows no emotion.
Returning ten minutes later for an encore, Hole do two songs again: they get the intro wrong at first on ‘Softer Softest’ and fail to recapture the untempered aggression it had earlier, while ‘Asking For It’ is a shambolic in the middle before reaching an intense abandoned end. Courtney pretends to trash her guitar, leaps off the stage and disappears backstage.