A Hole lotta Love
David Menconi
Staff Writer

03/11/1995
The News & Observer Raleigh, NC


RALEIGH - People came to Hole's Thursday night show at the Ritz eager for
spectacle, and Courtney Love wasted no time giving it to them. The band
walked onstage while a Nine Inch Nails song was playing on the sound
system, and Love barked, "Don't ever play that before we come on again!"
(an obvious reference to her recent well-publicized affair with Nine Inch
Nails' Trent Reznor, about which she's been dropping tantalizing hints for
months).

Surprisingly, though, Love was relatively well-behaved during the rest of
the show, aside from dousing the crowd with Evian water between songs and
taking a few cranky potshots at her peers (fellow "alternababe" Juliana
Hatfield was one target). The show drew a jam-packed crowd of mall rats and
young Courtney wannabes, plus a disturbing quantity of buzzclip-damaged
types who seemed disappointed that the Widow Cobain didn't indulge in more
loose-cannon theatrics.

How big a deal was this show? Well, also in attendance Thursday night was
Cat's Cradle owner Frank Heath, the first time in four years I've ever seen
him at a venue other than his own club. "I had them when they played for 12
people, so I figured I should come," he said. Such is the price of being
ahead of the curve.

Hole was far tighter than when I saw them last September (but having spent
much of the last six months on the road, they should be). Guitarist Eric
Erlandson was particularly impressive, handling most of the actual
guitar-playing and providing the perfect buzzsaw backdrop for Love's
howling pathos.

Love wielded her guitar more as a visual prop than an accompanying
instrument. In a black slip with her left foot up on the monitor, leaning
into her vocal lines, she was the very picture of "hey, sailor"
dishevelment. You weren't gonna notice much besides her up there.

There's little subtlety or nuance to Love's voice, which falls somewhere
between a hammer and a two-by-four on the bluntness scale. Her caterwauling
howl can get under the skin, though. It's impossible to hear her quaver,
"Live through this with me and I swear, I will die for you," without
wondering how it must feel to have made such an offer (even just
rhetorically, in song) only to have it rejected in as cruel and emphatic a
manner imaginable. That was one of several such moments Thursday night.

Truly, the inner void Hole's name alludes to ("the hole that goes right
through me") has assumed an awful, spectral presence in the wake of Kurt
Cobain's suicide. But if anyone can take care of herself, it's Love. It's a
measure of the power of "Live Through This" that its songs emerged from a
set of circumstances considerably less horrific than the way Love's
real-life situation has turned out - and still haven't been overwhelmed by
the events of the past year.

Not that she's above direct references to It. The fourth song of the set
was "Drowned Soda," an unreleased Cobain composition that (given the
context) was positively creepy: "Are you gonna sit and watch me, watch me
while I go down?" Love sang it with the numbed bitterness of someone who
had been forced to do exactly that.

Love also continued her running edit on the "Live Through This" song "Miss
World." In its original recorded version, the introductory verse ends, "I
am the girl you know, I lie and lie and lie." Last fall, the second part of
that line had been amended to, "the one who should have died." Thursday
night, it was a defiant, "I'll never ever die." ~~ We'll see.