How Courtney Love’s life as a stripper inspired her to be a rock star: “Well if they can do it I can!”
Courtney Love was born to be a rockstar. With the looks, the attitude and the voice, it feels like she was meant to be a frontman, carrying on the true spirit of rock and roll and the true bite of punk. When she joined her first band, it felt like that prophesy came true, but after a setback, the drive to make it work once and for all came from an unlikely place: the stage at a strip club.
It was 1982. Love was a 20-year-old dropout who had spent her youth travelling around, testing out different countries, different dreams and different potential futures. After watching a band called Faith No More perform in San Francisco, a new one emerged: she would be a singer, and, specifically, she would be a singer for this band. After figuring out a way backstage, she also managed to figure out a way to get them to let her join.
In her own words, Love was “not much of a front woman yet.” However, as she put it, “We all start somewhere”, and Faith No More was her start. While the group weren’t all that notable back then, it changed the musician’s life all the same. “I was a homeless street kid, and I’m [grateful] to these guys for adopting me,” she said, “This was a scary but fun time… wilding on the streets of San Francisco.”
But that time was short-lived. All in all, Love was only with the band for about six months. “She was a very chaotic personality—she took a lot of work,” their bassist Bill Gould said of the decision to cut her loose. “It just got too much after a while.” So quickly, Love was back where she started, which was down and out with no real direction.
By 1988, Love knew she needed a full restart, so she did what any logical person would do – move to a remote town in Alaska. “I decided to move to Alaska because I needed to get my shit together and learn how to work”, she explained of the decision, “So I went on this sort of vision quest. I got rid of all my earthly possessions. I had my bad little strip clothes and some big sweaters, and I moved into a trailer with a bunch of other strippers.”
The fact that Courtney Love was a stripper is neither surprising nor unusual. Music and sex work have interlinked again and again throughout eras and generations. Debbie Harry was a Playboy bunny, Lady Gaga worked as a stripper pre-fame, and countless other artists have taken notes from erotic dancers for inspiration for music videos and aesthetics. The mystique of strippers has undeniably influenced artists from across all genres, but for Love, it was stripping that inspired her to get back into making music.
One day at her club, Love was on stage dancing for money when suddenly over the speakers, there was Faith No More with their new chart topic hit, ‘Epic’. Having to dance to the song her old band made without her lit a fire inside the musician. “It pissed me off so much to be stripping to it, that it made me determined, gave me the head of steam to keep going and keep it together for my own band,” she wrote on Instagram, declaring “Getting kicked out of this band was one of the best things that ever happened to me” all because that failure motivated her to try again.
“Well if they can do it I can!” she thought as she danced and the next year, Hole emerged, kicking down the doors of the music world and finally positioning Love as the star she was bound to be.
