“Douchelords”: Was Courtney Love robbed without realising?
Contrary to popular belief, rock and roll stars are not always awash with riches. The days of rock stars driving gold Rolls Royce into swimming pools before diving into a mountain of cocaine are largely behind us. Still, even so, those dream-like scenarios have only ever been reserved for the most successful rockers. Given the way that the industry operates, with record company executives, producers, publicists, and A&R people all looking for a cut of profits, rock and roll is no longer a path for artists like Hole’s Courtney Love to become rich beyond their wildest fantasies.
One of the few all-female groups to establish themselves during the early grunge scene, Hole were vitally important in the development of the genre and came to typify the grassroots punk scene of Los Angeles during the early 1990s. Like any self-respecting punk or grunge band, Courtney Love never formed Hole to generate revenue. The band was predominantly an outlet for the songwriter to express her innermost thoughts and feelings, in addition to calling out misogyny and female oppression through discussing themes like body image, sexual assault, and rape.
Love never made much money from Hole. Not only were the band’s record sales poor, but they also spent the majority of their existence on small, independent labels, run on shoestring budgets without the capacity to pay their artists much in return. Nevertheless, Love has managed to fund a fairly luxurious lifestyle over the past few decades, thanks largely to the royalties from her husband, Nirvana songwriter Kurt Cobain.
In contrast to Love and Hole, Cobain and Nirvana firmly broke into the musical mainstream, with records like Nevermind becoming global smash-hits. As you can imagine, Nirvana made a lot of people – including Cobain – very rich. Unfortunately, as a result of his worsening mental state coupled with an increased reliance on drugs, this money was never utilised particularly well. When Cobain committed suicide in 1994, many of his royalties transferred over to Love and their daughter, Frances Cobain.
At that time, however, Love was in much the same position as Cobain had been: her life was dictated by drug addiction. Understandably, when you are addicted to heroin and dealing with the sudden loss of your husband, Love neglected her finances during the mid-1990s, allowing multiple con artists and chancers to exploit that vulnerability to take their own share of the money. This meant, broadly, that Love did not make much cash from Nirvana’s royalties following the death of her husband.
On top of this, Love claimed in 2010 that she had her bank accounts drained by “douchelords”, leaving the musician facing bankruptcy. Speaking to Clash at the time, she revealed the perpetrators, “Four fucking douchelords who started a bank.” Continuing, she said, “You and I could start a bank tomorrow, it’s really easy, I could show you how. I took these twelve anonymous people and just cleared their debt up. If you net under a quarter of a million and you own one property, I can make you credit perfect.”
While the details of this alleged fraud are fairly sketchy, aside from Love’s largely incomprehensible take on the situation, it is not the first time that the former Hole songwriter has accused somebody of fraud. In fact, during a court filing in 2009, her daughter, Frances, shared that her mother is “obsessed with uncovering fraud and spends much of her day raging about the fraud that has been perpetrated on her.”
In more recent years, Love has been forced to pay out hefty compensation in defamation lawsuits, most notably the 2014 case raised by Dawn Simorangkir. Nevertheless, Love has managed to continue producing creative works, including her memoir The Girl with the Most Cake and recent musical endeavours alongside 070 Shake, so it seems as though the “douchelords” who may or may not have robbed her bank accounts were not able to keep her down for very long.
