The moment Courtney Love decided to be “a rock star”
Even before fronting Hole, Courtney Love had already lived a chaotic life. Born to a hippie psychotherapist mother with connections throughout San Francisco’s counterculture, including Ken Kesey’s wife, and having Grateful Dead legend Phil Lesh as her godfather—thanks to her father being the band’s publisher and road manager—Love’s upbringing was anything but conventional.
Love was born in San Francisco in 1964 and spent her earliest years in the Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood, which was fast becoming the epicentre of the emergent countercultural movement. However, after her parents divorced in 1970, which even saw her mother claim in a custody hearing that her father had dosed her with LSD as a toddler, her life would be completely uprooted.
The pair moved to Oregon, where her mother and second husband kept an unorthodox home that welcomed a menagerie of colourful hippie characters through its doors. Demonstrating the free-spirited nature of her mother, Love attended a Montessori school in Eugene, Oregon, but struggled both academically and socially. She has since claimed she started seeing psychiatrists from the age of three, and later, at nine, a psychologist suggested she exhibited behaviours associated with autism.
In 1972, Love’s mother divorced her second husband and later married a third, moving the family to New Zealand. After being expelled from the Nelson College for Girls for misbehaviour when in the South Pacific, she was sent back to Portland, Oregon, where she was raised by her former stepfather and other family friends. Understandably, it was in her early teens that her behaviour started to mirror the constant uprooting and alternative upbringing she’d experienced.
After being arrested for shoplifting in Portland at 14 because she’d fallen in with the wrong crowd and turned into a scrappy, rebellious youth, Love was remanded at Hillcrest Correctional Facility in Salem, Oregon, and Skipworth in Eugene. At the latter, she was shown music that would change her life and bring her out of her shell, gradually turning her from a quiet victim of bullies to more like the outspoken rocker we know today.
In a 1994 interview, Love recalled that while remanded at Skipworth, an older intern for school credit sensed her inner fire and showed her punk music, a much different sound from the outdated glam she was into at the time. She was in no doubt that that was the moment she decided “I was going to be a rock star”.
Love recalled: “An intern who was working for school credit came back from England and said, ‘You should really be into this stuff, it’s really you.’ And he gave me three records: Pretenders, Squeeze, and Never Mind the Bollocks. I decided then that I was going to be a rock star.”
Being shown those records changed Love’s life, and her mindset shifted listening to them. She no longer wanted to hang around with her local mall rats but instead turned her attention to bigger things. She wanted punk friends, and when she found them, her imagination was now blown wide open. When finally emancipated in the eyes of the law, she moved to Portland, started hanging out with punks and drag queens, and, in her own words, “I found my inner bitch”. The rest was history; sojourns to Japan, Dublin, and Liverpool followed. Remarkably, Hole and Live Through This were still far away.
