The deep and painful feud between Dave Grohl and Courtney Love
In 1992, Hole vocalist and guitarist Courtney Love married Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain on a Hawaiian beach. Despite being crowned the ‘it couple’ of the 1990s grunge scene, Love argued that marrying Cobain “created a mythology around me that I didn’t expect for myself.” She claimed, “I became seen in a certain light–a vilified light that made Yoko Ono look like Pollyanna–and I couldn’t stop it.”
Although Love was subject to much criticism during her relationship with Cobain, when the pair tied the knot, Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl was one of the eight people to attend the ceremony, even posing with Love for photos. Meanwhile, bassist Krist Novoselic refused to appear at the ceremony due to the couple’s heroin use and his belief that Love was a terrible influence on his bandmate.
However, following the death of Cobain in 1994 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, the relationship between Love and Grohl quickly soured. Their feud officially began in 1999 when Grohl questioned Love’s songwriting abilities in an interview with Howard Stern. When asked what his favourite Hole song was, he replied, “‘Teenage Whore’, because I know she wrote it.” Talking to Spin, she said that Grohl’s claims were one of the reasons why she “hate[d]” him so much. “That stupid motherf*cker. He knows exactly what I wrote, he knows exactly the input I had on [Nirvana’s] third album. Kurt came [to the studio] to play with [Hole] more than he did with Nirvana because he liked us better.”
A few years later, Love got wrapped up in Nirvana-related drama when she demanded Nirvana L.L.C., a partnership between herself, Grohl and Novoselic, be terminated. By doing so, Love could block the release of unreleased Nirvana material. She argued that Nirvana “could never be a partnership because it was the living manifestation of the creative vision, personal will and life force of a single unique individual.” Grohl and Novoselic responded by calling Love “irrational, mercurial, self-centred, unmanageable, inconsistent and unpredictable.”
Simultaneously, she tried to block the release of ‘You Know You’re Right’, a track the band recorded a few months before Cobain’s death. Despite the remaining Nirvana members wanting to place the unreleased song on a boxset to commemorate Cobain, Love thought the track would be better suited to a single disc collection. Her lawsuit deemed the song “a potential hit of extraordinary artistic and commercial value.” Eventually, both parties settled the case, and ‘You Know You’re Right’ appeared on a single disc collection, Nirvana, released in 2002.
A few years later, their feud continued when fans noticed that a new Foo Fighters song entitled ‘Let It Die’ contained multiple potential digs at Love. In response, Love took to MySpace to accuse Grohl of hitting on her “many times” and accused Kurt of “loath[ing]” Grohl “more than anyone else (except a journalist).” She ended her message by writing, “There isn’t a word he could say that would ruffle my feathers, honestly.”
However, Love’s feathers were ruffled just two years later when Guitar Hero 5 was released, which used Cobain’s likeness. Players could perform any song using a cartoon of Cobain, which “disappointed” Grohl and Novoselic. The pair wrote in a statement, “The name and likeness of Kurt Cobain are the sole property of his estate, we have no control whatsoever in that area.” Love responded on Twitter by writing, “I dragged my butt and never signed off on the avatar and let alone this effing feature.”
Yet, according to Activision‘s Tim Riley, Love was active in creating the avatar of Cobain, selecting the outfit and providing photos and videos for reference. When journalist Everett True Tweeted his disgust at the game for letting users use Cobain to perform Bon Jovi songs, Love responded with vitriol, suggesting that he should “ass rape” Grohl, referring to him as a hell-deserving “bad seed.”
In 2011, Love broke down on stage, accusing Grohl of stealing money from herself and Frances Bean Cobain. She shouted, “If a guy takes money off my kid’s table, F him.” Shortly after, she explained these comments in an interview, stating, “Dave makes five million dollars a Foo Fighters show. He doesn’t need the money from Nirvana, so why the eff does he have a Nirvana inc. credit card and I don’t, and last week he bought an Aston Martin on it.”
Love continued her Twitter tirade in 2012 by accusing Grohl of hitting on her then-19-year-old daughter, a claim he has incessantly denied. “Him I am about to shoot, dead,” she wrote. Frances, who once filed a restraining order against her mother in 2009, dismissed the claims, writing, “Her recent tirade has taken a gross turn. I have never been approached by Dave Grohl in more than a platonic way. I’m in a monogamous relationship and very happy. […] Twitter should ban my mother.”
After a tiring feud, with most of the attacks launched by Love, the pair made up in 2014 when Nirvana were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Love told Pitchfork that they reconciled backstage, “On my way to the bathroom, I saw Grohl, and Grohl saw me, and he came up to me, and I was like, ‘Alright, no matter what happens, we’re not going to be bastards.’ This was my attitude going in and obviously his. Not much else needs to be said. We both knew it was time to let go. We were ready to do it. It’s been twenty years. We didn’t even talk at the funeral, none of us. So 20 years of Dave bashing and me bashing, making it worse. All that stuff, the legal stuff, the trial. We just buried it. It was really deep.”
We can’t be too sure if the feud is truly over after Love hit out at Grohl in a 2021 Instagram post. She accused him of “gorging on Kurt’s fortune and Kurt’s goodwill” in a post that has since been deleted. That same year, Love accused young pop singer Olivia Rodrigo of copying a Hole album cover; it seems like she is far from leaving her feuding days behind.
