Unconditional Love

AFTER YEARS ON the West Coast—after her flirtation with Hollywood and an entire album (Celebrity Skin) that romanticized California—Courtney Love has set up shop right here in New York City. You can almost hear L.A.’s collective sigh of relief.

It seems fitting, somehow, that Courtney’s back in Manhattan to relaunch her career. New York was, after all, the scene of her last album launch, that fateful week back in 2004 when she flashed Letterman, knocked some dude out with her mic stand at Plaid and let a guy suck her tit outside of a Wendy’s. All that kinda makes her recent New Year’s Eve show at The 18th Floor at The Standard (aka the Boom Boom Room) seem severely tame. But Love is set to revisit Letterman on April 27, the same day as the first of a pair of album release shows at Terminal 5. It’s like she’s calling for a doover, and her fans are ready.

It’s been a rough decade for Courtney Love fans. The early 2000s saw: the dissolution of Hole; her spectacularly short-lived, all-girl punk supergroup Bastard, with Louise Post and Patti Schemel; a lukewarm attempt at a solo career; troubles with drugs; some severely botched cosmetic surgery and a stint in rehab. In recent years, Love lost custody of her daughter, Frances Bean Cobain—twice. She launched a mini comeback tour in support of a solo album co-written by Linda Perry and Billy Corgan that never materialized. She later appeared to undergo some dramatic fluctuations in weight, accused everyone from Ryan Adams to former lover Edward Norton of embezzling money from her, and has, all the while, documented her every foible on nearly indecipherable MySpace blogs and Twitter posts.

Got all that?

Of course, it’s never been easy to be a Courtney Love fan. Even when she was at the top of her game there was always some kind of controversy, some reason to write her off as either a sell-out or a nut job, or both. And people don’t exactly take you seriously when you say that you love Courtney Love. Rock snobs—straight guys in particular—tend to turn their noses up at you. They demonize Love while adulating Kurt Cobain, never once considering what kind of mess he would have become had he survived into his forties. Most everyone else just doesn’t see what there is to be a fan of.

And, even though Live Through This was a seminal grunge-era album, a masterpiece of defiant female rage, in a sense the haters are right. Courtney hasn’t given the public much to be fans of in the past few years. Her bad behavior and questionable mental state have overshadowed her music. But now she’s back with a new album and a reconstituted version of Hole, minus any original members or competing egos. Advance buzz about Nobody’s Daughter has been, for the most part, positive, and this new incarnation of Hole has scored good marks on the band’s first few live shows.

Still, you have to wonder, who’s going to these shows? Who are these people who waited patiently through the past 10 years for Courtney to get her head out of her ass and make a record?

After conducting a highly informal survey—mostly involving Facebook friends and friends of friends who are going to either of Hole’s shows at Terminal 5—it becomes clear that a sizable number of these fans are gay guys. They’re the kind of queers who eschewed glossy fag rags for fanzines and adopted Courtney as their patron saint while others knelt at the altar of Madonna. And while Riot Grrrl culture may have long ago disowned her, Love’s queer fan base doggedly sticks by her. They insist that America’s Sweetheart wasn’t that bad. They laugh about her cosmetic surgery and say they find something comforting in the fact that she looks more like herself now than she ever did in her Hollywood phase.

“It’s like, the Courtney Love of now, is the Courtney Love I remember from my adolescence!” says Patrick Dyer, 26, an artist’s assistant.

They liken their devotion to Courtney to the way theater queens feel about Judy Garland. They compare seeing Hole, as messy as Courtney may be, to seeing Liza perform.

“You just kinda want to root for Courtney Love,” says Joshua Ackley, lead singer of the now defunct homopunk band The Dead Betties. “She’s your best friend from the wrong side of the tracks that you really want to do good.”

But even amongst fans, there’s some light-hearted skepticism about whether the shows will actually happen. Max Steele, 25, debated purchasing the insurance Ticketmaster offers on its tickets, because he felt like it was entirely possible that Love might die at some point before ever making it to Terminal 5.

Brian Sheehan, 26, who saw Hole play back in 1999, refuses to buy tickets in advance. “I don’t trust Courtney enough to buy tickets before the day of the show,” he says, in case she cancels the tour or goes back to rehab or fires her new band.

Despite all that uncertainty, Love’s gay fans still adore her. She’s an essential part of a certain segment of this queer generation’s cultural experience. And even if Nobody’s Daughter doesn’t win Love any new fans, even if the album tanks, these guys, along with a lot of ballsy, brassy women, will still be at Hole’s shows.

“A lot of it is definitely [Courtney’s] onstage persona,” says Ackley, “And I really think that she’ll deliver. I’m not so sure about the band, but Courtney will definitely deliver.”

That is, he adds, if she doesn’t die first.

But Courtney Love has managed to stay alive this long. Why should she drop dead now?

“She’s a cockroach!” Ackley agrees.

“She’ll outlive us all!”