GREAT: THE GREATNESS AND PERFECTION OF LOVE/JULIAN COPE

So much of what is deemed is great just grates. At least to my ears. I have always had a taste eccentric to the vox populi, preferring and tending to seek out the less well served by collective opinion. I guess as in the same way my favourite dog breed is under. Luckily, courtesy this mouthpiece, my clarion call to the masses, this allows me free rein to inveigle my audience, that's me and my sockpuppets btw, into submission.

The Greatness and Perfection of Love

I bloody loved this album when it came out, World Shut Your Mouth, the first record by Julian Cope after the demise of The Teardrop Explodes. Always prone to overtly english vocals: Syd Barrett, Kevin Ayers, Ray Davies, Cope was another who rejected the standard transatlantic twang most UK singers have always tended to adopt, knowing, I guess, the bigger market. Mind you, I had always been pretty keen on the Teardrops, especially the standout single, below.

Reward

Cope was never going to be conventional. Coming from Tamworth, a desultory town slightly north of Birmingham, it was never going to be his provider, that taking a move to Merseyside where his accent would always have been a sore thumb amongst those around him. And perhaps why and how a young Courtney Love took such a shine to him? When the record came out, in 1984, I really thought he would be a big star. Hell, he was even on Top of the Pops with the title track, confusingly not included on the album, it coming out two years later, sporting his own design microphone stand.

World Shut Your Mouth

In the years since he has built a name for eccentricity, inconsistency and a weird sort of reliability to avoid entirely any kind of pigeon holing, with this not the place to celebrate his increasingly bizarre stylistic ricochets. Well, not entirely and not now. But, should his musical meanderings not prove easy enough on your ear, consider the fact that he is a celebrated author on subjects as unrelated as (am I still allowed to call it, even if he does?) krautrock and ancient monuments.

Elegant Chaos

Lunatic and Fire Pistol

Back to the o.p. and why it is so great. One reason is always within the lyrics; is he really singing "the greatness and perfection of love"? Sounds mighty like the "greatest imperfection" to me, so much so I am not going to check, preferring the incongruity. But it isn't by any stretch the only good track on the album, I being drawn also to the oboe led majesties of Elegant Chaos and Lunatic and Fire Pistol, peculiar whimsies of uncertain provenance. This pair stand out, along with Head Hang Low, at full arms length from the poppier, Teardroppier other songs, betraying his then state of mind.

Head Hang Low

Fast forward and Cope is still around, with somewhere around 20 albums under his own name, more if you include ones his many and varied labels have suppressed or rejected, often sneaking out years later under some arcane imprint. Some are good, very very good, some frankly unlistenable, but always interesting and seldom classifiable alongside his peers. Somehow I think I need to return to his muse another day.

World!

Witch: Softer, Softest

Hole: Softer, Softest
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I’ve written before about my admiration for Hole’s album Live Through This, and in that piece, I summarized Courtney Love’s difficult life, so I won’t repeat the details here, except to note that if her life has been marked by addiction, wild behavior and anger, she came by it honestly. She is someone that I have found fascinating but not always in a good way. But I think that she has produced a bunch of good music over her career. There has been a lot written by young women who identify with her anger, her pain, and her attitude, and as an older man, I can’t understand her music the same way, but I don’t think you can listen to Live Through This without being moved by it.

“Softer, Softest” is a song that I really hadn’t paid much attention to, but in researching this piece, I think that it is one of the most poignant songs on the album. Introducing the song on MTV Unplugged in 1995, Love stated that it was “about the girl that always smelled like pee in your class, and she was me," so clearly it is autobiographical. The song’s lyrics appear to be about an abused girl, likely with the knowledge of her mother (or, at least, a female caregiver), because the litany of abuse is interrupted with the following lines:

Burn the witch 
The witch is dead 
Burn the witch 
Just bring me back her head 

This is, of course, heartbreaking, and I don’t really think that there’s much more to say, other than, listen to the song.

Instead, let’s discuss whether Courtney Love is a witch, an issue which has a certain amount of currency on the Internet, with a number of sites claiming that she definitely is, although others point out that she has publicly discussed Buddhist chanting. I don’t know enough about witches to know whether you can be one and be a Buddhist. At the same MTV Unplugged show, Hole covered Donovan’s “Season of the Witch,” although it wasn’t televised at the time, and was only released later. (That would be a good song to discuss in this theme, but Seuras Og already did so a couple of years ago, linking to Hole’s version). Love is friendly with Stevie Nicks, who has written songs about witches (and Love has covered “Gold Dust Woman,” Cover Me's No. 1 Fleetwood Mac cover of all time), but I’m not sure that is really evidence. Also, when she performed on Later... With Jools Holland in 1995, Love introduced a song by mentioning that she had “hexed” a “jerk” who was now losing his hair (probably former boyfriend Billy Corgan).  No one, to my knowledge, has tried to determine whether she weighs as much as a duck. Although she has dressed up as Donald Duck.

Love’s daughter, Frances Bean Cobain has been pictured wearing what appears to be a Wiccan moon necklace, her Instagram user name is “space_witch666, and her Twitter handle is “The_Space Witch.” Of course, her daughter’s beliefs aren’t necessarily those of her mother’s, a distinction that Love, considering her childhood (and the lyrics to “Softer, Softest”), would probably agree with.

Stage Names: Courtney Love

Hole: Doll Parts
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Sometimes, it is harder to come up with an idea when there are so many choices out there than when the theme is narrow. When you consider the universe of performers who have used stage names, it is a bit overwhelming. Kind of like the cereal aisle at the supermarket.

Instead, I decided to work backwards. I haven’t written about that many women in the just under two years that I’ve been part of the SMM family (roughly 16 of my approximately 100 pieces have included songs with prominent female vocals—sorry, Kath), so, this is an opportunity to rectify that imbalance. Also, I’ve posted a bunch of prog rock, so I wanted to go in a different direction, and although I’ve posted a bunch of new wave and punk, I haven’t really written about anything like this song.

So I decided to write about a woman who was born in 1964 in San Francisco as Courtney Michelle Harrison (although some sources state that her birth name was “Love Michelle Harrison”). As a result of various adoptions, over the years she was also known as "Courtney Michelle Rodriguez" and "Courtney Michelle Menely". And a few years ago, it was widely reported that she wanted to be known as “Courtney Michelle,” but she shot that story down.

Love’s upbringing was unconventional. Her mother was a psychotherapist and her father was a publisher and was briefly the manager of the Grateful Dead. Her parents divorced in 1969, and her father’s custodial rights were withdrawn based on allegations that he had given young Courtney LSD. Even in San Francisco in 1969, that was not a good thing. Her mother moved the family to a commune in Oregon, where Courtney struggled in school and was diagnosed with autism.

After a brief move to New Zealand, she was returned to Oregon to live with her former stepfather and friends. In what may well be one of the great “what ifs” of all time, Courtney auditioned for the Mickey Mouse Club when she was 12, but her choice of audition piece, the poem “Daddy,” by Sylvia Plath, somehow didn’t get her the gig. A couple of years later, she was sent to juvie for shoplifting, then bounced in and out of foster homes before becoming emancipated at 16. She spent the next few years doing various jobs, including DJ, stripper and actress, while also taking college classes in Portland, San Francisco and at Trinity College in Ireland.

Starting in the 1980’s Courtney began performing, first with bands that she formed, then briefly in Faith No More, before leaving that band to form other bands and playing bass with Babes in Toyland. She taught herself to play guitar and moved to L.A., where she placed an ad looking to start a band—her stated influences were “Big Black, Sonic Youth and Fleetwood Mac.” That band became Hole.

“Doll Parts” was released on Hole’s second album, Live Through This, and was written about Love’s insecurity about her then new relationship with Kurt Cobain. The song’s rawness and simplicity masks its complex musings on beauty, love, fear and pain, much as Love’s unpredictable (to be charitable) behavior has often overshadowed her obvious intelligence and talent. The song starts with just Love’s gritty vocals and a guitar, and builds slowly to a climax, before ending with a pained vocal, cracking with emotion. It is a song that truly lets you into Love’s heart, and makes obvious her pain, her insecurity and her fear.

It is a damn good song, and was a big success for the band. While Love and Hole put out some more excellent music, to my mind, this album, and this song, was the best work she ever did.

The Music Biz: Rock N Roll

Ryan Adams: Rock N Roll

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I’m not sure if any artist has been as defiant toward the workings of the music business as Ryan Adams has – at least no one as accomplished. He’s often been very outspoken with his opinions about radio, record labels, fans, critics, and executives, although never in his songs. Well, at least not in a literal sense.

After the huge success of Ryan’s sophomore album, Gold, his new label Lost Highway thought they had a cash-cow. As far as record sales were concerned, his follow up album, Demolition, was a failure. The company reportedly encouraged Ryan to re-create the sound from Gold, most likely telling him to “play more rock n roll.” As a metaphorical slap-in-the-face to the label, Ryan put together an album spitefully entitled Rock N Roll. The record was electric-soaked and filled with boatloads of reverb and cliché rock phrasing. That is, all except for the title track:

“Everybody's cool playing rock n rollEverybody's cool playing rock n rollI don't feel cool, feel cool at allI don't feel cool, feel cool at allSend all of my best out to the bandSend all of my best out to the bandI don't think I'll make it out to the showI don't think I'll make it out to the showThere's this girl I can't get out of my headThere's this girl I can't get out of my headI don't feel cool, feel cool at all”

That’s all there is to the song (which was placed directly in the middle of the album): those words, Ryan, and a piano. The song fades out with a voicemail from a “very terrified and flipped out” Courtney Love.

On a related note, Courtney Love recently came forward in a typo-ridden rant on her MySpace blog accusing Ryan of stealing nearly a million dollars from Courtney’s daughter’s trust fund. She says he squandered it all on expensive hotels, dinners, guitars, and drugs while recording Rock N Roll in New York City. Courtney calls the record “one of the worst recordings [she’s] ever heard.”
She must not listen to Hole records.

Read the whole ridiculous thing here.