Recent Stories with tag courtney love

If I'm honest, I usually hate multi-stage festivals. I don't like that you pay for the chance to see a bunch of bands and they all overlap and there's no way you can see them all. I don't enjoy waiting in line while I miss some of those bands.

That said, I still had fun at Bumbershoot on Sunday. Here are a few of my personal highlights.

I started the morning by visiting the Counterculture Comix and Flatstock displays. The Counterculture Comix collection was an impressive array of local comic art. I appreciated the old Rocket covers and Sub Pop cassettes and zines, in particular. Flatstock continues to impress with great poster art from both locals and out-of-towners.

Hey Marseilles drew a substantial crowd (the singer remarked that it was an "unnecessarily significant number" of audience members) and delighted fans with their feel-good orchestral pop. They've just gone national with their record, and I think fans of Death Cab or The Decemberists will be pleased with their multi-instrumental approach to songwriting. They sounded great at the festival and were the highlight of the early shows for me.

As a member of the press, I could not pass up the opportunity to get in to the Hole End Session. I waited in the requisite line with my press peers (Rolling Stone Brazil, for example!) and we made our way up the back stairs to a room in McCaw Hall to witness the crazy. We were not disappointed.

Courtney did play a few songs, but she also talked. For what seemed like hours, she rambled on and on in random directions, often changing thought in the middle of sentences. She mentioned she might not play later in the evening because of a death threat, she went on a strange rant about Jonathan Poneman, the founder of Sub Pop, and then about how her song "Samantha" was written to be as bad-ass as Trent Reznor's songs, even though she forgot some of the lyrics as she sang it. The End Session was difficult to watch and hilarious at the same time. (Sort of like Love's life, I'm sure.) She went on to chat with Charles Cross (who is working on the Kurt Cobain biopic) about cast members, mentioned how she remembers Cobain's "peen," and then she and current Hole guitarist Micko Larkin did a cover of Pearl Jam's "Jeremy." Since I want to share that misery with you, here's a video.... (more)

This sums things up nicely.

There is once in a lifetime, and there is once in a lifetime. Yesterday, a small group of about two hundred Bumbershooters (lucky End listeners, some VIPs, and yes, mostly press) gathered in a tiny room upstairs in McCaw Hall to see Courtney Love give a very intimate Hole performance.

Ultimately, it took up the biggest chunk of my Bumber-day, as we all excitedly waited in line for an hour, then waited for Courtney for half an hour, and then got four songs and a whole lot of talking from Ms. Love over the next hour.  I didn't know quite what to expect, and yet it went exactly as expected.

"Do we have an African-American child in our family now?" And so it began.

Over the next scatterbrained hour, Courtney went on to mispronounce "schadenfreude," rail against the Weekly's recent cover story on her ("the most irresponsible thing I've ever seen"), and occasionally answered a question from Red, The End DJ trying to conduct a Q&A--though it did take Red asking a question about the forthcoming Kurt biopic thrice to get a semi-coherent answer.... (more)

There's still no answer to the potentially myth-building riddle that is Who Will Land the Title Role in That Kurt Cobain Biopic? But one name is no longer in the hat, if it ever was to begin with: Team Edward captain Robert Pattinson.

It's not that RPattz is too busy sucking on Kristen Stewart, that his filming schedule's too packed, or that he's Cobain-ignorant. The Nirvana fan—a dime says his favorite song is "Drain You"—essentially pulled himself out of potential contention by calling Cobain's long-self-suffering widow Courtney Love a "dick" for saying that he, Twilight Boy, would be "stupid" and "just wrong" as Kurt. "No offense," she finished. Apparently there was some taken.

While this sucks for tweens and budding cougars, it's a cause for celebration for Nirvana fans. No one would possibly see a smidgen of Cobain's soul through Pattinson's eyebrows. (He does have the pale, thin thing going for him. But no naturally disheveled, seemingly aloof gravitas.)

It's also a good thing for one Mr. Zac Efron. If you're at all familiar with the ongoing efforts to silver screen-ize Charles Cross' Heavier than Heaven, with this picture, or with Kurt Cobain's regrettably slim oeuvre, you know there's no living being better suited to portray Cobain than Efron. (I've been calling for this inevitable casting decision for years, lastly on February 21. The video above was posted February 26. Is someone really listening?) He exudes dangerous duality. He simply oozes self-loathing. And who would look better in flannel?... (more)

June is here (sorta, if you don't look outside), and with that comes the first wave of artists tapped for this year's Bumbershoot.  It's the festival's 40th anniversary, so that means trotting out musicians both old and new, which in this case means Bob Dylan and Hole. Dare we dream of a croaky-voiced Courtney Love-Bob Dylan trainwreck duet?

Single-day tickets are available online as of today, and via Ticketmaster this Friday. Just a reminder on how the tickets are different this year: 

The Bumbershoot Standard Ticket ($40 advance/$50 gate) includes guaranteed Mainstage admission, as well as first-come, first-served access to all other Festival venues. The Bumbershoot Economy Ticket ($22 advance/$30 gate) gives ticketholders first-come, first-served access to everything at Bumbershoot except the Mainstage performances in Memorial Stadium. Economy Ticket holders may be able to purchase Mainstage Upgrade Tickets on-site for $30, if space in the Mainstage is still available day-of-show.

There's one more Mainstage act to be announced (mayhaps Soundgarden?), along with the literary, comedy, performing arts, visual arts, film and theater artists, and whatever other music groups get added to the bill. Check out the lineup by day, and the full list is after the jump.... (more)

Vote Nirvana this Election Day. On Tuesday, the band's seminal first record, Bleach, gets the 20th anniversary reissue treatment from Sub Pop on both CD and white vinyl. And its "I was there!" (and we all know you're lying) 1992 Reading Festival show hits both CD and DVD shelves. Oh, and you can watch the latter on Fuse (Comcast channel 476) at 8pm. How's that for bipartisan?

"This is too painful," says a lean, towering Krist Novoselic into a stage-right microphone. Then he shifts from mock compassion to mock reassurance: "You're gonna make it, man."

He's talking to a frail, blonde fright-wig- and hospital gown-wearing Kurt Cobain—and to the thousands assembled at the 1992 Reading Festival—who's being ushered to his own mic via wheelchair. The Nirvana singer grabs the mic with jittery hands and feebly pulls himself up. The chair's pilot, British rock journalist Everett True, rolls it away.

"Some say love," Cobain croaks, "It is a river ..." And he falls flat on his back.

Somewhere behind him on the huge airplane-hangar stage, Dave Grohl punctuates the faux faint with a heavy, staccato drum flourish.

 

This is the ironic, winking opening of Nirvana Live at Reading, a long-overdue, never before complete document of the band's ability to wryly enjoy the music and the hype they created. However briefly they could.

Watching Kurt Cobain poke fun at his overblown, distressed media image and then tear into what would become the most storied show of Nirvana's abbreviated existence is somehow, 15 years after his death, still a bitter pill to swallow. From the moment he dons a guitar and effortlessly forces the instrument into a tortured squeal, you want the real guy back. Not his likeness in a stupid video game.

But the Reading show is the closest we'll get to a living, breathing Cobain, and, I think, to actually seeing how he viewed his career and fame. It's also perhaps the best Nirvana performance—in a studio or on a stage—we'll ever hear.

As the band tears through most of Nevermind's already-iconic tracks (only skipping "Something In The Way"), its frontman appears healthy, engaged, and enthused. Until Cobain dedicates "All Apologies" to his divisive wife Courtney Love, encouraging the massive crowd to overlook the "crazy stuff" they may have read about her and chant, "Courtney, we love you!", there's no physical sign—other than that opening jab at the media—of his pain, addiction, or irritations.

Cobain displays, through fleeting gestures and performance techniques, many sides of his chameleon personality in the two-hour set. He enthusiastically jumps around with his guitar through "Aneurysm" and employs a casual axe-slinging swagger in "School." The singer screws with his vocal inflection for the verses of "Sliver." He clears his throat after the first line of "In Bloom," then completes the song with what has to be an intentional, extra-gravelly monotone. As he and Novoselic tease the opening of "Smells Like Teen Spirit," the frontman shoots the bassist a knowing smirk. (It's the closest Cobain gets to smiling, which Novoselic and Grohl do, with obvious aplomb, throughout.) He dumps his guitar on the stage during an extended "Love Buzz" jam. The man never takes off that hospital gown.

And after he tags a brilliant, Hendrix-style "Star-Spangled Banner" to the end of closer "Territorial Pissings," Cobain calmly knocks over speaker stands with his guitar's neck, climbs down off the stage, and hands the still-wailing instrument to the crowd. Cobain, it appears, in the midst of personal struggles and media-magnified drama, thoroughly enjoyed this performance.

I can't imagine any rock music fan who won't feel the same way. This is a legendary band at its best, with its fast-burning fuse at its brightest. Add a vivid film-to-video transfer, classic music video-style editing, Technicolor stage lights, and original, freshly mastered, multi-track audio, and Nirvana Live at Reading is the best means we have to celebrate what the band was—and wonder what it could have become.

Like everything else, you can probably blame this on Courtney Love:

 

This is a statement regarding Nirvana, Guitar Hero and the likeness of the late Kurt Cobain.

Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl

It's hard to watch an image of Kurt pantomiming other artists' music alongside cartoon characters.  Kurt Cobain wrote songs that hold a lot of meaning to people all over the world.  We feel he deserves better.

While we were aware of Kurt's image being used with two Nirvana songs, we didn't know players have the ability to unlock the character. This feature allows the character to be used with any kind of song the player wants.   We urge Activision to do the right thing in "re-locking" Kurt's character so that this won't continue in the future.

We want people to know that we are dismayed and very disappointed in the way a facsimile of Kurt is used in the Guitar Hero game.  The name and likeness of Kurt Cobain are the sole property of his estate--we have no control whatsoever in that area.