Courtney Love – "Take Me to the River" (2015)

I don’t know why I love you like I do

All the troubles you put me through

Courtney Love – who was born Courtney Michelle Harrison in San Francisco in 1964 – is now, and seems to have always been, a hot mess.  But that may not be entirely her fault.

Courtney’s parents met in 1963 at a party for Dizzy Gillespie.  Her mother, Linda Carroll, is a well-known couples therapist.  Her father, Hank Harrison, was a Haight-Ashbury hippie who was buddies with the Grateful Dead’s bassist, Phil Lesh.

Carroll was pregnant when the couple got married later that year.  She later claimed that the pregnancy was the result of date rape.

She also alleged that Harrison gave Courtney LSD when she was a toddler.  He denies it, but I lean toward thinking that Carroll’s story might be true – it would explain a lot about how Courtney turned out.  (Of course, so would the fact that she spent a lot of time in Portland, Oregon.)

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After the Carroll and Harrison got divorced, she took Courtney to Oregon and got remarried to a trash collector whom her friends nicknamed the “Garbage Adonis.”  She and Adonis had two daughters before they were subsequently divorced.  

Carroll then took Courtney and her two half-sisters to New Zealand, where they lived on a sheep farm.  Courtney was a difficult child, according to her mother, who says that she used to set a lot of fires, and told one of her half-sisters that she was retarded and adopted.  

Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love

When Courtney got expelled from school, her mother shipped her back to Oregon.  She promptly got herself arrested for shoplifting a T-shirt and was sent off to the Oregon reform school for girls.

Courtney was legally emancipated when she turned 16 and immediately started working as a topless dancer in Portland.  That’s when she changed her name to Courtney Love, which you have to agree is a pretty damned good stripper name.

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In addition to topless dancing, Courtney picked berries, worked as a DJ at a gay disco, and attended Portland State.  While still a teenager, she moved to Dublin, where she studied at Trinity College for two semesters.  Her next stop was Liverpool, where she met musician Julian Cope and his Teardrop Explodes bandmates.

Courtney returned to Portland briefly, then headed off to Japan and Taiwan, once again supporting herself by stripping.  When the authorities shut down the club where she was working in Taiwan and deported her, she came back to Portland but then moved to San Francisco, where she started a band and enrolled in acting classes.

She was cast in a minor role in the 1986 Sid Vicious biopic, Sid and Nancy, which was filmed in New York City.  She decided to hang around the Big Apple for a while, squatting in the East Village and picking up a few bucks at a Times Square peep show.  

Director Alex Cox gave her a leading role in Straight to Hell, an unwatchable neo-spaghetti Western that starred Clash frontman Joe Strummer and singer/model Grace Jones, but her role in that flop didn’t lead to additional acting role, so she moved back to Oregon – McMinnville, not Portland – and went back to . . . you guessed it . . . stripping.

Courtney roasting Pam Anderson in 2005

When the locals recognized her, it creeped her out a little.  So she packed up and moved to Anchorage, Alaska, where she lived in a trailer with the other strippers at a club frequented by local fishermen.  

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Courtney had enough of stripping in Alaska after a few months, so she relocated herself to Los Angeles and taught herself to play guitar.  

She placed an ad in a local music fanzine – “I want to start a band.  My influences are Big Black, Sonic Youth, and Fleetwood Mac” – which led to the formation of the band Hole.  

Courtney continued to dance at Hollywood strip clubs to help pay for amplifiers and a van for Hole to use.  After recording a couple of singles (“Retard Girl” and “Dicknail”), Hole released its first album, Pretty on the Inside, in 1991.  Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth co-produced it.

Hole toured with Smashing Pumpkins, and Love briefly dated that band’s frontman, Billy Corgan, before hooking up with Kurt Cobain.  

She and Cobain were married on Waikiki Beach in February 1992.

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Courtney Love appeared on the TV series Empire as Elle Dallas, an aging, drug-addled rock singer.  (Gee, I wonder why they picked her for that role.)  One of the songs she is shown recording on that show is Al Green’s “Take Me to the River.”

“Courtney Love is so open, and available, and raw,” Empire star Taraji P. Henson said after shooting a particularly dramatic scene with Love.  “She’s not afraid to take it all off.”  (As she proved in Portland, Japan, Taiwan, McMinnville, and Anchorage.) 

Courtney Love on “Empire” in 2015

Click here to hear Love’s recording of “Take Me to the River.”  I think it’s a little overproduced – too many backup singers, for one thing – but it’s not bad.  (Of course, Al Green’s original version and the Talking Heads’ cover are better.)

Click on the link below to buy Love’s “Take Me to the River” from Amazon: