The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • Page 176

KnimMn iiui.HtHH i iuiti n.Mtk In Love With Courtney She may be married and expecting, but Hole's Courtney Love hasn't toned down MICHAEL LA VINE readers poll, just behind Madonna and Kylie Minogue. Overseas, she is a paradigm of damaged slutty glamour. Over here, within the very glamorous world of underground rock, Love is notorious, and people who barely know her often gossip about her for hours. But happy as she might be, at the moment Love is miffed. She shuts the latest issue of NME hard.

"All of a sudden," she whines, "all these boys from all these papers are turning into New Man Feminists. Until they turn into something else next month, in which case they'll take it out on Patti and Debbie and Chrissie and meeee. I was reading one of these last week, and every single article had my name in it. And it's not like I've written a 'Brass in Pocket' or anything. It's all because I took a couple of pictures with my eyeliner smudged." Love is to smudged eyeliner what Karen Carpenter was to denim leisure suits.

"This whole 'underground' thing is really scary," she continues, twisting around her finger a platinum strand of hair, "because there's such a frenzy going on right now, and the industry thinks they can purchase it and make it pay. People are offering a million dollars to these scruffy little dirty stoner bands. And I can just see it's going to Please see Page 61 By JONATHAN GOLD An hour with Hole's 1991 "Pretty on the Inside" album might be one of the most harrowing experiences in rock 'n' roll, a black, labored, twisted hour that is closer to a gruesome-sex Mary Gaitskill story than to anything you might think of as popular art, a slack, grinding hour that imprints itself on your consciousness like an extended fingernail-screech. Most of the songs are about bad sex, bad drugs or a bad day at the abortion clinic. The most famous song from the album begins "When I was a teen-age whore.

If "Pretty on the Inside" were a horror movie, it would be all the parts that you have to look at through your fingers. Sometimes it is good to experience excruciating things. On a quiet back street of Los Angeles' Fairfax District, a quick walk from Canter's and a stone's throw from the hippest record stores on Melrose, Hole auteur Courtney Love sprawls in the living room of her groovy railroad-flat apartment, smoothing the week's British music tabloids around her on the floor, listening to the new Pavement CD, tugging at her tight, black skirt. At one end of the room, a line of well-worn books leans against the wall; on the floor by the couch, an exquisite thing in cream Atomic Age Naugahyde, is a vividly colored textbook chart of the female reproductive tract. Love looks up only occasionally, to say something snotty about the blaring music or to read a particularly juicy notice aloud.

She puts down the copy of Sounds and picks up a New Musical Express. Her new husband, Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain, has spent the afternoon straightening up. Sprawled on her clean living-room floor, Courtney Love is happy and in love. The British music tabloids have all mentioned her, she has a baby on the way, and she's been signed to Geffen Records for a lot of dough. Love has more money than she can count and a husband the world desires, a singing voice that could crack glass, and cool pads in both Los Angeles and Seattle.

She loves the British music tabloids almost as much as they love her, which is more than plenty. She reaches over to the coffee table and leafs through a packet of letters that teen-age girls have written to Sassy magazine about its recent Kurt Courtney cover, half of which are admiring and half of which say that she's a skank. Love is obsessed with people who are obsessed with her. About a year ago, Everett True, the American-underground correspondent for Melody Maker, found something deep and unsettling in Love, and the English weekly ran a full-page article on Hole at a time when the band was still third-billed at small club shows in Los Angeles, its own hometown. True called Hole "the best.

scratch that the only rock 'n' roll band in the world," and positioned Love as sort of the underground's answer to Madonna. The rest of the British press followed suit. Love, who does not think of herself as a beauty, was named the third sexiest woman in a recent Melody Maker The Ruckus Over the Vanity Fair Profile The 20 words that shook the record business are found near the end of Vanity Fair magazine's eigh't-page profile this month on rock provocateur Courtney Love. Talking about a day last January when her husband Kurt Cobain's band, Nirvana, appeared on "Saturday Night Live," the 26-year-old singer Is quoted as saying, "Then, we got high and went to After that, I did heroin for a couple of months." The shocker is that Love, the Please see Page 63 The Vanity Fair spread on Courtney Love-. A pregnant image, sans cigarette.

LOS ANGELES TIMES CALENDAR 6 SUNDAY, AUGUST tfc WW.