Way Past Almost Golden: Courtney Love In The 2000s

By Emily Carney

It’s late 2009, and the endless enigma of the singer and musician we know as Courtney Love has still not spawned a new album or a record deal. The general populace has now come to view Courtney Love as the rock version of Anna Nicole Smith. She has been regularly photographed by paparazzi looking like an anorexic, drugged out mess. In one recent video from TMZ she ranted on for a few minutes about things that made no sense, and syringes were seen in her handbag (I seriously doubt she has any form of diabetes).

This is not the first time we’ve seen Courtney Love fall from grace; the first time was after her husband Kurt Cobain’s suicide in 1994. She cleaned up and even became glamorous and somewhat respectable. . . for a few years. The most recent decline of Courtney Love has been going on at least since the year 2000, when Hole called it a day, and it has been punctuated by many interesting, insane events, almost too many to catalogue here. The precipitous trajectory of Ms. Love’s career might even be considered tragic if she wasn’t the one sabotaging it.

There was the incident when she impaled a poor dude with a microphone stand javelin at the NYC club Plaid. Around the same time, looking haggard and horrible, she let some random guy suck on her breast at a Wendy’s franchise. Since this is the Internet age, within minutes this image was transmitted worldwide. She went on David Letterman’s show completely wasted, flashed her surgically-destroyed breasts some more, and concluded her act with a version of “Hold On to Me” which was shambolic at best and completely atonal at worst.

Love also became embroiled in a legal dispute with the surviving members of her late husband’s band Nirvana. Obviously, a lot of bad blood still exists between her and Dave Grohl, who went on to an eminently successful career with the Foo Fighters. Apparently, her behavior and general demeanor were so questionable that Grohl and Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic requested that she undergo a psychiatric evaluation. I am not sure what the resolution of this case was—there are literally hundreds of other legal dramas surrounding The Widow Cobain—but it’s fair to say that she received a fairly big chunk of change at the end of it. This did not stop Courtney from dissing both men in the music press.

In fact, Courtney’s biggest problem seems to be keeping her mouth shut. Her acting career, which had begun brilliantly with an impressive turn in 1996’s The People vs. Larry Flynt, has dried out completely. This happened in part because no one will insure her. Extreme plastic surgery has also rendered her almost expressionless.

Within the last few years, things have really begun to implode around Ms. Love. Allegedly, she has “misplaced” millions of dollars; God only knows where this money went. She also developed a nasty cocaine habit and in 2004, released an awful solo record she probably doesn’t remember recording (this atrocity was called America’s Sweetheart). This attempt at a comeback was derailed by an incident in which she broke into her ex-boyfriend’s house and physically assaulted a woman sleeping on the couch. After what was called a “miscarriage,” she was carted off on a stretcher (quite publicly, I might add) to Belleview, a mental hospital.

Shortly after this incident, she temporarily lost custody of her daughter with Cobain, Frances Bean. We consistently heard stories about her unsuccessful attempts at drug rehabilitation. In 2005, there was another example of Courtney refusing to keep her mouth shut: she overdosed on heroin and was taken by paramedics to a hospital, where she admitted to using heroin. This slick move caused her to violate her probation, and she had to face a judge yet again.

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