Musicians - Courtney Love

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	Musicians - Courtney Love

Courtney Love Michelle Cobain (born July 91964), better known as Courtney Love is an American rock musician, model, and actress, best-known as lead singer for the now-defunct alternative rock band Hole. Love is the widow of Kurt Cobain (1967–1994), lead singer of the band Nirvana. With him she has one daughter, Frances Bean Cobain.

Biography

Early life

Courtney Love was born Love Michelle Harrison in San Francisco, California, and in 1967 had her name changed to Courtney Michelle Harrison. Her parents are onetime Grateful Dead manager and publisher Hank Harrison and therapist Linda Carroll (née Risi). Love's mother was born to writer Paula Fox but given up for adoption to an Italian American couple who raised the (Jewish-born) daughter Catholic . Love spent her childhood with her mother as she wandered through four husbands and as many hippie communes in Oregon and at boarding school in Nelson, New Zealand. Love later claimed to have been given LSD as a toddler. Her father denies this allegation and has passed polygraph tests.

A troubled, angry child, Love was a veteran of reform schools and juvenile halls by the time she was a teenager. She broke away from her family and traveled around the US, United Kingdom and Ireland, living on a trust fund established for her by her mother's adoptive parents. Her first rock musician boyfriend was Rozz Rezabek followed in Liverpool by Julian Cope, the founder of The Teardrop Explodes. In her late teens she worked in Japan as a stripper, a job that she would return to at several points in her life before attaining fame. At age 22 she found herself back in Portland, Oregon, then moved to Los Angeles, California in 1987 along with the band Babes in Toyland. After being fired from the band by founding member Kat Bjelland, she took up in Los Angeles with Leaving Trains. Viewed by some as a social climber, she befriended many musicians who would later become alternative rock icons, among them Michael Stipe of R.E.M. and Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins.

Musical career and marriage

Love began her professional music career with a brief stint as the lead singer of Faith No More in the early 1980s. She was kicked out of the band for being overly controlling shortly after. About this time she also played in an all-female pop-rock band called Sugar Baby Doll with Kat Bjelland and Jennifer Finch. None of their Bangles-influenced material has ever been released. Love had more early success as an actress, appearing as the best friend of Nancy Spungen in Alex Cox's Sid Vicious biopic Sid and Nancy in 1986, and in Cox's Straight to Hell in 1987, as well as some small roles on television episodes.

Returning to music in her adopted hometown of Minneapolis, Minnesota, Love claims she co-founded Babes in Toyland with Bjelland, but this is denied by others; acrimony between Love and Bjelland led to Love's quick exit from the band. The band's biographer claims she stole house receipts to a Butthole Surfers concert. In 1991 Love formed her own band, Hole. The band's debut album garnered little critical or popular attention in the U.S. but was celebrated in the influential British alternative music press. Already a star in England, Hole's fortunes improved considerably following Love's marriage to Cobain and the publicity following Cobain's death.

Unpopular with some Nirvana fans (comparisons to Yoko Ono were made early on and persist to this day), Love's image was further tarnished by a 1992 article in Vanity Fair entitled "Strange Love", in which she admitted to using heroin in the early stages of pregnancy. As a result, Child Welfare Services briefly investigated the Cobains' fitness as parents. Love claims to this day that she was misquoted, saying she had told author Lynn Hirschberg that she had stopped using it once she learned she was pregnant.

Similarly to Axl Rose, she was often ridiculed in the press for her abrasive, sometimes erratic behavior, such as cursing at paparazzi and publicly harassing Cobain's former girlfriend, folksinger Mary Lou Lord.

Shortly before the release of Hole's breakthrough album Live Through This in April 1994, Cobain apparently committed suicide. Love read his suicide note at a televised memorial a few days later, sobbing hysterically and alternately cursing her husband as a "fucking asshole" and pleading with him to come back.

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Musicians - Courtney Love

Biography

Early life

Musical career and marriage

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