in the name of love… some kind of wonderful?

Godzilla with a skirt…

by Art Chantry ( art@artchantry.com)

TODAY’S weird piece o’ crap that i’m posting is this little note from courtney love. orpheum records on broadway in seattle was a small independent record store (long gone) that used to sell old cool used bootlegs mixed in among it’s regular LP stock. one day ms. love waltzed in to the store and found several nirvana boots mixed into the bins. she got indignant, scooped them all up and walked up to the desk and announced she was they were illegal and she ‘taking them’. when the person behind the counter said she’d have to “talk to the boss”, courtney grabbed the notepad next to the register and wrote this note to “the boss”. read it for yourself. i don’t think curt (“kurdt”) was in the store, that is her handwriting signing FOR him.

a copy of the note made it’s way to The Rocket editorial offices and we all got a big laugh out of it. we published in the next issue, straight across. a big laugh all around.

ADDENDUM:
AC: i only met her once. she came into the rocket offices (with sub pop’s jonathan poneman, who looked terrified and never said a word) and wanted to place an ad (looking for a new bassist for hole.) she was dressed in a dirty corderoy jacket, her hair was all dirty and matted and she was really pale and zitty and smelled bad, sorta dazed looking. she’s also tall, so she was VERY imposing and scary.

She was smoking a cigarette. the owner of the rocket was extremely anti-smoking (much to the staff’s chagrin) and the front desk woman (name of “viva”, a notorious toughie) looked courtney love in the eye and told her it was a non-smoking office. courtney didn’t get it. she gave viva a blank look and said,”wha?” viva said, you’ll have to put the cigarette out. this is a non-smoking office.”

What ensued was one of those amazing moments – a stare-down between the legendary viva and the notorious courtney love. the earth shook, the sky got dark and a low ominous hum started growing underground for a few seconds. then courtney shrugged, marched back to the front door, took a big last drag off the stick and threw the butt on the rocket’s carpet and ground it our with her foot.

That butt stayed there for a week. i finally put a sign taped to the floor next to it with an arrow pointing at the butt. it read “courtney love’s cigarette butt.” it stayed for another day and eventually viva cleaned it up in disgust.

courtney was an unintentional laff riot….

…when she paid for that ad (her bassist had OD’d), she had to empty out the contents of her “purse” o

e counter top to look for money. you can only imagine what came out of that thing…

she ended up signing over a check written out to her from curt (or something like that. it was weird). nobody really knew what to do with it, so we hung it on the wall for a while. i think it was stolen later. collectors are even weirder than rock stars…. i’ve heard those tapes. several folks at the rocket had copies. legendary fuckedupedness abounds. and kurt got his two bits in that tape as well. when people get THAT whacked out on the big D, madness is rife (ripe?). sure was funny to listen too, though….

…i think most of seattle had their fill of her “behavior” (sounds so polite, doesn’t it?) she was like some carpetbagging black widow spider that came waltzing into town, sucked it bone dry and then swaggering off to the next place looking for more gluttonous “behavior” to satiate. there was a palpable sigh of relief when she staggered out of s-town…