On Love’s Rocky Road
Hogging the Show at Lollapalooza
July 24, 1995, by ??

A million and one cool, weird, interesting things are happening on the Lollapalooza tour this summer, but you’d hardly know it with Courtney Love on the bill. “I’m going to abuse you, ’cause you fucking deserve it, you shits!” she said by way of a greeting, taking the stage at the Sandstone Amphitheater in Bonner Springs, Kansas. She gave a little flip of her dress, giving the audience a peek at her black-bikinied behind and then flipped them off before screaming the first lines of “Plump.”

After an extended version of “Miss World,” rasping, “I am the girl you know, who dies and dies and dies,” she announced that her yeast infection, “Stinks!” and then broke into “Gutless.”

For the next hour or so, Courtney demonstrated why she is the tour’s undeniable main attraction. She insulted the audience, went on a long rant about Henry Rollins and Nine Inch Nails, walked off the stage for fifteen minutes and then dove into the mosh pit, and repeatedly flashed her breasts to her guitarist, Eric Erlandson.

The music had a raw, sloppy beauty, but the crowd was more interested in whatever shocking thing Courtney would say next. “Melissa, I bet if you showed them your tits, they’d get really excited,” Love goaded her bassist, Melissa Auf Der Maur, as if one bad girl in the group weren’t enough. Courtney and Hole went through “Credit In the Straight World” to what seemed no end until Love began to whisper despairingly, “I am doll eyes, doll parts, doll legs…”

After being drowned out by her guitar on a powerful “Violet,” she yelled at the “nigger bouncers who kept groping me,” then took a doll off an amp, shoved it into her crotch and threw it into the crowd.

During “Rock Star,” Courtney could barely stand up and kept wandering off into the issue of her yeast infection. Finally, after 9 minutes of attempting to scream about her enemies in Olympia, Love rolled around the stage, sang one last weak verse of “Sugar Coma” and threw her guitar at the audience along with whatever else she could; bottles, microphone stands, an amp, before she bid the crowd farewell with her chest and middle finger.