Voiceless Love Quacks Up on Stage
March 20, 2004, by Jim Farber

You don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to realize that Courtney Love is a tad on the needy side. Which, I suppose, is why she needed to make her fans prove their ardor by waiting up to three hours for her to show up to her Bowery Ballroom concert Thursday night.

And why, when she finally did turn up after midnight, she left the stage after muttering one incoherent line about her arrest the night before for hurling a mike stand into a crowd, which bloodied the face of a fan.

“If any of you are planning on getting injured,” she brayed, “go outside and get yourself arrested now.”

Love’s undying need for, well…love, may also explain why she decided to go on with the show, 10 minutes later, even though it became clear in the first number that she had lost her voice.

“Jail will do that to you,” she commented, in an agile act of blame-shifting.

Love went on to argue with her sound man, taunt the audience (“Touch my dress and you die!”), pull off her top, replace it with a T-shirt reading “Eat My F–” and call her guitarist a prostitute.

That was just in the first 10 minutes.

Over the next 60, Love croaked in a voice that sounded like a duck having a tracheotomy without anesthetic.

At the same time, she provided what had to be the worst possible introduction for her new, five-woman band.

They seemed as confused by their singer’s behavior as anyone. The group tried to follow Love through songs from her new album, “America’s Sweetheart,” which has vanished from the charts in just three weeks.

But Love kept changing her mind about what song she could sing, how it would be arranged and how long it would last.

Love spent as much time talking as “singing,” offering such bons mots as “I so need to get f–” and “all I need is one good f–.”

Various band members seemed anxious to escape the stage at several points, but Love whined “I wanna stay!”

Clearly, she was enjoying getting so much notice for doing little but act out. I felt like I was enabling just by being there.

Make no mistake. Love knew her show wasn’t exactly Grammy-grade stuff.

“I sucked,” she said at around 1:30 a.m. “I’m going to be crucified for this.”

But at the show’s close, she experienced a bizarre moment of personal triumph when she dove off the stage, got passed through the entire crowd and “wasn’t molested once.”

Love presented this as one of the great moments in the history of civility.

Didn’t she consider that maybe people just didn’t want to get that close?