Well it took a while but I finally heard a Babes in Toyland track which I liked enough to include here. It would have been here several years ago had the version Kat Bjelland recorded for the Guitarrorists compilation album been available when I covered Peel's 9/2/92 show. As it is, we get to enjoy the full band version released as a single from Babes in Toyland's Fontanelle album.
Between Bruise Violet and Violet by Hole, which was so excellently captured in a Peel Session at the start of the year, it would have been logical to conclude that whoever Violet was, they had pissed off two of early 90s alternative rock's hottest and most quotable talents. In Bruise Violet, they are accused of cramping Bjelland's style, being a suffocating presence, appropriating other people's lives and experience because they lack the courage to have their own experiences and - as the chorus so directly and dammingly makes clear - spreading lies. In Violet, they are attacked for their selfishness and a tendency to drop people once they've got what they want from them. As a pair of character references, they're pretty sucky, it has to be said.
Who was Violet though? At the time, it was initially assumed that Bjelland was writing about Courtney Love and that Violet was Love writing about Bjelland. The two had become friends in 1984 and following a move to San Francisco they formed a short-lived band called Sugar Babydoll. However, the band made little headway due to a mixture of Love's growing drug habit, musical differences and conflicting priorities whereby Love focussed on what the band could do to get itself noticed, while Bjelland felt that the band needed to tighten up its material so that they had something to be noticed for.
She clearly didn't hold any of this against Love though, because after moving to Minnesota and forming Babes in Toyland in early 1987, Bjelland invited Love up to try out for the band and see how it went. It only lasted a few rehearsals as Love found that playing bass wasn't for her and in Bjelland's own words, I enjoyed her company but she had this weird tendency to try and take over. A bunch of alpha bitches in one room is never a fun thing.
Eventually, Love found the band which was a perfect fit for her by founding Hole. Whatever happiness Bjelland felt for Love at getting the band started was tempered by allegations that Love was recycling Bjelland lyrics in Hole compositions and there was also the issue of the respective front women's styles - There was surely only room for one bottle blonde, shouty vocalist in a babydoll dress in the record collections of North America.
The pair had a brief falling out but reconciled quickly. As to who Violet was, Love claimed that she was writing about her former boyfriend, Billy Corgan while Bjelland claimed that Violet was a muse that they both shared. But as this 1995 Rolling Stone interview makes clear, she was writing about Love and believed Love was writing about her.
Video courtesy of Warner Records Vault
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