On Thursday 25 March, 1993, Hole recorded their second and last session for John Peel. In the two years that had passed since they recorded their first session, they had replaced Jill Emery and Caroline Rue with Kristen Pfaff and Patty Schemel on bass and drums respectively. They brought three songs to the session which would eventually feature on the band’s next album, Live Through This, which was released almost a year after this session went out. Interestingly, Live Through This would also feature two songs which the band had played in their 1991 Peel Session.
Two of the songs saw Hole in attack mode. I wasn’t taken by She Walks On Me, which according to Courtney Love is about the way geeky girls try to impersonate weird girls in order to seem more interesting. Beyond its everyday observation, this could have been a swipe against Riot grrrl bands that Love had so little time for.
They were certainly the target in Olympia, the capital city of Washington State, noted both for the liberal arts/progressive politics at Evergreen State College, and its music scene which was seen as the hive for riot grrrl bands such as Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, Heavens to Betsy etc, in the way that Seattle was seen as the hive for grunge music. Although Love’s upbringing was peripatetic, marriage to Kurt Cobain had seen them set up home in Seattle, and on one hand it’s possible to look at Olympia as a song in which one major city disses another major city within the same state. Hole take the piss out of the political earnestness and community ethos of the bands in Olympia, compared to the more nihilistic attitude underpinning the music of Seattle’s bands. The collection of yelped “Yeah?”s which end the track sound somewhat passive aggressive. Less “yeah, I agree with you”, more “yeah, I thought you were a moron and everything you say is confirming it, so I’ll keep drawing out your stupidity for everyone to see.”
The version that Hole recorded for the Peel Session had several differences from the out-take version
which ended up hastily substituting for the original album closer Rock Star* on Live Through This. There’s less profanity for a start, and the session version also has a verse scoffing about time spent with someone called Calvin. This appears to be Calvin Johnson, whose record label K, had distributed records by numerous Olympia bands for over a decade at this point. On the album, the track cuts much more quickly to its point that too many of the bands look and sound the same, that they are condescending to their audience and that all of them preach revolution but leave Love unconvinced that any of them would know what to do if they achieved their goal. Love’s whispered “fascist nexus” comment is particular to the session, and in 1993, could be read as a reaction against politically correct feminism, as embodied by the attitudes of the riot grrrl groups. It’s a reminder that, in the age of wokeism, the terminology changes but the insults stay the same.
I don’t have many things in common with Courtney Love, but one thing we both had to endure was being given a derogatory nickname in our childhoods. For me, the failure to pull out a handkerchief when I sneezed in a lesson at junior school, and exposed my classmates to a shower of mucus, meant I had to put up with being called Bogieman for the best part of two years, until I went to secondary school.** Love’s nickname was marginally worse as she was known as Pee Girl, mainly due to the smell of urine on unwashed clothes that she often had to wear while living on a hippie commune. In adulthood, Love managed to regain some semblance of ownership on the nickname. She included it in the lyrics to 20 Years in the Dakota, which was recorded as a b-side to their then current single, Beautiful Son.
Now, it had a song all to itself, but there’s nothing particularly triumphant or self-asserting about its use here. This is a song in which its lonely and vulnerable heroine is seeking a friend to confide in and unburden themself to amid bursts of domestic violence (Pee girl gets the belt) and allusions to potential sexual abuse (Your milk is so sour). When the song was recorded for Live Through This under the title Softer, Softest, the line became even more uncompromising (Your milk has a dick). Having not long become a mother herself, Love appears to be hitting out at her own mother for the abuse she suffered (Burn the witch/The witch is dead/Burn the witch/Just bring me back her head). She also references her own struggles and self-destructive behaviour, which she was trying to break free from (I’ve got a blister from touching everything I see/The chasm opens up, it steals everything from me.) The song tries to surge in its final 40 seconds, but remains a sad and dispiriting piece.
Peel played The Raincoats original recording of The Void from their eponymous 1979 debut album on this show and broadcast Hole’s cover of it, 10 tracks later. When you hear the chorus line on The Void it sounds tailor made for Love’s voice. Hole slightly rework the lyrics, referring back to their own Olympia with references to revolution, but both versions do a good job of addressing depression and ennui in a manner which seems invigorating rather than crippling, although the churning violin on The Raincoats original recording provides an extra layer of emotion which isn’t quite there on Hole’s cover.
It could be argued that, in 1993, no-one was doing more to boost the reputation of The Raincoats than Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain. The previous autumn, Cobain had met Ana da Silva while she was working in her cousin’s antiques shop in London. He wrote about this meeting and his request for a copy of The Raincoats debut album in the liner notes to Nirvana’s rarities and early tracks compilation, Incesticide. A few months after this session was broadcast, all three of The Raincoats albums, recorded between 1979 and 1984, were reissued in the UK and US. Cobain again contributed liner notes to the reissue of The Raincoats. Early in 1994, The Raincoats reformed after a 10 year hiatus, and exactly a year after this show, Peel broadcast a new session by them, which included a dedication to the recently deceased Cobain.
When considering this session as a whole - pardon the pun - it’s a curious beast really. A cover and 3 works in progress. It shows signs of the poppier direction that Hole were looking to move in, away from the days of Pretty On the Inside and which had prompted original bassist, Jill Emery leave the band. I wonder whether the content of this session would have produced any new Hole fans. I’m not sure that it would have, but it’s an interesting signpost to where the band were going and would have asked any existing fans, listening in, whether they were going to join them on their journey. At the end though, I find myself going back to a comment Peel made after playing Hole’s session version of Drown Soda on 13 March 1992: There are so many bands doing pop, but only one band doing Hole.
*Although Olympia replaced Rock Star on Live Through This, the substitution was made after the album artwork and track listings had been completed. Live Through This was released a week after Kurt Cobain’s suicide and Rock Star’s refrain of You’d rather die was attached to verses about being in Nirvana, creating an unbearably shocking case of art imitating life. Curiously, the titles have never been changed on reissues of the album, making the Peel Session one of the few recordings to feature Olympia under its own name.
** It could have ended up being replaced by an even worse nickname in subsequent months, given that an attack of diarrhoea during a PE lesson in Year 5 caused me to shit myself. But I got away with that to a large extent because while people were aware it happened, no-one actually witnessed it, they just knew that something pretty extreme had happened which meant I had to be cleaned up by the headmistress in the toilets.
Hole videos courtesy of Anna Logyka, VibraCobra23 Redux and JusticeforCourtney.
Raincoats video courtesy of The Raincoats - Topic
All lyrics are copyright of their authors.
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