Courtney Love is a woman who deserves her own feature story. She's been at odds with a shed-load of celebrities including Madonna, Billy Corgan and Marilyn Manson, but the most vitriolic would have to be her disastrous relationship with Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor.
In September 1994, six months after Kurt Cobain's suicide, Nine Inch Nails asked HOLE to open several shows on their Downward Spiral tour. Reznor later complained Courtney was "Completely intoxicated, a complete fucking mess," throughout the tour, which Courtney later confessed was true.
Nonetheless, Reznor courted her (if courted is a word to be applied to a man who writes songs with the refrain "I want to fuck you like an animal".)
Reznor and Love, by the latter's account first rendezvoused in New Orleans and then in LA where the ill-fated relationship ended traumatically. At the Sunset Marquis Hotel, they got into a fight, according to HOLE's management about "Something very bad Trent had done that Courtney would never talk about". Soon after that ugly night, which ended with Courtney being forcibly ejected by Reznor's bodyguards, she went online saying "lousylaylousylaylousylay, what I have paid in blood and dishonour for that lousy lay", further describing the scene backstage at NIN concerts where she claimed groupies were passed around, degraded, roughed up and even raped, without even getting close to Reznor himself.
When audiences derided her about Trent she would retaliate with "Nine Inch Nails - more like Three Inch Nails." Reznor responded with denial claiming Courtney was pissed off "because I wouldn't be her boyfriend. It just wasn't going to happen - the romance of the century." That autumn, NIN cancelled a show at Madison Square Garden, alledgedly because Reznor knew Courtney was planning on attending and causing a huge scene backstage.
AND NOW: No intimate dinner dates are planned in the immmediate future. NIN have an album scheduled for release very soon, perhaps we can expect some gentle critiques from the HOLE camp.
- BY Yvette Chegwidden