"Where does the name Courtney Love come from, anyway?"
"Straight out of nowhere."
Lois Maffeo/Mike Applegren interview, early 1991
The story as I have heard it: in the mid 1980s, 2 young aspiring punk rockers lived together in Portland, Oregon. Lois Maffeo and Love Michelle Harrison (who went by the somewhat less hippie-recalling "Michelle") used to joke about the perfect rock star name: Courtney Love. Eventually things would go sour (from the accounts I have heard, Harrison was not the easiest person to live with... Go figure) and one of the women would escape to a quiet life of indie-rock obscurity, while the other would go on to full-blown rock stardom with every last one of the attending cliches thereof, complete with the biggest and most controversial rock-and-toll marriage since John and Yoko. Both would go on to use the name they'd created.
The Courtney Love that you haven't seen on the cover of Spin was a two-piece band consisting of Maffeo and Yoyo Recordings founder Pat Maley. The work they did is not much different than Lois's later releases under her own name. Simple, stripped down acoustic guitar and drums, with slightly clever, unpretentious lyrics drawn from Maffeo's life and relationships. The band would eventually break up after a few singles, a number of compilation appearances, and a whole host of legal threats from the woman who felt that she owned the name.
This isn't groundbreaking music, or revolutionary, but it doesn't try to be. The band formed to play at a party in Olympia in 1989 and happened to just keep it going for a couple years. I think it's pretty safe to say that within the spectrum of rock, Courtney Love (the band) and Courtney Love (the person) are about as far from one another as you can get, and I consider that a big point in the band's favor. Certainly worth checking out if you like the idea that punk doesn't mean 120 decibels and Rock doesn't imply publicity agents...
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