Love was born Courtney Michelle Harrison on July 9, 1964 at Saint Francis Memorial Hospital in San Francisco, California, the first child of psychotherapist Linda Carroll (nee Risi) and Hank Harrison, a publisher and road manager for the Grateful Dead. Love's godfather is the founding Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh. Her mother, who was adopted at birth and raised by a prominent Italian-Catholic family in San Francisco, was later revealed to be the biological daughter of novelist Paula Fox; Love's maternal great-grandmother was screenwriter Elsie Fox. According to Love, she was named after Courtney Farrell, the protagonist of Pamela Moore's 1956 novel Chocolates for Breakfast.
1988-1991: Beginnings of Hole
At the end of 1988, Love taught herself to play guitar and relocated to Los Angeles, where she placed an ad in a local music zine: "I want to start a band. My influences are Big Black, Sonic Youth, and Fleetwood Mac." Love recruited lead guitarist Eric Erlandson; Lisa Roberts, her neighbor, as bassist; and drummer Caroline Rue, whom she met at a Gwar concert. Love named the band Hole after a line from Euripides' Medea ("There is a hole that pierces right through me") as well as a conversation she had had with her mother, in which she told her that she couldn't live her life "with a hole running through her."  Love continued to work at strip clubs in the band's formative stages, saving money to purchase backline equipment and a touring van, and rehearsed at a studio in Hollywood that was loaned to her by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Hole played their first show in November 1989 at Raji's, a rock club in central Hollywood. The band's debut single, "Retard Girl", was issued in April 1990 through the Long Beach indie label Sympathy for the Record Industry, and was given airtime by Rodney Bingenheimer's show on local rock station KROQ. That fall, the band appeared on the cover of Flipside, a Los Angeles-based punk fanzine. In early 1991, the band released their second single, "Dicknail", through Sub Pop Records.  With no wave, noise rock and grindcore bands being major influences on Love, Hole's first studio album, Pretty on the Inside, captured a particularly abrasive sound and contained disturbing lyrics, described by Q magazine as "confrontational [and] genuinely uninhibited." The record was released in September 1991 on Caroline Records, produced by Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth with assistant production from Gumball's Don Fleming; Love and Gordon had initially met when Hole opened for Sonic Youth during their promotional tour for Goo at the Whisky a Go Go in November 1990. In early 1991, Love sent Gordon a personal letter asking her to produce the record for the band, to which she agreed. Though Love would later say it was "unlistenable" and "[un]melodic," the album received generally positive critical reception from indie and punk rock critics and was labeled one of the twenty best albums of the year by Spin magazine. It also gained a following in the United Kingdom, charting at 59 on the UK Albums Chart, and its lead single, "Teenage Whore", entered the country's indie chart at number one. The underlying feminist slant of some of the album's songs led many to mistakenly tag the band as being part of the riot grrrl movement, a movement that Love did not associate with. The band toured in support of the record, headlining with Mudhoney in Europe; in the United States, they opened for The Smashing Pumpkins, and performed at CBGB in New York City.
How did the band Hole form originally?
" Love recruited lead guitarist Eric Erlandson; Lisa Roberts, her neighbor, as bassist; and drummer Caroline Rue, whom she met at a Gwar concert.
" Love recruited lead guitarist Eric Erlandson; Lisa Roberts, her neighbor, as bassist; and drummer Caroline Rue, whom she met at a Gwar concert.