Three chords in a Cambridge bathroom, and a dog at the door
Three chords, and they do not hurry. Courtney Love’s guitar on Doll Parts sounds as if the strings were a little too far from the frets, a toy instrument asked to carry a grown want. The vocal is almost flat, which is how the ache gets in. She lists the parts: bad skin, doll heart, the girl with the most cake. None of it is metaphor in the polite sense. It is an inventory taken in a bad mirror. The band, when it enters, does not rescue her. It agrees.
She wrote it in about twenty minutes, in a bathroom at a house party in Cambridge, Massachusetts, around 1991, while people knocked. The paper ran out. The rest of the lyric went down her arm in marker, and the song was played an hour later at the Virgin Megastore in Boston, under the working sense of a girl who had heard that the boy, whose band had just left town, was sleeping with two other girls. The boy was Kurt Cobain. Love has said the line about the dog came from an actual dog begging in the room. The rest came from the wish to be chosen, and from the fury when the wish looked foolish. Live Through This was recorded in October 1993 at Triclops Sound Studios in Marietta, Georgia, with producers Paul Q. Kolderie and Sean Slade, and released on 12 April 1994, four days after Cobain’s death. The song had been in the set for years. The calendar made it sound like a memorial. It was a demand, written while he was alive and elsewhere.
On the record, Eric Erlandson’s guitar keeps a thin glare, Patty Schemel’s drums stay dry, and Kristen Pfaff’s bass holds the floor without decorating it. The single’s video, all smeared color and dolls, fixed an image the lyric had already refused to prettify. Live, Love sang it as if the bathroom door were still being pounded, the repetition of someday you will ache like I ache turning from curse to fact depending on the night. Audiences who arrived after April 1994 heard a widow. The tape heard a rival.
I still don’t understand why that one song with just three chords is such a big thing. But it’s definitely got some good lyrics. That was a song about Kurt. I wrote it in Boston.
(Courtney Love, Uncut, 2010)
The simplicity is the scandal. Love has wondered aloud why three chords became the thing people keep, and then granted that the lines are good. They are specific in a way anthems usually sand down: the most cake, the dog, the breakable objects loved because they break. Hole’s louder songs threw bottles. This one set the table and waited. The wait is what radio understood, even when it misunderstood the date.
What remains is the arm with the marker still wet. Doll Parts does not explain the marriage that followed or the week the album met. It keeps the earlier hour, when wanting someone was still a tactic, and the tactic was a song short enough to finish before they opened the door.
