Courtney Love | Filching From Fox411
Courtney Love Declares War on Web Enemies
Not everyone is feeling all patriotic, warm and fuzzy. Some people are still remembering their pre-Sept. 11 priorities.
Take Courtney Love, the peripatetic rock personality, mythic widow and sometime actress.
Love, who recently won the right to sue Geffen Records/Universal Music to get out of her recording contract, is having a meltdown on a record-industry chat site called The Velvet Rope.
In the last few days, Love has posted several hideously long messages — often rambling, always misspelled — attacking just about everyone she knows in the music business.
Each letter is signed with a facetious quote she's made up and attributed to Allen Grubman, the famed music-biz attorney whose infamous daughter Lizzie is now facing jail time for mowing down 16 people in the Hamptons over the summer.
The quote is: "They are just the apples that fall and rot — we are the trees [signed] Allen Grubman Great Dad."
Love's attacks concern not only her desire to get her rock band, Hole, out of their Geffen contract, but also to get sole ownership of the publishing rights of songs written by her late husband Kurt Cobain, including songs he wrote with his group, Nirvana. The latter issue is part of a separate lawsuit.
In her filibustering bromides, Love skewers current Geffen Records President Jordan Schur, claiming "he's a pig." She also claims Schur recently did something to the group Weezer, although she doesn't specify what, and intimates that he's a drug abuser.
"It's more about how much blow can you chop on Jordan's desk," Love writes.
Schur declined comment about Love's remarks.
But sources tell me that at one point before Love filed her lawsuit against Geffen, Schur invited her out to dinner in Los Angeles at L'Orangerie to try to smooth things over. Love ordered a bottle of Petrus wine for about $250, then took it and left Schur holding the tab.
Meanwhile, Love assaults rock managers Gary Gersh and John Silva as well. Gersh was the exec at Geffen Records who signed Nirvana, then went on to run Capitol Records before becoming a manager.
Gersh and Silva now manage the Foo Fighters, the group which Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl formed after Cobain died. Love is suing Grohl and Nirvana bassist Krist Noveselic for the rights to the Nirvana songs.
Love's zigzagging observations were placed on The Velvet Rope site by a member who copied it from Hole's Web site. Although the posting has since been deleted from The Velvet Rope and from Hole's site, Velvet Rope site owner Julie Gordon recently summarized it thusly:
"Courtney here acknowledges that she has an authority problem in a very misspelled, mis-typed and rambling kind of way.
"She characterizes a manager as a shill who does deals for you while you supervise them.
"She calls Gersh and Silva some unpleasant names.
"She lets us know that she has an excellent memory and is capable of reciting the contents of a '70s Billboard Magazine backwards.
"She reminisces briefly about her time at a school for troubled girls.
"She says that Gary Gersh landed his job at Capitol based on the premise that he found and brought in Nirvana, but that, in fact, Sonic Youth [longtime New York art-rock band who were one of Geffen's first signings] were responsible for bringing Nirvana to Geffen. She says that in eight years at Geffen, Gary Gersh did not have one platinum artist.
"She bad mouths Gary Gersh's wife.
"She adds that she does not hate Gary Gersh.
"She calls [Gersh's partner John] Silva a clown and says he spoke unkindly of Kurt [Cobain] behind his back and liked Courtney better than Kurt.
"She describes herself as fiercely loyal to her family, drawing an analogy between herself and Arab men based on this.
"She calls [rock manager and impresario Irving] Azoff her patron, and characterizes him as a manager who has left his clients rich or at least provided with healthcare benefits. She says he is helping her to terrify GAS, Gersh and Silva's management company. She says she is proud that she would not be manageable by a low-end outfit like GAS.
"She calls the person who started the [messages on The Velvet Rope] to which she is now responding a drooling spastic.
"She says that everyone at the Recording Industry Association of America and John and Gary will go down."
When Fox 411 contacted Gersh's office about Love's comments, his assistant said, "Gary says consider the source."
More recently, Love has announced to members of The Velvet Rope community that she's hired a private detective to track down the real names of anonymous posters who may be Universal Music employees.
"My gentleman friend prints out said defamatory posts and puts them in a little file," writes Love, who claims another private detective, Jack Palladino, who works for Mariah Carey, told her to do this.
Love warns Universal employees: "In your employment contracts you will find a clause preventing you from making defamatory and slanderous statements about any artist on your label. Look closely — it's in there. … Remember this is the Internet," she says. "Anonymity is a pretense."
So what does Courtney Love want? Some good things, some greedy things, it looks like. She wants health care for musicians under contract, respect for women execs and artists, a revised recording contract that reflects 2001 and not the 1940s, and a way to get hold of Nirvana's rich publishing rights.
But her methods for even the most admirable of these tasks are not going to win her many friends.
In the record business, she writes, [sic] "You've got too many gangsters with too much power like always but NOW youve got harvard mba guys bossing them around. thats new."
A tip of the hat to the BBC.com site, which helped itself to our news about Mariah Carey appearing on Ally McBeal this January. Many other sites only stole bits and pieces from us. But BBC took the entire serving. Hey, the bill is in the mail. … And the New York Daily News liked our story so much about Paul McCartney's late-night jam after the Concert for New York that they just plunked it right down on their pages.
To read Roger Friedman's review of Michael Jackson's latest album, click here.
Get all the stories you need-to-know from the most powerful name in news delivered first thing every morning to your inbox