Courtney Love plays Miami with Hole
July 2, 2010
The Fillmore Miami Beach, Miami, FL
Written by Kate Dingle
Over the past few years, Courtney Love has certainly had her fair share of public blunders, outbursts, and breakdowns. The most recent was the well-publicized train wreck of a performance Sunday night in Washington, D.C. That said, concertgoers weren’t really sure what to expect from Love as she and her band, Hole, stopped in Miami Friday night to play the Fillmore.
When Courtney Love took the stage, the crowd in Miami seemed ready for whatever the grunge goddess was going to throw at them. As she donned her Rickenbacker and stomped out her cigarette, three words escaped out her mouth: “So, shall we?”.
With one leg up (literally), Love and the re-invented Hole catapulted into “Pretty On The Inside”, The Rolling Stones 1968 tune, “Sympathy For The Devil”, and the current single “Skinny Little Bitch”.
The more the slick-tongued rocker teased the crowd with invites to her “real nice Miami Beach penthouse”, the more fans became wrapped around her finger. Although she would take time to make some off color comments or chat with lead guitarist Micko Larkin, the music never really seemed to stop (which seemed to be a characteristic of the D.C show).
Before surrendering her guitar to perform “Letter To God”, “Pacific Coast Highway”, and the Leonard Cohen song, (“not ‘Hallelujah’”) “Take This Longing”, Love and her guys plowed through one of Hole’s biggest hits, “Violet” off the platinum selling album, Live Through This. Other set highlights included, “Asking For It”, “Someone Else’s Bed”, “Celebrity Skin” and “Doll Parts”. The six song encore included “Malibu” and another Stones cover “Play With Fire”.
The show was closed with Love and Larkin and a couple of acoustic guitars for stripped down versions of “Thirteen”, originally by Big Star, and the painfully honest “Never Go Hungry”.
At 45, Courtney Love is still hanging on. She’s still going out every night and putting on shows. She seems to go out and do the best she can on any given day. Whether or not it ends in catastrophe or not is something completely separate. She’s certainly not a perfect musician (as was shown during Friday’s show when chords and lyrics were missed here and there) and she certainly has not been portrayed as a perfect human being. But she’s still going out there and fighting, and she’s going to fight until the end.
Photos by Christina Mendenhall
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