I will neeeeeeveeer go hungry, go hungry aaagaaaaaiiiiin !!
Courtney Love and Amanda De Cadenet at Vanity Fair Oscar Party, March 1995.
Courtney Love grabs Quentin Tarantino’s Oscar statue at the party and threatens to hit journalist Lynn Hirschberg with it. Hirschberg had previously written an article for Vanity Fair claiming Love used heroin while pregnant.
Nowadays it’s hard to imagine, but there was a time when stage-diving and crowd-surfing never existed at rock shows or at any shows, for that matter. Iggy Pop was the first person to go out and walk on the hands of his audience, that stands out to me as an iconic event. However, in all the crowd-surfing moments I’ve witnessed, watching Courtney Love walk into her audience was one of the most outrageous I’d ever seen. I can remember it clearly: I was watching with friends at Manhattan’s Bowery Ballroom balcony in 2004 as she was elevated above the crowd, being passed from hand to hand. I remember thinking how funny and weird it looked, like a giant snake pit. It was such a crazy angle to view it all from, and there I was, looking down as it unfolded. From where I stood, it almost looked as i the crowd wasn’t made up of individual people, but that it was really just a gigantic organism, all moving in sync with Courtney Love at the helm.
With all of the concerts I have been a part of and have seen over the years, this was truly a memorable musical moment. Every person in the audience fed off her energy from that performance. And when she crossed that invisible boundary between the stage and the crowd, everyone jumped at the chance to literally carry her performance on. Taking it all in, I couldn’t help but think about Iggy and his legendary stage dives. It was wild to watch how Courtney took such control of that audience, continually leaping into the crowd. It was such an incredible performance to witness, and it was definitely one of the most exciting rock ‘n’ roll moments of the last decade.
- Deborah Harry.
