PERFECT SONG: ‘Boys On the Radio’ with Patrik Sandberg, Plus An Interview With Hole Bassist and Author Melissa Auf der Maur

Yasi is joined by writer Patrik Sandberg to break down one of Hole’s (many) perfect songs “Boys on the Radio.” They talk Courtney Love’s evolution, her relationship with critics, and the inspirations, intentions, and alternative culture of the 90’s that influenced it all. Then, Melissa Auf der Maur stops by to discuss her new book, Even the Good Girls Will Cry. She discusses her time in Hole, her friendship with Courtney Love, and her wide-ranging life as an artist. CREDITS:Host: Yasi Salek @yasisalekGuests: Patrik Sandberg @patriksandberg, Melissa Auf der Maur @xmadmxProducer: Rob SundermannEditor: Adrian BridgesAdditional Production Supervision: Justin SaylesTheme Song: Bethany Cosentino Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 1:05Speaker 02

  What's with this band, anyway? I don't get it, can you please explain? Wait, like, Bandplain? Never heard this band in my life. Oh, you haven't? I'd love that. Really? Why? Yeah, I love this song. Oh, I don't know that one. Bandplain, Bandplain, Bandplain. I really like this band! Whatever, I'm their biggest fan. Bandplain, Bandplain, Bandplain, Bandplain. Bandplain!

• 1:45Yasi Salek?

  Hello and welcome to Bandplain. I am your host, Yasi Salek. This is usually a show where I invite an expert guest on to help me explain a cult band or iconic artist, but today's episode is a little different. Today's episode is about just one perfect song, and that song is "Boys on the Radio" by Hole. Also, please stick around after our talk about "Boys on the Radio" for my interview with Hole bassist Melissa Oftermar about her book, "Even the Good Girls Will Cry." My guest today is one perfect man, the triumphant return of Patrick Sandberg. Welcome, welcome back, Patrick. I'm so happy to have you.

• 2:22Speaker 04

  Thrilled to be back.

• 2:23Yasi Salek?

  Newly minted Substackonista, Patrick Sandberg.

• 2:26Speaker 04

  Back where we belong. Yes.

• 2:28Yasi Salek?

  It's called the paraphernalia and you guys should really get involved with it. I won't lie, I'm like of two minds about it. I'm like, this is so great for everyone else, but like, you know, when you're like gatekeeping, because you're like, but that's my perfect friend who sends me his perfect thoughts in voice memos. And now everyone's gonna know his perfect thoughts.

• 2:49Speaker 04

  Well, gatekeeping is also like, kind of the originating principle of the Substack itself, because I am paywalling it.

• 2:58Yasi Salek?

  It's true.

• 2:59Speaker 04

  I just figured someone will pay.

• 3:01Yasi Salek?

  I also know that some of your more

• 3:06Yasi Salek?

  fringe thoughts will be left just to the group chats and I can feel happy about that.

• 3:10Speaker 04

  Oh yeah, all the mean ones.

• 3:14Yasi Salek?

  Okay, Patrick, before we get started, and try to keep it brief, but can you tell me your relationship to this song? Slash album, slash band?

• 3:26Speaker 04

  How did we think to do this song?

• 3:28Yasi Salek?

  You chose it.

• 3:29Speaker 04

  I did?

• 3:30Yasi Salek?

  That's right. Yeah, I said, we should do, I mean, it was a while ago, we were crafting the idea, you guys famously, or maybe infamously, I don't know if you don't follow me on social media, it's a bit of your loss. But we get asked to do the whole episode quite frequently, and I hear you, you're heard. But Ms. Courtney Love herself has strongly requested that we do not do the whole episode until she releases her forthcoming solo album. And who am I to go against that?

• 4:07Speaker 04

  And how do you even do a whole episode? Like, would you bring her on?

• 4:11Yasi Salek?

  If she wants to, but maybe not as the main guest.

• 4:14Speaker 04

  Right, because that's a lot to go through.

• 4:16Yasi Salek?

  Well, we just, it's an outside lens usually, you know?

• 4:20Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:21Yasi Salek?

  Um, but we will, we will be doing that eventually. But in the meantime, we have this interview with Melissa Aftermark. Please stick around.

• 4:29Speaker 04

  Wow, the gingers are taking over.

• 4:30Yasi Salek?

  The gingers are taking over. And then we were like, oh, we can, we're allowed at the very least to do a perfect song on whole to pair perfectly with the Melissa Aftermark interview. And I was like, well, Patrick, dealer's choice. And you chose Boys on the Radio.

• 4:47Speaker 04

  I thought I chose Malibu.

• 4:49Yasi Salek?

  No.

• 4:52Speaker 04

  But Malibu would be my choice, maybe. I have to think about this. Boys on the Radio is a perfect song.

• 4:57Yasi Salek?

  Well, it's a little late now because I've done the research on this one. So don't, we, I mean, look.

• 5:02Speaker 04

  No, it was you and me and our friend Cody and we.

• 5:06Yasi Salek?

  Did Cody, did Cody choose Boys on the Radio?

• 5:09Speaker 04

  Consensus became Boys on the Radio.

• 5:10Yasi Salek?

  Right. Listen, we're always.

• 5:12Speaker 04

  Which is how it should be.

• 5:12Yasi Salek?

  We're gonna talk about the other songs, touch on them on the, on the album Celebrity Skin also from 1998. But I think, I think this is actually a great song to kind of dive into. Cause I do think it has a really interesting backstory as well as being like a really cool song, which makes a good episode, you know?

• 5:35Speaker 04

  It feels, uh, like it kind of represents a turning point for Courtney in terms of songwriting, in terms of what she was aspiring toward. It kind of, and if you listen to the Celebrity Skin album, there's sort of moments that really peak and this feels kind of like a whoa moment on the record.

• 5:57Yasi Salek?

  Totally. And I also think it represents like almost a slight moment of personal softening.

• 6:06Yasi Salek?

  Do you know what I mean? In like a really cool way, which we can get into.

• 6:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:10Yasi Salek?

  Especially when you hold Live Through This next to Celebrity Skin, which.

• 6:14Speaker 04

  Pre yoga, post yoga.

• 6:17Yasi Salek?

  To, but two, to me, kind of perfect albums, both in, you know, they both really 10 out of 10.

• 6:27Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 6:28Yasi Salek?

  Um, but in kind of really different ways.

• 6:30Speaker 04

  I think Celebrity Skin gets a bad rap.

• 6:32Yasi Salek?

  Hundred percent.

• 6:33Speaker 04

  I mean, we're gonna get into that a lot. I have a lot to say about that, but I think partially the reason why is because Live Through This is such a seismic album.

• 6:41Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 6:42Speaker 04

  It was such like, an insane moment that catapulted this person to ubiquity and stardom on like a world stage.

• 6:51Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 6:52Speaker 04

  And it also was kind of like this open wound of an album that was, we had never seen somebody express grief like that before, in that way.

• 7:02Yasi Salek?

  But it's, it's what's so interesting to me is that this is the grief album.

• 7:08Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 7:08Yasi Salek?

  Celebrity Skin is the grief album. Live Through This was written.

• 7:10Speaker 04

  Was not written.

• 7:11Yasi Salek?

  Pre.

• 7:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:12Yasi Salek?

  I mean, of course, there's plenty to grieve and be.

• 7:14Speaker 04

  But the way that it played out, you know.

• 7:16Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, but the way that it played out for sure.

• 7:17Speaker 04

  Upon release and, and also it is just such a beautiful and intense album. I think a lot of people consider it the best album of the 90s, or it's like very, very high up there.

• 7:28Yasi Salek?

  Smart people.

• 7:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, smart people, but even like the idiots, you know, like Rolling Stone.

• 7:35Speaker 04

  Um, which camera do I look at when I'm insulting somebody?

• 7:39Speaker 04

  It's, it's like, I think even like the kind of, you know, the like mainstream media lists tend to rank it very highly even at this point.

• 7:49Yasi Salek?

  I was talking to someone else about this, I can't remember who, but I, it's one of my greatest litmus tests, especially of men, not to put my pink pussy hat right back on, but like. I feel like you can tell a lot about a straight man by how they speak about Courtney Love and how they speak about Hole. And even like, I think if you're, if you're a straight man at home, maybe just like do a little soul searching, because you might not even notice your deeply internalized misogyny jumping right out, you know? Because also, it's just like, you have shit taste also. Like, if you can't hear how phenomenal Live Through This is.

• 8:28Speaker 04

  Even shitheads at this point, admit it.

• 8:30Yasi Salek?

  Hang it up.

• 8:31Speaker 04

  I think that's the power of Live Through This and where it is, where it kind of like lives and situates in the kind of like great American songbook at this point.

• 8:40Yasi Salek?

  Not Rodgers and Hammerstein.

• 8:41Speaker 04

  And maybe sometimes it takes forty years. You know what I mean?

• 8:45Yasi Salek?

  Well, and obviously to address-

• 8:47Speaker 04

  The golden oldies are what we're talking about today.

• 8:49Yasi Salek?

  It's really crazy.

• 8:50Speaker 04

  To be clear.

• 8:51Yasi Salek?

  To like, also get out in front of it, you know, one of the many injustices and indignities that Courtney Love had to bear was being accused of not writing her own album. And, you know, the accusation being that Kurt Cobain wrote it. And I actually loved, in Melissa Aftermar's, um, book, she says it really well, where she's like, "These songs are really simple. Like, we didn't need Kurt Cobain." Like, or not "we," because she wasn't part of the band, but like, she didn't, like, they're not difficult, like, complicated songs. Like, Courtney said it in an interview too, she's like, "He would have done it something better." This is not him.

• 9:30Speaker 04

  Well, they definitely had a shared, uh, outlook and-

• 9:35Yasi Salek?

  Well, of course, how can you not?

• 9:36Speaker 04

  His sense of humor, sense of irony.

• 9:38Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, but like, put some respect on Eric Erlison's name, babe.

• 9:40Speaker 04

  They were married.

• 9:41Yasi Salek?

  That man wrote these songs too. It's, I don't know.

• 9:45Speaker 04

  But also, simple songs can be the hardest ones to write. Especially the good, simple songs.

• 9:50Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Well, let's do a little Hole TLDR before we get, just to bring us up, because I think-

• 9:56Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 9:56Yasi Salek?

  The context is obviously really important. So, formed in Los Angeles in 1989 by Courtney Love and Eric Erlison. We will not go through each and every personnel change, um, but at the time of Celebrity Skin, the lineup was Courtney, Eric, bassist Melissa Aftermar, and drummer Patty Shetmel.

• 10:14Yasi Salek?

  First album, Pretty on the Inside, was produced by Kim Gordon and put out by Caroline Records.

• 10:21Speaker 04

  We've heard. We found out recently, no.

• 10:25Yasi Salek?

  And also, just importantly about Pretty on the Inside, like, this wasn't some, like, nobody heard it, who cares album. Like, within the world of, like, elevated indie music, like, it was voted Album of the Year by The Village Voice that year. It made Spins Top 20. Like, it wasn't, you know, nobody's ever heard of these people. The band toured in support of that record. They had line with Mud Honey in Europe. In the United States, they opened for Smashing Pumpkins, which is, I believe, where Courtney maybe first met Billy, or, you know, sometime around here. And they briefly dated. And then later, she started dating Kurt Cobain, whom she married in February of 1992. Nevermind had been released, Nirvana's Nevermind.

• 11:08Speaker 04

  Okay, record scratch.

• 11:09Yasi Salek?

  Yes.

• 11:11Speaker 04

  For the younger listeners.

• 11:12Yasi Salek?

  Sure.

• 11:13Speaker 04

  In the 90s, rock music was like a really big deal.

• 11:19Speaker 04

  Alternative music was the dominant culture.

• 11:23Yasi Salek?

  Really? Not till 92?

• 11:25Speaker 04

  Not until 92. And so what I'm trying to say is, like, indie culture as we know it now.

• 11:30Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 11:31Speaker 04

  Didn't exist in the same way back then. It was, it looked a little bit different, but Hole's renown around Pretty on the Inside would be the equivalent of, like, an indie record now that's pretty big.

• 11:44Yasi Salek?

  Right, yes.

• 11:44Speaker 04

  That does well within the indie space, but hasn't, like, broken through. So that was sort of where Hole was at back then, like, opening for the Pumpkins. The Pumpkins were also, like, kind of like, the best indie band from Chicago.

• 11:59Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 11:59Speaker 04

  That then blew up.

• 12:00Yasi Salek?

  At this point, they put out Gish, but not.

• 12:05Speaker 04

  Simi Street.

• 12:05Yasi Salek?

  Simi Street. Yeah, so this is like the incubation period of what is going to become known as, like, the best of the brightest of MTV 90s, you know, glitterati. But they're not there yet. And even Nevermind didn't sort of.

• 12:23Yasi Salek?

  Blow up until the top of ninety two, like it was like through the Christmas shopping period of December nineteen ninety one and CD buying that like kind of pushed them over the top and they dethrone Michael Jackson. It was a whole

• 12:36Speaker 04

  Right.

• 12:37Yasi Salek?

  So anyways, by this point.

• 12:39Speaker 04

  But that was like smash hit record, kind of changed everything.

• 12:42Yasi Salek?

  Changed everything. So at this point Kurt and Courtney are incredibly famous due to the fact of Nirvana being this like massive situation. They have their first child in August of ninety two, Francis being Cobain. Hole signed to a Gethin subsidiary called DGC with an eight album contract in late nineteen ninety two.

• 13:04Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 13:05Yasi Salek?

  That's what Wikipedia said.

• 13:06Speaker 04

  They used to do it serious, you guys.

• 13:08Yasi Salek?

  I don't have access to the contract, but that's what Wikipedia said.

• 13:11Speaker 04

  Draconian.

• 13:12Yasi Salek?

  And then in ninety three, they were wrote and recorded their next album, Live Through This.

• 13:18Yasi Salek?

  On April seventh nineteen ninety four.

• 13:20Speaker 04

  Can I add one thing?

• 13:21Yasi Salek?

  Yes.

• 13:22Speaker 04

  So Francis is born in August nineteen ninety two.

• 13:24Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 13:24Speaker 04

  That month is when the September nineteen ninety two issue of Vanity Fair comes out.

• 13:30Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 13:31Speaker 04

  I remember the photos are by Michel Compt. The article is by Lynn Hirschberg and the article was called Strange Love.

• 13:40Speaker 04

  It opened with the sentence Courtney Love is late.

• 13:44Speaker 04

  And it goes pretty downhill from there. In the article, Lynn Hirschberg articulates an accusation that Courtney was on heroin while pregnant with Francis.

• 13:56Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 13:57Speaker 04

  Which of course became a linchpin in a lot of later drama.

• 14:03Yasi Salek?

  Also like unsubstantiated.

• 14:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:05Yasi Salek?

  Unproven. Just kind of a reckless thing for a journalist to do, in my personal opinion, given what's at stake, given that it's Vanity Fair, not Star Magazine, you know, kind of crazy. I know I'm obviously a stan, so.

• 14:20Speaker 04

  Of course, but it's also.

• 14:21Yasi Salek?

  But I think I would say that about anyone. Like I think that a publication at the level of Vanity Fair would not maybe toss around.

• 14:30Yasi Salek?

  Things that are pretty criminal accusations.

• 14:33Speaker 04

  Libleus?

• 14:34Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 14:35Speaker 04

  Well, I think that there was a kernel of truth to it in, in the sense that Kurt and Courtney were on heroin and she stopped using heroin when she got pregnant, or when she found out she was pregnant.

• 14:48Yasi Salek?

  Right, which like so.

• 14:48Speaker 04

  So she said for, until she found out she was pregnant, she was.

• 14:51Yasi Salek?

  How many girls do I know that have been like doing cocaine in Miami whilst pregnant without knowing? You know, like, okay, well.

• 14:58Speaker 04

  Smoking cigarettes at China Shelly.

• 15:00Yasi Salek?

  People do a lot of things, uh, when they don't know that they're pregnant.

• 15:05Speaker 04

  Or when they do know.

• 15:06Yasi Salek?

  Right. And also like, just to point out, like, going through hell and high water, because when you put in Vanity Fair that someone uses drugs during their pregnancy, Child Protective Services will show up at your door. And they did.

• 15:18Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 15:18Yasi Salek?

  So we're going the fuck through it already.

• 15:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:22Yasi Salek?

  Before April 7th, 1994, which is the day that Kurt Cobain dies by suicide. April 14th, 1994, which is one single week later. Is, uh, the day that Holes Live Through This came out.

• 15:39Speaker 04

  I want to talk to David Geffen about this decision.

• 15:44Yasi Salek?

  I am curious about it.

• 15:47Speaker 04

  Would that happen now?

• 15:48Yasi Salek?

  No, I don't think so.

• 15:50Speaker 04

  It's crazy.

• 15:51Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 15:51Speaker 04

  There's something that feels deeply cynical about it. Like, oh, we better capitalize on this.

• 15:57Yasi Salek?

  On everyone talking about this.

• 15:58Speaker 04

  It was all over MTV all day, every day, you know, and MTV was a big deal back then. In ways that are probably impossible to fathom now. I don't even know, like.

• 16:08Yasi Salek?

  It's 23 hours of ridiculousness.

• 16:10Speaker 04

  MTV was, was Instagram. It was like what everyone was looking at. It was like, you would go to school, you would come home, you would.

• 16:17Yasi Salek?

  You would park yourself.

• 16:18Speaker 04

  Refuse to do your homework and you would turn on MTV and it was like face TV screen glued.

• 16:24Yasi Salek?

  What was going on in the world. I didn't, I wasn't going to know if there was a war, honey, unless Kurt Loder was going to tell me about it.

• 16:30Speaker 04

  Yeah. How would we have known about freeing Tibet?

• 16:33Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, would never, then would never.

• 16:35Speaker 04

  The Live Through This coming out a week after Kurt died was very insane. And not to mention, there was a televised memorial.

• 16:44Yasi Salek?

  Yes.

• 16:45Speaker 04

  Where Courtney read the suicide note that is like deeply tattooed on my subconsciousness.

• 16:51Yasi Salek?

  One million percent. I mean, it was, it was an insane. Cluster of time and forget about the like album coming out. All of the professional obligations around the album coming out that fell to the shoulders of a person who is grieving the loss of their husband. Kind of insane, but also.

• 17:19Yasi Salek?

  As like a workaholic, I kind of understand at least the impetus from her perspective to be like, well, what am I going to do? Sit at home and think about how he's dead? That's not what I would also want to go. Just do something.

• 17:35Speaker 04

  A little bit. I think it and that's it's some it all blurs together in our memory because it was such a kind of insane spectacle at the time.

• 17:43Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 17:45Speaker 04

  But Hole didn't make, didn't do a public performance in support of Live Through This until the Reading Festival that August.

• 17:51Yasi Salek?

  Right. So it was, it was, there was some time, some downtime.

• 17:55Speaker 04

  Yeah. And it was sort of like, it's crazy what like with everything that we're about to talk about. It's like, if you look, there's like a two year period of time where Courtney Love's life changed irrevocably. It was like from Nevermind until Live Through This becoming like a platinum selling album. And she became super, super famous.

• 18:14Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 18:14Speaker 04

  Lost Kurt, lost Kristen, which is the next thing that probably.

• 18:18Yasi Salek?

  Kristen Pfaff. Yeah. She passes away in June. So June 16th, 1994, the, the basis of Hole, Kristen Pfaff died of a heroin overdose in Seattle. So just like two months after.

• 18:35Speaker 04

  The hits keep coming, but it's like, Nevermind, marriage, baby.

• 18:39Yasi Salek?

  Right. Like.

• 18:40Speaker 04

  Like Kurt's suicide. Kristen dies, Live Through This comes out. All of this is happening in like such a short span of time. That is like, it would drive any sane person crazy.

• 18:51Yasi Salek?

  And this is where they pick up Melissa, which we'll talk about more in the interview with Melissa. So again, stick around for that. And it's very well detailed in her book. I, I think I heard Courtney once describe it as like, it was like seeing opera to see Hole perform in this time span, which I did twice. And it was, she's right. Like it was like, because she was very publicly. Grieving.

• 19:15Speaker 04

  I'm so jealous that you saw them.

• 19:17Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 19:17Speaker 04

  I was too young.

• 19:19Yasi Salek?

  My father took me, thanks dad, to the K-Rock Weenie Roast. And then they also played Lollapalooza. That was one of the best sets I've ever seen. Both ninety-five, so I would have been like twelve and thirteen years old or whatever.

• 19:34Speaker 04

  If I can like set the stage for my Courtney Love fandom, if you will. Apart from the fact that I'm a gay man, which it will all make sense. But I was extremely young when Pretty on the Inside came out.

• 19:52Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 19:52Speaker 04

  And I was telling you that like, looking back, when I was like very, very young, like from age three until like six, I was heavily into like hip hop and R and B.

• 20:04Yasi Salek?

  Not age three to six.

• 20:06Speaker 04

  No, but like you remember what music you loved when you were like really, really little. And it was like, besides it being like Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston and Madonna. It was like TLC, like it was En Vogue. It was things like that. And it was all like cassette tapes that were my sisters that I would listen to because they were like, what was around the house? And then I just remember really vividly, I must have been like seven years old. My sister was listening to some music that was like kind of unlistenable to my childlike ears. And my mother was really upset about it and was like pounding on her bedroom door, which my sister had like locked or barricaded somehow. And was like, turn that off. And she was very upset by it because it was like teenage horror.

• 20:51Speaker 04

  And my sister was probably ten at the time.

• 20:54Yasi Salek?

  How did your sister get a hold of Pretty on the Inside?

• 20:56Speaker 04

  From Courtney Neeson, who gave, who cop, who made a copy of the tape for her. Back in those days, when, this is before CDs even, there would be cassette tapes and you could put them in a double cassette tape stereo and tape the tape onto a blank tape. And so people would pass around records that way. And that was how my sister got it. And because one of her friends, her bad friend gave it to her. And then as soon as I knew my mother hated it, I was like, what the fuck is this?

• 21:23Yasi Salek?

  I need to give it to me, put it straight into my fucking veins.

• 21:26Speaker 04

  In my veins. And so that was like how I learned about Courtney. Nirvana, I kind, what's really funny, looking back is like my dad loved Nirvana.

• 21:35Yasi Salek?

  Really?

• 21:36Speaker 04

  So I actually thought Nirvana was like a little bit.

• 21:38Yasi Salek?

  It's like dad music.

• 21:39Speaker 04

  Lamer or something, or like more palatable. But that's also because like. My dad loved the, and this is probably years later even because I don't know when all of these releases came out, but he loved the unplugged Nirvana.

• 21:51Yasi Salek?

  That came out, I'm pretty positive in ninety, I want to say ninety-five. It was definitely after he died because I remember they played it nonstop on MTV and it felt like you were watching someone play their own funeral because of just the way it was so candles. It was so gorgeous, but also like really kind of Gothic and, and sad. There was a melancholic quality to it and like the way it's lit and it was just like, it was such a jarring experience to just watch that.

• 22:23Speaker 04

  And it is such a good album.

• 22:24Yasi Salek?

  It's incredible.

• 22:25Speaker 04

  As an album, it's amazing. It's like kind of underrated, uh, but yeah, I, I, and it was all over the radio Nirvana was and Hole wasn't. But then she started to kind of appearing in the culture and becoming famous and I was of course just like glued to her. Like he was invisible to me, like because she was there.

• 22:43Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 22:44Speaker 04

  And so like when, I remember when he died, I, all I cared about was Courtney.

• 22:48Yasi Salek?

  You're like, how is my girl?

• 22:49Speaker 04

  Exactly. It's like, oh no, Courtney's husband died. It was really that.

• 22:55Yasi Salek?

  I can remember all of this like it was yesterday. It was just so meaningful and impactful. It's, it's, it's so strange to talk about it because it's someone's life, you know? But for us, it was like these like larger than life figures that also like the music of these people and the place they occupied in culture changed my life. Like they changed the wiring of my brain. Like I was, you know, 12 years old and was like, I've never heard anything like this with Nirvana. I became so obsessed and like, you know, everything and people who listen to this podcast have heard me tell this story a million times, but like, I found so many bands through Nirvana because of a book I read about Nirvana. But Hole did come to me after because I didn't know about Preon, then said I wasn't cool enough.

• 23:34Yasi Salek?

  And I, but I knew about Hole, obviously because I was obsessed with Nirvana and I found, lived through this in a trash can at middle school. Can you believe it?

• 23:42Speaker 04

  Who threw it away?

• 23:43Yasi Salek?

  I have no idea, but like an angel put it right on top of the trash can for me and I went by and I remember listening to it.

• 23:50Speaker 04

  You just saw it. It's like when you would go to the video store and it's like, you don't know what Welcome to the Dollhouse is, but the cover is staring out at you and you're like, well, I have to watch whatever that is.

• 23:59Yasi Salek?

  And it was, it sounds fake, but that's literally exactly what happened. And I went home and I was like, well, there's life before lived through this and there's life after lived through this.

• 24:07Speaker 04

  You were seduced by Ellen Von Unworth.

• 24:10Yasi Salek?

  I was seduced by Ellen Von Unworth.

• 24:12Speaker 04

  Photo, the tears.

• 24:13Yasi Salek?

  Well, what young girl doesn't?

• 24:13Speaker 04

  Of course.

• 24:14Yasi Salek?

  Like the image of a beauty queen, you know, just like, of course we all want that, but then the crying and it was just so alluring and then putting the album on and I, again, I'm sorry if I'm like in reruns, but we are here to talk about Hole, so. I just never, I had no conception prior to that point that you could be a woman and be like this. Like all we had, even on MTV really, you know, were pop stars. And I hadn't, you know, obviously so much existed, but I'm 12. Remember I don't have access to like Kim Gordon or Bikini Kill or whatever is going on like.

• 24:52Yasi Salek?

  And I see this and I'm like, oh, you can be hyper feminine, but also a complete like ravaging angry monster. And you can be messy, but like glamorous, like all of these things in like one, I didn't know that that was even allowed.

• 25:09Speaker 04

  Well, what's so funny is like, of course, because I was so young at the time, when I was older, and I'm not even saying much older because I was very precocious and I was ahead of my, ahead of the curve for someone my age, when it came to like music and culture stuff, I was very like hell bent on being an adult from a very young age and wanting to know everything about music and fashion and pop culture and all of that. And so of course I got really into like Bikini Kill and Modest Mouse and all of these like bands that were sort of like from around the Pacific Northwest. I grew up in Northern California. It was all very like near, but far away to me.

• 25:50Speaker 04

  And all my friends were older and they were like throwing shows at like punk houses and stuff like that. So I had sort of an access to like zine culture. All these things like that. But as I sort of metabolize all of those artists, it made me love Nirvana and Hole more. They're good. And I feel like I got into it much later. Well, Modestists is amazing. Because I just related more to their sort of nihilism, their sense of humor, their kind of, what they were poking fun at and talking shit about in their songs, like resonated with me. Whereas there was sort of like more of a kind of tweedness or, or like earnestness to some

• 26:31Speaker 04

  of these other bands that wore very thin for me quickly. I also got really into like bari punk, which is a whole other, whole other podcast. Shout out Jesse Michaels. Yeah. Rancid was big in my bedroom. But yeah, like I remember one, like a formative moment of my childhood was that I had, I had started going to local shows. There's a theater in my town called the Phoenix Theater in Petaluma, California, where like all the bad kids hung out and parents would be like, you're not allowed to go there. So of course I like just walked straight over there after school and like was really annoying and like inserted myself in the Phoenix Theater like scene. And that was where I would see like Blink

• 27:16Speaker 04

  182 would come through and like No Doubt and all these bands would, like big bands would play the Phoenix because it's kind of a legendary little theater. Right, famously. And like you, it's like you play the Phoenix if you're kind of on the punk touring circuit, but you would play Gilman if you like are like legit. And then you would play like the Fillmore if you were famous, basically. It was sort of the like my conception of that stuff. I had been sneaking and going to shows at the Phoenix Theater, but my parents would tell me that I was like too young to go to concerts. Right. Which drove me crazy because I was like, you don't even fucking know what I'm up to when I enter back. And then there was a Live 105, which was the modern rock radio station in San Francisco. The K-Rock of the north. Yeah, which it still is, I think. There's, they're still playing a Sublime song, if you probably turn it on right now.

• 28:01Speaker 04

  Right now, they're playing a Sublime song. They never left the 90s. It's very eerie. They threw a Christmas show, which was, there, there's an LA one too that happened. Almost a coast to Christmas. So it's the equivalent of that. And it used to be called Green Christmas or something. And then they changed it to Not So Silent Night. And I guess they got, they thought it was better branding or thought it was a better pun. And there was one year that the lineup was like Rancid, Hole, Smashing Pumpkins, The Cure. It was like all my favorite bands. My parents wouldn't let me go. And I locked myself in my bedroom and threatened to kill myself if they wouldn't let me go. And they didn't let me go. But Live 105, yeah.

• 28:44Speaker 04

  Live 105 broadcast the entire show live on the radio and I taped it. And so like, one of the things that I listened to the most from whenever that was for the next like few years was this cassette tape that I taped off the radio.

• 28:59Yasi Salek?

  That was probably 96.

• 29:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 29:01Yasi Salek?

  Because Wild Mood Swings came out that year. So that would have made sense if The Cure would have played. And again, you still back, the point I think that's really interesting is that once this started, this like 91, 92 of like, alternative music, you could be a kid in that era and get it all mixed up. You like, you referenced Blink 22. I mean, that's a bit later, but it all kind of, the, the long tail of the fame of these bands really pushed it all the way until basically the end of the century, you know, which is actually a great way for us to get to celebrity skin.

• 29:39Yasi Salek?

  Um, anyways, real quick, big tour for Live Through This. Courtney Love goes back to acting. She'd already done some acting in the eighties. And some wonderful, uh,

• 29:54Speaker 04

  Right.

• 29:55Yasi Salek?

  Sid and Nancy and, um, what was the other one? The other Alex Cox movie?

• 30:00Speaker 04

  Straight to Hell.

• 30:01Yasi Salek?

  Straight to Hell, fantastic film. And then she does Basquiat and she does Feeling Minnesota. And then most importantly, she does a starring role in Milos Forman's critically acclaimed.

• 30:11Speaker 04

  Biopic.

• 30:12Yasi Salek?

  Yes.

• 30:12Speaker 04

  Incredible movie.

• 30:13Yasi Salek?

  The People vs. Larry Flynt.

• 30:14Speaker 04

  Run, Don't Walk.

• 30:15Yasi Salek?

  And this makes her a movie star.

• 30:16Speaker 04

  One of the greatest scripts ever written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karizewski. A devastating, heartbreaking performance from Courtney Love in that movie. She should have been nominated.

• 30:27Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, she was nominated for Golden Globe, but not for an Oscar. And she did win the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Supporting Actress. Regardless, I mean, it's an incredible performance. She's an incredible actress. She's able to be vulnerable on screen, I think, in a way that is really important to being a good actress.

• 30:45Speaker 04

  And funny and like.

• 30:46Yasi Salek?

  And charismatic and all the things. But I think the vulnerability is what kind of like puts her a notch above, you know?

• 30:51Speaker 04

  Well, like, when you look at the kind of what, the magnetism that drew us to her during the entire period that we just talked about, it's like, at that time, I knew, it was like, atomically, clairvoyantly, I knew that like, I had never seen a rock star like this before in my life.

• 31:09Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 31:10Speaker 04

  And that I probably, on some level, knew that I would never see something like that again. You know, it was like, truly like a phoenix rising from the ashes moment. Like, that's like a phrase that gets thrown around. It's like a myth. But with her, it became manifest in this way that was like, it was hardcore, it was scary.

• 31:28Yasi Salek?

  Because she was so powerful. She had so much raw, unbridled power, and it wasn't manicured, and it wasn't.

• 31:36Speaker 04

  It wasn't under control.

• 31:37Yasi Salek?

  It was under control, and it wasn't made pretty for, you know, purposes of commodification. It was just, it was incredible to like, kind of behold. Again, I don't want to harp on it, and because it was a woman, you know? You might have seen that in a man, but I had not seen it in a woman, you know?

• 31:57Speaker 04

  And this was probably very telling, that the thought that came to me was like, I hadn't fallen in love with a woman like that since I saw Margaret Hamilton in The Wizard of Oz.

• 32:08Yasi Salek?

  So the gayest thing you've ever said.

• 32:10Speaker 04

  But like, here's the thing about the vulnerability, is that I was worried about her. I was like, deeply, profoundly worried. And like, I think that's because like, she has that characteristic where when she's being funny, it's fucking funny. When she laughs, you laugh. When she cries, you cry.

• 32:26Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 32:27Speaker 04

  And like, that's, people talk about John Belushi having that quality. That like, there was, I read this book once that said like, he was the sort of person where if you got into the elevator with him and he was crying, you would be crying by the time you got off the elevator. You know what I mean?

• 32:41Yasi Salek?

  That's how powerful their emotional field is.

• 32:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, and like. You know, whether people couldn't stand her at the time, like, didn't like her, you know, and she had approved, she had all this disapproval and misogyny kind of leveled at her. You couldn't take your eyes off her.

• 32:58Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 32:59Speaker 04

  Which is what made her a movie star.

• 33:00Yasi Salek?

  You couldn't deny the, uh, just the meteor that was her. Um, so she's, she's very famous, is what I'm saying.

• 33:09Speaker 04

  Right. It's movie star famous and then there's elements of like, when she did the People vs. Larry Flynt, they drug tested her on that movie, so she had to get clean for it. So it was also very like Courtney's cleaning up her act.

• 33:20Yasi Salek?

  Totally. Yeah, she's like leveling up in a way. And she's in the Versace ad campaign, which is a huge thing. Um, she starts, you know, she was always to me a fashion icon, but she starts entering like high fashion world in a really like meaningful way.

• 33:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:36Yasi Salek?

  And then also.

• 33:37Speaker 04

  She's being shot by Avadin, she's makeup by Kevin Akua, she's being styled by Ariane Phillips. Like Steven Mizell is shooting her for Vogue and like, she starts dating Ed Norton.

• 33:47Yasi Salek?

  Yes. It's all, it's all very Hollywood.

• 33:50Speaker 04

  It's all very Hollywood. She signs with CIA. She's like in the belly of the beast, you know? And she's having a good time.

• 33:56Yasi Salek?

  She's having a great time.

• 33:57Speaker 04

  She's loving it. And people hated that.

• 33:59Yasi Salek?

  People hated it. This is sort of the rich fertile world and from which celebrity skin comes. But, and then the last thing, because obviously everything is kind of tinged by the shadow of the past, is earlier in 1998, the filmmaker Nick Broomfield releases his documentary, Curtain Courtney, that doesn't outright say that she murdered him, but definitely.

• 34:25Speaker 04

  People in the documentary say she did it.

• 34:27Yasi Salek?

  Insinuates, that takes that point of view in a way. And I, I would just bring that up because it's like, oh, fuck you. But also, that demon is not going away, you know? Like, even if, when she's on top of the world, that demon's not going away. Also, it's, it's only been four years since she lost her husband, you know? And this is sort of like, all this is going on, the high, high glam. I'm in Hollywood. I'm, you know, I'm on the red carpet and that you'll remember the, the, the white like stunning, was that Versace with the?

• 35:00Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 35:01Yasi Salek?

  With the little bob, just like so.

• 35:03Speaker 04

  The Oscars.

• 35:04Yasi Salek?

  The Oscars. And but then, then you have also all this darkness still swirling and that's what celebrity skin kind of.

• 35:11Speaker 04

  Which is so cinematic and impossible to look away from. Also, it's like, she's always had this kind of subtext of just like drama and unpredictability.

• 35:23Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 35:23Speaker 04

  That is part of what makes her so compelling.

• 35:26Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 35:27Speaker 04

  But people were jealous.

• 35:28Yasi Salek?

  Sure.

• 35:29Speaker 04

  Like, straight up. It's like, they couldn't believe it because it was their worst nightmare, because it was secretly their dream for themselves. It was happening for somebody else and it was happening for her.

• 35:39Yasi Salek?

  Well, she was really, in my, you know, young opinion, I wasn't, you know, there in a meaningful way, but like, looking back on it, I'm like, okay, like, you're between two worlds, right? You're between this world of like, devotedly indie punk haters who are like, you sold out or whatever. And then you have the like, you know, gilded world of Hollywood who's like, you're not, you don't belong here. You know, like, I don't know if everyone was saying that, but like, I'm sure she was getting a lot.

• 36:09Speaker 04

  There was a split, I'm sure.

• 36:11Yasi Salek?

  You read, you would read things, you know, where it's like, living in between those two places. And I, I really feel like that's a, a reason celebrity skin is so impactful emotionally, because it has all of that, like, in the soil of the songwriting. And we said it earlier, this is the grief album. If you listen to these songs, these are the songs that are overtly and directly about grief and loss.

• 36:36Speaker 04

  It's a grief album, but also Courtney, one of her kind of defining characteristics is that she's so honest.

• 36:42Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 36:42Speaker 04

  Like, she will always, she will say something about herself so you can't pin it on her.

• 36:47Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 36:48Speaker 04

  Which is part of like, it's something that I can't get enough of. I really love it. There's like, and I hate, and this is not a judgment. This is just how I'm describing it. There's like a little bit of a criminal mindset to someone who was like once ever a dope fiend. Like, when you're a dope fiend, like dope fiends are very like manipulative people. They are always looking for like their next opportunity. They're always charming their way around people and with people. And there's this quality of like,

• 37:18Speaker 04

  Entertaining people while trying to like sort of get one over. And I'm not saying that's what Courtney was doing, but I think that she has a little bit of that in her, which I find irresistible personally.

• 37:28Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 37:28Speaker 04

  It's like a Bugs Bunny quality.

• 37:31Yasi Salek?

  Going Bugs Bunny.

• 37:31Speaker 04

  If that makes sense.

• 37:32Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I just, I think they don't make them like this. I would say anymore, but ever like, it's just like this sort of like unbridled and sort of like unmitigated honesty to the point that it's like, sometimes doesn't benefit her, you know? And also this like galaxy brain level way of thinking that like you hear her talk and you're like,

• 37:59Yasi Salek?

  I'm too stupid to even like, maybe even understand what you're saying. Or like, there's all these instances where like, you look back at these interview clips of her talking about something that's so prescient that now we're all talking about very openly, but she was talking about it nine years ago, you know, or 12 years ago.

• 38:14Speaker 04

  I was sending you that, of course, my favorite interview with her. Everyone can go watch it. It's like seven minutes long.

• 38:19Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 38:20Speaker 04

  It's the junket or the kind of, um, the press, what do you call it?

• 38:24Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 38:24Speaker 04

  Like the scrum, when you go backstage in an award show when Hole was at the 1998 VMAs during Celebrity Skin.

• 38:30Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 38:31Speaker 04

  She's being grilled about, um, the Lewinsky scandal, which is just so bizarre that like, you're at the VMAs.

• 38:39Yasi Salek?

  This is a KFC, you know, like we're at.

• 38:42Speaker 04

  They're like, do you think the president should be impeached? And like, she's giving these hysterical, and she said, she basically says no right up front. But then later there's a part where they're, the reporters are upset that she said no and kind of dismissed the conversation and they're coming back at her and they're trying to like, impugn her for like, saying that she didn't think that Clinton should be impeached. And she snaps back at them and she's just like, she's like, we make our own opinions and you don't decide them for us. And that's a good thing. And like, who the fuck talks to the press like that now? No one has the. Balls.

• 39:17Yasi Salek?

  No one has the cahons, babe. No one has the cahons.

• 39:20Speaker 04

  But like Courtney, like with the kind of honesty she has, she was admitting that she was ambitious. And it's like almost impossible to fathom now because of the way that pop culture is and like the way that everybody's an influencer. Everyone's securing the bag all the time.

• 39:35Yasi Salek?

  Oh, yeah.

• 39:35Speaker 04

  It's like, there's no such thing as selling out anymore.

• 39:38Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, like I just want to get to the point where I can sell skincare.

• 39:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. And so it's like, but she at that time was willing to admit her own ambition, which like kind of put a target on her back. Especially among these like grunge purists, whoever the fuck that is, like Caucasian guys that hang out at coffee shops. Who like certainly have an opinion, you know what I mean? It was like, and in that same interview, she kind of gives this. It's gone viral and it's like a very popular clip of her where she's talking about how like proletariat male rock critics have real denim boomer Springsteen issues when it comes to fashion.

• 40:16Yasi Salek?

  So good.

• 40:17Speaker 04

  And she kind of just like defends and explains herself in the most like genius way in like a five second screed.

• 40:28Yasi Salek?

  She's hands down, hands down the smartest person I've ever talked to in my life. Like, I'm just like, I can't even.

• 40:34Speaker 04

  So that's celebrity skin. Celebrity skin is coming at that exact moment. And it's like, because what the fuck else is she gonna write about? She's writing about grief and loss, but she's also writing about this world that she's coming to.

• 40:45Yasi Salek?

  And also interesting to me is how it was like, she was in LA in the beginning. So it's, she's experienced every version of LA, you know?

• 40:56Speaker 04

  She's a California legend.

• 40:58Yasi Salek?

  She knows the gutter depths of like, you know, the late eighties, like Sunset Strip, Jane's Addiction ass LA, you know?

• 41:08Speaker 04

  She's gonna laugh if she sees this, but like, when I was in high school, my best friend was 10 years older than me. She was a heroin addict, ex junkie. She married this older hair metal glam rocker named Ron Yocum. Carly's gonna kill me for bringing this up.

• 41:27Speaker 04

  Who was roommates with Courtney Love in San Francisco during Courtney's like San Francisco

• 41:32Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 41:33Speaker 04

  Era. And it's like, there was always stories about her and things like that because people knew her because she had been sort of this itinerant, like omnipresent.

• 41:41Yasi Salek?

  Because she's always doing.

• 41:42Speaker 04

  Urban legend.

• 41:43Yasi Salek?

  She was always doing music stuff and being part of things. And again, she's in St. and Nancy way prior to any of this. She was briefly the lead singer of Faith No More.

• 41:52Speaker 04

  Right.

• 41:53Yasi Salek?

  There's a lot of lore that we're not going to get into here. We'll save it for the whole episode.

• 41:56Speaker 04

  The UK era.

• 41:57Yasi Salek?

  The UK, exactly. Liverpool, I believe it was Liverpool.

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• 43:04Yasi Salek?

  And before we talk about the song, I just want to talk also briefly about like, what is going on in music in 1998? Because I think that's also an interesting thing to talk about because to me, the 90s are like the decade that things changed the most and the most rapidly. And like, you start on Life is a Highway and you end on fucking Limp Bizkit. You know, like, it just really like zero to 60 in fucking 10 years with the internet and everything that happened. We're pretty firmly post-grunge at this point, like by 94, it's like, it's the Weezer Blue Album. It's Green Day, like, things have supplanted grunge and kind of pushed it aside. Brighter, more pop punky type things. Blink 182 comes along.

• 43:45Speaker 04

  We talked about this in the Depeche Mode episode that I was on, where like, you know, Garbage was like getting very electronic and like, Depeche Mode was doing like this kind of electronic thing. Like, that people were moving into these other sonic directions.

• 43:57Yasi Salek?

  And you have also, I mean, even the pop punk is sort of like, has like, an also ran next to it, which is new metal and rap rock, because Marilyn Manson and Kid Rock have big albums in 98. Limp Bizkit's first album came out in 97. Korn's big commercial breakthrough, Life is Peachy, was 96. TRL also officially launched September of 98. So the same year is where like MTV's kind of changing into this new thing. But we're still a couple of years away from Christina Aguilera, Britney, like, the pop-ism.

• 44:28Speaker 04

  Destiny's Child.

• 44:29Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, although Spice World has come out in 97, so that's a kind of an important.

• 44:33Speaker 04

  The Spice Girls were the canary in the coal mine.

• 44:38Speaker 04

  Of TRL pop.

• 44:39Yasi Salek?

  And the biggest selling alternative, like, rock albums of 98 were the Offspring Kid Rock, Matchbox 20.

• 44:45Speaker 04

  Oh, dear.

• 44:46Yasi Salek?

  Beastie Boys Hello Nasty, Cornfall of the Leader, Garbage Version 2.0.

• 44:51Speaker 04

  Love.

• 44:51Yasi Salek?

  Smashing Pumpkins Adore came out that year too, which I actually also think is unfairly maligned.

• 44:56Speaker 04

  Interesting, and it's interesting that these records hit at the same time.

• 45:00Yasi Salek?

  But then the top selling music in general?

• 45:03Yasi Salek?

  By a country mile. Music from the most motion picture, Titanic.

• 45:08Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 45:08Yasi Salek?

  Second, number one.

• 45:09Speaker 04

  I'm gonna say that doesn't count, but I understand.

• 45:11Yasi Salek?

  The miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Believe.

• 45:14Speaker 04

  Who can argue with that?

• 45:15Yasi Salek?

  Cher.

• 45:16Speaker 04

  Who can argue with that?

• 45:19Yasi Salek?

  Brandy, Never Say Never, Ray of Light by Madonna.

• 45:22Speaker 04

  These are all amazing albums.

• 45:23Yasi Salek?

  The double live album by Garth Brooks, because one thing you bitches and hoes will never fucking forget is that Garth Brooks dominated the 90s. I don't care how much we're gonna sit here and talk about alternative rock music.

• 45:32Speaker 04

  It was flawless until Garth Brooks's name came out.

• 45:33Yasi Salek?

  My man Garth Brooks was cashing checks all the whole decade of the 90s. You will never forget. Chris Gaines, I don't know if that one did that well, but... And even the videos, the top videos on MTV.

• 45:47Yasi Salek?

  They're not rock ones. It's Brandy and Monica, the boy is mine. It's Aaliyah, are you that somebody? Aerosmith, I don't want to miss a thing. It was like the big rock video.

• 45:56Speaker 04

  Diamant, big shouts.

• 45:58Yasi Salek?

  You have one garbage video, push it, but it's N'Sync, it's Will Smith, it's next, it's Puff Daddy and Faith Evans and 112, great song. I'll be missing you.

• 46:07Speaker 04

  Great song, Born of Evil.

• 46:09Yasi Salek?

  So Celebrity Skin is again in between two places, kind of like Courtney was. It's in between this like little lightly dying, alternative rock world and this new shinier. What is gonna be more pop, right? I mean, it's certainly not going into nu metal. So.

• 46:29Speaker 04

  But I also remember it was really dominating MTV when the album came out.

• 46:33Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 46:33Speaker 04

  Because they were running, I remember they ran a promotion because they're, I feel like a broken record sometimes because I bring up the same things over and over, but. And Fanatic on MTV is one of them. It's like, it's just a bee in my bonnet. Like, I feel like they need to take all those old MTV Fanatic episodes and put them on Paramount Plus because they're crazy. It's crazy if you look back at, everyone did one. But when Hole did theirs, it was when Celebrity Skin was coming out and there were these amazing promo commercials that aired on MTV. Where it was like Hole riding in the back of a limousine and like teaching like a fan how to like avoid paparazzi and like.

• 47:11Speaker 04

  You can look it up and watch it, but I remember seeing that on TV all the time and I entered the MTV Fanatic competition to be Hole's Fanatic and I was not chosen.

• 47:21Yasi Salek?

  They blew it, babe.

• 47:22Speaker 04

  The wrong person was picked.

• 47:24Yasi Salek?

  The wrong, they didn't, they did forecasting there. Um, Celebrity Skin did well, okay. Debut at number nine on the Billboard 200. That's not nothing. It was their first top 10 album in the US. Even Live Through This didn't do that. Hit platinum. Produced by Michael Beinhorn, who.

• 47:44Yasi Salek?

  Famously, or infamously, I guess,

• 47:49Yasi Salek?

  replaced Patti Schimmel's drums with a session drummer because he was sort of a meticulous and exacting and maybe awful man. I don't know, I wasn't there, but I'm team Patti Schimmel over here, so.

• 48:03Speaker 04

  I'm definitely team Patty.

• 48:04Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 48:05Speaker 04

  But also like the results, like the album is.

• 48:08Yasi Salek?

  I'm like, she's an incredible drummer. She could have done that too.

• 48:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, of course.

• 48:11Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I don't hear something where I'm like Patty couldn't have done that. Anyways, that doesn't matter. But it does sort of push Patty out of the band at that point. She, she leaves.

• 48:21Speaker 04

  And if you haven't seen Patty's documentary.

• 48:23Yasi Salek?

  Hit So Hard, he got it named after one of the songs on Celebrity Skin. A great song. We were.

• 48:28Speaker 04

  A great song, great documentary.

• 48:30Yasi Salek?

  We were banding back and forth about this song on here and I was like, man, there's so.

• 48:33Speaker 04

  There's so many good ones.

• 48:34Yasi Salek?

  Favorite, like maybe it's awful? I don't know. Awful goes real hard.

• 48:39Speaker 04

  Hit So Hard is a really good drug song.

• 48:42Yasi Salek?

  They were nominated for some Grammys.

• 48:45Speaker 04

  Incredible.

• 48:45Yasi Salek?

  But I'm gonna tell you what happened.

• 48:47Speaker 04

  Adding to the war chest of awards accolades.

• 48:50Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, they didn't win though. They were nominated for best rock album. They lost to Sheryl Crow's The Globe Sessions.

• 48:57Speaker 04

  Big mistake.

• 48:58Yasi Salek?

  But also look how insane the other nominees were. Sheryl Crow, Dave Matthews Band, my beloved, and John Fogerty. I'm like, who programmed this? Rock is dead by 1998, is what I'm saying.

• 49:09Speaker 04

  The Grammys have never gotten rock, correct? I feel like they've never gotten alternative, correct? When that became a category, it's like, it's all a shame to me.

• 49:17Yasi Salek?

  This album is critically beloved. You pointed it out.

• 49:19Speaker 04

  Never gotten a bad review.

• 49:21Yasi Salek?

  Well, I'll tell you one person who was dead wrong. In Entertainment Weekly, David Brown. He said.

• 49:27Speaker 04

  She brought that up. In the, in the press interview, someone brings up the reviews and that there were three bad reviews and she's like, it's all personal shit. Like one of them.

• 49:35Yasi Salek?

  David Brown.

• 49:36Speaker 04

  Honestly, play the clip. I can't paraphrase it, but she cites each of the critics and why they gave her a bad review.

• 49:43Yasi Salek?

  Like nine out of 10 are good. The only ones that are bad are like, personal weird shit. Like all three bad reviews were just the EW guy. David White. I went to my first, he had a huge crush on me and I rejected him.

• 49:55Speaker 04

  She goes off and is like, "I'm sorry, I win."

• 49:58Yasi Salek?

  This guy says the instruments are boisterous and brawny, but they're as conventional as those on a Third Eye Blind single. First of all, not the diss you think it is, because Third Eye Blind, a phenomenal band.

• 50:08Speaker 04

  It's a compliment to say that.

• 50:09Yasi Salek?

  Similarly, Love's voice is less blemished and technically more melodious than the box cutter roar she brandished on Live Through This, but she sounds too, she sounds less razor edged, more anonymous. First of all, that woman couldn't sound anonymous if she tried with every...

• 50:24Speaker 04

  Please. If she wasn't singing on pitch, they would fault her for that, too.

• 50:28Yasi Salek?

  David Brown, retire, bitch. But all the other ones are like, "This album teems with sonic knockouts that make you see all sorts of stars. It's accessible, fiery, and intimate almost at the same time."

• 50:39Speaker 04

  That's a really good summation.

• 50:42Yasi Salek?

  "overflowing with commentary and bite, this is a far more complex work than the invigorating mainstream coding would lead you to believe. It is the most ambitious and quite possibly the most revealing album Love has made." Robert Hillburn, my king at the LA Times, fucking four stars, knocked out of the park. Anyways, this is wonderful. We are getting into the song, but this is, I'm sorry, this is what I do. I like to, I like context.

• 51:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:03Yasi Salek?

  Big themes of, well, there's lots of themes, obviously, of Celebrity Skin, but one that's a little more esoteric that I want to talk about is water and drowning.

• 51:14Speaker 04

  Water, drowning, angels.

• 51:17Yasi Salek?

  Angels, stars, for sure. So Awful has, "He's so deep, like dirty water." God, he's awful. Little Water, fucking, what a banger that song. Hit So Hard has, "He's cold, give him a candy coat. He can't swim, but he can float. One by one, they all fall down. I look at him and drown." Malibu, you already know. Cry to the angels and let them swallow you. Go and part the sea.

• 51:40Speaker 04

  Oceans of angels, oceans of stars.

• 51:42Yasi Salek?

  Exactly. Down by the sea is where you drown your scars. Reasons to be beautiful talks about how it rains and rains. "I weep at your feet and it rains and rains." Dying.

• 51:56Yasi Salek?

  Just that's

• 51:57Speaker 04

  That song.

• 51:58Yasi Salek?

  Why don't you just take a spoon that's rusty and put it here and just carve

• 52:03Speaker 04

  They're gonna say, put a lighter on, direct. Get a straw.

• 52:06Yasi Salek?

  Carve my heart right out with that song. It's so just

• 52:10Speaker 04

  Crack pipe.

• 52:12Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, crack pipe. But in that one, she says, our love is quicksand, so easy to drown. Um, and then Heaven Tonight, which is also an incredible song.

• 52:20Speaker 04

  I love that song and I love that it comes right after Boys on the Radio. This is them, this is like the Ronettes portion of the album.

• 52:26Yasi Salek?

  Totally. Um, this is about horses galloping in the summer rain. Um, and there's a storm in the form of a girl. So lots of water and drowning.

• 52:34Speaker 04

  I love the dedication on that album. It's so funny to me. To all the stolen water of Los Angeles and anyone who ever drowned.

• 52:42Yasi Salek?

  To all the stolen water of Los Angeles and anyone who ever drowned, again.

• 52:46Speaker 04

  Gorgeous.

• 52:46Yasi Salek?

  Drowning theme. To anyone who ever drowned is actually, I think, pretty specific. Um, because

• 52:51Speaker 04

  Drowning feels like a metaphor also for

• 52:54Yasi Salek?

  Well, also Jeff Buckley drowned. Pretty, you know, what, a year or two before this, I think.

• 53:00Speaker 04

  Althea drowns in The People vs. Larry Flynt.

• 53:03Yasi Salek?

  Isn't there also an Ophelia image on the back of this album? Is that right? Drowned.

• 53:09Speaker 04

  But it is like also an apt metaphor for drug overdoses.

• 53:12Yasi Salek?

  Totally. Well, and Kristen Faaf died in a bathtub.

• 53:15Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 53:16Yasi Salek?

  She didn't.

• 53:16Speaker 04

  It must have been really on her mind. I mean, after playing Althea in that movie and there's the drowning scene at the end. It's not, sorry, spoiler.

• 53:24Yasi Salek?

  Spoiler for a thirty something year old movie. That's based on a true story that also you could have known what happened.

• 53:32Speaker 04

  But like truly, I feel like it's not as often brought up as like Amadeus or his other films, you know? So I feel like you

• 53:39Yasi Salek?

  It's an incredible film. I do love Amadeus as well.

• 53:42Speaker 04

  If anyone hasn't seen it or they haven't seen it in a long time, revisiting it is just, it feels so expensive.

• 53:48Yasi Salek?

  It's a good pairing with this podcast, I think, because we're talking about that era and you'll really see, you'll really see kind of the vibes we're coming from. Okay, Boys on the Radio. That we didn't pick, but we are gonna go with.

• 54:02Speaker 04

  We did pick it. We picked it.

• 54:03Yasi Salek?

  We picked it. I think, again, I think it's a good one.

• 54:05Speaker 04

  And I stand by it. It is a perfect song.

• 54:07Yasi Salek?

  We talk, it is a perfect song. Honestly, so perfect that Courtney told me that Jimmy Iovine told her that it shouldn't be a single because it has too many hooks. That song has too many hooks. And she was like, that's the greatest compliment I've ever received.

• 54:22Speaker 04

  Well, we're gonna, obviously, we're gonna get into how it started a sugar coma.

• 54:26Yasi Salek?

  Right. So, okay, so 1994, this, the song was originally a song called Sugar Coma, which had much sadder and darker lyrics because

• 54:38Speaker 04

  Which was in Hole's Unplugged, which was not

• 54:41Yasi Salek?

  Was not commercially released. I think it was aired, but it was not released. You can watch a bunch of it on YouTube.

• 54:48Speaker 04

  Can they commercially release it? Like, I'm so curious about these things. Who owns the recording of that? It was recorded.

• 54:55Yasi Salek?

  Well, I, I would, again, I'm not a music lawyer. I, I assume that the actual recording is owned by MTV, but the rights to the songs are owned by the label, right?

• 55:09Speaker 04

  But if Hole was on Interscope, like, who released the Nirvana Unplugged? I'm just saying, we could still get this.

• 55:16Yasi Salek?

  Should we start, should we start one of those online petitions?

• 55:19Speaker 04

  And if you, if you look at like the whole Reddit

• 55:21Yasi Salek?

  Should we start going, standing outside of Trader Joe's with a clipboard?

• 55:25Speaker 04

  And by the way, which cam, where do I look?

• 55:28Yasi Salek?

  Yours is right there.

• 55:29Speaker 04

  Interscope Records, get your shit together. Like, where is the Celebrity Skin vinyl?

• 55:33Yasi Salek?

  That's such a great point. You can't buy the Celebrity Skin vinyl, babe?

• 55:37Speaker 04

  I walked over to Amoeba, they laughed at me.

• 55:40Yasi Salek?

  How dare?

• 55:41Speaker 04

  I was laughed out of the building, asking for the Celebrity Skin vinyl. It's like, you, you have no problem reissuing Pinkerton every six months.

• 55:48Yasi Salek?

  Pinkerton is a good album.

• 55:49Speaker 04

  It's a good album, but, I mean, Celebrity Skin sold more.

• 55:53Yasi Salek?

  I'm sure there's some sort of draconian, like, Byzantine

• 55:59Yasi Salek?

  You know, contractual things that we're not aware of that is like binding this from happening. Um, because I'm sure they would want to make the money off of it.

• 56:07Speaker 04

  We want the Celebrity Skin vinyl and we want the whole MTV Unplugged release as an album.

• 56:11Yasi Salek?

  Free, free whole MTV Unplugged.

• 56:13Speaker 04

  You're leaving money on the table.

• 56:14Yasi Salek?

  I will go stand outside the Trader Joe's. I will shove over the man who's trying to get signatures for affordable housing and be like, this is more important.

• 56:22Speaker 04

  Exactly. Who were some of the like cited influences on Celebrity Skin, the album? I remember maybe it was Howard Stern or something. She brought up the Eagles, which I don't

• 56:33Yasi Salek?

  Oh, interesting.

• 56:35Speaker 04

  But like

• 56:36Yasi Salek?

  Well, I get, I kind of get that.

• 56:38Speaker 04

  The Yardbirds, like she was like, I want to do this California.

• 56:41Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. I don't know. I, I get what she's saying.

• 56:45Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 56:45Yasi Salek?

  Like a song like Malibu or even like, like it's obviously doesn't sound like, you know, Peaceful Easy Feeling or whatever, but like, I see what she means. Um, I thought it was interesting and it didn't occur to me until I read this, but I was like, oh, I totally, this clicked for me. Courtney said to Melody Maker in 1998 that she played Boys on the Radio for Kim Cobain, Kurt's sister, and she said it sounded like Teenage Fan Club. And I was like, oh, that is interesting because Teenage Fan Club made similarly like shimmering, beautiful songs like this. And I was like, oh, that's such a great comp.

• 57:21Speaker 04

  Well, according to a little website called Wikipedia.

• 57:23Yasi Salek?

  Oh, wow. You're really, you're really going deep.

• 57:25Speaker 04

  Deep diving. According to love, her vision for the album was to deconstruct the California sound in the LA tradition of bands like The Doors, The Beach Boys and The Byrds. But then she was struggling with the composition and then that was, she sent the songs to Billy Corgan and he decided to come to the studio to help.

• 57:45Yasi Salek?

  I think, yeah, I think she achieved that, but in like a contemporary 1998 way, and also in a very whole way, like it sounds like a whole record.

• 57:57Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 57:57Yasi Salek?

  We were texting about this before, but like, I hadn't put it on in a while and I was like, kind of in my head was swimming the criticisms of like, it's so shiny, it's so glossy, like what is this? And I was like really expecting, I don't know, because I hadn't heard it in a while, I was like, okay. And I put it on, I was like, this is a fucking rock record, like what are you talking about? It's really just a matter of production, I think, because like, there's also songs on Live Through This that are straight up pop songs that are just grimier guitar and grimier production. Again, I'm not great about speaking about, you know, super musical things, but.

• 58:33Speaker 04

  When you love a songwriter, you can hear their songwriting in all of their songs. You can hear their voice and their things that they return to. So maybe there's a little bit of that happening, but I also think there's a little bit of like, almost a tongue in cheek thing happening where she's going back to certain sounds of Live Through This, being like, oh, this is what you want from me, this is what you think I'm gonna do. And then she kind of subverts it into something that's a little more like pop. And that happens on all of these songs, because like, there is like, definitely a more kind of unhingedness about Live Through This, and she screams a lot more on that album than she does on this one.

• 59:10Yasi Salek?

  It's, it's so interesting to me, because I'm like, okay, what do you people fucking want? Do you want authenticity or do you not? Because what is more inauthentic? Making this album or pretending to still be the four-year prior version of yourself? That hasn't changed and isn't occupying this new space? Like, is that not more inauthentic to try to fake It's So Really or Beyond Fake? Or whatever, fake this like, oh, I'm still like a fucking hard rocker babe, I'm still, you know, like, to me, that would be far, that would ring way more hollow than writing exactly from where you are.

• 59:51Speaker 04

  I mean, that really gets at the crux of why I love Celebrity Skin so much, because like,

• 59:58Speaker 04

  Being that kid that was worried about Courtney Love or that was scared of what was gonna happen to her, it was like seeing her kind of actualize as this like glamorous figure and to be like, have the freedom and the support and the money and all of that to like, create this album that was actually about something that meant something to her and to do it in this very like grandiose way. You know, like, there's a little bit of Stevie Nicks, especially on this song, I feel like, like, there's Fleetwood Mac vibe to it. It just feels like she's kind of ascended. And then there were people that either celebrated it or that resented her for

• 1:00:36Speaker 04

  it. Yeah. You know, it was like, she did what no other like fat, loud, hatchet-faced punk bitch,

• 1:00:46Speaker 04

  punk rock gutter snipe had ever done before, which is she became the most beautiful woman in the world. Like, she crashed the Golden Gates, Hollywood genuflected for her. It was like, she was like a lightning bolt from God to me when this was happening. I couldn't believe it. I was like, oh, my God, she made it. It was like, we all made it. She's good. Everything's gonna be okay. That was like how this album felt. And it sort of felt like a victory lap. Like, even as like profound and sad as the record can be at times, it was such an accomplishment to me.

• 1:01:21Yasi Salek?

  Well, and also, everything you're saying, I firmly and strongly agree with. I think, like, you know, people famously and endlessly, I don't know why this is such a human condition, they don't want you to ever be more than one thing. Yeah. You can only ever be the one thing, right? And they wanted her to be that angry, grieving widow forever.

• 1:01:49Yasi Salek?

  That's who you are.

• 1:01:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:01:51Yasi Salek?

  And how fucking dare you all slap your hand away if you try to do something different or be something else?

• 1:01:56Speaker 04

  That's like a tension that I think makes someone a really good celebrity or a really good public figure or pop star or whatever it is. Because it's like the thing that pisses off one sect of people is the thing that attracts another. You know, it creates kind of like an alchemy.

• 1:02:16Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:17Speaker 04

  Of a moment. Like, imagine being a gay kid or like a 13 year old girl in the fucking suburbs.

• 1:02:25Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:25Speaker 04

  And you turn on Entertainment Tonight and like that's who's staring at you from the TV. It's fucking major. Like, it was fucking major.

• 1:02:33Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:34Speaker 04

  Let's just say it.

• 1:02:35Yasi Salek?

  It's incredibly major and there's just no, there's no way I can like overstate how important it was. And I can't know, I don't know what teens now have like in, for the currency of, you know, soothing their soul or, or seeing what's possible. But I hope it's not just pop stars, you know, who are like.

• 1:02:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:02:59Yasi Salek?

  By and large, pretty safe and tame and that's fine. They make good music. It's okay.

• 1:03:06Speaker 04

  Well, you get frightened that the entertainment industry might try to package something like this or like try and, or that someone really canny will try and fake it, you know? Because also what was amazing about it was that it was so real. It was like, you remember the Barbara Walters interview with her and it's just brutal. Like, we had a little bit of this with Amy Winehouse, I think, of like, someone that was being very self-destructive and emotional and raw on this world stage. And it was like, are they gonna make it? You know, like, there's something to that that I think is very compelling, but it's not something to be.

• 1:03:42Speaker 04

  This doesn't mean to be like sought after.

• 1:03:44Yasi Salek?

  I think we get, maybe not, um, in a way that we're like worried for their safety, but like, I think in the way that they're like an unusual pop star that does not conform to the standards. I think we have it with Lana Del Rey. I mean, she's kind of constantly.

• 1:04:02Speaker 04

  We have it with Kanye.

• 1:04:03Yasi Salek?

  Well, yeah, but we're not gonna.

• 1:04:05Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:04:05Yasi Salek?

  Right now, not rabbit hole today. That rabbit hole is closed for business.

• 1:04:09Speaker 04

  Friend, Courtney's old friend Kanye. All of our old friends, no.

• 1:04:13Yasi Salek?

  Okay, so Sugar Coma, the lyrics, it's, I didn't ask about this, but I'm assuming it was written very close to the wake of the death of Kurt Cobain because the lyrics are, "He said, I'll never ever go away. He said he'd always, always, he would always stay." You know, it's, it's pretty tragic and, and it's, and it's a sadder arrangement.

• 1:04:41Speaker 04

  It's really beautiful.

• 1:04:42Yasi Salek?

  It's really beautiful. It's a fan favorite, I think.

• 1:04:44Speaker 04

  It's sad. It's a fan favorite and I also want to poke a hole in this a little bit because it, I just think it is such a kind of common refrain for people to complain when someone changes something that they love. You get demoitis, so to speak.

• 1:05:00Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:05:00Speaker 04

  And if you go online, everyone is like, "It was so much better as Sugar Coma. I wish they never changed it. I wish Boys on the Radio never happened." Fuck off. First of all, we get to have both.

• 1:05:14Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:05:14Speaker 04

  No one's stopping you from listening to Sugar Coma.

• 1:05:16Yasi Salek?

  Totally another song on Celebrity Skin that to me takes that place, which is dying, you know?

• 1:05:22Speaker 04

  Yeah. And also it's like, when you listen to Sugar Coma, the chorus feels work in progress to me. It feels kind of like an unformed song. It feels a little like placeholder lyrics.

• 1:05:34Yasi Salek?

  We're gonna get into it, but what Boys on the Radio became about is very different than what Sugar Coma was about. In terms of like, the thematic, the lyrical consideration.

• 1:05:45Speaker 04

  And it's so much catchier. I think the chorus of Boys on the Radio is one of my favorite choruses. It has maybe, I can't.

• 1:05:53Yasi Salek?

  Too many hooks, babe.

• 1:05:54Speaker 04

  Maybe the best bridge on the album.

• 1:05:57Yasi Salek?

  There's a lot of really good bridges.

• 1:05:58Speaker 04

  But the Malibu Bridge is like iconic, but.

• 1:06:04Yasi Salek?

  You don't have to choose. We don't have to choose here or there. Melissa said about this song, it is an example of one of the songs on the record that took four years, basically, from the moment I joined the band, the first time that we rehearsed together. When we put it live, it was the song called Sugar Coma that we did for MTV Unplugged. And that was kind of a country sad love song. Or sappy, no sugary, love, beautiful, whatever. And when we got to the studio, we wanted to take it one step further. So we had our friend Evan Dando from The Lemonheads, who's a, you know. What? Yeah. So, okay, this is all, you guys.

• 1:06:35Speaker 04

  Learned something new every day.

• 1:06:36Yasi Salek?

  One of you have this. I did listen to it, but I think she gets cut off. They made an interview CD. Do you remember this? They made a CD of the interviews. You can, they have a couple of copies on Discogs, where it's just them talking about celebrity skin. And that's from this. So he, Dando does not have a writing credit on this song, but I don't know if he, like, jeered it a little. Again, I'm not really sure, and I didn't ask. But there's some Evan Dando moment that Melissa alludes to. What Courtney said to me is, okay, well, during a block of songs on K-Rock in 1997, Edward and me were in

• 1:07:16Yasi Salek?

  the car, and I was astonished because there were four songs about me in a row. And after the ads, two more, plus glycerin.

• 1:07:26Speaker 04

  She's like every girl I've ever been friends with, I swear to God.

• 1:07:28Yasi Salek?

  I mean, I'm sorry. I don't know if any girl you've ever been friends with has had four songs back to back on K-Rock about them.

• 1:07:37Speaker 04

  If you ask them, I'm sure they would say they have.

• 1:07:39Yasi Salek?

  She said, after the ads, I just blurted it out. And I'm not crazy. I know all these guys. Then I, of course, went ahead and did my FBI work where I was like, what songs could these have been? What songs would have been in rotation in 1997?

• 1:07:54Speaker 04

  Call the CIA. Let's find out.

• 1:07:55Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. It's not that hard, actually, to piece together. Obviously, Heart Shaped Box by Nirvana was still in very heavy rotation. Although, as we just recently learned from the Billy Corgan podcast that Courtney appeared on, which was full of learnings.

• 1:08:08Speaker 04

  Learnings.

• 1:08:09Yasi Salek?

  Yes, full of amazing learnings, that the chorus of Heart Shaped Box is apparently about Kim Gordon. Hey, wait, I got a new complaint forever in debt to your priceless advice.

• 1:08:30Yasi Salek?

  Um, and the rest of the song is obviously about Courtney's Heartache Box. Foo Fighters, "I'll Stick Around", is, was for many years allegedly about Courtney, but Dave Grohl wrote in his book, "I don't think it's any secret that 'I'll Stick Around' is about Courtney. I've denied it for 15 years." Yeah. "I'll stick around, I'll stick around." Um, it's a mean song about Courtney.

• 1:09:03Yasi Salek?

  "Swallowed" by Bush, I would imagine, would be on the radio at this time. To me, arguably, the best Bush song.

• 1:09:08Speaker 04

  I love that song. Now I know why.

• 1:09:12Yasi Salek?

  "Everything but my love, swallowed."

• 1:09:24Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, so that's, that's a little Courtney moment. "Crushed with Eyeliner" by R.E.M.

• 1:09:30Speaker 04

  Cue.

• 1:09:31Yasi Salek?

  Courtney has said, and I believe her, that this is at least partially about her. I believe it's also partially about just glam rock and the New York Dolls. But I think she is a muse of this song.

• 1:09:50Yasi Salek?

  There's one Smashing Pumpkins song off Siamese Dream that is about her, but I don't think it would have been on the radio, which was "Luna," one of the most beautiful songs. Just fucking, what, imagine that song's about you. If I had just that, that one song about me, could die happy. There's some speculation that there are multiple other Smashing Pumpkins songs about Courtney.

• 1:10:09Speaker 04

  Probably.

• 1:10:10Yasi Salek?

  "Zero" and "Tonight Tonight" in particular, which also would have been on the radio in 1997.

• 1:10:15Speaker 04

  But what I love about the Smashing Pumpkins is that their lyrics are so not didactic in that way. You never know what they're talking about.

• 1:10:21Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, he's always talking about some bitch named June, who doesn't exist.

• 1:10:24Speaker 04

  His lyricism is very like phonetic and kind of abstract.

• 1:10:29Yasi Salek?

  Right, but I do like there's like a little, little like... FBI moment of um, tonight's night, because Smashing Pumpkins were like, that's not about her. It's about himself. He says, you know, in the, in your city by the lake, the place you were born. He was born in Chicago by the lake, but there's, there is some footage of him in uh, different recordings saying city by the bay instead of city by the lake, which Courtney was born in the city by the bay, so.

• 1:10:56Speaker 04

  So was I.

• 1:10:57Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Other songs, just for funsies, you guys, that um, are about Courtney Love, but did not come out till after 1997.

• 1:11:03Speaker 04

  I was like, the new radicals.

• 1:11:05Yasi Salek?

  The new radicals, which is not even about Courtney.

• 1:11:07Speaker 04

  We'll go to their mansions, rob their mansions, kick their asses.

• 1:11:10Yasi Salek?

  Courtney Love and Marilyn Manson, yeah. Um, you got what you give by the new radicals. Hollaback Girl by Gwen Stefani.

• 1:11:16Speaker 04

  Wait, what?

• 1:11:17Yasi Salek?

  Wait, have we never talked about this?

• 1:11:19Speaker 04

  That's her like, shots fired song at Courtney?

• 1:11:21Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:22Speaker 04

  Oh my god, that's so corny.

• 1:11:24Yasi Salek?

  Because she was like, Courtney did an interview with like Seventeen, some sort of teen magazine, and was like, basically like, I'm not, like Gwen Stefani's like the cheerleader at the high school, and I'm the girl smoking cigarettes in the bathroom. She wasn't even like taking shots. She was just being like, she's the popular, pretty girl, and I'm like the bad girl in.

• 1:11:41Speaker 04

  Well, that was a little bit like, she's not really rock, you know?

• 1:11:45Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:45Speaker 04

  That it's.

• 1:11:46Yasi Salek?

  I think she might have also been mad about some interactions between Courtney and Gavin.

• 1:11:50Speaker 04

  I believe earlier, we talked about how Courtney doesn't lie.

• 1:11:53Yasi Salek?

  No, yeah, she's not, she's not lying.

• 1:11:54Speaker 04

  Did she lie?

• 1:11:56Yasi Salek?

  No lies detected. Anyway, that's what Hollaback, so, so, thank you Courtney Love, that you, if you like Hollaback Girl, you can thank Courtney Love.

• 1:12:02Speaker 04

  Everyone loves Hollaback Girl, to be clear.

• 1:12:04Yasi Salek?

  Yes, it's a great song. Good job for all, good job Gwen Stefani.

• 1:12:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:12:07Yasi Salek?

  Starfuckers Inc. by Nine Inch Nails, off the Fragile.

• 1:12:12Speaker 04

  I fucking love that song too.

• 1:12:13Yasi Salek?

  Courtney Love and Marilyn Manson also very much like the new radical song.

• 1:12:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:12:17Yasi Salek?

  Uh, The Strokes Meet Me in the Bathroom is allegedly about Courtney Love.

• 1:12:21Speaker 04

  Well, then she in turn wrote Julian, I'm a little bit older than you.

• 1:12:24Yasi Salek?

  Exactly. So anyways, that's the basis.

• 1:12:27Speaker 04

  I can't wait for her song about Cameron Winter.

• 1:12:31Speaker 04

  We all know it's coming.

• 1:12:32Yasi Salek?

  Oh dear. Oh my. So that was the impetus, right? Hearing these songs on the radio. And then she also said, and I loved this. Courtney said, "Those songs on the radio were the, that was the basis of the song. But as I wrote it, I decided to make it an empathy song. The best ones. No longer about staking a claim for myself. It's about all those boys. One of the songs was one of the two Scott Weiland wrote. I kind of remember, who was never a lover, a drug buddy, probably closer than a lover. But I busted him on why the fuck he was writing snark about me. And he said, "You're just too easy." And I was tired. Anyways, the whole, my point being that it was-

• 1:13:10Speaker 04

  That's funny.

• 1:13:11Yasi Salek?

  She decided to make Boys on the Radio, she shifted the perspective to having empathy for these boys on the radio. And I think that's where you also get the line about Jeff Buckley. "In your endless summer night." That lyric is about Jeff Buckley, because he died, he drowned on a summer night. You know, when the water is too deep.

• 1:13:42Speaker 04

  I saw someone say something that I thought was so beautiful on Reddit. My favorite website.

• 1:13:48Yasi Salek?

  It's the only place the truth exists.

• 1:13:50Speaker 04

  Honestly, I mean, there's some real poetry to be found there. But somebody had said something, and I don't even really feel like this is accurate. But I was like, what a beautiful thought. That they were talking about how in that lyric on Boys on the Radio, endless summer night being about depression and death and whatever else. And she says, "I'll be on the other side," of course, meaning like, "I'll be here living while you're gone." But that you can flip it around, and it's like she's singing to the listener of the song who might be feeling that way, that she's on the other side. She's on the other side of like the radio.

• 1:14:25Yasi Salek?

  Of the radio, right.

• 1:14:26Speaker 04

  Like that, "I'm over here." And I was like, that's so moving, that someone would like, receive it like that.

• 1:14:33Yasi Salek?

  I love that.

• 1:14:34Speaker 04

  I know. I'm gonna cry.

• 1:14:36Yasi Salek?

  She put the empathy in, and it was received, whether, you know, whether it was in a different way.

• 1:14:41Speaker 04

  And I just love how she sings that chorus. It's so like, na na na. It's like Korgan-esque.

• 1:14:47Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:54Yasi Salek?

  This, this song, by the way, to be clear, does not have a Corrigan writing credit on it. It is, I think it's another reason why I'm glad we did this particular song off of Celebrity Skin, because even though I think it's pretty stupid and unfair, the way people talk about Corrigan's involvement on this album and give him like the lion's share of the credit for it, at least, at the very least, on this song, you can't say he had anything to do with it because he didn't.

• 1:15:23Speaker 04

  But also, isn't that because, I'm like, Jane, don't use this. No. Like, isn't that because there was some dispute where he said that like she wasn't crediting him enough? Or like that she was downplaying his credit? So then everyone then reacted by giving him too much credit?

• 1:15:38Yasi Salek?

  There was like a whole feud afterwards that I like didn't dip my toes into, but I think he, he said something publicly about how it's like he has a bad taste in his mouth about the album or like, and then Eric was like, but he just came in and kind of like vibe tweaked some songs. So it's unclear what happened, but that aside, nothing here. So she said she heard these, this rock block. Courtney, Courtney is the Muse rock block.

• 1:16:03Speaker 04

  You've heard of a cock block, but have you heard of a rock block?

• 1:16:06Yasi Salek?

  Rock block, inspired by Courtney. She wrote the lyrics to this song to Boys on the Radio and she said she decided to make it an empathy song because those are the best ones.

• 1:16:16Speaker 04

  That's the divine feminine coming in.

• 1:16:18Yasi Salek?

  That's the divine feminine. A hundred percent.

• 1:16:20Speaker 04

  Like truly.

• 1:16:21Yasi Salek?

  That is the divine feminine.

• 1:16:22Speaker 04

  That's the difference.

• 1:16:23Yasi Salek?

  And this song has this like beautiful feeling of like warmth and tenderness and safety in it and sadness and sort of like all in there.

• 1:16:38Speaker 04

  And a little bit of like obsession.

• 1:16:40Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:41Speaker 04

  And adulation.

• 1:16:42Yasi Salek?

  Well, yeah, and the fandom.

• 1:16:43Speaker 04

  Idolatry.

• 1:16:43Yasi Salek?

  Yes, of course, the, the idea of being a fan.

• 1:16:46Speaker 04

  One of my favorite things about the song is like how it ends. Because she goes into the chorus again, but then she changes the lyrics. And there's this lyric where she says, "When the water is too deep, I will ease your suffering. When the glitter fades in mourning, turn away and you will find my empty eyes." Which is like insane to me. That's the most genius insane lyric, because it's like, "I'm done crying for you, actually." It's like, you know, like, "You're not here anymore." Like, "When the glitter fades in mourning, I've had it." You know, it's like, sort of like, "You left me here."

• 1:17:19Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:20Speaker 04

  And then she goes into, "I know that you're rotten to the core." It's like that it's eating you alive, actually, how much you love these men.

• 1:17:27Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:28Speaker 04

  Like, that it's actually toxic, in a way. It's so smart.

• 1:17:40Yasi Salek?

  The lyrics are brilliant, the song is brilliant. It feels so good. I, I love that Courtney told me, she was like, "I usually, I prefer to lie about songs, because I think it's more interesting." So she's had multiple other stories about the song, meaning she told Spin,

• 1:17:55Yasi Salek?

  that it started all peppy and poppy, but then Jeff Buckley died, and it became an homage to Evan Dando and Jeff and Brian Wilson. So I guess that's the Evan Dando of it, right? They were just thinking of the sort of tragic Evan Dando in 1998. It's about self-destructive pop boys.

• 1:18:14Speaker 04

  And I can't help, just because it's Courtney, to think that she's like, twisting the knife a little bit in this song of like, "Oh, you're so miserable. You're suffering, you're so beautiful." Like, "Oh, we care," because like, she is a little like jealous and competitive.

• 1:18:28Yasi Salek?

  Also, it's like, the luxury of, this pink pussy hat, I better fucking get a nice one, because I keep putting it back on my head, is the luxury of men to wallow, to feel sorry for yourselves, and to make that beautiful and glamorous and seductive. It's not beautiful and glamorous and seductive when women do it. Courtney was like, "I have to get on with fucking business over here." Like, I, like, for me to achieve what I've achieved, I can't sit around and feel sorry for myself.

• 1:18:56Speaker 04

  But she's like, "I'm gonna be here for you." And she's like, putting herself in the position of like, the adoring fan, but she's also being like, the mother that's caring for them. She's being like, all of these sort of like feminine archetypes within this song, in this way, and it comes across like, really sincere and really sweet, but then if you think about it, it's kind of funny.

• 1:19:19Yasi Salek?

  As with like a lot of, I think, things that Courtney does always has like a streak of humor in it. I liked this other interpretation, which came from that whole interview CD. She said it became about a girl who sits alone in her room and listens to the radio. The boys on the radio sing to her and promise her that when she gets to heaven, they'll be there. She thinks all the songs are about her. So not that different from the actual

• 1:19:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:19:41Yasi Salek?

  spark of inspiration, but then that's such like

• 1:19:44Speaker 04

  And that's a pretty literal

• 1:19:46Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:46Speaker 04

  But it's such a funny thing to make a song about.

• 1:19:50Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. And she did say this one thing that I wanted to ask you about. She said, a song like Boys on the Radio is really pretty, but there's subversion going on. And I think that's what you just kind of nailed with those, the way the lyrics twist at the end and like, it, if you're not listening closely, you won't catch that subversion.

• 1:20:09Speaker 04

  Exactly. And the, the bridge that I brought up earlier that is my favorite is when she says like, if I let you in under my skin and risen every angel slain, he said he'd never, ever, ever go. But heavens, heavens, heavens, no.

• 1:20:25Yasi Salek?

  Kept that a bit from, from Sugar Comma.

• 1:20:27Speaker 04

  Yeah. And then never, ever, ever go away. And she goes, baby, I've gone away, which is the best, the most like gut punch, like sugar coated, like sugar rush of a lyric, I think on this entire album. It's like so like, uh, you know, it's like euphoric when you hear her say that line, but it's also histrionic and it's hilarious because that's the point in the song where she's like, I've died, like I'm dying with you, I'm going with you. It's like the extreme devotion moment of like, she's like, so she feels it so much that she could just die. And like fans feel that.

• 1:21:07Yasi Salek?

  Which is how I felt, which is how I felt about Kurt Cobain when I was 11 years old.

• 1:21:12Speaker 04

  It was like, take me with you.

• 1:21:14Yasi Salek?

  Kind of like, speaking of being histrionic.

• 1:21:16Speaker 04

  Leave me here.

• 1:21:18Yasi Salek?

  Hormonally miserable 12 year old, like misunderstood, ugly braces, one, one eyebrow. Okay. Acne, like frizz balls, this childbearing hips. It was

• 1:21:31Speaker 04

  Fat, sunburned, Catholic school uniform, calic, crooked teeth.

• 1:21:36Yasi Salek?

  Pick a struggle, but I had nine.

• 1:21:38Speaker 04

  Gay.

• 1:21:41Yasi Salek?

  And I'm just, these were my saviors and I was like, take me with you. And this song really gets to the heart of that. And not until I was 43 would I understand the rest of it.

• 1:21:49Speaker 04

  I mean, thank you for forcing me to pay this much attention to this song.

• 1:21:55Yasi Salek?

  You know?

• 1:21:55Speaker 04

  You know, no one, we don't do this enough. You just hear it in the car and you kind of sing along ambiently and like certain things hit sometimes and some things don't.

• 1:22:04Yasi Salek?

  I'll close it out by saying a quote from the Spin magazine cover story in 1998 about Boys on the Radio by the writer Isabel Castro Cota.

• 1:22:16Speaker 04

  Not this one.

• 1:22:17Yasi Salek?

  This one's 95. Um, she said, I just really loved how she said it and I think it kind of sums up everything we've been talking about and I'm really glad we chose this song because I, I think in the end it really was the perfect choice.

• 1:22:28Speaker 04

  Well, you are the subject of the song and all the boys on the radio are all the bands that you're splaining.

• 1:22:33Yasi Salek?

  That's so true. I'm just mooning by the radio.

• 1:22:36Speaker 04

  This is your theme song.

• 1:22:36Yasi Salek?

  Um, so Isabel Castro Cota said, "There was undying anger and love and contempt in Boys on the Radio. Mythic poetic images of vanity and self-loathing, all interwoven in a pop melody." And that's the magic trick of the song, right? That it is a sugary pop song that contains within it all of this depth and barbs and no Nicki Minaj and intellectualism and mythology. It's just like, what's crammed in and complicated emotions into this beautiful like, meow, medicine.

• 1:23:18Speaker 04

  Well, what else do you expect from a genius?

• 1:23:20Yasi Salek?

  Amen, brother.

• 1:23:22Speaker 04

  I hope that everyone that wished that it would have stayed Sugar Coma can now appreciate this song in a different way.

• 1:23:29Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:23:29Speaker 04

  Because it's obviously, there's more to it than some people would give credit for.

• 1:23:33Yasi Salek?

  It definitely was elevated, I think, from, while Sugar Coma is a great song and that's, feels sort of just like a raw emotional missive, this is something like far more intricate and interesting.

• 1:23:46Speaker 04

  Agree.

• 1:23:48Yasi Salek?

  Well, Patrick Samberg, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy life to

• 1:23:55Speaker 04

  It's my pleasure.

• 1:23:55Yasi Salek?

  talk about Boys on the Radio. Please stick around for my interview with Melissa Oftmar right after this.

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• 1:25:40Yasi Salek?

  You guys, I'm so excited to be talking to musician, artist, and author Melissa Oftermar. Did I pronounce that correctly?

• 1:25:46Speaker 07

  Perfect.

• 1:25:47Yasi Salek?

  It's all German studies over here. Whose new book, Even the Good Girls Will Cry: My 90s Rock Memoir, just recently came out. And you guys, this is... You gotta, you gotta, look at, look at what I did here. You gotta get into this.

• 1:26:02Speaker 07

  Yeah, very curious.

• 1:26:03Yasi Salek?

  There is all of my favorite things. There is goss, there is tea, but there is also spirituality. There is philosophy. There is reflection. It's good stuff.

• 1:26:16Yasi Salek?

  Melissa.

• 1:26:16Speaker 07

  Let me see it.

• 1:26:17Yasi Salek?

  Oh, yes.

• 1:26:18Speaker 07

  Let me see it. I'm gonna flip through while you ask me questions.

• 1:26:21Yasi Salek?

  I'm just so excited to be talking to you, obviously.

• 1:26:23Speaker 07

  Thank you. I've heard amazing things about you. Los Angeles, you know, is a faraway sister city for me. And I'm very excited to be here for a weekend occupation. And you're a new music woman to meet. So, nice to meet you.

• 1:26:37Yasi Salek?

  So, nice to meet you. Well, you lived here, right? You've done your time in the trenches.

• 1:26:41Speaker 07

  I had this serious, serious chapter, which the book, yeah, ends in my, you know, towards the end of that Celebrity Skin ode to California. And then I eject and leave, once I leave Hole. Yes. But, yes, I had a very deep chapter here.

• 1:26:57Yasi Salek?

  Just in case for like, the three people who are watching this, who don't know who Melissa Oftmeyer is, because like, you're just obviously kind of on the wrong podcast. I'll be honest, we welcome you all, but...

• 1:27:07Speaker 07

  Absolutely.

• 1:27:08Yasi Salek?

  She was one of the bassists of Hole, but in my young life, and in many people's eyes, the most iconic and memorable bassist.

• 1:27:18Speaker 07

  Well, I was there the longest.

• 1:27:19Yasi Salek?

  You were there the longest.

• 1:27:20Speaker 07

  So, it's like, not the competition, but it is the fact that I was there the longest of any of the other bass players.

• 1:27:24Yasi Salek?

  And at the height, you know, like, really at the breakthrough period.

• 1:27:28Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:27:29Yasi Salek?

  Post-Live Through This, coming out, and all the sort of real MTV moments, and the touring, the Fan of Lollapalooza, that young 12-year-old, actually, I would've been 13, 13-year-old, the Aussie attendant. I feel like, did you guys play the K-Rock Weenie Rose that year, too?

• 1:27:45Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 1:27:46Yasi Salek?

  Yes, I was there as well. My dad brought me to them.

• 1:27:48Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:27:48Yasi Salek?

  Manager. And also, she played in Smashing Pumpkins. So, no big deal, just...

• 1:27:55Speaker 07

  Back to back.

• 1:27:57Yasi Salek?

  For the music at all, I feel that's actually a good entry point for me to say, like, one thing that I really loved about the book that you did is...

• 1:28:09Yasi Salek?

  And this was just you being honest and being authentic, but you're very good at reminding people through the story that these were bands in a subculture. These were underground bands that were playing these small places and it was word of mouth. Because I think, you know, for people in 2026, who weren't there at the time, these are massive iconic. It's impossible to imagine that they didn't come fully formed right onto MTV on a major label.

• 1:28:40Speaker 07

  For $1 in front of 20 people, which is one.

• 1:28:43Yasi Salek?

  Looney Nights.

• 1:28:44Speaker 07

  Looney Tuesdays.

• 1:28:45Yasi Salek?

  Looney Tuesdays.

• 1:28:46Speaker 07

  In Montreal, Canada, which is how I was exposed to all of these bands. Yeah, I was like a ticket girl DJ. I, I watched and the, the book is an ode to the decade that defined me and my generation, 91 to 2001. So that the listeners know, it's a very specific arc of that 10 years and what I witnessed as a girl obsessed with music and then who joined the big bands. But as a just comment on general what happened in that decade, how subculture went to mainstream and the hijacking

• 1:29:21Speaker 07

  of visceral zeitgeist youth power into corporate hell zone. So I very clear that that's what I want the reader to join me on is when something so magical and innocent slash demonic, the cool, the like, the way that the explosion from 90 to 94 was phenomenal. And then very quickly, we got bought and sold and everything just went to pretty, you know, literally death, drugs, you know, soul sucking situation in the second half of our 90s music thing. So yeah, I really wanted to do a lot of things with this book,

• 1:30:03Speaker 07

  but I wanted to make sure that I brought the reader into the innocent place of me as a teenager who fell in love with the music, who then somehow joined her favorite bands. But it's, yeah, it's a ride of, it's a, it's a telling tale of what happened and how we got here now with the corporate tentacle, techie creepiesoids.

• 1:30:25Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, it's a common theme on Bands Plan, actually, where I talk a lot about how, in my estimation, the 90s were

• 1:30:33Yasi Salek?

  The most like change crammed into one decade. Like from the way the world was in the turn of 1990 and the way the world was when the clock struck 2000, two different universes.

• 1:30:47Speaker 07

  Well, we went through the portal of the 21st century and we were the generation that and the youth culture that birthed the painful. I mean, I see us like literally screaming through the birth canal of the 21st century. We were arrived in a new universe. Between Y2K and 9/11, which is where my book ends. It's simply clear that we no longer live in the same world. And it's not that the 90s music is like the best, but it is the last of that analog reality. And that our generation, like all artists of any generation, have a psychic premonition of what's around the bend.

• 1:31:31Speaker 07

  Just like the turn of the last century, I look at things in hundreds of years, not in decades. And I studied photography and art history and I'm looking at, you know, what were the turn of the century romantic movements in the industrial revolution 100 years before. And we're just a reflection of the brave and terrifying shift of a clock that was more dramatic. And most artists kind of had, kind of had lived in a certain similar analog way for hundreds of years until the digital arrival.

• 1:32:02Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. I also think one thing that like it was a real be careful what you wish for, protect me from what I want. If you want to have a Jenny Holzer moment is like, the minute the subculture became mainstream, it was like one year of like, yes, this is so cool. And then with it, like you said, comes so much shitstorm and terror. And now I think I talk a lot to like younger people where I'm like, I can't, if I could bottle the feeling of being 13 years old and going to Lollapalooza and being like, oh my God, there's other kids like me who like, like this weird stuff, like it wasn't everywhere, you know? And now it's like impossible.

• 1:32:47Yasi Salek?

  Which in a good way, like I was, I just came back this morning from Boise, Idaho, going to Tree Fort Music Festival, and I just looked around and it was like every kind of subculture represented, often in multiple ways in one person, you know?

• 1:33:01Speaker 07

  Yeah, it is very different. It is cool. The mix, and you hear it in the music. The cool new music is like not one kind. And we were still in a, in a more black and white nineteen hundreds categorization. Even me as a multimedia artist, I was a photographer, musician, and I remember it sort of being suggested like, well, you have to pick one.

• 1:33:21Yasi Salek?

  Pick one, right?

• 1:33:21Speaker 07

  No, I'm a Renaissance person. I'm going to pick all. And that's what's so exciting. And I'm so grateful is that in my 50s, in this decade, I get, in this year, 2026, I get to present myself to the world as an author and as a photographer. And I'm forever a music fan first. And music is what is the subject of so much of these, this new creative force. I have decided I want to share with the world, but it is a, it is because I want to connect with people about that innocent subculture moment that, that we are still

• 1:34:02Speaker 07

  trying to unpack of like, we, you know, we did see a lot of greed kind of ruin. And I, and I love that there is alternative, everything, everywhere, all the time. But because it's all done through so many corporate stamps, every single platform.

• 1:34:19Yasi Salek?

  Well, I'm not sure it's alternative anymore.

• 1:34:21Speaker 07

  Well, exactly.

• 1:34:22Yasi Salek?

  I mean, just like it's baked into the word. It's alternative to what? What's alternative now is the alt-right, you know, unfortunately, like.

• 1:34:27Speaker 07

  Exactly. It's true.

• 1:34:28Yasi Salek?

  That's the alternative.

• 1:34:29Speaker 07

  It's true.

• 1:34:30Yasi Salek?

  But they're not selling that at our benefit.

• 1:34:32Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's more that the corporate tentacles are everywhere and everything is monetized through a corporate platform. And that even the coolest musicians at this point are branded and associated to some giant, you know, we were trying to resist that. Like, I remember so clearly, you know, the beginning of being offered like, Fashion campaigns for Courtney and, and just it being shocking that, you know, now every band, but I don't blame them. They literally need sponsorship because you can't make money in any other way. I don't even, it's just such a different beast. Yeah.

• 1:35:05Yasi Salek?

  No, we always pinpoint it back to the, I think the shins at a McDonald's commercial or something. I always like have a triangulation of like the point where selling out stopped existing. And this is no shade to the shins. Like, 100% take that McDonald's shit because that came basically on the heels of pirated music. So like CDs stopped selling, you know, like you stopped being able to make money. And now everyone's like, yeah, we'll be in a Taco Bell ad.

• 1:35:26Speaker 07

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:35:27Yasi Salek?

  Or else I can't pay rent.

• 1:35:28Speaker 07

  It's not the artist's fault. I'm just saying that our creative communities reflect the evolution of the corporate takeover of everything. And that's what I'm also really desperate to want to be in dialogue with cross generational music art people on this tour of this book. It's like.

• 1:35:47Yasi Salek?

  Was there something like particular about this timing? I presume it took you like a year or two to write the book. But this timing that you were like, oh, I need to do this. Like it's getting to a fever pitch. I need to write this now.

• 1:35:59Speaker 07

  Definitely fever pitch exploded out of me like a, like a weird waterfall volcano of just downloaded the whole book in a year. It was a combination of very, very personal, about to turn 50, daughter gonna be a teenager, me wanting to unpack my coming of age story for myself and healing, but for also my daughter to like not have to carry my garbage. Like we have a job to do as parents to like move through our big lessons and a lot of what happened in the night. I definitely went running from a lot of the nineties when I ejected myself from that big machine. So there was a lot of unresolved stuff. My father died really young

• 1:36:43Speaker 07

  during the, in the nineties. I needed to like heal, unpack that. And there was just enough time that had passed that I felt like I could objectively look at it. But it was also mainly to participate in the cultural reflection that a quarter of a century passed is exactly when you can start pinpointing. The ripple effect and what is still, my hope is to hunt what is missing, what is still alive between what made the nineties magical. And it's not a nostalgic thing, it's just a humanist thing. Like, what are we missing now that we had then? What can we learn from the nineties? What can we bring back? And then what is still intact? So it's a way for me to participate in the dialogue because the world has gone to a pretty garbage crap.

• 1:37:27Speaker 07

  And I want to be able to be part of the solution.

• 1:37:31Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:31Speaker 07

  I don't want to just sit back and, I mean, that's not, just not the type of person I am. But I want to be able to be out there and learn from this dialogue with you, with the Q and A tomorrow when we talk to an audience. I just want to like, better understand, take the temperature and bring my lens to it. This book is my mission statement of the lens and perspective of my experience riding that end of the analog era. And now that it's out in the world, what's going to come back? I'm just going to learn a lot. I want to learn about where we're at. So that my daughter and her teenage friends can have a cooler future, if possible.

• 1:38:10Yasi Salek?

  Totally. Yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm so interested in that project. Because I like, I go back and forth all the time where I'm like, I don't want to be like old man shaking my fist at the clouds, you know? Because I'm like, okay, well, I'm sure my parents looked at me at 15 and was like, what are you doing? This is dumb. Like,

• 1:38:29Speaker 07

  Weirdly though, I don't, in my book, it's clear. I don't come from, I come from super progressive countercultural parents. So like, that's why I, I am convinced that the counterculture people who are born from counterculture people, I'm pretty progressive and I am concerned about what the youth have today. They are being dealt a very bizarre way of interfacing with the world and art and each other. And I'm pretty pissed at the corporate tentacle creeps that have come between youth and life experience. Of course, there's good shit in the internet. I'm not saying the internet is evil.

• 1:39:10Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:39:10Speaker 07

  But it's the function.

• 1:39:12Yasi Salek?

  Of the internet is evil.

• 1:39:13Speaker 07

  I mean, thank, whatever just happened this week, the, you know. Meta is officially held accountable for making an addictive product.

• 1:39:21Yasi Salek?

  I would love to throw my lawsuit in the ring here. That's how I kind of know that I'm, it's not 100% me being out of touch. Cause I'm like, well, whatever like 16 year olds are suffering from, I'm also sick with it. You know, like I promise like I'm ill as well, like on my phone than the same way.

• 1:39:37Speaker 07

  Absolutely. It's not the young people's fault. That's why my daughter and her friends, they know me as like the super cool, but unbelievably annoying mother. It's like, oh, you see that? And then the new joke lately has been like, Melissa, River is never going to fall in love because she's on her phone. Because all like storming, I'm like, you are not going to fall in love on that. You know that, right? You are not going to find the magic of music there. You have to get out into the world and find that person, find the band. So I'm both the cool, fun and really direct. This thing will get in between you and happiness.

• 1:40:11Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:12Speaker 07

  So, but yeah, me too. Of course I have like all fractured, my brain is like in 17 places.

• 1:40:17Yasi Salek?

  I have no attention span anymore. I'm like, wow, that's interesting.

• 1:40:19Speaker 07

  So it's not their fault. It's like, we're all suffering from this and every single thing is like an app, like every frigging like check in, every bank. I get it. There's conveniences that we need, but we also need to be super aware. And that's what my book is trying to be part of, is aware of how we got here.

• 1:40:35Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. And also where we're going. I mean, don't get me started like that it came out that Pokemon Go was actually just a way to gather. Um, it's like the, the most nefarious thing is that not only are they, are they like profiting and benefiting off our addictions, they are, they are, we work for them for free. These kids walked around catching Pokemon like they were playing a game and what they were doing was mapping the world for these, now they have maps.

• 1:41:03Speaker 07

  Have not heard of this, but I'm not surprised.

• 1:41:05Yasi Salek?

  Now this company has gathered like complete maps of all places in different weather, in different times of the day, because kids were filming to catch these Pokemon Go's.

• 1:41:16Speaker 07

  Unbelievable. No, I mean, they were just all ponds and the big like, it's like the Wizard of Oz, the big, you know, this. Weird wizard behind the curtain. I mean, they're just manipulating. We know this, but and it's not that it's always been like this. It's just that the tools are way more infiltrated in our daily life.

• 1:41:33Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:34Speaker 07

  And like, living in pre-surveillance era, which I talk about in the book, in the eighties, when I was like a teenager coming up in like goth clubs and just nobody watching and like that whole thing of dance like nobody's watching.

• 1:41:45Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:46Speaker 07

  That's how free life was. The self-consciousness of youth not being able to just be free alone in their room bored finding things to do.

• 1:41:55Yasi Salek?

  Weirdly safer. I was, I was having a conversation with a girlfriend of mine who's a musician. She's about 29. And I was trying to explain to her, I was like, I don't think you understand, like, every decade has gotten harder for people to have fun in a free way. Like, it's in your book a lot, and I was really struck by it every time. Like, you know, there's like, people are just doing fun things. You're out till four in the morning. You might do one line of cocaine here. Like, can't do a line of cocaine here now. You need a testing strip and a lab, you know, like.

• 1:42:24Speaker 07

  So insane.

• 1:42:25Yasi Salek?

  And I'm not saying go do cocaine. That's not what I'm saying, but it's just like, you used to be able to just have a kind of a fun and free existence. And then you think back, it's like, the seventies were even

• 1:42:36Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:42:37Yasi Salek?

  more like that. And it was more this pre-AIDS, you know, it's just

• 1:42:40Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:42:41Yasi Salek?

  every decade brings with it these like new restrictions on how unsafe it is to just be a person in the world.

• 1:42:49Speaker 07

  And then I'm gonna bring it even more specific to women. So like women's safety, which I always say to my teenage daughter and her friends, never take women's safety for granted. Never take your, you know, your body rights for granted and that we all know about the predatory nature of social media and the likes and the self-consciousness and the but what I'm more freaked out about is that there's an illusion that you're safe because you have a phone. Like, people are not being trained to actually, like, when I was a young girl, walking alone at night.

• 1:43:23Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, you were.

• 1:43:24Speaker 07

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:43:24Yasi Salek?

  Aware.

• 1:43:25Speaker 07

  Exactly, aware. It's like the, and so. They don't even have, they're not even being trained to use their 360 like protection. Like it's, it's not only more dangerous because you could be, have a predator in your bedroom alone with your, with your parents.

• 1:43:39Yasi Salek?

  Or driving you home in an Uber. That happens all the time.

• 1:43:42Speaker 07

  I just cannot believe that it is more dangerous and the sense of protection is being lost. So I don't know. I, I feel like as just like a woman out there, I've got to go out, not to just like only reframe the fact that Courtney was burned at the stake and holds legacy is in the gutter and it shouldn't be. But also to just talk to young women today about how they move through the world.

• 1:44:03Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:44:04Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:44:04Yasi Salek?

  I'm so glad you brought that up because I, I read this, that you said something to the effect of you wanted this to be a full throated defense of Courtney Love. And as you know, I'm a Courtney Love truther. Um, I will, to anyone who will listen, I'm like, I don't think you understand that you'll never meet a more intelligent person as long as you live, like.

• 1:44:21Speaker 07

  Nor a more punk powerhouse person.

• 1:44:24Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:44:24Speaker 07

  Not male or female.

• 1:44:25Yasi Salek?

  I think you, in the book you're referred to as like, something about her like dignity and her, her like morality.

• 1:44:32Speaker 07

  Noble.

• 1:44:32Yasi Salek?

  And she's, she's extremely noble, you know, like, and always, there's a clip circulating out, I think I saw she actually posted it as well.

• 1:44:40Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:44:41Yasi Salek?

  She's always predicting the future. Always.

• 1:44:45Speaker 07

  I know, from monopolies taking.

• 1:44:46Yasi Salek?

  And no one listens. And then 10 years later, they're like, oh, Courtney Love said that. And you're like, yeah, Courtney Love said that. So that I think is great. I was curious, like you, you had a firsthand view, you're what, about 22, 23, 23 years old. You had a firsthand view of how Courtney Love's fame was intertwined with how she was treated, you know? The more famous she got, the worse I think people tweeted, treated her and the media was horrible. Did that affect your personal relationship with fame and your interest in having it or not having it?

• 1:45:26Speaker 07

  Well, I never wanted it to begin with. So I was horrified from the moment I stepped into Hole. It's like why I said no is I didn't. I want a life as an artist. I want a life of integrity. I'm not in it for fame, fortune, anything. So when I reluctantly joined Hole, I was doing it for women's, uh, progress and for women's right to be at the table and be part of rock history. I never did it for fame. I. Reluctantly dealt with the fact that she grew more famous mixed with her own ambition because she also is, you know, unapologetic of her power. Her plan is, was always more power to have more of a platform. And I'm, that's just not who I am, but we were a good counterbalance because that was

• 1:46:11Speaker 07

  not my style of change, but I also benefited from her brave. And so I get to put this book out because I was along alongside for the ride. But no, I was pretty much appalled by the whole thing, you know, and she would put herself out there in such a, I mean, she actually like sent me a note this week. It's so sweet. We're closer than we've ever been. We were close then, but when I left the band, we didn't, we lost touch for about a decade. But she sent me the sweetest, you know, congratulations, you know, it sounds, sounds, seems like the book is going great and I'm so happy you're out there. You're so diplomatic. I have to lock myself up or I'll be canceled every day. So and it's just, we were just always the opposite of each other.

• 1:46:53Speaker 07

  And I watched her just, she did what she had to do to survive and she needed quite literally to scream and stage dive and be received by the audience, received by the press, get clean, become a Hollywood movie star. All of that is what kept her alive. She just needed to move forward. It's so much more complicated than ambition. It's like, this is survival. This woman just needed to be alive. And all of the superficial idiots are like, she's just ambitious and wants to be famous or just looking for attention. Yeah. Have you ever thought about why? Why she might, right. Why would this woman need to have attention? And that's why I was always of a defender too, but I like that I now have a quarter

• 1:47:35Speaker 07

  century in my own understanding of my very private perspective to the, you know, six feet to the right of her every night and seeing the shotgun shells being thrown at her, seeing the mixed bag of the audience that are some desperate teens who love her, some haters, some, just like what we received from the audience and from the press and from the industry. Taught me everything about humanity and she was the avatar of the wild Medusa woman. And I learned so much by being next to her and I now have the privileged quarter century perspective where I feel like I actually, I need to join this conversation and tell

• 1:48:17Speaker 07

  anyone who wants to think about the arc of women and the demonization of women, I have a valuable opinion that I want. And she was the one who sacrificed herself and we all witnessed it.

• 1:48:28Yasi Salek?

  And benefit. I mean, I

• 1:48:29Speaker 07

  Yes, and benefited.

• 1:48:30Yasi Salek?

  My, my arm is up because I've cried on this podcast talking about it before. I was 12 years old and found, lived through this CD in a trash can and it changed my whole life.

• 1:48:39Speaker 07

  Amazing. I guess I've heard that, yeah.

• 1:48:40Yasi Salek?

  And it was, it was obviously because of the music, but also because I never, I had never seen that it was possible to be a pop, what Corny was, was a pop star really, you know, by that point. But she was messy and chaotic and imperfect and that had not been presented to me as a possibility of a way to be a woman. And it made me, who had messy and complicated and angry feelings, feel like, oh, it's okay. You know, like, there's a path for, like, you can also be glamorous. And, you know, like, all these things can exist in one package, so.

• 1:49:16Speaker 07

  You know, we were pushing, we were pushing, pushing it forward, pushing what women can be, which we were only at that point, like, 50 years or 60 years into the rights to vote, the right to have our own credit cards. You know, it's so new, this movement of women having autonomy over their own anything. There's still, like, all biology of our, our sexual experiences. Everything's been written by men for men with no understanding of women. We are still

• 1:49:44Yasi Salek?

  They just invented perimenopause two years ago.

• 1:49:46Speaker 07

  Exactly.

• 1:49:46Yasi Salek?

  I was like, oh, sorry, have we not known about this? This has existed forever and you guys just found out about this?

• 1:49:50Speaker 07

  And that's all because they want us to buy the drugs. It's all just pharmaceutical.

• 1:49:54Yasi Salek?

  They want us to buy gummies for our hair growth. And I'm like, no, but can I have some, can I have some real medicine? You guys don't have any science?

• 1:50:01Speaker 07

  Oh, my, anyway, yes, it's, it's a, we're so early in the game of, of Of what should be happening is women running the world, you know?

• 1:50:11Yasi Salek?

  It frustrates me to know, because I'm like, it shouldn't be, like, it shouldn't even have to be a feminist act to exist and to be who you are. And it's such a litmus test for me, especially with men, the way they speak about Courtney Love. Like, it's an immediate tell for me. I know what kind of man you are, you know? And even like, men who I think, think they've interrogated their own misogyny, think it's okay to be misogynistic against Courtney Love, and they don't really understand that that's what's going on there.

• 1:50:41Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:50:41Yasi Salek?

  You know?

• 1:50:42Speaker 07

  No, I like it when I, um, meet men, and it's not that often, but younger ones I'm now seeing have said, I've heard it a couple of times in the last couple of years, "Oh, Hole was the better band."

• 1:50:54Yasi Salek?

  Wow.

• 1:50:55Speaker 07

  That's a big deal when a man says that.

• 1:50:57Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:57Speaker 07

  About, you know, and it's funny that there's... Yeah, and then the opposite ones were like, "Well, I was a Nirvana fan," so I'm like, "So what? So that means you couldn't be a Hole fan?"

• 1:51:07Yasi Salek?

  You're not allowed. It's illegal.

• 1:51:08Speaker 07

  It's just like, it's such a, it's so telling, yes.

• 1:51:12Yasi Salek?

  Okay, well, to take it back to a slightly different subject. So, you talked about just now, like, you're not interested in fame. I wonder, though, does being seen have value for you?

• 1:51:24Speaker 07

  Yes, absolutely, yes. Which is definitely where I'm at, at this moment.

• 1:51:28Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:51:29Speaker 07

  And the joy and profound gratitude I have that I've released a book a week ago, and I have been received, obviously here, but Drew Barrymore showed, my book events have been selling out, and second nights are added, and that feels incredible, not just because

• 1:51:50Speaker 07

  I worked really hard and I want to spread the message of what I'm trying to, you know, lift the hood on, but it is that I stepped away from public eye for a long time for a reason, to become a mother, but also to experience life outside of what had been 17 years of touring and playing on stages as a performer, but also as a young girl, I grew up in the shadow of my politician father, I grew up in the spotlight of a small city, and I needed to just inner world, and I did that, and I learned a lot, obviously. Becoming a mother, biggest transformation a person can ever experience, but...

• 1:52:33Speaker 07

  There was a missing part of what I'd always had, which is this dialogue with the outside world, you know, so some people maybe are satisfied to be seen by their parents or their husband, wife, their partner. There's something in my like lifetime, this however I came into this lifetime and the destiny I have with Courtney and Billy and whatever my father's destiny was of being in the public eye that I do actually, it's not fame, it is a recognition in this sort of public, private conversation between my inner world and the big outer world of people who need art and archetypes to understand themselves. I am someone who

• 1:53:16Speaker 07

  found myself through Robert Smith and Morrissey and I found myself through Botticelli's Birth of Venus and art. I needed, that's how I got, that's how I developed. And I like participating in being that archetype for a young person who is looking for themselves. So I stepped back to become a mother to make sure I provided my daughter with a real human mother, but I'm excited for her to go out now, she's 14, to find herself and I'm excited to come back out and talk to anyone who needs to hear from a weird archetype avatar, the bass player who disappeared, the redhead, the Canadian, whoever I am. If I can help somebody

• 1:53:59Speaker 07

  find their way, like so many people did for me in the public and art world. So it's not obviously fame, it's being seen in a strange like other dimension, you know, you find yourself in other people, just like everyone says, like a marriage or a close close relationship, you are a mirror to each other. But there's something about strangers and public performers that are mirrors to each other.

• 1:54:28Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, we need someone or something to project.

• 1:54:31Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:54:31Yasi Salek?

  On to, yeah.

• 1:54:33Speaker 07

  To grow.

• 1:54:33Yasi Salek?

  To learn about ourselves.

• 1:54:35Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:54:35Yasi Salek?

  And I do think it's, it's really interesting because, you know, in your book, we learn a lot about you, but it's not the common archetype you learn about, right? Because like. Most people would learn about a Courtney or a Billy, right? It's the front person that you kind of learn about. And I thought it was, it was really interesting to read about.

• 1:54:59Speaker 07

  The bass?

• 1:54:59Yasi Salek?

  The bass, literally, I mean, like, literally, being like, I played bass for two seconds in a band. I'm terrible at it. And it was literally only because like, my friend was like, you look cool. I want you to be in my band. And I was like, I would love to be in a band. I have zero musical talent. He was like, you couldn't do the bass. And I was like, Sid Vicious, talking, like, unplug it. But I do feel like someone, I think someone said it to you in the book. I can't remember who it was, but that like, nobody's first choice is the bass. But that was your first choice. Because you knew yourself really well, even at that young of an age, that you were like, I don't really want to be out front. I just want to be part of it.

• 1:55:34Speaker 07

  Exactly. I'm a team player. I'm a collaborator. I want, I wanted to join my generation's movement. And I was obviously in love with music and I had been lucky to grow up on my mother's record collection and went to art school as a kid. So I was already in like, the, the magic of music and art. And I wanted, and I could feel something bubbling in my generation. And when I got to see Hole and the Pumpkins and Sonic Youth and everyone in like 90, 91, I felt, I could feel the wave. Anyone that was there just knew, whoa, and I wanted to catch it. So I had to pick the most subtle position on the stage to do it. And I, you know, I get crap for this all the time, but the bass is the easier entry. It's easier to fake it.

• 1:56:19Yasi Salek?

  Sure.

• 1:56:19Speaker 07

  And people have, yeah, I mean, like, drumming is like a sport. Lead singer, you can't be shy. You've got to have something to say. You have to be able to scream shredding guitar players. So it was like an easy way for me also go from like A to Z. I went from A to Z. I had a bass for a year and then I joined Hole.

• 1:56:37Yasi Salek?

  But I think that does diminish your musical talent because you obviously were a really good bass player.

• 1:56:41Speaker 07

  I mean, I, I clearly have a natural feel for it and recently. Billy actually broke it down on his podcast. It was the first time I've ever been told by my musical mentor what my feel is as a bass player.

• 1:56:54Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I watched that. He was saying about how you're more aggressive than all the other-

• 1:56:57Speaker 07

  Yeah, I'm ahead of the beat. And I was like John Bonham and, and John Paul Jones. It's like a particular thing where some bass is laid back, some bass is on, and I guess mine is ahead and there is like a push, a pulse or something. And that just I do believe comes innately, like bass is you either feel it or you don't. And I, I definitely felt it, but I am, and which is how I got in so quick to bands. Yeah.

• 1:57:23Yasi Salek?

  So cool. Do you think it's too late for me to be in a band?

• 1:57:26Speaker 07

  No.

• 1:57:27Yasi Salek?

  Okay, great. I'm polling people. Once again, Fender, corporates, if you're listening, you want to send me a guitar?

• 1:57:33Speaker 07

  Oh my-

• 1:57:33Yasi Salek?

  I'm right here.

• 1:57:34Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 1:57:34Yasi Salek?

  You can, you can be part of the feminist movement.

• 1:57:37Speaker 07

  Cam Gordon has a alum in her seventies. I mean-

• 1:57:41Yasi Salek?

  She did start a little earlier than me, but you know what, Fender, hear me out. We can do some sort of perimenopause gummies and guitar package and I can be your spokesperson.

• 1:57:51Speaker 07

  I was, I was a Fender. I've only ever played Fender and I was sponsored by them. I could, I could, we could start a band together.

• 1:57:57Yasi Salek?

  Melissa and I are available for the perimenopause special marketing project. I have sort of a personal question.

• 1:58:03Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 1:58:04Yasi Salek?

  For people that don't know, and again, you're going to read this book because it's great, but you come from two parents, like you said, they were countercultural, but they were also both writers and artists and your father was this big personality that, you know, activists, like really interesting people, but you didn't have a stable home life. They were not really together when you were growing up, just one year, I guess, right? You lived in some caravanning situations with your mother. You called your father by his first name and hung out with him at the bar.

• 1:58:35Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:58:36Yasi Salek?

  All amazing. But I was, I'm just, I'm, I'm so not like this. Like the, the self-possession that you seem to have at such a young age to be like- I don't want to be in a hole. That seems too much for me. You're like,

• 1:58:49Speaker 07

  Mm hmm.

• 1:58:50Yasi Salek?

  I'm not going to do those drugs. Me, it was like, do you want to do drugs? Yes, whatever. It was like, whatever everyone else was. I was just kind of like,

• 1:58:56Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:58:56Yasi Salek?

  down to clown. Not even because I wanted to, but more because I didn't know myself well enough to know I didn't want to. I guess the question is, this is a long way of asking, how did you develop that, given that you, it's not that you came maybe from so much stability?

• 1:59:14Speaker 07

  Well, I definitely credit, I so, I am someone, which you can tell by my book, I reflect constantly. One of the things I've always reflected on is innate versus nurture. What are you born with? And what is your environment? So I believe very much so that you're born with a certain.

• 1:59:32Yasi Salek?

  Your temperament?

• 1:59:33Speaker 07

  Temperament, exactly. You come to this earth with a, my daughter goes to Waldorf School and they, they basically, they can read even in a like kindergarten child, a temperament.

• 1:59:43Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 1:59:44Speaker 07

  Are you Sanguine? You know, and I definitely am melancholic, reflective, and I always have been. And I've been the sort of daydreaming into the, you know, infinity universe for as long as I can remember about what is the meaning of life. So I've just always been like that. So I think the combination of what you, what you come into this world with, and then I fully credit my parents. Talk about self-possession. My parents, I mean, they just, they knew who they were from some, they, they did not, they broke away from where they came from, you know, son of immigrants, daughter of like super suburban American milquetoast. Like, they went like charging

• 2:00:25Speaker 07

  far and wide away from what they came from. So for me, it is a combination of however I came into this, which I think is more of a stargazing, tripping out person. And then they were these like super.

• 2:00:37Yasi Salek?

  They modeled for you.

• 2:00:39Speaker 07

  They modeled just, I was in awe of both my parents for as long as I can remember of how clear it was that they were going to work for themselves. They're going to be freelancers. They're going to do only things that they believed in and work their asses off to make the outside world what they want it to be. Fight for, you know, civil rights or for, they were just so. Clearly who they were. So for me, the modeling of my parents who just like knew, and it's also I credit a lot the their maybe even healthy neglect up raising of me, which was really like, you tell us, Melissa, what do you want? Like, I, I like photography.

• 2:01:20Speaker 07

  Oh, borrow my camera. I like music. Please buy me a bass. And they didn't, I didn't come from money. It came from that. But they would listen when I had an inkling of who I am. And they empowered me to believe that my instincts were right. But mainly, I saw that their instincts made them happy and fulfilled. They like thrived as people. They weren't like sitting around depressed, smoking pot, watching TV.

• 2:01:46Yasi Salek?

  No, it doesn't sound like it. I'm really into the theory that your soul like chooses your parents based on like the growth that it wants to experience in this life.

• 2:01:55Speaker 07

  What I suggest in the book. And at one point, my mother thought that seemed pretentious. I was like, I don't know. I'm just telling you what I, what I feel.

• 2:02:03Yasi Salek?

  I believe, I believe, before I even read, that's like a belief that I hold. I feel that that's everyone's thing, you know? Like, and so like, as much as we have to work through certain things, yeah, core wounding or whatever, it's, that's the arc of your life.

• 2:02:17Speaker 07

  And it's believing in the reason you're here and having like, like a bigger than you, bigger than this lifetime belief system that you dropped down at this time for a reason. And that these are the lessons you are meant to learn. And I mean, I was a one night stand. My mother hates that I start the book with that. She's like, well, we were together a couple of times. I'm like, yeah, three times? Like, just, she was a promiscuous, wild, independent woman who wanted to have a daughter alone, who only had sex with bachelors so that she could be a single mother. That was her plan.

• 2:02:53Yasi Salek?

  Knowing what you want, you know?

• 2:02:53Speaker 07

  Yeah, that was pretty radical in the seventies. So, and I'm proud of that. Like, I'm proud of her that she knew to do that. That's, you know? But so that's how chance my arrival was. You know, I'm not a product of like, people who got married and had sex hundreds of times and like fell in love. Like, no. I would just came for that one moment for these two radical weirdos to have me. So, yeah.

• 2:03:19Yasi Salek?

  Do you feel that you were able to distill like your core wound while by the end of writing this book?

• 2:03:24Speaker 07

  Oh, my God. Talk about therapy times 10,000 years. I am.

• 2:03:32Speaker 07

  The most light and healed because of this process. I think there's still a big journey up ahead right now that the book is out. And I think the healing will take on a new. But phase one of mega healing has happened with me alone in this manuscript for the last few years. So much of the difficult things in this book that I unpacked for myself and for anyone who's ever dealt with addiction or death.

• 2:04:01Yasi Salek?

  It's a real Al-Anon vibe.

• 2:04:02Speaker 07

  Yes, yes. So, but I, yes, I couldn't recommend it enough to anyone, even if you don't publish it. Just write your memoir. If you've got crap to deal with, write it. It's, yeah, it is like self-therapy is self-soothing, I guess.

• 2:04:17Yasi Salek?

  You wrote something in the book that I was like, really like, I kind of held on to because I thought it was so interesting that you noticed that while you were playing, I think you were maybe still playing bass in Hole, I'm not sure. But that you felt that this was like being in a loveless relationship, being, making art for hire, basically. Even though you loved it for like a multitude of other reasons, you realized that you needed to be creative yourself on the side to have a balance.

• 2:04:44Speaker 07

  Yeah, like the equivalent of intimacy with sex, of like, just sex without intimacy or love without sex. And yes, it was like a lacking, yeah, yeah, I had to. And again, that's probably where I'm unpacking this bass player perspective in the shadow of the big front people more than most memoirs go into. Because yeah, it's a very kind of like, that's a very subtle, I'm glad you picked up on it. Because when I was writing, that was part of my reflection of like, why I felt so alone in that band? And why I felt so, and why when I left the band, Courtney accused me of like withholding my talents.

• 2:05:28Speaker 07

  When I published in the book, the letter, her reaction to my departure, departure of the band.

• 2:05:34Yasi Salek?

  She's a brilliant writer.

• 2:05:34Speaker 07

  Yeah, incredible, incredible. I'm happy that she gets to have her own words in my book, you know, she gets to say. But when I reread that letter and her accusing that I didn't give all of myself to the band.

• 2:05:49Speaker 07

  It actually kind of stimulated these kinds of reflections of, did I withhold? I wonder, just, oh, well, yes, actually, because I didn't feel safe and I didn't feel seen and I didn't feel all of these things. So I was able to, in the book, you know, go that deep into this. And I was like, I mean, I was, you know, now everybody's like, trauma bonding, new age, you know, Instagram therapy. I have been living that in my mind since the day I was born. You know, it's kind of cool that everybody is now reflecting on that.

• 2:06:20Yasi Salek?

  Sure, or not, yeah.

• 2:06:25Yasi Salek?

  Or they could tone it down a bit. It's like, not everyone's a narcissist. That's not possible. Maybe you're the narcissist, if everyone in your life is a narcissist.

• 2:06:31Speaker 07

  But in the 90s, people were not thinking like that. I was kind of like the only one in the band, like, is this gonna hurt people's feelings? Is this, you know, why are they trying to kill themselves? This is like a very complicated situation to be in. So yeah, I feel like maybe now is my time, like, people maybe relate to this kind of processing. The world was very black and white back then. And people were much less compassionate for troubled, difficult people like a Courtney, but also much less sensitive to a sensitive person like me, who was just trying to like, take care of herself. That's all I was trying to do is protect myself from a big, bad world, even though, of course, I'm the lucky

• 2:07:12Speaker 07

  one. We don't have bombs over our heads. I had roof over my head and all that. But within, like, going out on the road in a giant rock band alone at 22 is not like a safe space.

• 2:07:24Yasi Salek?

  Right. Maybe that's what we traded. Maybe we traded the analog beauty stuff for people being more therapized and more accepting of addiction. I wonder if that was sort of like the Faustian bargain that had to be made, you know?

• 2:07:40Speaker 07

  I believe that, yes. In fact, it is a spiritual growth that is happening while the earthly world gets worse. I definitely see that in my, like, long game, thousand year vision of what's happening. This destruction that is happening to our planet Earth with the fossil fuel addiction and then the mining of our souls through the algorithm addictions. There's really bad, non-sustainable things happening there, but I do ultimately believe in the spirit of existence and I think that there is progress happening on other planes.

• 2:08:15Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:16Speaker 07

  Which is more of an awareness of what is life beyond here.

• 2:08:19Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:08:20Speaker 07

  That's like exciting and organized religion have had some bad raps lately, so we're not gonna like all like go running to the church.

• 2:08:26Yasi Salek?

  It's really funny that you say that though, but that's all, I always do say that because I just, I talk about God on here a lot and some people really don't like that.

• 2:08:32Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:08:33Yasi Salek?

  And I'm always like, I know bad reputation, God, but like, let's just separate that out of, you know, the context. And shout out to the clergy members who listen to Ban's Plan, I love you guys.

• 2:08:44Speaker 07

  Oh, and I mean, the higher power, there, there is and there better be belief in it. I believe in it. It's a matter of, I, I talk a lot on the book about how I found my own way

• 2:08:55Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:08:56Speaker 07

  to the higher power of self, of, of beyond self, of the universe. And that my parents who were really like anti-religion, understandably, because they were from another generation that were good. And they were progressive people who wanted to live in like the power of political action here and now, intellectuals. But I was lacking, I was starving, which is how I fell in love with music. I was starving for a spiritual outlet.

• 2:09:22Yasi Salek?

  All songs are about God.

• 2:09:22Speaker 07

  Absolutely. So, bad rap, God, because it is a higher, universal power that is there that I'm very clear about in the book that I followed and listened to. And it is potentially where we could all go a little deeper now while we watch total criminals take over the earthly plane.

• 2:09:43Yasi Salek?

  Do illegal wars.

• 2:09:44Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:09:44Yasi Salek?

  Um, yeah, it's cool.

• 2:09:46Speaker 07

  Yeah, it is.

• 2:09:46Yasi Salek?

  It's really cool. Um, yeah, there's actually, I'm not gonna say what it is, so I want you guys to read the book. There's an incredible exchange between you and Dave Navarro in the book, kind of about this that like, pretty much distills down like the difference between addicts and non-addicts and it's so good.

• 2:10:00Speaker 07

  And you're the first person who's brought up that chapter, Dan. With death in my, in all, I've done about eighty interviews in the last six weeks. You're the first person, like, I was like waiting, it's like, I don't know if it's like an LA addict thing, but you picked up on it, like, that that.

• 2:10:15Yasi Salek?

  Oh, it was just like a perfect distillation of exactly, like, you don't need any more information until like what makes, and I'm very self-aware of him to say it to you like that.

• 2:10:23Speaker 07

  That's why I wanted to honor him in the book, is he taught me something, even though I'm not in touch with him, I'm in meaning to say, hi, Dave Navarro.

• 2:10:30Yasi Salek?

  Speaking of Taco Bell, loves to live moss, Dave Navarro, famously.

• 2:10:33Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:10:34Yasi Salek?

  He lived moss. Yeah, he was a Taco Bell spokesperson.

• 2:10:37Speaker 07

  Interesting.

• 2:10:38Yasi Salek?

  Pretty sure.

• 2:10:38Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah. Did I miss that? But he taught me something when I was lost in the maze of all these addicts about it.

• 2:10:46Yasi Salek?

  So we've been talking about being seen, and I was gonna be like, oh, is this like the biggest and scariest being seen so far? But then I was like, well, what about when you did your solo albums?

• 2:10:58Speaker 07

  That, yeah. I think back to what you asked about, like, how to, was I so self-assured that I don't want to join Hole?

• 2:11:04Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:11:05Speaker 07

  I do have some, I guess it's kind of my superpower, that I'm not too concerned about what people think. I mean, it's not that I don't care. I do. I want, I care about people. It's more that I'm gonna have to do what I have to do, and that's how I feel about it. I grant that to other people, too. Courtney's got to do what she's got to do. Everyone's got to do what they've got to do to get where they need to get in themselves. So I'm not, so, you know, yes, in some ways horrific. Like, I cannot believe that my first orgasm is in this book. Like, what am I doing?

• 2:11:40Yasi Salek?

  You couldn't pull that information out of me with a gun to my head. I'm so sorry.

• 2:11:43Speaker 07

  So I want you to know that I wrote it without ever thinking about that it was gonna go out into the outside world. I wrote it because I needed to write it, and I needed to write it.

• 2:11:50Yasi Salek?

  You could have edited that out.

• 2:11:53Speaker 07

  My, my husband actually wanted me to, but I was like, no, this is about women, and like, this whole, the fact that the mystery of sex and orgasms isn't even like properly talked about. So there's a lot of things that could have been edited that I didn't, but I ultimately decided to choose my most personal truths to put forward, for better, for worse.

• 2:12:15Speaker 07

  And it was because I wanted honest, but then it wasn't until I read the audiobook that I actually had a shudder of terror of what have I just done? I hadn't even, it's almost like maybe my superpowers, I don't think about it.

• 2:12:31Yasi Salek?

  Until it's too late.

• 2:12:32Speaker 07

  Until it's too late, truly. Like I'm walking on stage in front of 65,000 people. Oh, 20 years later, it occurred to me, that could have been scary.

• 2:12:40Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:41Speaker 07

  I don't think about it.

• 2:12:42Yasi Salek?

  Your story really reminds me of a thing I like to call going trawler law mode. Where you're just like, okay, I guess I'll join whole fine. You called so many times and then you're like, no, I'm in whole. Okay.

• 2:12:53Speaker 07

  Exactly.

• 2:12:54Yasi Salek?

  Oh, I'm, okay, I'm gonna go here. We're going to be amazed.

• 2:12:57Speaker 07

  Dissociate?

• 2:12:58Yasi Salek?

  That's fun.

• 2:12:58Speaker 07

  I don't know what it is, but it's definitely the way I do it. And this is the way I've done this. And it wasn't until I walked out of the audio booth that I thought, oh God, there is going to be some uncomfortable moments that I'm about to walk into. But so far, I've been six weeks into this chatty chat and I'm on this book tour. And because I can stand behind that all of this is my, my version of the story.

• 2:13:23Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:13:24Speaker 07

  There's not much that, you know, I don't want to hurt people and I don't think I do. I did, you know, check in. People trust me, like the main people in the book, you know, that, but I don't know. I, I'm not, I'm a diplomatic person, so I don't think I'm like.

• 2:13:41Yasi Salek?

  Canadian?

• 2:13:41Speaker 07

  Exactly. So Canadian. So, yeah, I, but it is bizarre that I, in, in fact, my family, I only really have like my mother and my half brother. And they, over the holidays, when they, you know, thought, okay, well, she's really doing this. And they had a conversation that my mother shared, like, I guess this is the way Melissa needs to deal with her stuff, like in public. I was like, that is weird. But that's back to this, like, I was so moved by. Heroes of the eighties of music and art history heroes that I benefited so much from other people putting their hearts out there.

• 2:14:19Yasi Salek?

  Robert Smith really unpacked it for all of us, for sure.

• 2:14:21Speaker 07

  Seriously.

• 2:14:22Yasi Salek?

  Morrissey said things that I would never have said publicly as well.

• 2:14:25Speaker 07

  Yes, unfortunately, but I, yeah, I, I just, I participate in that strange dialogue of put yourself out there publicly and, and help somebody.

• 2:14:35Yasi Salek?

  I think it can be really cleansing. Like, I have a weird practice lately, thanks to a psychic, we'll have to get into it. Shout out Eric, if you're listening, where I'm like, I actually like, need to post more of myself on the internet in like a really, but in a way that I'm like, I don't care. Because it's, it's like, it was a lifelong practice for me to not care what people think of me. Having a podcast will really help you because people will be like, your voice is so annoying. And you're like, oh my God, who are you, where do, why are you knocking out? I don't even know, don't listen then. But it's just like a barrage and then you just like go through like the galaxy brain levels of.

• 2:15:09Speaker 07

  It's a good practice.

• 2:15:10Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:11Speaker 07

  And I wonder if it's the same psychic Eric that I have spoken to.

• 2:15:13Yasi Salek?

  New York based, channeler.

• 2:15:16Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 2:15:17Yasi Salek?

  Oh, hi Eric. I don't think Eric listens to this podcast, but maybe our guides who are different are, are circling. Just know I'm doing it, babes. I listen.

• 2:15:26Speaker 07

  Interesting. So, but I also am in the realm of the internet, not giving a crap. Like I had to start using Instagram to prep this book. And I just, I'm like, hello internet, this is not natural for me, but I want to connect with you. So it's also in that mode, I just go into like, I want to find these people and I want these people to find me, so I will do, I will use this channel.

• 2:15:49Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. And I'm like, also like being, as my favorite quote, which I haven't said lately is to, to be cringe is to be free, you know?

• 2:15:56Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:15:57Yasi Salek?

  Like, whatever you feel embarrassed to do is probably your like highest and truest self and you feel vulnerable. That's what cringes.

• 2:16:05Speaker 07

  Vulnerability is good. I mean, I'm like, and it's like a lifelong journey into vulnerability. I'm like, this morning was crying my ass off. I've not like, it's not about the book, it's just like, oh, this book is helping me identify that the other kernel of vulnerability that I am.

• 2:16:26Speaker 07

  Always gonna be dealing with, you know, we can only, it's just, it is a lifelong journey and you better make the most out of it.

• 2:16:33Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:16:33Speaker 07

  You gotta maximize, you gotta take risks, put yourself out there, tell people you love them.

• 2:16:40Yasi Salek?

  Got a vulnerability max, babe.

• 2:16:41Speaker 07

  Yes, seriously.

• 2:16:43Yasi Salek?

  My therapist always says that vulnerability is the currency that you use to buy intimacy, which I think is very on point, but it also even extends to the currents you use to buy intimacy with yourself.

• 2:16:54Speaker 07

  Yeah, interesting. I haven't heard that.

• 2:16:56Yasi Salek?

  Well, because how can you have intimacy with another person if you're not vulnerable to them?

• 2:16:59Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:16:59Yasi Salek?

  It's not possible, right?

• 2:17:00Speaker 07

  I know, I mean, exactly.

• 2:17:02Yasi Salek?

  But also with yourself, like if you're gonna be with yourself, you have to be able to not live a version of yourself that isn't actually you because you're trying to please some audience, you know?

• 2:17:14Speaker 07

  Yes, I am currently vulnerable. Hello, how are you?

• 2:17:17Yasi Salek?

  I'm, I'm actually dying to know your human design because there's a human design that has to be invited to do stuff. Do you know which one that is?

• 2:17:25Speaker 07

  Interesting.

• 2:17:26Yasi Salek?

  I wonder if that's the one you are.

• 2:17:27Speaker 07

  I mean, I've had it done on my chart before and I have it somewhere in a screenshot.

• 2:17:32Yasi Salek?

  I'm so curious.

• 2:17:32Speaker 07

  That is interesting because I don't know that particular has to be invited, but someone who's, I guess it's a Jewish mythology thing, knock three times or ask three times.

• 2:17:45Yasi Salek?

  Well, to become Jewish, you have to ask three times.

• 2:17:47Speaker 07

  Right, well, someone said they noticed in my, I had to be asked three times to join whole.

• 2:17:53Yasi Salek?

  I wonder if you are this human, because I just, I can't remember the one because I'm not that one. I'm like, absolutely not that one. I'm like, hi, I'm here.

• 2:17:59Speaker 07

  Right.

• 2:18:00Yasi Salek?

  But it's, it's one that's like, life path is dictated by people and have to invite you, like a vampire. You have to be invited in all the time.

• 2:18:07Speaker 07

  That amazing film and that, interesting because yes, this is a reoccurring theme.

• 2:18:12Yasi Salek?

  And it's great, the right people seem to come and invite you at the right time. It works out beautifully, you know?

• 2:18:17Speaker 07

  Because that's what's cool about the fable fairy tale side of my book is that I never went to try to do any of this. They found me and that is also what makes me have the luxury to feel. Destined, like, they found me. I didn't ask. They didn't. So maybe, yeah, you're probably right.

• 2:18:36Yasi Salek?

  Who knows? We'll never know until we Google it later.

• 2:18:40Yasi Salek?

  This book is such a celebration of how, I don't know how to say it without sounding corny, but like.

• 2:18:47Speaker 07

  I am a hippie corny person.

• 2:18:48Yasi Salek?

  Just like how soulful it is, how, how much import there is to friction. Authenticity or analog things require friction, right? That's part of what makes them, I think, valuable. Like, you spoke about a little bit earlier on finding music. I'm really obsessed with this idea now that we lack friction in our society.

• 2:19:08Speaker 07

  Ease and ridiculous convenience of everything.

• 2:19:11Yasi Salek?

  And it's like, a good example that I can't stop bringing up because I don't understand it, is that these songs go viral on TikTok and it'll be like a Pavement song or whatever. And these 20-year-old kids or 18-year-old kids will be like, I love Harness Your Hopes. And you'll be like, amazing. And then they never listen to one other Pavement song in their life. They don't find a song that they love and it doesn't inspire them to dig deeper. Whereas like, the minute I heard, I mean, I remember, shout out one more time to my hero Gina Arnold, who wrote a book called Route 666: On the Road to Nirvana. I was obsessed with Nirvana, like, as 11-year-olds in 1990, whatever, were. Bought this book and she had broken down all the, like, bands and movements

• 2:19:55Yasi Salek?

  that led up to allowing Nirvana to break through.

• 2:19:57Speaker 07

  Oh, cool. I can't believe I haven't read that.

• 2:19:58Yasi Salek?

  It's amazing. It's out of print now, but you can, you can get the copies. It's wonderful. And it's from a, I never knew you could be a woman and talk about things, talk about rock music from a personal lens. Like, she basically made this possible. But she wrote about The Replacements, she wrote about Fugazi, and I would take my little allowance money to the warehouse music and buy those records. Because friction, like, I dug. I wanted to find it. And it meant so much to me. And now I'm just like, so sorry, there is a question in here. My question is, do you feel that we can regain any of what we've lost?

• 2:20:30Speaker 07

  Of course, but it's a matter, you have to be conscious and self-aware of how you are living. And by reading this book and understanding how all these chance, wild things happen to me, the ease of the phone and the connectivity of just through here is not going to get you to that magic carpet ride. Yes, I think that people can make conscious decisions on how to, like, follow an analog gut and not follow the algorithm. So I think that people just. But obviously, the concern is if people are like raised with the dependency on the machine, it's hard to, but I think, I believe the analog is so deep, deep, deep within

• 2:21:11Speaker 07

  for thousands and thousands of years, that yeah, you know, there, and there's a rise of like awareness of it. And there's like, hopefully some crooks will go to prison for destroying kids' lives with this. But yeah, I think that what's funny is I thought you were going to go somewhere else with the friction, which is the astrology parallels I describe again, because we were, we went into psychic things. I'm not, don't want to alienate the non astrology, non ghost people out there. Every episode of this podcast, like they're here for the ride. What sign are you? I'm a Taurus. Oh, cool. Double Taurus, actually. Yeah, love. But I'm going to read you this simple line. I'm a Pisces. Kurt Cobain

• 2:21:55Speaker 07

  was a Pisces. Billy Corgan and I share the same birthday. And later, I would learn that Pisces represents the end of the life cycle, connecting the material world to the afterlife and divine. The sign is symbolized by two fish tied to each other's tail, one swimming upstream and the one other one swimming downstream. This duality would come to define me even more than the narratives and details of my mortal life. I have always been torn between the mortal and ethereal sides of myself. How to live on both sides. This inner conflict has always defined me. And I was beginning to believe it defined my generation. That's

• 2:22:37Speaker 07

  what I thought you meant by the conflict, because it was the before and after of the way we lived. Yeah. That our earthly way of living, pre-digital takeover, and then the crossover, and our generation being the ones who have lived at half and half, we are embodying two ways of living. Right. And I've seen that as a very similar thing that I just naturally resonate with is like, how do you try to do both? And how do you find the peace between? But that that tension?

• 2:23:10Speaker 07

  Is what made our youth movement exciting and is what makes me both a seeker and a futurist and a past like nostalgia person. Like I have high hopes of where we can go. But I also really love where we were. And I rely on that duality to give me good perspective of where we are right now.

• 2:23:31Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, no, I agree. I think that, you know, it's all it's all pendulum. Stuff, you know, like we're gonna, you already see it happening, like with the rise in people getting those bricks for their phones. And these apps.

• 2:23:46Speaker 07

  Light phones and.

• 2:23:47Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, exactly. So you can tell people are hungry.

• 2:23:51Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 2:23:51Yasi Salek?

  For freedom from the way they're living. And so I'm interested to see what's gonna happen and just I guess I'm a little sad at like the casualties along the way, but.

• 2:24:01Speaker 07

  Tragic.

• 2:24:02Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, but.

• 2:24:03Speaker 07

  Not to mention the casualties of kids who got drugs on Snapchat that died. Like all, I mean, you know, the combination of tech and this terrible drug thing is like a real deal.

• 2:24:13Yasi Salek?

  It's crazy. Yeah, it's gonna be interesting to see now what also what happens with AI because I have an interesting take on AI that I don't think a lot of people like. But I I kind of feel like the train has left the station and it's gonna be like if you were in 1994 being like, I won't use. I'll just not be using email. I'll see you at the post office. Okay, that's like not, you know, but I think like with everything else, it's a good. I think where we always go wrong is we stick our head in the sand. And it's like, actually, what you have to do is be rigorous. Like you have to rigorously check in with yourself and what are your motivations? What are you doing? Are you gonna use AI to what end?

• 2:24:57Yasi Salek?

  Like there's that crazy study that they did that people that used AI for five days, these study subjects had diminished creativity. They for creative tasks specifically had diminished creativity for months afterwards. It's incredibly damaging in that way. So again, if you're gonna use it that way, you do whatever you want, right?

• 2:25:14Speaker 07

  Social media, just like normal, not even AI is diminishing people's ability to function.

• 2:25:19Yasi Salek?

  To focus.

• 2:25:20Speaker 07

  Like brains are being scanned and seeing like.

• 2:25:22Yasi Salek?

  Be be aware, know what you're doing and be disciplined with yourself. But I do think it's like. Opting out is almost not having to self-examine. And it's better always.

• 2:25:33Speaker 07

  I agree.

• 2:25:33Yasi Salek?

  Whenever we can self-examine.

• 2:25:35Speaker 07

  Everything in moderation.

• 2:25:36Yasi Salek?

  It's better. Yeah.

• 2:25:37Speaker 07

  Absolutely. Function within what the current society is. Adapt.

• 2:25:42Yasi Salek?

  Exactly. Like, we're not like, we're like, go be a Luddite and live in off the grid or whatever.

• 2:25:46Speaker 07

  And I support that.

• 2:25:47Yasi Salek?

  Which you can, if you want.

• 2:25:48Speaker 07

  I support that, and I have friends.

• 2:25:50Yasi Salek?

  Sounds cool, to be honest. Yeah, would love to grow my own food or whatever.

• 2:25:52Speaker 07

  And I have friends that do that, and I'm all for it. And I like that back to the tension. I like both. I want to be adaptable and be able to see the beauty in both sides. And I am also a dual citizen of Canadian and American heritage.

• 2:26:08Yasi Salek?

  It's always, always the two fish.

• 2:26:10Speaker 07

  Yes, exactly.

• 2:26:11Yasi Salek?

  Melissa Oftermar, this was so wonderful. Thank you for coming on the pod and talking about your book and all the cool things that you experienced. It was a big honor for me.

• 2:26:19Speaker 07

  Yep, I'll be back one day.

• 2:26:23Yasi Salek?

  Come back next week for a new episode of Bandplain.

• 2:26:32Yasi Salek?

  If you liked what you heard today, subscribe for more episodes of Bandplain. Our guests today were Patrick Sandberg and Melissa Oftermar. This episode was produced by Rob Sunderland and edited by Adrian Bridges with help from Justin Sales. Video production by Jacob Cornet. Executive producers for Bandplain are Gina Dalvak and me, Yasi Salek. Our gorgeous and catchy theme song was composed and performed by Bethany Cosentino and Jennifer Clavitt, and graciously recorded by Carlos Del Garza in Los Angeles, California. Special thanks to our producer emeritus, producer Dylan, aka Dylan Tupper Rupert, and also Sean Fantasy and The Goop Kitchen. Come back every Thursday for a new episode of Bandplain on Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

• 2:27:20Speaker 04

  I would support there being more Dunkins in the Los Angeles region.

• 2:27:25Yasi Salek?

  Do you think there's like a Starbucks lobby?

• 2:27:28Speaker 04

  Fatwa?

• 2:27:29Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, that's like, we won't allow it because we know we'll lose business.

• 2:27:33Speaker 04

  Probably.

• 2:27:35Speaker 01

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