round 1

(6) Patti Smith, “Gloria”
broke down
(11) Hole, “Gold Dust Woman”
242-200
and will play on in the second round

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on 3/9/22.

Alphabet of Desire: Ashley Naftule On Patti Smith’s “Gloria”

G.

A believer is a horse in search of a rider. In vodou a worshiper who is possessed by a Loa spirit is sometimes called a mount. To be possessed is to be ridden, the human acting as a vehicle for the divine. When the avant-garde director Maya Deren documented vodou rituals and dances in Haiti, she called her 1954 film Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. Deren had gone to Haiti to make a recording of ritual dances as an observer, but was so moved by the vodoun tradition that she became an initiate. She left the U.S. as a woman and returned as a horse.
The relationship between a spirit and its rider is the inverse of how humans deal with horses. Normally, we keep our mounts calm and form a rapport with them. We earn their trust so they’ll be willing to carry our weight. It’s different with spirits: you have to make them feel at ease so they’ll take you for a ride. You ply them with offerings of their favorite liquors and treats, maybe bribe them with a hand-rolled cigar or shiny bauble. You decorate your space with colors they like and wear the kinds of clothes they prefer, taking on their mannerisms for your own, hollowing out a space in your skull for them to make themselves at home. You say their name and sing their songs until you’re hoarse, following Aleister Crowley’s credo of “Invoke often! Inflame thyself with prayer!” You live and breathe as them until one day the spirit moves you and you are them. For a time. Until one of you throws the other off.

L.

Before “Gloria,” before Horses, before Mapplethorpe, before fame, before critical acclaim, before fucking Blue Oyster Cultists and playwrights and guitarists named after French Symbolist poets, before tours in Europe, before “Because the Night,” before THAT song that shall remain unnamed, before playing chicken with God, before Fred “Sonic” Smith, before retirement, before motherhood, before Law & Order: SVU guest appearances, before Just Kids, Patti Smith was a poet. She came to New York with dreams of making it as a decadent, renowned artist. Her heroes ran the spectrum of brows from high to low: Rimbaud, Bob Dylan, William Burroughs, Maria Callas, Brian Jones. The Beats, garage rock, and William Blake all vied for Patti’s affections but she wouldn’t commit to a single muse.
There were others who came to NYC with similar outlaw literary dreams: Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell. The three of them quickly realized that the glamourous spirit that once rode the Beats had moved on to popular music. People still fucked and feted writers but not nearly as much as they do rock stars, and besides— the musicians get better drugs and paydays. Had James Murphy written “Losing My Edge” in the early 1970’s he’d no doubt be warbling “I hear that you and your friends have sold your typewriters and bought guitars.” The spirit of rebellion didn’t want ink anymore; it hungered for electricity.
For Patti, the gateway to music was through poetry. It was through her St. Marks Poetry Project readings that she became initiated into the downtown art scene, where she first started working with her musical partner Lenny Kaye, and where she first blew that legendary raspberry at the Almighty: “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.”
“Oath,” the poem from which the opening line of Patti Smith’s “Gloria” is taken from, was originally a St. Marks solo piece. As recounted in Ray Padgett’s Cover Me: The Stories Behind the Greatest Cover Songs of All Time, Patti’s performances of “Oath” took on many different forms before it got merged into “Gloria.” The daughter of a Catholic mother and a father who “used to blasphemy and swear against God,” “Oath” is a hard dismount of her past, kicking off Jesus with a dismissive “I am giving you the good-bye/Firing you tonight.” With Lenny Kaye accompanying her on guitar at her readings, Patti heard her future career taking shape one power chord at a time.

O.

“Gloria” is not a cover in the conventional sense. It is a bricolage, a hybrid of the original Them song and Patti’s poetry. “Gloria” is not a cover, it is a hijacking. It changes the original so profoundly that it usurps it, renders it anemic in comparison. Through some kind of artistic time paradox the very existence of Patti Smith’s “Gloria’ has turned the original song into a cover of its own cover. The Them song feels naked without the (many) alterations Smith added to Van Morrison’s song: the “humping on the parking meter,” the stadium full of screaming fans, the tower bell chiming tick-tock tick-tock, “oh my god it’s midnight,” the piano notes that are perfectly timed to mimic knocking as she sings “she’s knocking on my door.” The one thing Van Morrison’s original version has going for it is Morrison’s feral vocals, all full of lusty swagger—the sound of a man who’s so horny it causes him searing pain.
Patti has done these kinds of rewrite covers before: her debut single was a heavily Pattified take on “Hey Joe,” and she would also throw in some choice ad libs when doing live performances of The Who’s “My Generation.” On “Land,” the song on Horses whose ecstatic visions of waves rolling in like Arabian stallions gives her first album its name, Patti breaks up her soliloquies about switchblades and sperm coffins to do a snippet of Wilson Pickett’s “Land of 1000 Dances.” Like so many great folk art traditions, Patti wasn’t afraid to file the serial numbers off of older work and repurpose it for her own ends.
Patti wasn’t the only rock singer/poet who took liberties with “Gloria.” Jim Morrison would do his own wildman poet take on the Them classic during Doors concerts, asking the object of his affections how old she was and what school she went to. Eventually the clumsy seduction between Jim and Gloria builds to the point that she sneaks him into her room while her parents are out and Morrison, in full blustering sex god mode, intones “Now why don’t you wrap your lips around my cock, baby” (the rest of the Doors chiming in with hoots and “suck it” ike the dorkiest wingmen imaginable transforms the line from sleazy to hysterical). Morrison narrates the positioning of Gloria’s lithe limbs around his body like he’s doing play-by-play commentary for a game of Twister. None of his additions to the “Gloria” canon seem essential or even necessary—all the luridness he makes explicit in his version is plainly evident in Van Morrison’s voracious, leering vocals.
Patti’s contributions are far more unexpected and poetic. Beginning the song with a soft piano intro, she sings her famous brush-off to the Lord before the rest of the band joins in. Patti doesn’t change the gender of the narrator or Gloria, singing the song as a woman in a man’s body—which gives the song its off-kilter energy, like an 80’s body-swap film where a woman turns into Van Morrison and immediately goes into horny cartoon wolf mode. The song sways and lurches in its tempo as it struggles to find a shape that will contain it, much in the way that Patti as a singer seems to be teasing out the possibilities of being a male character—taking both the song itself and masculinity out for a bumpy joyride.
“I can’t write about a man, because I’m under his thumb, but a woman I can be male with. I can use her as my muse,” Smith said in Please Kill Me. She would later tell The Observer that she “enjoyed doing transgender songs. That’s something I learnt from Joan Baez, who often sang songs that had a male point of view. No, my work does not reflect my sexual preferences, it reflects the fact that I feel total freedom as an artist.”
The Gloria in the two Morrison versions of the song is a sexual conquest, an object of desire to own and tell the world about (and in Jim Morrison’s case, someone to patronize: “why did you show me your thing, babe”). Patti’s Gloria is more complicated. The singer almost seems afraid of her, intimidated by how wild Gloria is—the sweet young thing enters the song’s orbit humping on parking meters, as uninhibited as Darling Nikki under a magazine. Listen to the strain on Patti’s voice when she sings about “her pretty red dress,” the tremulous gasp of someone who wants something so badly and is afraid they’re going to get it. Smith’s Gloria is a figure of lust and awe, a challenge, a free spirit looking for a body to call home.
When we finally get to the chorus, the guitars and drums gallop as they rush headlong into Smith’s invocation of her lover, inflaming herself with the letters of her name. You can hear the roles shifting as she gnaws and spits out each hickie-mangled letter: she goes from prey to hunter, from deer-in-the-headlights to speeding Cadillac, from horse to rider. Smith’s “G-L-O-R-I-A” is her victory lap, celebrating her freedom from God, from the rules and regulations of Man, from gender itself.
For Van Morrison and Jim Morrison, the song is about a man finding himself by fucking a woman. For Patti Smith, “Gloria” is about a woman finding herself by being a man fucking a woman,

R.

God, sex, and the liberatory power of rock & roll are the animating spirits behind “Gloria.” You can hear Patti wrestling with this trinity in “Piss Factory,” the B-side to her debut single. The Patti in "Piss Factory" is a "speedo motorcycle,” a fast worker whose productivity rate is too high for the pipe factory that’s paying her “screwed up the ass” wages. Browbeaten by her floor boss and by a “real Catholic” coworker who threatens to beat her in the bathroom if she keeps throwing off their quota, Patti daydreams about bringing a radio to work so she can listen to James Brown scream and sigh instead of the mechanized chorus grinding around her. She steals glances at the nuns living in a convent near the factory. “They look pretty damn free down there,” she croons. “Not having to worry about the dogma of labor.” It’s like Dylan says: You gotta serve somebody. At least you don’t get your hands burnt up in God’s factory.
Patti sees a final escape hatch in the form of gender. “I would rather smell the way boys smell,” she snarls as the music thrashes behind her like factory equipment struggling to meet a rush order. She rhapsodizes about the “forbidden acrid smell” of “roses and ammonia” that rise from their drooping dicks, lamenting that all she can smell is the “pink clammy lady” odor of the women laboring around her—hardened, dead-end women with “no teeth or gum or cranium.” She wants the freedom the bad boys sitting in the back of class have—not by enjoying it vicariously through fucking them or hanging on their arms but by taking their cockiness, their who-gives-a-shit swagger, for herself.
“Gloria” is this Promethean moment for Patti, where she steals the fire from the male artistic gods she venerates and runs with it. It’s the moment she was building up to since she arrived in New York. Reading accounts of her time in the NYC scene, it’s easy to see why people accused her of being a careerist: laser-focused on emulating her heroes, hob-nobbing with Warhol at Max’s Kansas City, getting in good with all the local literary luminaries, always “on” as though she were rehearsing for the role of Patti Smith: Punk Poetess before it existed. But from a ritualist’s eye, Patti’s early years take on a different light.
Patti did what she had to do to summon the same spirits that rode Rimbaud and Brian Jones. She left her family, cut ties with her past, and started anew. She inflamed herself with the names of her heroes and invoked poetry and rock & roll as often as she could, until she could hollow herself out enough to coax the same dark angel that spread its wings over the Beats and Lautreamont and Gene Vincent to move into her. And thus the trap was sprung: she grabbed that spirit and rode it for dear life. “Gloria” and the rest of Horses is Patti trying to answer the question “am I the horse or the rider?”
The sound on Horses is unstable and manic, the band trying to keep pace with her hipster glossolalia. Compare it to the music of her fellow poet-turned-rocker Tom Verlaine, whose own masterpiece/debut Marquee Moon takes a more Apollonian approach to her Dionysian rock & verse. Marquee Moon is a twilight rollercoaster, Verlaine and Richard Lloyd’s twin guitars ascending in pristine loops and curves, sliding down through a landscape of neon signs and piss-stained floors and barroom napkin poetry. Television are Apollonian detectives—stiff, beautiful, regulated—forever running in circles after a mystery they’ll never solve.  Television’s music is as clean and dry as an unlit match. Every note on Horses is a blackened match-head.

I.

If we could resend the Voyager probe with a new golden record, it only needs two brief pieces of music to represent the whole of rock music: a vocal loop of Iggy Pop screaming “LOOOORD” at the beginning of “TV Eye” and a sample of Patti gnawing on the “I” in “Gloria” like it’s the bar on a jail cell door she’s trying to chew her way out of. Pure lust and rage, defiance and triumph, fuck-you and fuck-me all co-mingled in the briefest of exhortations from two of our greatest singers. The aliens don’t need anything else.

A.

“Jesus died for somebody’s sins, why not mine?” Patti Smith retired in 1979, playing a final concert in Florence. They normally saved “Gloria” as their closing number, but on this last concert before Smith walked away to devote herself to starting a family she made it the opening number. She also changed the opening lyric, offering up a reconciliation of sorts with the Christ she fired back at St. Mark’s.
Smith’s relationship with her fired God had changed over the intervening years. She used to do a bit during live performances of “Ain’t It Strange” where she would challenge God by taunting “C’mon, God, make a move” and start spinning onstage. During a show in Tampa in 1977, her game of chicken with God finally sent her sailing over a cliff—Smith tripped over a speaker while dancing and fell 15 feet into a cement orchestra pit. A freak accident or divine intervention, it had the effect of sidelining Patti and her band right as the punk scene they helped foment in New York went global.
Smith’s late 70’s embrace of faith and family seems baffling at first. So much of her artistic life was a refutation of both traditional religion and domesticity. Her fear of being trapped in another piss factory with real Catholic shithead coworkers fueled her drive. For someone who seemed to devote every waking hour to becoming a rock star, who devoted an entire verse in “Gloria” to the fantasy of rocking a stadium where all the girls are there to scream her name, giving that all up is confounding.
But try to imagine being laid up for a year, recuperating from a fall that nearly crippled you. You think of all your heroes, and how so many of them died young: Jones, Hendrix, Joplin, Rimbaud. The spirit rode them hard and stabled them under six feet of dirt. That’s the trade-off if you stay a horse in the art world for too long: you could end up dying face down in a pool or waste away delirious & one-legged in a hospital in Marseilles.
Faced with the prospect of going from “Piss Factory” to the glue factory, surrounded by scene peers like the Dead Boys who were busy living up to their names, a second act staged around faith and family must have looked like a pretty safe bet. If having a brief Godly face turn was good enough for Bob Dylan, who could blame Patti for wanting to steal one more move from his playbook? And so Patti completed her personal concert tour of Damascus, going from Saul of Tarsus to Saint Paul in just four albums.

P-A-T-T-I

The spirits move in and out of the world, taking their laps on borrowed legs when the right person comes along. Some of their horses die, some are forgotten, and a few are as eternal as Muybridge’s race horse—their grace and power preserved in snapshots by their works on this Earth. Horses, Radio Ethiopia, Easter, and Wave endure because they sound like nothing else. They are messy and beautiful and sometimes they over-reach and fall into orchestra pits. But they all come a distant second before “Gloria,” one of the greatest acts of homage and vandalism ever recorded.
Dave Barry once joked that "if you drop a guitar down a flight of stairs, it'll play "Gloria" on its way to the bottom." At the time he made that joke he was referring to the Them song. Drop a guitar down a flight of stairs today and you’ll hear a different voice echoing out of that hollow body. And her name is, and her name is, and her name is—

Ashley Naftule is a resident playwright and the Associate Artistic Director at Space55 theatre in downtown Phoenix. They’ve written and produced five full-length plays: Ear, The First Annual Bookburners Convention, The Canterbury Tarot, Radio Free Europa, and The Hidden Sea. Their next play, Peppermint Beehive, is set to premiere this summer. As a freelance journalist, their work has been published in The AV Club, Pitchfork, Daily Bandcamp, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Vice, Fanbyte, The Outline, Longreads, Phoenix New Times, Echo Magazine, The Arizona Republic, and The Cleveland Review of Books. Their short fiction has been published in Coffin Bell Journal, AEther/Ichor, The Molotov Cocktail, Cabinet of Heed, Grasslimb, Dark City Mystery Magazine, Hypnopomp, Write Ahead/The Future Looms, and Planet Scumm . Their micropoetry chapbooks Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth and Epoch & Olivetti Sing All The Hits are available (respectively) via Rinky Dinky Press and Ghost City Press. Despite the uncanny resemblance, Ashley bears no relation to country singer Vince Gill nor is in any way an evil Vince Gill doppelganger that escaped from The Black Lodge.

Cori Winrock on hole’s “gold dust woman”

     I want to start a band. My influences are Big Black, Sonic Youth, and Fleetwood Mac.
—Courtney Love’s 1989 ad for bandmates

Liner Notes ♥

The year is: mid-90s. The internet does not exist in our homes. We are a group of girl-identifying about-to-be teenagers that actually get bored and find ways to entertain ourselves by doing things like sneaking out and streaking shirtless in the neighborhood at night with glow-in-the-dark paint on our bodies while ding-dong ditching houses. We call ourselves the Bare Breasted Bandits, aka the BBB—the acronym we fingerpaint across ourselves. We answer the door for the pizza guy with pantyhose over our heads like the singer in the “Been Caught Stealing” video. We pay for our pizza in pennies and other annoying change. We throw knives into drop ceilings to see how long it takes for them to fall. We pierce the skin between our thumb and pointer fingers. We drink Kool-Aid from pitchers we pull from each other’s fridges. We try cigarettes for the first time and pass out because no one tells us to stop inhaling. Later we find cloves and strawberry biddies and learn to smoke properly and like we mean it. Later we regret all those cigarettes. We memorize phone numbers for landlines that we don’t call landlines and carry quarters in our socks for payphones to check in with our parents. We drink Robitussin after hearing it’s supposed to be fun and then lie on our backs and give each other stomach rubs because chugging cherry cough syrup makes us feel sick. Some of us kiss the magazine-faces of musicians we have crushes on, scotch-taped all over our walls. Some of us kiss each other’s real faces.
We love each other unguardedly and near-maniacally and so when one of us jumps off a bridge into the disgusting Erie canal that runs through the center of town, we all jump off the bridge. Local lore wants to scare us into believing the canal is full of cow carcasses rotten at the bottom and rusty shopping carts we’d get tetanus from scraping our legs on. We jump anyway. We jump to keep from being permanently called the worst of the worst, “a skirt,” by our fellow skaters, all boys, who are taunting us. We jump to avoid being caught on camera by the local channel filming our ridiculous choices for the nightly news. We jump because we are or want to be or would be braver and bigger and stupider than local lore. But we don’t want our parents to know any of it. We are unabashedly miserable and unabashedly happy and so full of longing and lostness and so pent up and so so so everything.
Our brains are full of Fuzzbox feedback and our hair is Manic Panic dyed. We run around looking like something you’d see in a post-apocalyptic aftermath, which is sometimes what it feels like to grow up in the town we’re from. We are still trying to figure out who we are when suddenly we have to figure what the f*ck it means to be in the teen male gaze or not be considered enough to be in that gaze. None of which we have language to deal with and honestly just sucks. We think someone finally gets what it means for us to live in our moment because some mid-20s male grunge/rockers are singing to our longing from cassette tapes we rewind until stripped or CDs so scratched they skip. We obsess about liner notes and lyrics. We close read every song. We’ll spend months playing raucous air instruments, chanting: We want to be Jackie Onassis / We want to wear a pair of dark sunglasses / We want to be Jackie O O O / Oh please don’t die! We sense something isn’t quite as it should be but we don’t know what it is. We can’t see that despite all our devotion we are still stuck being girls.
After enough sweaty mosh pits that we attend with our dads because we are way underage, we miraculously find our way through this dude-filled dark to a music that doesn’t just get to us but gets us. We climb down inside the velvet lining of Tori Amos’s seductive don’t-fuck-with-me piano. We are obsessed with the undone pop guitar line of Die Cheerleader’s “Pigskin Parade.” The innocent come-hither of Smut’s “Women” surging so deep into screeched fever pitch we can barely believe it. Those lungs, those drums. We find L7s deadpan dark lyrics rubbing up against their harmonized brightness. We find 7 Year Bitch and belt the opening lines of “The Scratch” as our motto. We practice screaming. We practice harmonizing in tiny bathrooms because they have the best acoustics. We sit incredibly close to each other. We have no need for inhibition. We are busy dreaming and dreaming our all-female grunge-rock riot-grrl band until it’s no longer just a vision. We finally have our instruments.

In the center of all this is Hole.

We don’t just love Hole. We are consumed. We want to be as uncaring and reckless and beautiful and ugly and gross and grrl and somehow do something new with our music. We want to bleach our hair and rock slurred mascara that reflects our indifference to revealing our feelings. We want to show everyone, but especially the annoying boys in punk bands in this town, that we have somewhere to go and people to be that are not just the punchline vaginas of their whacking off jokes. We don’t say these things. We embody them. With instruments and attitudes. We are innocent and aggressive. We name our band after a comment about the Botticelli-esque qualities of Hole’s second bass player. We covet their grunge girlhood: the glitter of Built by Wendy guitar straps, mary jane doc martens, peter pan collar dresses we can only find in dELia*s catalogs and can’t afford. Because we don’t have the internet we are wildly naïve about the hard history of women in rock. About the privilege that gives primarily white grrls a chance to shout into a microphone in the first place. We and the 90s are not woke. In Western NY we’re too far from Kathleen Hannah’s DIY riot grrl uproar and its 3rd wave politics to take part until we’re properly mid-teens. We’re still twelve to fourteen. We are busy learning about identity invention. We revive the cute plastic animal hairclips from our childhoods. We middle part. We babydoll tee. We fan. We band together.
We are ready to be the girls with the most cake.

♥

♥

Nicks’s “Gold Dust Woman” finds her at her folky (not flaky)
best with one of her most poignant character studies. 
—music critic Barry Walsh

The year is 1996. Hole’s cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Gold Dust Woman” is released as their ninth CD single and as the lead song on the soundtrack for an absolute tank of a film, The Crow: City of Angels. Even with a soundtrack that sells a million copies, nothing could save the movie from being anything other than a horrible cover of the original. We walk out of the theater in the first 10 minutes.
From its opening riff, Hole’s rendition of “Gold Dust Woman” embodies the gritty erotics of the best mid-90s music—a sliding bass line, a melody played along a single string rather than as individually picked notes. It’s recognizable 90s: somehow underwater and reverberating-electric—it lures you then slow shocks you, tricks your heart into skipping along with it. Hole’s version of the final track on Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours owes as much to other songs on the album as it does to “Gold Dust Woman” itself. That opening progression rips out and repositions the driving bassline that cuts through the center of “The Chain.” Why not open at someone else’s crescendo? Hole know their Fleetwood Mac—and they’re not afraid to show off the ways this band is part of their collective consciousness.
Arriving at the last song on Rumours, to the original “Gold Dust Woman,” feels like waking inside a mirage in a warped Western—a hazy brightness of high noon heat and bending notes, an Ennio Morricone composition coming gorgeously undone. It is somehow a country tune gone folk gone new age gone gothic rock. And somehow it works. At the center of this genre-collage is Stevie Nicks—that great witchy queen, her voice of gold. The embodiment of mysterious female woo-woo 70s goth aesthetic with an America’s sweetheart palatability: harmonic, blonde, almost believably incarnating a black widow’s darkness for the sake of a song. In a few years Nicks will still be the music budding punk girls are listening to alone in their bedrooms but not admitting to it. She’s paving the way for female-lead rock bands like Hole to take the stage. Unlike Nicks, Love and Schemel and Auf Der Maur and even Erlandson will be allowed to be grrl enough to publicly admit to wanting both worlds: to empower us to play mean guitars and sing while also inviting us to cry our eyes out in the mosh pit.

♥

Two years before Hole’s “Gold Dust Woman” comes out, we see them play a show in Rochester, NY—an early stop on their delayed tour to support their second album, Live Through This, which debuts three days after Courtney Love’s infamous husband’s suicide. But we’re keeping the husband out of this. We’re here for the band. Offstage Love is clearly visible, Francis Bean in her arms in a fuzzy leopard print coat and oversized earmuffs. We are in awe of our proximity to our music gods—one standing there in a see-through slip dress, frilly white underwear and patent leather black pumps, just holding her baby. Everything is electric and sticky and a little dangerous in the mosh pit. Hole’s harmonizing and howling through the amps reverberating in our chests.
Halfway through the show Love throws herself into the arms of the crowd and we carry her like a rock goddess that will save us from our town and our time’s rampant sexism while the rest of the band sends grunge grrl punkrock feedback through our bodies. When Love’s back at the mic she’s screaming full throttle, accusing someone of ripping off her dead husband’s locket and punching her mid-ride. It’s a performance of fucked up and fucked over lover, bad woman and bad mother, the messy and real, the grieving and aggrieved widow. As the frontwoman of this album, Love is living through this in real time—promoting an album critics and fans have run through a retrospective elegiac machine, turning every lyric into a roadmap to that inevitable suicide (and a second unexpected one). The entire tour Hole will have to keep grieving on stage before a live audience and still somehow make the music central.

♥

Unlike Nicks, when Love sings Hole’s rendition of “Gold Dust Woman” she’s unabashedly backed by the voices of women. This is how even one woman’s belief she can be something she hasn’t seen exist yet shifts what’s possible for those that follow—Nicks sets off the revolution, girl style. The same song 20 years into the future—with a different backdrop, different landscape, different kind of ruin—echolocates the progress of women in rock.
Hole’s cover unveils Love having honed her grief to a serrated edge. She’s been mourning it out on stage for two years and knows exactly what the fuck she’s doing. In “Gold Dust Woman” she’s doing it exceptionally well. She’s doing it so it feels like hell. She’s doing it so it feels real. She’s not overcoming other people’s projections—of songs written with no idea they’d only ever be played in the shadow of what happened rather than as they were written, in a hopeful if desperate conditional—if you live through this with me, I swear that I will—. It’s as if, for Love, “Gold Dust Woman” begins in medias res. And she wields it. She’s not entering a character study. She’s already in it. So when the chainsaw of Love’s black widow cuts through the sugary background siren song of Schemel and Auf Der Maur’s pale shadow of a woman—we get this isn’t a rehearsal. Courtney Love is not a cover of Stevie Nicks. Love is years of living in a complicated after. And she’s starting to make space for what comes next.
By the time the cover of “Gold Dust Woman” comes out we’re a couple years older and about to come down off the high of Hole. Live Through This has gone multi-platinum and Courtney Love has been busy reinventing herself. She’s gone from the fucked-up rock mother wandering messily around the streets of Seattle, giving away her husband’s clothes and reading his suicide note, to a kind of refined goth Jackie-O-Yoko-Ono of widowhood. No longer only the epitome of bad woman, she’s nearly likable. In a few months she’ll be a Versace-wearing darling of the silver screen—nominated for a Golden Globe for her role in The People vs. Larry Flynt.   
A year later, in a 1997 article in Spin magazine, Love and Nicks dish with each other about everything from Nicks’s backstory, to life around recording music, to becoming famous. Mostly they’ll talk about how being famous makes them ridiculously rich and what that much money allows them to buy. But “Gold Dust Woman” will arrive at the end:

CL: I love the imagery in the song, when she's a dragon, and a black widow. 

SN: That just means an anger. The black widow, the dragon thing, is all about being scary and angry.

CL: But I think it's more powerful than that. A dragon is the most potent and virile symbol you can use. So applying yourself to a woman, or to yourself, or to an archetypal alter-ego self is like this power, especially if you wrote it when you were frail and frightened and maybe not as powerful as you became later. 

SN: You know what, Courtney? I don't really know what Gold Dust Woman is about. …I'm going to have to go back to my journals and see if I can pull something out about Gold Dust Woman. Because I don't really know. It can't be all about cocaine.

CL: No, I think you're bigger than that.

♥

Fleetwood Mac had a notoriously hard time getting “Gold Dust Woman” to come together in the studio. The version that makes its way onto the record is captured at 4am—Nicks wrapping everything but her mouth in a black scarf, trying to go deep into herself to find the dark center so she can sing from inside of it. And she almost finds it. By the end of the song, everything is so far flung from that center that the instruments eventually collapse together into a kind of 70s bacchanal of noise. Hole’s version offers a 90s take on some of the more boring cock-rockian elements of male guitar lines swaggering relentlessly through so many songs of the 70s—swapping them out for the interchangeability of pop power chords, a bass line carrying the melody, drums occasionally taking an instinctive center stage. There’s no fake bravado in this cover. They’re not overblowing it to show off their musical chops because they don’t have to—they know they’re that good. Unlike the Fleetwood Mac version, Hole’s doesn’t devolve into a jam session or threaten to come undone at the end. When they record it in the studio and when they play it live, their version is bigger than that. It rides itself out to the limits of feedback and then into its absence.
The thing is, Hole’s version doesn’t feel like a cover. This isn’t Love draping herself in a mourning shroud, trying to find her way to Nicks’s song’s emotional center so she can perform a Hole-sounding version of it. Love is belting out her own self-elegy. To a moment in time. To a relationship in her life. To the music that she could have made or was making that will always have been interrupted by a spectacularly famous suicide. An elegy for all those lost possible selves, holding hands like a paper doll chain. In “Gold Dust Woman,” Love is having a last word about her and her husband and what it means to be living past the aftermath. In this version the black widow has already ransacked the kingdom and is singing from the ruins. But these ruins were built and destroyed by someone else.
Every generation will have different kinds of feminist anthems. As teens we aren’t quite ready to see the ways it’s ok that we are and are not covers of our mothers. We don’t care. We aren’t caught up in your love affair.
Later that same year, Nicks will amend what she said in the interview with Love about not remembering the meaning behind the song: “Gold Dust Woman was really my kind of symbolic look at somebody going through a bad relationship, and doing a lot of drugs, and trying to just make it—trying to live—you know trying to get through it to the next thing.” Gold Dust Woman is just trying to live through this. To pick up the pieces and go home.

♥

By the time Hole releases “Gold Dust Woman” we’ll be playing basement shows and weekly gigs at the local Rock ‘N’ Bowl, where other punk teens will throw bowling balls straight toward us on a stage built between two lanes. We’ll no longer be practicing with covers of other people’s music. We’ll be paid real money to play the music we write on our own. We’ll go on to win the local Battle of the Bands, beating out the favored all-male group that, looking back, sounds a lot like Fleetwood Mac. We’ll be offered the possibility of a real recording session. But we won’t be able to make it happen. One of our parents will say being in the band is over the fun scale. One of us could be doing better in school. One of us will find out our boyfriend is writing love letters to our best friend and the fall out will mean not having a place to practice anymore. One of us really belongs as the front of her own band. We’ll be drifting apart and finding different music.
The edges of dissolution are nebulous at this age. We are embodied by the music we are loving and we move through new music new selves new loves all the time. By 1996 we can’t enter into Courtney Love’s new world and she can’t enter into ours. She’s a rockstar mother moviestar in her 30s and we can’t even drive. When Hole’s next album comes out we feel betrayed by its pop, its absence of brashness. Where are the edges? And though Love takes the band with her for a while down the road, eventually that falls apart as well. Hole is not just Courtney Love—it’s their we that makes them who they are.
For an important moment, Hole is part of our collective consciousness. “Gold Dust Woman” the last hurrah, a farewell to a particular instant in time, one that later we’ll have trouble explaining to people who weren’t there. Angst, like grief, is hard to communicate. But we don’t care. We’ve long since taken off this particular We. We listen to the feedback reverberate until it fizzes out. We don’t regret it. We were there.

♥ for Venus 478

Cori A. Winrock is still a punk grunge riot grrl in the innermost vulnerable dark Hole of her heart. She is the author of the forthcoming book-length essay, Alterations (Transit Books), and the poetry collections, Little Envelope of Earth Conditions (Alice James Books, plague year 2020) and This Coalition of Bones (Kore Press). She holds a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Utah and teaches rabid hybrid forms as an Assistant Professor at the Cleveland Institute of Art. She is equally shocked at the existence of a grainy yearbook photo of the day she got the Spin issue with Courtney Love on the cover.