WBCN
Orpheum Theater
Boston, MA
Dec 1, 1998

From a friend of Nanna!:

courtney, she even flashed us twice.. They played for a while, 1 encore in which courtney came out dressed like a show girl (kinda like the violet video-but it was pink w/sequins). They opened up w/awful, and played (in no specific order) plump, violet, doll parts, northern star, some bob dylan cover, into your arms (lemonheads cover), some song i don't know, pretty on the inside, celebrity skin, dumb, beautiful son, reasons to be beautiful, boys on the radio, heaven tonight, use once and destroy, malibu, dying, and i think that's it.

Boston Globe (Dec 12/98) (thanks Nanna!):

Checking in on the latest Courtney
By Jim Sullivan, Globe Staff, 12/02/98
Of all the curiosities out there in the rock world, none is more curious than the state of Love. As in Courtney Love, Hole's iconic lead singer-songwriter- guitarist.
Will she wear Versace, as she did in Vanity Fair? Or maybe ripped Versace? Is she a starlet? A junkie? A rebel? A poseur? Questions linger about her talent and fame - is it by merit or association? Did she ride the coattails of her late husband, Nirvana's Kurt Cobain, to the top? What about her detour into acting and Hollywood with ''The People vs. Larry Flynt''? What about her and Hole's reemergence earlier this year with the hard-edged but pop-oriented ''Celebrity Skin'' CD, a steady-selling gold album? How will this all play out live?
All these imponderables hung in the air as Hole took the stage 35 minutes late last night at the Orpheum, headlining the hottest gig of WBCN-FM's multi- venue, 31-band charity ball called the XMas Rave. The last time Hole played a local radio-sponsored gig was for WFNX-FM in 1994; someone may or may not have phoned in a death threat, but Love advanced the rumor by telling the crowd, ''If somebody's gonna shoot me onstage, what a great footnote to rock 'n' roll history. ... I don't care!'' She was not shot. Later, she shed her dress and crowd-surfed. No dress shedding and no crowd-surfing this time - at least through the point when we were forced to leave, 45 minutes in, midway through the set, to make deadline. Love did, however, drop her low-slung black velvet top twice (''How could I resist?'') and played the deranged chatty Cathy she's long been, drugs or no drugs.
Say this: Love looks good. She again blurred the line between falling apart and coming together, between playing the damaged-goods punk rock priestess and mainstream supernova. She played the nasal diva, whining at the roadies for muffing her sound mix in ''Awful'' - ''Roadie guy! Somebody fix this!''
She chewed out the industry suits who dared sit in the front rows while others stood and screamed. She praised Boston bands the Lyres and the Pixies, and she (once again!) slammed the Boston busker (Mary Lou Lord) who evidently dared to date Love's late husband, before Love and Cobain had even met. Go figure. She cooed about ''the sweetest Bostonian'' Evan Dando and covered his band the Lemonheads' ''Into Your Arms.'' She praised singer Shirley Manson, of the preceding band Garbage, as being ''a better rock star.'' Love, it seems, has no internal filtering mechanism in her head. Hole's music, though sculpted in a less abrasive fashion than it used to be, still curdles and coils. The quartet (besides Love, bassist Melissa Auf der Maur, drummer Samantha Maloney, lead guitarist Eric Erlandson) has a visceral, cathartic clout that suggests - no, demands - that whereever you come down on Love herself, you can't help but respect the raw power of which this band is capable. It was a glorious mess, with guitar chords crashing and crunching and sound meters undoubtedly ratcheting past the 120 decibel pleasure/pain threshold.
This was Hole's first US show in more than three years and if it was ragged at times - well, that's a chunk of the charm. Love brought her old self - the punk rock mess full of loathing, self and otherwise - into her latest self, which is just a bit more open to the world at large, but still largely self- fixated. But this is what a successful rock star often does. Hence, there was both liberation and folly expressed in ''Celebrity Skin'' - ''When I wake up/in my makeup ...'' - and there was the old venom of ''Miss World.'' Love is the celebrity who rages against the machine, the machine being anything that might remotely slow down the bullet train that is Love. It's to her credit that she can enrapture us so in this narcissism, to make her rocky, glamorous life one with ours for a night. She's still fascinating. Garbage preceded with an hour of electro pop and edgy rock, with Manson showing the athleticism and energy of a Spice Girl but packing 100 or so more IQ points into the mix. Like Hole, Garbage likes mixing dark thoughts with brighter music, subversion with melodic sustenance. Canadian singer Tara MacLean opened with an incongrous but at times compelling set of spiritually inclined folk-rock. (This was just the first of five radio-sponsored shows Hole is doing. They'll undertake a tour overseas in the new year and likely return to the States in the spring.)

This story ran on page F01 of the Boston Globe on 12/02/98. © Copyright 1998 Globe Newspaper Company.

From Sonicnet (thanks Nanna!) for this:

A Hole Lotta (Courtney) Love Going On At Tour Opener
Unpredictable singer was happy, sad, angry and sweet during her band's first U.S. show in four years.
Correspondent Sheril Stanford reports:

BOSTON -- The main question, when Hole played their first U.S. gig in four years Tuesday, wasn't about the music. It had more to do with Hole's roster, particularly their inimitable leader. The question was: Which version of Courtney Love would show up? In a sense, they all did: trash-talking songstress, grieving widow, confrontational punk-rocker, non-confrontational peacenik. For good measure, she also threw in rock 'n' roll history professor. But mostly, Love, who has followed a haphazard trajectory from disheveled punk-rocker to famous rock wife to acclaimed actress to model and back, seemed to want to let the crowd at Boston's Orpheum Theater know this: Courtney Love is still Courtney Love, and Courtney is as Courtney does. "It's so hard to sing a happy song! It's cool, though!" -- Courtney Love And lest anyone think that simply means wearing designer clothes and going to Hollywood parties, she led the band into Pretty on the Inside's (1991) abrasive title track (RealAudio excerpt), saying, "Picture me in a Versace gown singing this." The show was the first date of a two-week U.S. mini-tour. The band mixed plenty of material from the new Celebrity Skin with songs from its previous two albums and covers of folk-rock legend Bob Dylan ("It's All Over Now, Baby Blue") and guitar-poppers the Lemonheads ("Into Your Arms"). The sound was muddy and bass-heavy, and there were musical rough spots, but if anyone can turn forgotten chords and lyrics to her advantage, it's Love. At one point she demanded, "Take the guitar away. I can't play this song." Eric Erlandson, acting his usual low-key self, was doing the brunt of the guitar work anyway. Love wore hip-hugging leather pants, a cropped tank-top with a distractingly low neckline and a pair of beautiful black leather boots. In her inimitable way, she managed to make this fairly sophisticated outfit look like trailer-park wear. She had a huge, glittering cocktail ring on each hand, a sparkling black cuff-bracelet on her left wrist, glitter in her wavy-'n'-wild, shoulder-length blond hair, and she sported her signature baby-blue Fender Stratocaster. Love didn't disappoint those who came to the 3,000-seat theater to gawk at, admire or disparage the trash-talking, train-wreck version of her. She was caustic and confrontational from the outset. Following a tight rendition of Hole's juicy "Awful" and a ripping "Miss World," she berated three radio- station suits in the front row who wouldn't stand up. "It's f---ing boring to look at you guys!" Love yelled. Cigarette in hand, she then lit into her sound crew, demanding, "Fix this! And don't let it happen again!" She ranted at the rest of the crowd for failing "Rock History 101." "Did you people even know that was a Dylan cover?" she asked after Hole played "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue." Referring to two influential, underground rock bands from Boston, she also found time to say, "I can't f---ing believe you don't know who the Lyres are!" and, "Who here knows the Pixies? You've got to know your rock history!" But fans willing to look beyond Love's trailer-trash exterior could see an inner light shining in this year's model. Love laughed and smiled many times, prompting one fan to say, "It's so good to see her looking happy!" Love prefaced "Boys on the Radio," from Celebrity Skin, by saying, "OK, this is a goddamn pop song coming up, but it's a f---ing good one!" Later, grinning after the tambourine-laden "Heaven Tonight," she proclaimed, "It's so hard to sing a happy song! It's cool, though! It's kind-of fun!" She didn't shy away from her sad songs, though. "Dying" evoked the specter of late husband, Nirvana leader Kurt Cobain, with its themes of loss and loneliness and the line, "I want to be under your skin." Love sang it draped over the mic stand and surrounded by cigarette smoke. Another poignant moment was Love's emotional delivery of the new single, "Malibu" (RealAudio excerpt), in which she sang, "Oh come on, be alive again, don't lay down and die. ... Get well soon, please don't go any higher." By song's end there were tears in her eyes. It was a night of mixed signals. At one point, Love recalled slugging her old nemesis, folk-rocker Mary Lou Lord -- a Boston busker who had a brief fling with Cobain -- and the crowd cheered. Love chided: "No, no, it's not so good that I clocked her. It's not good to want confrontation." But earlier, addressing a heckler, she said, "What was that? Did I hear some confrontation? I would LOVE some confrontation." For Hole's encore, Love returned in a dusty-pink number that looked like a figure-skating outfit, complete with feather bustle and sparkly, nude tights -- definitely not a Versace ensemble. "Does this look stupid?" she asked. Hole closed with the transcendent new tune "Northern Star," followed by an extended version of "Violet," off their previous album, Live Through This. By the end, Erlandson was on the floor in a fetal position, banging on his guitar. Love continued to thrash randomly at her Strat long after drummer Samantha Maloney tossed her sticks into the crow d and bassist Melissa auf der Maur walked offstage. Finally, in a storm of dissonance and feedback, Erlandson tossed his guitar over his shoulder and exited stage right with Love sashaying behind him, trailing a faded-pink feather boa. She was something like a luxury sports car speeding expertly down a twisting mountain road -- filled with risk, a trifle dangerous, a little scary, and yet totally in control.

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