San Jose Event Center
San Jose, CA
Dec 10, 1998

From Sonicnet (Thanks Nanna!):
Not So Silent Night' Is A Hole-y Night
All-star holiday show featured sets from Garbage, Offspring, Cake, Rancid, Everlast and Courtney Love at her best. Senior Writer Gil Kaufman reports:
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Hole leader Courtney Love was clearly in the giving spirit Thursday night. As part of the all-star Live 105 (105.3 FM)-sponsored "Not So Silent Night" concert at the San Jose Events Center, Love gave and gave during her band's 40-minute performance. She may have even gone a little overboard in getting into the spirit of the season. The nouveau glam-rocker offered the crowd everything from glimpses of her ample bosom to a sliver of fur from the Seattle mansion she once shared with her late husband, Nirvana leader Kurt Cobain. The greatest gift of all, however, was a baby-blue electric guitar that the singer chucked into the roiling crowd at set's end, causing a near riot as fans clamored for the instrument. "Give it to the girl!" -- Courtney Love, Hole singer "It was crazy," said 33-year-old Lynne Christiansen -- a longtime Hole fan who was nursing an ugly black-and-blue bite mark on her upper thigh as a result of the mad crush to capture Love's guitar. Christiansen, attending the show with her 17-year-old daughter, said she acquired the battle scar while trying to help the young girl hand-picked by Love obtain the coveted six-stringed collectible. The five-hour show also featured sets from bluesy rapper Everlast, boho-pop band Soul Coughing, tongue-in-cheek party-rockers Cake, fey techno-rock group Garbage, neo-punk crowd-pleasers the Offspring and the headliners, ska-punk quartet Rancid. But Love created the most havoc. "Give it to the girl!" the extroverted singer screeched as she gave the umpteenth up-tug to her downsliding black halter dress. "I want that blond girl to have it! You skinhead boys get away!" But it was not to be. Friends of the waifish, 14-year-old blonde whom Love had targeted for the guitar said their friend ended up empty-handed despite Love's demands. During the band's see-saw set of post-grunge pop songs, Love repeatedly baited the "8-year-olds" in the sold-out 7,200-strong audience about their love for the Spice Girls and rapper Snoop Dogg. Mixed with the flashing and the flying guitar, it made for quite a stage show. it was Love who stole the show. Proclaiming "grunge is dead," Love and Hole tore through such newer songs as "Awful" (RealAudio excerpt), "Malibu," "Celebrity Skin" and a thoughtful, acoustic version of "Northern Star" with guitarist Eric Erlandson. They delighted the crowd with older favorites, such as "Doll Parts," and ended with a violent thrash through "Violet." Cursing, chatting aimlessly between songs, taunting the audience, Love frequently struck her trademark provocative pose: one leg up on the monitor, her skirt flapping open, but with uncharacteristically modest panty hose on underneath. Still, judged against the other acts' fairly staid singers, Love's antics seemed outrageous. For better or worse, her persona fell somewhere between Bette Midler's party-hearty rock singer in the movie "The Rose" and what one fan referred to as "a grunge Joan Rivers."

From SF Chronicle - Dec 12 by Neva Chonin (Thanks Nanna!):
A HOLE In HER SOUL
From the moment she charged onstage at the Event Center at San Jose State Univ. Thursday night, Courtney Love let the crowd know she still had some fire in her veins, despite her pink lipstick and matching guitar. "You better f--- mosh for us like you did for the Offspring, or I'll kick your ass," the singer warned the sold out crowd at Live105's Not So SIlent Night Christmas concert, which also included short sets from Rancid, Garbage, Cake, Everlast, and Soul Coughing. In front of the stage, an anry of 12 year old girls squealing "Cooouuurrtnney!" moshed on command. But in contrast to the preceeding Offspring set, which transformed every body on the floor into a giddily misfiring piston, Love and her band, Hole, could only inspire it's own fan-girls and boys to get into the groove. The rest of the crowd simply stood and gawked at the singer as if she were a 2 dimensional TV character, which, for many of them, is exactly what she is. Love-she of the overexposed body and limited body of work- is under pressure to woo those disinterested voyeurs. As 1998 winds down, the stardom that began with her brilliant 1994 album "Live Through This" and climaxed with her award-winning performance in Milos Forman's "People Vs Larry Flint" is flickering close to extinction. Her lastest film for Forman, an Andy Kauffman biography starring Jim Carrey, will either resurrect her film career or bury it. ...Throughout Hole's 45 minute set- one of only a few the band will have played in 1998-the spotlight wasn't on Love's music so much as her breasts, which insisted on popping out of her ridiculously low-cut evening sheath. Even when they stayed put, they were relentlessly carressed and squeezed by their owner, who seems incapable of leaving her stripper days behind and for whom musical performance seems to have become an excuse for auto-erotic exhibitionism. The set's 2nd song was a sure crowd pleaser, "Miss World," whose anthemic refrain soon had every fan in the house singing along. And when a plastic bag of white powder-salt? non-dairy creamer? was tossed onstage as a testament to her druggy past, she used it as an opportunity to win over the crowd by poking fun at herself. Dumping the contents on stage, she quipped,"Don't do that shit. I mean, look what it did to my face.:" The comment, addressing rumors of her extensive plastic surgery, won appreciative applause. But such moments were rare. It matters little that Hole's volatile singer is clean and sober. For Love, Love is the drug, and she was flying high in her own trippy world on Thursday night. She diluted the visceral punch of "Dying" and "Northers Star" with self-conscious gestures. Hands over heart, eyes raised heaven-ward, at times she looked like the heroine of some soppy fin de siecle tearjerker more than a rock star. To be fair, when she cut the acting, she shined. Especailly impressive were the current singles "Malibu" and "Celebrity Skin" and her signature track "Doll Parts., for which she cut loose with all the sound and fury of the messy-but-brilliant Courtney of 94. The rest of Hole-bassist Melissa AufDerMaur, long suffering guitarist Eric Erlandson and new drummer Samantha Maloney- simply held the fort down. A solid trio, they suffered, particularly on the newer material, from Love's unwillingness to stop gesticulating long enough to play her guitar. In many ways Love is the Norma Desmond of the 90s, overblown, overwrought, and stubbornly narcissistic. Whether she shares the fate of the fading star from "Sunset Blvd" remains to be seen. She has the will to fame, but when she's ready for her close-up, will anyone bother?

From Rolling Stone - Dec 16/98 by Marlene Goldman (Thanks Emmet!):
Not So Silent Night
San Jose Event Center, San Jose, Calif., Dec. 10, 1998
Until Courtney Love nabbed centerstage at the Live 105 "Not So Silent Night" radio station Christmas extravaganza, the night was rather predictable. Reputable "alt rock" chart toppers stuck to their twenty-minute or half-hour sets, appeasing the sold-out, all ages (read: adolescent) crowd with brief banter and punchy sets. But by now fans have come to expect Love's snide irreverence, and to that end she did not disappoint. Love stormed out, twirled around, flicked her cigarette away and assumed her crotch-revealing leg-on-the-monitor pose. The band promptly fired off "Miss World" followed by a succession of mildly jarring tracks from her band's latest effort, Celebrity Skin -- the title track and current hit "Malibu" being the most distinctive. But Hole's music, which pinnacled with a primal, emotive version of "Doll Parts," was just part of the gig. More memorable was the spectacle of Love's uncensored showmanship (including flashing her breasts, which were barely covered by her scant black dress) at a time when radio-friendly bands are barely distinguishable, let alone demanding of the spotlight. With feline rock reflexes, Love seized opportunities to mock the crowd. A bag full of a powdery substance was thrown onstage and Love picked it up. "Oh look someone threw fake drugs onstage. How about we give it to the police? Or maybe I'll just dump it out," which she proceeded to do. She also quipped, "I see eight-year-olds who know all the words to these songs. It scares me. It's like the Spice Girls." Then Love egged on the audience, telling them to scream curse words since the show was being broadcast live. At the finale, Love refused to leave the stage after hurling her guitar, inscribed with the word "Dork," into the crowd. When a guy caught it, Love screamed incessantly, "Give it to a girl." When she was finally satisfied that a girl would take home the trophy, she left the stage, and much of the 7,000 or so in attendance exited the building before the last band, Rancid, had a chance to take the reins. Preceding Hole, a slew of Live 105 hit-makers revved up the crowd. Everlast grooved things into gear with about fifteen minutes of tracks from the rapper's toned-down foray, Whitey Ford Sings the Blues. Soul Coughing added a slice of tension with M. Doughty pacing around like a caged animal. The New York hipsters ended their brief set with a jazzed up "Super Bon Bon," with Doughty pounding his fists in the air and getting the audience riled as he urged participation: "Say candy bar ... now scream." Cake sauntered onstage with singer John McCrea sporting a fishing hat, shades and a dime-store guitar. The band's low-key set, including their mariachi-style cover of "I Will Survive," lagged in the big arena setting, as fans waited for "The Distance." They never got it, but Cake did please with their more recent radio score "Never There." During Garbage's set, an enigmatic Shirley Manson picked up the pace by working the stage with pure energy. Drummer/uber-producer Butch Vig and crew ran through a tight set laced with Garbage's hits like "I Think I'm Paranoid," "Push It" and "Stupid Girl," leaving the crowd longing for more. Meanwhile, the Offspring's generic sounds failed to spark. Singer Dexter Holland announced he had lost his voice that day, and, perhaps as a result, "Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)" from their latest, Americana, sounded especially limp. The band and crowd did spring to life with stand-bys "Come Out and Play" and "Self Esteem." Rancid, on the other hand, proved their musical integrity runs deeper than just "Time Bomb." Unfortunately, the elongated Hole set pushed the clock past most of the kids' curfews, while others were too exhausted to stay. There was also some delay while the Event Center crew sought help for an injured fan. But Rancid forged on in true punk fashion and blasted through rave-ups like "Hooligans," "Roots Radicals" and "Ruby Soho." The foursome ended with a rousing cover of Sham 69's punk anthem "The Kids Are United" while a young fan pogo-ed onstage next to them. It was just unfortunate most of the kids were out the door.

Back to All Around the Hole World main page