Background
Hole formed in 1989 in Los Angeles, California when frontwoman Courtney Love, after years of fruitless attempts at forming bands, bought her neighbor Lisa Roberts a bass and posted an advertisement in local fanzine Flipside stating: "I want to start a band. My influences are Big Black, Sonic Youth, and Fleetwood Mac". Eric Erlandson, along with over a dozen other musicians, answered the ad. Love later said that she knew Eric was "the one" as soon as they met, and that he had a "Thurston Moore quality about him" that she liked.
Erlandson said that early in Hole's career, they were more interested in "making noise" than achieving success and before drummer Caroline Rue joined the band that they used no percussion whatsoever. It was not until Love and Erlandson heard Mudhoney's "Touch Me, I'm Sick" that they began to think about taking the band to the next level. Early on, the band was most influenced by the New York No Wave art and music scene of the 1980s, which included visual artists, such as Richard Kern, as well as scuzz rock acts, such as Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Sonic Youth, and Pussy Galore. The band also featured a third guitarist in its early days, first Mike Geisbrecht and then Errol Stewart. After the band's first four shows, the original lineup disbanded and Hole recruited bassist Jill Emery in 1990.
In the documentary film Not Bad for a Girl, Love, who had been in the erotic dancing industry for years prior, said that she worked as a stripper to help support the band in its early incarnation. She also cited her work as a dancer as being one of many inspirations for the songs on Pretty on the Inside: "I was blonde, wore makeup, had to support my band by dancing, and had to play this ridiculous archetype at work... so I took, you know, high heels and white pumps, and I had a wiglet—I just took that and messed with it."
Read more about this topic: Pretty On The Inside
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—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)