'Kristen Hovers At The Edge': Excerpt from 'I Know How To Live': The Life of Kristen Pfaff via 3AM Magazine
This is the first chapter from ‘I Know How To Live’: The Life of Kristen Pfaff by Guy Mankowski (with an afterword by Jason Pfaff).
It’s 1993, and a teeming English summer afternoon. A crowd sways in front of the stage. The singer wears a guitar over her grey trench coat. Smoke flows through her hair as she waves her lit cigarette at the crowd. A man in the crowd shouts, with contempt, ‘she’s dyed her hair!’ There’s a woman next to her in a black miniskirt, carrying a black bass with the confidence of one who treats it as an appendage. The black hair that obscures her face is somehow more convincing than that of the singer, who doesn’t look at her. The singer strums, her singing inaudible at first and the woman to her right winds her mike stand, plectrum in her mouth. There’s a sense of growing conviction about her. Ear-splitting feedback. A sense of occasion, the clenched body language of a band determined to prove themselves to this huge crowd at The Phoenix Festival. Fatima Mansions have had their turn, and next will be House of Pain. Floating above the bodies is a sense of wooziness, of a drink and drug-infused crowd, full of expectation but ready to cut loose.
On the other side of the singer a man with a toothpaste-mint guitar wearing the plastic sunglasses Kurt Cobain made famous-starts picking out a dry riff. The drums erupt; cymbals flash. The woman at the singer’s right is now in her element, arching back as she deftly picks out the bass line that forms the spine of this song. It’s ‘Credit In The Straight World’, off Hole’s ‘Live Through This’. An album the world is yet to hear, but performed with the belief of players who know they’ve made something great. That belief is there in the drummer’s flourishes, her bass drum keeping the crowd moshing in time. It is there in the small smile of the guitarist, his expression unreadable behind those sunglasses. But despite that we can sense a band in conflict — it’s there in the lack of eye contact between them. The song is from an album that Rolling Stone will come to call one of the greatest albums of all time.
The singer tears off her wig, revealing the distinctive peroxide blonde locks and scowl of Courtney Love. The crowd reacts — with recognition, derision, devotion. At the heart of this caterwaul of sound, in the grainy footage that portrays it all, is Kristen Pfaff. Kohl eyed, black-haired, her face finally revealed as she throws her head back and plays.
Kristen Pfaff was unusual. She was someone who, throughout her life, ingratiated herself into new situations that turned out to be influential, and she often became the figurehead of such situations as a result of her natural talents. But on her diary tapes, dark undercurrents within her are revealed. People predominantly know Pfaff for dying of a heroin overdose at 27, but not of the undercurrents which might have led to that. Before writing this book I carried the same misconceptions.
As part of the hugely successful band Hole, during their acclaimed Live Through This era, Pfaff made her creative mark on the world whilst in a highly intense and complex situation. Her band’s leader, Courtney Love, was married to Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, a band that had seized the zeitgeist. It was an inter-band situation, fused by marriage, in which immense, impactful artistry was strongly entwined with intimacy. The power of the work being produced both in the Hole and Nirvana camp — and the ensuing tragedies that would befall both — lead to contradictory accounts from figures within it. Figures known for having been adept at mythologising themselves in a situation which needs no further mythologising.
There was a lot to unravel.
Fans were electrified by Pfaff. Kurt Cobain was — as we will see — in awe of her as a person, and in awe of her artistry. As close friends of Pfaff’s (who have not been on record before) reveal, Cobain and Pfaff secretly considered each other equals in a scene in which people were loath to concede much to others when the spotlight was offering so much. Pfaff suffered from certain people dismissing and denigrating her talents, or from feeling threatened by her. People feared Pfaff’s power. But Pfaff had personal power in spades and was shrewd about deploying it. Her activism helped bring in initiatives that made her university a safer place for women. She brought to Hole’s first hit single the chorus lyrics. People often remarked about falling instantly in love with her; it was a refrain no biographer would anticipate hearing so often. Students who she taught once in classes travelled across the country to attend her funeral, knowing no one else there. But she also suffered extraordinarily, unfairly. From scoliosis, forcing her to wear a metal brace. From being abandoned, unappreciated, from addiction and — we have learnt — terrible bulimia.
There had always been something fascinating about this elusive figure. I had wanted to write a book about Kristen Pfaff for a long time, without really knowing why. The motivation to do so only deepened when the obtuseness of the reporting about her life became apparent to me. Pfaff is often dismissed as another member of ‘The 27 Club,’ the macabre categorisation of a group of rock stars — including Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin — who happened to die at 27. Even retrospectives of Hole tend to dismiss her with one line. Stereogum, in their consideration of Hole’s career, said only of her: ‘Soon after [Cobain’s death] ‘the band’s bassist Kristen Pfaff died of a heroin overdose.’ End of consideration.
However, investigation into her life reveals Pfaff to have been far more than a bassist and brief drug user who overdosed on 16th June 1994. Pfaff was also an academic, and a political activist with progressive views way ahead of her time. She was also a powerful creative forced in the internationally-loved Janitor Joe.
Yes, Pfaff’s death is the most frequently-reported fact of her short life. But around this fact is a constellation of other factors which illuminate why Pfaff has been so overlooked as a figure. Foremost is the fact that Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain died only six weeks before Pfaff, in a death in which heroin was also implicated.
When research for this book began, the name Kurt Cobain came up again and again. It became striking how the factors around Cobain — the inter-band pressures, his impending divorce, and his health problems — were readily considered by people as part of an approach to understanding Cobain. In contrast, by placing Hole within the same genre as Nirvana, Pfaff was depicted as passive.
She was anything but.
Much of the coverage around Pfaff’s death was coloured by the miasma around Cobain’s passing, and tended to dismiss details of her own demise. Writing for Vice magazine, Hannah Ewens dismissively wrote, ‘when Kristen Pfaff died shortly after [Cobain] of a heroin overdose, it was just a footnote in the shadow of the pop-cultural phenomenon that was Kurt Cobain.’
This is a tendency that began even in the days after Pfaff’s death. When, in August 1994, Seattle Weekly pasted a picture of Pfaff on their cover the headline asked ‘Did Seattle Kill Kristen Pfaff?’ the by-line ran, ‘after Kurt Cobain’s suicide this rising star wanted to go home. She never made it.’ This narrativized the last chapter of Pfaff’s life within the frame of Cobain’s death, even when she was the headline. Considering such depictions, writer Paula Hearsum notes, ‘the theme of ‘self-destruction is played out notably more strongly with women than men in the music industry, especially in cases where individuals had either taken their own lives or died through reckless behaviour.’
But there were heavier forces at play. As Anwen Crawford said, Cobain ‘haunts a generation for whom his suicide signalled a premature end to the fragile promise that rock music could be something else — something a little less rapacious and sordid and just plain goddamn sexist.’
Think back to 1994. How hauntingly vivid are the scenes around Cobain’s death? From the vantage point of the twenty-first century they are easily bundled in with the outpouring of grief following the death of Princess Diana a few years later. This was another death in which something untapped within a mass consciousness found its outlet. Michael Bracewell, in his book The Nineties, called Cobain’s death and funeral ‘a part of the cartoon decadence of a neo-grunge demi-monde,’ forging a link between it and the death of Princess Diana. Cobain and Diana’s deaths mixed genuine grief with a performative aspect. People learnt how to publicly grieve, to demonstrate devotion to a certain figure, and by extension the values that they represented.
When Cobain’s death was reported, the sense of something raw, heartfelt and uncontrollable having been unleashed was felt. But Cobain’s death wrote a script for how the sudden and unexpected death of a much-loved figure could be publicly played out. This was seen in how fountains and parks local to Cobain were utilised. The scenes of young people comforting each other in public spaces in Seattle, swaddled in flannel clothing with their self-dyed hair, are haunting. Not least for the way such mourners visually evoke Cobain, having left these former iterations of themselves grieving in the nineties.
The impact of Cobain’s reported self-immolation sent shockwaves around the world and led, even in the United Kingdom, to the end of a cultural era. What followed in the UK was the forced jauntiness and faint whiff of sexism around Britpop, as masculinity was clumsily redefined. Other people’s lives, other people’s legacies, then became a part of the death-pull that existed in Cobain’s wake.
Pfaff is mainly mentioned at present in the media as part of ongoing investigations into the circumstances around the death of Kurt Cobain, in forums and podcasts concerned with theories about her death which this book intends to address. She is therefore considered through a lens which inevitably fails to capture her colour. But having asked Pfaff’s brother if I could write a book about her, Jason Pfaff brought colour to the picture. He shared with me previously-unheard diary tapes her own family had not brought themselves to listen to. With it, a vibrant range of materials gathered from sources close to Pfaff. Jason Pfaff is in possession of the lion’s share of Pfaff’s personal effects and these were offered for the first time. Once word got out about this book, and a TEDx talk was released on it, scores of people around the world who knew Pfaff got in touch to contribute more. Every day new strangers asked when the book would be out. The response was at times overwhelming. The portrait became more multi-faceted.
What is fascinating, when you begin to peel back the layers of Pfaff’s life with such materials, is how misguided the popular characterisations of Pfaff often are. People like Pfaff elicit personal devotion from the people who knew them, but they also act as totemic figures for lost eras to which people remained emotionally attached. Particularly if they remind people of a time when their own identities were in an exciting state of possibility.
When I began researching Pfaff’s life I soon realised that drugs played a relatively brief part in it. Hole’s Eric Erlandson said in an interview, ‘Kristen’s drug use wasn’t bad at all. All those media reports were wrong. She wasn’t a junkie. She dabbled with drugs before she was in our band, in Minneapolis, but it was very light.’ Yet on her diary tapes Pfaff records, in the moment, her using drugs in a manner which she knows could be life-threatening. She describes injecting herself with doses that she knows could kill her. She seems to be courting death, articulating poetically the traumatic situation she feels trapped in and using the recordings to reach out to people who she believes are hurting her. As if the recording itself will somehow force them to release her from the pain she is in. Pfaff was further raising the stakes by telling us how close to death she knows her behaviour is taking her.
But she was far more a musician than an addict. In fact, Pfaff was a classically trained musician, whose vocals, piano, guitar and bass playing were central to Live Through This. As Pfaff put it, ‘I was playing classical music my whole life. It was dainty, and that’s what girls do.’ But her mindset about rock music was changed when she saw the scope of it to affect women. Pfaff said; ‘I was a fan of rock since I was a teenager. But it didn’t really occur to me to play it until I started seeing some female sort of role models on the alternative scene …’ Pfaff’s diary tapes reveal the complex, political approach she took to music, and a prodigious awareness of how it could be used to further the feminist cause. Pfaff’s musicianship was steeped in a complex intellectual understanding of political and feminist theory that Pfaff gained before she ‘graduated herself’ from university.
During the end of her tenure with Hole, in her final diary tape, Pfaff reflected on the opportunity she had to ‘impact the culture’, her voice dripping with irony as she referred to herself as a ‘womyn in struggle’. This consideration of how her work as a musician can impact the feminist cause is worked into her recordings about her relationship with Courtney Love, and she plays with the idea of sending Love her diary tapes and redressing difficulties between them by sharing recordings in which she made herself so vulnerable. In one recording she implores Courtney Love ‘not to wear her guitar as a necklace,’ adamant it sends a bad message for women. Referencing Juliana Hatfield she says, ‘fuck you, I’m not a lesser guitar player because my hands are smaller. There’s not a biological propensity for guitar that men have that we don’t so just remember that ok?’
Pfaff also says on these tapes that she was ‘trying to analyse the motivation to impact the culture,’ and decided, ‘it’s like a sort of duty if you’re given the power to do that. It comes back to potential. It’s not like you’re a fool not to use it; it’s a sin not to use it.’ Was her drug use a consequence of the pressure her vast ambitions put her under?
Pfaff remains an elusive, fleeting figure in what portrayals there are of her. A non-physical presence banded around by the forces of patriarchy, macabre interest and romanticised fascination. In her book on Hole’s Live Through This, Anwen Crawford writes, ‘Kristen Pfaff hovers at the edge of my research…she’s there in snatches. Ordering a carrot muffin from hotel service in the short piece of footage that MTV filmed…playing bass with Courtney. She appears in the ‘Miss World’ clip and in a handful of promotional photographs. And then there’s [just] her musicianship.’ She is not only elusive for authors of her life.
In the course of researching this book, Jason Pfaff revealed that he had gained new insights into his sister through the process of collaborating on this book. It soon became apparent that Pfaff lived a life that was at times shocking in its unusual secretiveness and given her extreme tastes. Her ex-boyfriend Robert Slammon (now a lecturer) uses the concept of ‘limit theory’ to try and understand Pfaff’s extremes. Pfaff was attracted to the dark side and threw herself into it, sometimes without a lifeline. When she was in recovery these unusual aspects raised challenges for her (as well as for her biographer, who had to follow her into the darkness). People noted this tendency in her from a young age. A friend recounts a young Pfaff falling in love with The Doors. ‘I remember she thought Jim Morrison was beautiful,’ the friend says. ‘For me, I sensed a darkness over Jim…but she didn’t see it.’ In a first-person childhood story in which Pfaff describes an alien visitation on earth, her insatiable appetite for adventure shocks her friend in the story, when ‘Krist’ asks the aliens to take her with them.
Cutting through the fog to reach the pertinent facts of Pfaff’s life — beyond gender bias, media bias, the biases of narrow ‘27 Club’ reportage or conspiracy theory — was central to gaining a fairer understanding of her. It was only when I had access to Kristen’s private diary recordings, photographs, journals, archives and the wealth of interview footage her brother had painstakingly gathered for a project of his own, that a mission to reclaim Kristen Pfaff from misrepresentation began. I was now able to evidence what Pfaff really thought.
I was also able to bring in the real views of those in the Hole camp about her. Through essays and recordings that the Pfaff family shared with me I gained an insight from Pfaff that her family (wary of experiencing further hurt after her death) had not yet heard. I was able to read Pfaff’s academic essays on Marxism, her take on ‘The Making of the Archetypal Woman in Jean Toomer’s Fern.’ As I did so, I realised how much there was to unpack in this complex and multi-dimensional individual. As with the likes of Kurt Cobain and Richey Edwards — other members of the macabre 27 Club who didn’t survive their first Saturn Return — Pfaff retains the youthful lustre and fine cheekbones of one pre-thirties, with a late twenties slightly malnourished sheen. Her unresolved state, in our mind, invites the biographer to ascertain the person she’d have become.
Through interviews with those who had previously never talked about Pfaff — such as her ex partners and fellow activists — an insight was gained which takes us far beyond the existing media portrayal of Pfaff. To allow for the first time a nuanced portrait to be made.
Through the texts she left behind, Pfaff at last gets to speak. The more I can present Pfaff’s unvarnished voice, the better. I hope it allows me to pull Pfaff from the heavy shadows to which she has been abandoned, whilst also resisting any temptation for hagiography.
When I first spoke with Kristen’s mother Janet and her brother Jason I was struck by the polarities in her character. Janet Pfaff’’s description of her daughter as ‘an angel’ saw Jason affectionately respond by saying, ‘she could be a bitch too.’
From the vantage point of the 21st century, the nineties, with its brash MTV videos and its vivid Romeo and Juliet style adaptations, is currently viewed more with bemusement than anything else. It now seems an era possessing a naivety which was both charming and disingenuous. But Pfaff — not least as an iconic bassist in the mould of Kim Gordon — works well as a focal point for the era. She represents a counter-cultural figure in an era in which there are few that aren’t commercially cast as such. She would probably now be reductively placed in the camp labelled as ‘woke.’
Kristen Pfaff was pro-gay rights, pro feminist values, pro equality. She was critical of the patriarchy, and as a feminist protestor and counsellor she had seen the effects of male oppression up close in her own life, as we will see. Pfaff resisted the misguided puritanism of the day in her progressive thinking; her voice in her journals evidenced this. We hear snatches of this voice, straining against the constraints of such puritanism, in a promotional article Pfaff wrote for her first professional band Janitor Joe. In it, she wrote:
I disagree with Kathleen Hanna [of riot grrrl band Bikini Kill] when she says we should only buy records with girls in them. C’mon — is awareness measurable by gender alone??? Is every girl worth supporting uncritically? Can’t boys be aware of girls’ things too? Isn’t binary thinking something we want to get beyond anyway? While I may argue with a lot of it, I will admit that if riot grrrl had been around when I was younger and coming into an awareness about sexual politics, I might have had a lot more fun than I did with the oppressive and rigid PC culture I grew up in. Shit, they’re not even allowed to say ‘girl’ and ‘tits’ and ‘pussy’ and stuff.
Despite her scepticism of the riot grrrl movement, Pfaff was highly motivated to use whatever abilities she had, and whatever initiatives were in progress, to further the causes she believed in. In an era of vying for the right to self-victimise, Pfaff was, by contrast, proactive. An autodidact who taught herself to play bass. Using this finally released archive material allows us not only to reclaim Kristen Pfaff but also allows us to try to reclaim something of the era in which she lived.
Pfaff exists as an intriguing proposition, straddling the world just as the internet took hold. We see glimpses of the struggles that artists like her would have had, with the oncoming invasiveness of the internet, in Pfaff’s only foray onto a fan forum. In a 1993 post she wrote:
I logged in expecting to find a viable source of information (as in non-mass media) and instead found a rather closed elitist community which, for the most part, relies on the mass media for its ill-informed and entirely derivative ideas. Where I thought I’d find anarchy I found fascism. What a surprise.
Pfaff went on to deride ‘a rather limited range of ideas being listlessly exchanged in formalised ways’ before signing herself off as ‘your esteemed “Delphi loser”.’ Ironic, then, that in her passing Pfaff too would fall prey to the broad-brushstroke characterisations that she is still now considered within.
When digging into Pfaff’s life, I was struck by how much agency she possessed. An agency which is best revealed with her own words. Or, as Kristen Pfaff herself wrote, perhaps in a neat middle-finger gesture to her future, male biographer:
Do you think I’m a guy because I am:
A smartass
In a band
Articulate
While I may be all this and more, I sure as hell don’t have a dick.
Luv,
X-ten
