A civic minded Courtney Love arrived in San Diego  in the pouring rain. Her mission, besides the obvious one of belting out her brand of alt/punk rock, was to bring the masses together in  a showing of brotherly love and understanding.  But, she had a score of her own to settle first.  It seems the Coca-Cola Company bought a sizable number of seats at the SDSU Open Air Amphitheatre for promotional purposes and didn’t give them all out.  The result - an almost sold out venue that was half empty.  After the band’s first song, Courtney stopped the show and let everyone know what happened and said she couldn’t play like that.  She asked everyone who was sitting up in the nose bleed seats to come down and sit as close as possible and they would play a really good, small show.  Cut away to the cattle drive scene - mass hysteria.

With that bit of business taken care of, Hole proceeded to rock the house with songs like "Celebrity Skin," "Awful," "Pretty on the Inside" and "20 Years in Dakota.".  It was rainy and cold in the audience but the stage was hot and balmy as Love propped her fishnet clad leg on a monitor and belted out "Miss World."  Feeling playful, she then jumped onto the neck of a security guard and went into the crowd to join the wet set (a stunt I wouldn’t have tried while touring with Manson).   As part of her civic duty, and in the wake of the Columbine, CO school slayings, Love invited "jocks" and "nerds" to join her on stage and get to know one another instead of building pipe bombs.  She admonished the crowd saying "If I can get along with f*****g Ben Affleck, you can get along with each other!"  Not wanting to leave out any outcast social group, she next invited fat girls to come sit on stage with her.  "If you are fat, or you hate yourself, I want you to come up on stage."  The stage was full of over-energized fans being kept in check by roadies doing their best border collie imitations.   Maybe it was the chaos of unassigned seating, or maybe it was the red tutu.  Somehow the cold, rainy San Diego night turned into a night of merry musical mayhem.

Purchase Hole's Music or listen to Sound Samples
 

All Photo's by Debbie Seagle. 
Debbie is the Associate Editor of RocknWorld.com