25 years ago today: Hole and Sugartooth

25 years ago today, April 12, 1994, was a good day for grunge rock.

A week after the death of Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love's band, Hole, released its breakthrough album, Live Through This.

Rolling Stone ranked it #4 on a list of the "50 Greatest Grunge Albums":

Live Through This is the sound of Courtney Love ripping herself to shreds. Her band’s second album is a roller-coaster reflection on co-dependency, motherhood and feminism that found the volcanic frontwoman making the case that she was more of a pop-culture heroine than the villainess she’d previously been painted as. . . . The title of Live Through This felt like a prophecy as Love was suddenly thrust into the role of celebrity widow.

Here's an oral history of Live Through This.

The album title is in the lyrics of "Violet" — Hole at its best:




"I’m part of an evolutionary process. I’m not the fully evolved end.” — Courtney Love




Hole was "grunge" in a way that, say, Soundgarden and Alice in Chains were not. Those bands were a mix of genres: grunge, hard rock, metal, prog rock, etc. But the unpolished, first-take feel of a song like "Rock Star" (a/k/a "Olympia") makes it pure "grunge."




On the same day, Sugartooth, a band from Southern California which never found its big break, released its debut album (self-titled). Sugartooth was best known for the first song, "Sold My Fortune":




One more from Sugartooth: