My Body, The Hand Grenade Liner Notes

"There's a part of me that want's to have a grindcore band and another that wants to have a Raspberries-type pop band."

Courtney Love 1991

So, what exactly is the purpose of an album that is neither a Greatest Hits package, nor a Greatest Misses collection, nor even a compilation of 'Totally Bonkers Volume 21' techno tracks? Well, in Hole's case it's fairly obvious. My Body, The Hand Grenade stands as a document, an anthology of sorts, of a band that rocketed from a tiny LA basement studio into alternative rock superstardom. In doing so, they went through such wild times and changes that the shift from the legendary first, fiercely intense singles to the late, beautifully sculptured acoustic performances for MTV's Unplugged was almost too fast to follow.

Maybe there should have been another album between the debut platter 'Pretty on the Inside' and the second coming 'Live Through This'. If that's so, this disc could be seen as the missing link. But it's more than that. Here is the definitive opportunity to explore the many different aspects of one of the world's most interesting and original rock bands in less than one hour.

My Body, The Hand Grenade offers the earliest brutal noise work-outs as well as the first steps towards more accomplished writing and continues on to the first songsmithery of the 'Live Through This' era.

The album kicks off with Turpentine, the very first Hole recording ever, which has until now never been released. The first two hard to find singles, Retard Girl and Dicknail, are also included with attendant B-sides. Gaining wild press acclaim, notably in the UK, it was nothing compared to the praise for 1991's Pretty on the Inside, probably that year's most important album. To quote one of our press releases, this was "where the extremes of abjection, obsession, trauma, atrocity and, most importantly, humanity collide." Certainly The New York Times agreed, making it their Album Of The Year, whilst others wrote of it being "the very best bit of fucked up rock 'n' roll I've heard all year" (Sharon O'Connell in Melody Maker, Sept. '91) and "...in the grand tradition of Patti Smith's 'Horses' and The Ramones, Television and New York Dolls' debut discs, Pretty On The Inside is in a class of its own." (Edwin Pouncey in NME, Sept. '91)

World-wide touring, a marriage and a maternity break followed, but the release of the now deleted single Beautiful Son, and it's haunting flipside 20 Years In The Dakota, focused attention on the music once more. Both tracks are found here in remixed and remastered versions, and highlight the evolution of Courtney and Eric's songwriting in just two years, from some of the scariest, most painful three chord cacophonies ever written to the sophisticated, accomplished and more dynamic sounds that led to 'Live Through This'.

Since everybody has that record, we have consciously decided to leave any original album tracks off this. Instead there's the early demo version of Miss World, a beautiful live version of Asking For It, and the MTV Unplugged version of Softer, Softest. There's also their intense and almost tribal live rendition of Drown Soda, a song which dates back to 1991, but appears here in a recording from 1995.

The album spans Hole's entire recording career, from their earliest and very first recordings in the past punky days of 1990 Los Angeles to their last spectacular and fiercely different live shows of a post grunge 1995, when both the face of music and HOLE themselves had changed, singer Courtney Love being instrumental in both transformations. My Body, The Hand Grenade comes at a time when Hole are in the middle of recording their next proper studio album, and stands as both a monument to the band, and as a signal of the end of one era and the beginning of another in their tumultuous history. Alternatively, as a Hole shirt once read: "Use Once and Destroy!"

In November 1993, after having finished Live Through This, Eric Erlandson proclaimed that, "It's easy when the music is more in your face and aggressive, but... now we've made a pop record..." My Body, The Hand Grenade documents this journey, and far, far more.