POP MUSIC REVIEW : Benefit a Reminder of Courtney Love’s Potential

It’s kind of hard to picture Courtney Love, underground rock’s unruly heroine of the moment, sitting at a card table asking passers-by if they’re registered to vote. So Love’s brief performance at a benefit for the activist Bohemian Women’s Political Alliance on Monday at the Largo took on a little extra charge from sheer incongruity.

But when you consider that the BWPA was founded by people who were pretty unruly in their younger days--former punk priestess Exene Cervenka and longtime punk-scene figure Nicole Panter--the gap might be less than it seems, and Love seemed to acknowledge both the discrepancy and the common bond when she said, without any apparent sarcasm, “Thanks for letting me in your club.”

In any case, Love’s two songs dropped like a plate of writhing, crawling things into the evening’s cabaret-toned fare (from such artists as Julie Christensen, Weba Garretson and Charlie Parks). Clawing out rough, fuzzed chords on electric guitar, she applied her corrosive howl to two new songs: “Pennyroyal Tea,” a powerful tune she co-wrote with her husband, Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, and “Doll Parts.”

New parents Love and Cobain have made more news offstage than on in the past several months, much of it centering on drug problems, but lately they’ve cut the Sid and Nancy act and have been busily clearing the air. What tends to get lost in this sideshow is that Love has the makings of a striking artist.