Courtney Love's big Sacramento adventure

The singer and actress takes her campaign against the record industry to the California Legislature.

By Anthony York

Sept. 6, 2001 | SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- She walked into the hearing more than an hour late, with a red felt hat pushed over her eyes, looking every bit the rock star. She staggered into Committee Room 4203, in the California state Capitol, and sucked the oxygen out. The men in neckties seemed to gasp collectively. Cameras turned away mid-sentence from LeAnn Rimes, the teenage country sensation, to focus on the woman as she removed the hat, shook out a head of red-rinsed hair and took her seat next to Don Henley.

With that, Courtney Love's crusade against the record industry came to Sacramento Wednesday, in a committee room normally reserved for haggling over budget minutiae or marathon sessions on the state energy crisis. Love, alternative rock star, actress and the widow of Kurt Cobain; Henley, onetime leader of the Eagles, whose first greatest-hits set now stands as the bestselling album ever; the Dixie Chicks, who sold 11 million copies of their last album; and Rimes lent some star power to Sacramento Wednesday, as they asked the Legislature to repeal a state law that they say turns artists into "indentured servants" to the recording industry, as Henley put it.

Love was her typical ebullient self, vacillating between the articulate and the scatterbrained. When, for example, she was asked about AFTRA, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, which serves as a sort of de facto union for some musicians, she was dismissive.

"AFTRA doesn't negotiate our interests in terms of healthcare," she responded. "I can get six days of rehab maybe ...." Love has confessed to heroin use in the past and has seen celebrity rehab from the inside. Her remarks were cut off as the room of lawyers and legislators erupted in laughter.

The informational hearing was convened by Democratic state Sen. Kevin Murray of Los Angeles, a former agent at William Morris Agency, in an effort to defuse growing tensions between record labels and their artists. At the heart of the hearing was a provision in California state law, passed in 1987, that allows record companies special dispensation to enter into contracts with artists for more than seven years. Under state law, no other industry contract for personal services can extend beyond seven years.

Henley, Love and others say the industry has manipulated those laws to lock up recording artists for their entire careers. "The deck is stacked in the labels' favor," Henley said. "Record companies can fire us, but we can't fire them."

Speaking for the labels was Miles Copeland, founder of the eclectic I.R.S. Records, home in the 1980s to then-uncommercial bands like R.E.M. Copeland contended that though the record industry grossed more than $41 billion last year, much of that becomes the millions of dollars the labels spend on acts that never make money.

"The difference of our business, unlike banking and all that, is we invest millions of dollars in artists and at the end of it if it doesn't work, they walk, we're stuck holding the bag," he said. "This is why labels have to have a length of time with their artists, so they will spend these millions and millions of dollars to make artists happen. And if major artists can simply walk out from their contracts, the record business will be in serious trouble and many, many artists who would like to have a career like Don Henley has had will never be given that opportunity. My concern is I don't want to see the health of the record industry further attacked particularly when we're seeing the Internet, which is our real danger.

"It's risk vs. profit," he said. "It's common sense. You take away profit, and you take away willingness to risk."

The labels also argue that the exception was made for the record industry because it is not unusual for big-name artists like Love and Henley to let years go by between records.

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