3/11

cori a. winrock
on
Hole, “Gold Dust Woman”

(March Faxness)

For 2025’s March Second Chanceness, each day in march we are bringing back an essay that previously lost in the first round of previous March Xness tournaments for your consideration.

March Xness is a fun tournament, but also at times a cruel one! Each year 32 essays and essayists lose in the first round (and 63 of 64 will bow out before a winner is crowned). Because of the pace of the first round, many of our readers probably don’t get a chance to closely read all of the essays each year! So for 2025 we wanted to dig some of these out of the archive and give them another read, this time on their own, no competitor. Just a moment of attention and even of glory. The Official March Second Chanceness Selection Committee picked these based on reader nominations as particularly worthy of getting a second look. There are many brilliant essays that lose each year. Which are your favorites? This year we’re not voting: we’re only reading and celebrating and remembering. The tournament proper will come back in 2026 with March Sadness (lottery entry link in the menu above). We hope these great essays will again earn your love. Signed, the Official March Second Chanceness Selection Committee

About a year before I wrote the essay, I called my dad to ask why I didn’t remember Fleetwood Mac ever being played in the house when I was growing up—it felt like a strange omission. After all, they seemed of-a-piece, a perfect crossover of my parents’ musical taste—electric folk-plucked guitar lines my dad could play after a single listen, the kind of uncompromising female vocals that my mother loved to sing alongside. Vocals that still send me back out to my car, stunned with grief, when I hear them playing over the speakers at grocery stores. I called because I was listening to and loving Fleetwood Mac for the first time in my life. I couldn’t figure out how I’d missed out on them. Rumours, the soundtrack playing as I tried to find the right order for a poetry manuscript—an elegy to my mother. He told me they actually had listened to the album on repeat when it first came out and on into the year when my mother was pregnant with my sister. By the time I was born they had moved on—both music lovers who were onto the next thing and the next. Until, like many of us, they would get stuck in a moment and begin to play their story backwards through the music of their lives.
I am writing this reflection from a city in the PNW so close to where the riot grrl/grunge music scene happened that my teenage self wouldn’t believe me if I said this is where I am located on the map. When I wrote this essay I was living in Cleveland, OH during the pandemic—as far from my teenage self as I now feel from Cleveland. States, ages. I was writing the first essay at a moment in time where I was trying to remember a childhood self. The strange thing I learned is that losing a parent can suddenly make it difficult to access early memories. What had disappeared? Who could I ask? I was writing to locate myself in a time and place.
As soon as I learned who I was up against for MarchFaxness, I knew I would get crushed by Patti Smith’s “Gloria.” Beloved artist, writer, rockgodmother to us all. Of course she should win. But a part of me still wanted this longshot divisive love-it or hate-it cover of “Gold Dust Woman”—that I didn’t even know as a teen was a cover and wouldn’t locate its original until an unimaginable future—to win. I wanted to convince people that Hole made so many parts of breaking out of where I’m from seem possible. They mattered more than a lot of other grunge scene musicians to female-identifying humans that the 90s spat out into a world that we thought would keep progressing until we could, in fact, have it all. But the pandemic was telling us, all over again, a different story. Back then, it felt as if winning even one round of this contest might actually pull Hole and Courtney Love, and my mother, and me forward again into a more feminist future. 
As I am writing this reflection now the essay I was writing then keeps traveling through my timeline. When I arrived in the Seattle airport for the first time, to decide if I wanted to take a job out here, so far from my family I felt something snap irrevocably while I barreled through the sky, I heard Pearl Jam playing over the speakers as I wheeled my baggage toward the possible future. I know someday you’ll have a beautiful life, I know you’ll be a star—. Who did or who would this punk rock riot grrl become. On my best days I am my seventh-grade self. Now Courtney Love is beloved again, partially for calling out a certain horror well before two journalists could eventually take him down. Mostly for inspiring a whole new generation of musicians whose voices are finding their way into the hearts of teenagers who are and will always be mapping and imagining their lives forward while the rest of us map our way back to meet those selves from the opposite direction. To pick up the pieces and go home. —Cori A. Winrock

Cori a. Winrock on hole’s “gold dust woman”

     I want to start a band. My influences are Big Black, Sonic Youth, and Fleetwood Mac.
—Courtney Love’s 1989 ad for bandmates

Liner Notes ♥

The year is: mid-90s. The internet does not exist in our homes. We are a group of girl-identifying about-to-be teenagers that actually get bored and find ways to entertain ourselves by doing things like sneaking out and streaking shirtless in the neighborhood at night with glow-in-the-dark paint on our bodies while ding-dong ditching houses. We call ourselves the Bare Breasted Bandits, aka the BBB—the acronym we fingerpaint across ourselves. We answer the door for the pizza guy with pantyhose over our heads like the singer in the “Been Caught Stealing” video. We pay for our pizza in pennies and other annoying change. We throw knives into drop ceilings to see how long it takes for them to fall. We pierce the skin between our thumb and pointer fingers. We drink Kool-Aid from pitchers we pull from each other’s fridges. We try cigarettes for the first time and pass out because no one tells us to stop inhaling. Later we find cloves and strawberry biddies and learn to smoke properly and like we mean it. Later we regret all those cigarettes. We memorize phone numbers for landlines that we don’t call landlines and carry quarters in our socks for payphones to check in with our parents. We drink Robitussin after hearing it’s supposed to be fun and then lie on our backs and give each other stomach rubs because chugging cherry cough syrup makes us feel sick. Some of us kiss the magazine-faces of musicians we have crushes on, scotch-taped all over our walls. Some of us kiss each other’s real faces.
We love each other unguardedly and near-maniacally and so when one of us jumps off a bridge into the disgusting Erie canal that runs through the center of town, we all jump off the bridge. Local lore wants to scare us into believing the canal is full of cow carcasses rotten at the bottom and rusty shopping carts we’d get tetanus from scraping our legs on. We jump anyway. We jump to keep from being permanently called the worst of the worst, “a skirt,” by our fellow skaters, all boys, who are taunting us. We jump to avoid being caught on camera by the local channel filming our ridiculous choices for the nightly news. We jump because we are or want to be or would be braver and bigger and stupider than local lore. But we don’t want our parents to know any of it. We are unabashedly miserable and unabashedly happy and so full of longing and lostness and so pent up and so so so everything.
Our brains are full of Fuzzbox feedback and our hair is Manic Panic dyed. We run around looking like something you’d see in a post-apocalyptic aftermath, which is sometimes what it feels like to grow up in the town we’re from. We are still trying to figure out who we are when suddenly we have to figure what the f*ck it means to be in the teen male gaze or not be considered enough to be in that gaze. None of which we have language to deal with and honestly just sucks. We think someone finally gets what it means for us to live in our moment because some mid-20s male grunge/rockers are singing to our longing from cassette tapes we rewind until stripped or CDs so scratched they skip. We obsess about liner notes and lyrics. We close read every song. We’ll spend months playing raucous air instruments, chanting: We want to be Jackie Onassis / We want to wear a pair of dark sunglasses / We want to be Jackie O O O / Oh please don’t die! We sense something isn’t quite as it should be but we don’t know what it is. We can’t see that despite all our devotion we are still stuck being girls.
After enough sweaty mosh pits that we attend with our dads because we are way underage, we miraculously find our way through this dude-filled dark to a music that doesn’t just get to us but gets us. We climb down inside the velvet lining of Tori Amos’s seductive don’t-fuck-with-me piano. We are obsessed with the undone pop guitar line of Die Cheerleader’s “Pigskin Parade.” The innocent come-hither of Smut’s “Women” surging so deep into screeched fever pitch we can barely believe it. Those lungs, those drums. We find L7s deadpan dark lyrics rubbing up against their harmonized brightness. We find 7 Year Bitch and belt the opening lines of “The Scratch” as our motto. We practice screaming. We practice harmonizing in tiny bathrooms because they have the best acoustics. We sit incredibly close to each other. We have no need for inhibition. We are busy dreaming and dreaming our all-female grunge-rock riot-grrl band until it’s no longer just a vision. We finally have our instruments.

In the center of all this is Hole.

We don’t just love Hole. We are consumed. We want to be as uncaring and reckless and beautiful and ugly and gross and grrl and somehow do something new with our music. We want to bleach our hair and rock slurred mascara that reflects our indifference to revealing our feelings. We want to show everyone, but especially the annoying boys in punk bands in this town, that we have somewhere to go and people to be that are not just the punchline vaginas of their whacking off jokes. We don’t say these things. We embody them. With instruments and attitudes. We are innocent and aggressive. We name our band after a comment about the Botticelli-esque qualities of Hole’s second bass player. We covet their grunge girlhood: the glitter of Built by Wendy guitar straps, mary jane doc martens, peter pan collar dresses we can only find in dELia*s catalogs and can’t afford. Because we don’t have the internet we are wildly naïve about the hard history of women in rock. About the privilege that gives primarily white grrls a chance to shout into a microphone in the first place. We and the 90s are not woke. In Western NY we’re too far from Kathleen Hannah’s DIY riot grrl uproar and its 3rd wave politics to take part until we’re properly mid-teens. We’re still twelve to fourteen. We are busy learning about identity invention. We revive the cute plastic animal hairclips from our childhoods. We middle part. We babydoll tee. We fan. We band together.
We are ready to be the girls with the most cake.

♥

♥

Nicks’s “Gold Dust Woman” finds her at her folky (not flaky)
best with one of her most poignant character studies. 
—music critic Barry Walsh

The year is 1996. Hole’s cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Gold Dust Woman” is released as their ninth CD single and as the lead song on the soundtrack for an absolute tank of a film, The Crow: City of Angels. Even with a soundtrack that sells a million copies, nothing could save the movie from being anything other than a horrible cover of the original. We walk out of the theater in the first 10 minutes.
From its opening riff, Hole’s rendition of “Gold Dust Woman” embodies the gritty erotics of the best mid-90s music—a sliding bass line, a melody played along a single string rather than as individually picked notes. It’s recognizable 90s: somehow underwater and reverberating-electric—it lures you then slow shocks you, tricks your heart into skipping along with it. Hole’s version of the final track on Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours owes as much to other songs on the album as it does to “Gold Dust Woman” itself. That opening progression rips out and repositions the driving bassline that cuts through the center of “The Chain.” Why not open at someone else’s crescendo? Hole know their Fleetwood Mac—and they’re not afraid to show off the ways this band is part of their collective consciousness.
Arriving at the last song on Rumours, to the original “Gold Dust Woman,” feels like waking inside a mirage in a warped Western—a hazy brightness of high noon heat and bending notes, an Ennio Morricone composition coming gorgeously undone. It is somehow a country tune gone folk gone new age gone gothic rock. And somehow it works. At the center of this genre-collage is Stevie Nicks—that great witchy queen, her voice of gold. The embodiment of mysterious female woo-woo 70s goth aesthetic with an America’s sweetheart palatability: harmonic, blonde, almost believably incarnating a black widow’s darkness for the sake of a song. In a few years Nicks will still be the music budding punk girls are listening to alone in their bedrooms but not admitting to it. She’s paving the way for female-lead rock bands like Hole to take the stage. Unlike Nicks, Love and Schemel and Auf Der Maur and even Erlandson will be allowed to be grrl enough to publicly admit to wanting both worlds: to empower us to play mean guitars and sing while also inviting us to cry our eyes out in the mosh pit.

♥

Two years before Hole’s “Gold Dust Woman” comes out, we see them play a show in Rochester, NY—an early stop on their delayed tour to support their second album, Live Through This, which debuts three days after Courtney Love’s infamous husband’s suicide. But we’re keeping the husband out of this. We’re here for the band. Offstage Love is clearly visible, Francis Bean in her arms in a fuzzy leopard print coat and oversized earmuffs. We are in awe of our proximity to our music gods—one standing there in a see-through slip dress, frilly white underwear and patent leather black pumps, just holding her baby. Everything is electric and sticky and a little dangerous in the mosh pit. Hole’s harmonizing and howling through the amps reverberating in our chests.
Halfway through the show Love throws herself into the arms of the crowd and we carry her like a rock goddess that will save us from our town and our time’s rampant sexism while the rest of the band sends grunge grrl punkrock feedback through our bodies. When Love’s back at the mic she’s screaming full throttle, accusing someone of ripping off her dead husband’s locket and punching her mid-ride. It’s a performance of fucked up and fucked over lover, bad woman and bad mother, the messy and real, the grieving and aggrieved widow. As the frontwoman of this album, Love is living through this in real time—promoting an album critics and fans have run through a retrospective elegiac machine, turning every lyric into a roadmap to that inevitable suicide (and a second unexpected one). The entire tour Hole will have to keep grieving on stage before a live audience and still somehow make the music central.

♥

Unlike Nicks, when Love sings Hole’s rendition of “Gold Dust Woman” she’s unabashedly backed by the voices of women. This is how even one woman’s belief she can be something she hasn’t seen exist yet shifts what’s possible for those that follow—Nicks sets off the revolution, girl style. The same song 20 years into the future—with a different backdrop, different landscape, different kind of ruin—echolocates the progress of women in rock.
Hole’s cover unveils Love having honed her grief to a serrated edge. She’s been mourning it out on stage for two years and knows exactly what the fuck she’s doing. In “Gold Dust Woman” she’s doing it exceptionally well. She’s doing it so it feels like hell. She’s doing it so it feels real. She’s not overcoming other people’s projections—of songs written with no idea they’d only ever be played in the shadow of what happened rather than as they were written, in a hopeful if desperate conditional—if you live through this with me, I swear that I will—. It’s as if, for Love, “Gold Dust Woman” begins in medias res. And she wields it. She’s not entering a character study. She’s already in it. So when the chainsaw of Love’s black widow cuts through the sugary background siren song of Schemel and Auf Der Maur’s pale shadow of a woman—we get this isn’t a rehearsal. Courtney Love is not a cover of Stevie Nicks. Love is years of living in a complicated after. And she’s starting to make space for what comes next.
By the time the cover of “Gold Dust Woman” comes out we’re a couple years older and about to come down off the high of Hole. Live Through This has gone multi-platinum and Courtney Love has been busy reinventing herself. She’s gone from the fucked-up rock mother wandering messily around the streets of Seattle, giving away her husband’s clothes and reading his suicide note, to a kind of refined goth Jackie-O-Yoko-Ono of widowhood. No longer only the epitome of bad woman, she’s nearly likable. In a few months she’ll be a Versace-wearing darling of the silver screen—nominated for a Golden Globe for her role in The People vs. Larry Flynt.  
A year later, in a 1997 article in Spin magazine, Love and Nicks dish with each other about everything from Nicks’s backstory, to life around recording music, to becoming famous. Mostly they’ll talk about how being famous makes them ridiculously rich and what that much money allows them to buy. But “Gold Dust Woman” will arrive at the end:

CL: I love the imagery in the song, when she's a dragon, and a black widow. 

SN: That just means an anger. The black widow, the dragon thing, is all about being scary and angry.

CL: But I think it's more powerful than that. A dragon is the most potent and virile symbol you can use. So applying yourself to a woman, or to yourself, or to an archetypal alter-ego self is like this power, especially if you wrote it when you were frail and frightened and maybe not as powerful as you became later. 

SN: You know what, Courtney? I don't really know what Gold Dust Woman is about. …I'm going to have to go back to my journals and see if I can pull something out about Gold Dust Woman. Because I don't really know. It can't be all about cocaine.

CL: No, I think you're bigger than that.

♥

Fleetwood Mac had a notoriously hard time getting “Gold Dust Woman” to come together in the studio. The version that makes its way onto the record is captured at 4am—Nicks wrapping everything but her mouth in a black scarf, trying to go deep into herself to find the dark center so she can sing from inside of it. And she almost finds it. By the end of the song, everything is so far flung from that center that the instruments eventually collapse together into a kind of 70s bacchanal of noise. Hole’s version offers a 90s take on some of the more boring cock-rockian elements of male guitar lines swaggering relentlessly through so many songs of the 70s—swapping them out for the interchangeability of pop power chords, a bass line carrying the melody, drums occasionally taking an instinctive center stage. There’s no fake bravado in this cover. They’re not overblowing it to show off their musical chops because they don’t have to—they know they’re that good. Unlike the Fleetwood Mac version, Hole’s doesn’t devolve into a jam session or threaten to come undone at the end. When they record it in the studio and when they play it live, their version is bigger than that. It rides itself out to the limits of feedback and then into its absence.
The thing is, Hole’s version doesn’t feel like a cover. This isn’t Love draping herself in a mourning shroud, trying to find her way to Nicks’s song’s emotional center so she can perform a Hole-sounding version of it. Love is belting out her own self-elegy. To a moment in time. To a relationship in her life. To the music that she could have made or was making that will always have been interrupted by a spectacularly famous suicide. An elegy for all those lost possible selves, holding hands like a paper doll chain. In “Gold Dust Woman,” Love is having a last word about her and her husband and what it means to be living past the aftermath. In this version the black widow has already ransacked the kingdom and is singing from the ruins. But these ruins were built and destroyed by someone else.
Every generation will have different kinds of feminist anthems. As teens we aren’t quite ready to see the ways it’s ok that we are and are not covers of our mothers. We don’t care. We aren’t caught up in your love affair.
Later that same year, Nicks will amend what she said in the interview with Love about not remembering the meaning behind the song: “Gold Dust Woman was really my kind of symbolic look at somebody going through a bad relationship, and doing a lot of drugs, and trying to just make it—trying to live—you know trying to get through it to the next thing.” Gold Dust Woman is just trying to live through this. To pick up the pieces and go home.

♥

By the time Hole releases “Gold Dust Woman” we’ll be playing basement shows and weekly gigs at the local Rock ‘N’ Bowl, where other punk teens will throw bowling balls straight toward us on a stage built between two lanes. We’ll no longer be practicing with covers of other people’s music. We’ll be paid real money to play the music we write on our own. We’ll go on to win the local Battle of the Bands, beating out the favored all-male group that, looking back, sounds a lot like Fleetwood Mac. We’ll be offered the possibility of a real recording session. But we won’t be able to make it happen. One of our parents will say being in the band is over the fun scale. One of us could be doing better in school. One of us will find out our boyfriend is writing love letters to our best friend and the fall out will mean not having a place to practice anymore. One of us really belongs as the front of her own band. We’ll be drifting apart and finding different music.
The edges of dissolution are nebulous at this age. We are embodied by the music we are loving and we move through new music new selves new loves all the time. By 1996 we can’t enter into Courtney Love’s new world and she can’t enter into ours. She’s a rockstar mother moviestar in her 30s and we can’t even drive. When Hole’s next album comes out we feel betrayed by its pop, its absence of brashness. Where are the edges? And though Love takes the band with her for a while down the road, eventually that falls apart as well. Hole is not just Courtney Love—it’s their we that makes them who they are.
For an important moment, Hole is part of our collective consciousness. “Gold Dust Woman” the last hurrah, a farewell to a particular instant in time, one that later we’ll have trouble explaining to people who weren’t there. Angst, like grief, is hard to communicate. But we don’t care. We’ve long since taken off this particular We. We listen to the feedback reverberate until it fizzes out. We don’t regret it. We were there.

♥ for Venus 478

Cori A. Winrock is still a punk grunge riot grrl in the innermost vulnerable dark Hole of her heart. She is the author of the forthcoming book-length essay, Alterations (Transit Books 2025), and the poetry collections, Little Envelope of Earth Conditions (Alice James Books) and This Coalition of Bones (Kore Press). She holds a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Utah and teaches as an Assistant Professor at Western Washington University. She is equally shocked at the existence of a grainy yearbook photo of the day she got the Spin issue with Courtney Love on the cover.