Grinning and Baring It  The Crimes of Courtney Love  Sure it was
a publicity stunt. When Courtney Love gave David Letterman a
peek, and later did the same and more for some guy outside
Wendy's, she certainly had the sales of her latest album in
mind. But I'm willing to cut Courtney a lot of slack. No woman
in music today gets closer to Janis Joplin when it comes to
channeling the primal.  Though she was much too shy to show her
breasts, Janis definitely let it all hang out. She was one of
the great hunger artists of the '60s. In performance, she tore
her insides out and offered them up to her audience in the
(usually vain) hope of pleasing and attracting men. I don't
surmise this from a rockumentary. I got about as close to Janis
as a rock writer could, and in those days you could get pretty
close. I saw her neediness and confusion, and I watched as she
was allowed to slip away. Her death from an overdose was a major
reason why I stopped writing about music in the early '70s—but
that's another piece.  When I