<\/p>\n
Courtney Love at the National Portrait Gallery’s Portrait Gala on March 19, 2024 in London, England. Love revisits her claim that she was given LSD as a toddler while growing up in San Francisco\u2019s\u00a0Haight-Ashbury in\u00a0a new podcast interview with Billy Corgan.<\/p>\n
Dave Benett\/Dave Benett\/Getty Images for Nat<\/p>\n
Courtney Love<\/a> is revisiting her San Francisco childhood \u2014 and debunking one of the city\u2019s most enduring myths.<\/p>\n In a new episode of \u201cThe Magnificent Others<\/a>,\u201d a podcast hosted by Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan<\/a> that features long-form interviews with artists and cultural figures, the Hole singer describes growing up in Haight-Ashbury not as a flower-power idyll but as something far darker.\u00a0<\/p>\n She also alleges that her father, former Grateful Dead<\/a> associate and author Hank Harrison<\/a>, gave her LSD repeatedly when she was a toddler. The two were long estranged before his death in 2022.\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n \u201cPeople think the Haight was this really great place,\u201d Love said. \u201cMy memory of the Haight-Ashbury, other than my father giving me acid from about 3 to 6 until my mother noticed and he got his custody taken away, is that it was dank and dirty and awful, and people were on heroin and early meth.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cSo the whole \u2018Summer of Love\u2019 thing \u2014 they just use the same footage over and over, like two days in Golden Gate Park. I\u2019m not kidding. It was the opposite. The whole Fillmore thing was dark.\u201d<\/p>\n San Francisco Chronicle Logo<\/p>\n Make us a Preferred Source to get more of our news when you search.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Add Preferred Source<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Historians have documented how an influx of runaways, overcrowding and the spread of hard drugs, including heroin, reshaped the Haight by the late 1960s, even as its legacy was softened in popular culture. Love\u2019s version leans squarely into that reality, denouncing decades of romanticized imagery<\/a> \u2014 tie-dye, free concerts, a generation in bloom.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Chronicle could not independently verify Love\u2019s account.\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Born Courtney Michelle Harrison in San Francisco in 1964, Love has long spoken about an unstable upbringing. She described her father as drifting between identities.<\/p>\n \u201cIn the Grateful Dead world and then in the Irish holy grail world, and in the giving LSD to his child at the Haight-Ashbury world, you know, he\u2019s got a hero\u2019s journey, as lame as he was,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Harrison has previously denied the allegation, saying in a 1995 Chronicle interview<\/a> that he did not give his daughter LSD.<\/p>\n In the interview, she also draws a stark contrast between her parents\u2019 worlds \u2014 one immersed in counterculture, the other shaped by wealth. Her mother, Linda Carroll, was a therapist who guided ’60s radical fugitive Katherine Ann Powers into surrendering to authorities in 1993.<\/p>\n \u201cThey were really rich. They lived at 999 Green St.<\/a> in the entire penthouse<\/a> \u2014 doormen, uh, maids. My mother had a maid when she lived in the Avenues named Modell,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Billy\u00a0Corgan and Courtney Love\u00a0at the Gagosion Gallery on April 15, 2006 in Beverly Hills.<\/p>\n Patrick McMullan\/Patrick McMullan via Getty Image<\/p>\n That privilege, she suggested, did not translate into stability.<\/p>\n \u201cI was scared most of the time,\u201d she said. \u201cI was really abandoned in that family. I knew I didn\u2019t like my mother. I knew it was a bad match … and I just wanted to get away.\u201d<\/p>\n At times, Love zooms out, framing her experience as part of a broader generational pattern.<\/p>\n \u201cAs I like to say, we grew up with those boomer parents who were more \u2014 my joke is they were more obsessed with cocaine and yoga or weed and yoga,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019m saying we all were kind of the byproducts of this. Yeah, like latchkey kids or kids whose parents watched too much \u2018Gilligan\u2019s Island.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n The episode, part of the latest run of \u201cThe Magnificent Others,\u201d also finds Love and Corgan revisiting their shared history in the 1990s alternative rock scene and the tensions that shaped it.<\/p>\n Both criticize what they describe as \u201cgatekeeping\u201d in indie music at the time, arguing that rigid ideas about authenticity often stifled ambition.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n