‘Hit So Hard’ Charts Hole Drummer’s Path From Grunge Heroine To Heroin Addict (And Back Again)

While rock n’ roll was once the almost exclusive domain of men, the 1990s alternative rock explosion brought a flood of female musicians out of the shadows and on to center stage. Foremost among them was Hole, featuring ferocious front-woman Courtney Love. However, while Love grabbed the headlines, Hole was a band, and powering them through the peak of the grunge era was drummer Patty Schemel. Her ups and downs with the group are the subject of the 2011 documentary Hit So Hard: The Life And Near Death Story Of Patty Schemel, which is currently available for streaming on Amazon Prime.

With its dependence on physical strength and stamina, drumming has held out as the last bastion of musical male chauvinism. Drummers are often stereotyped as jocks at best, brutes at worst. This ignores the tremendous amount of coordination required to play drums as well the ability to add and subtract measures, beats, rhythms and accents on a moment’s notice. If drummers are jocks, then they’re really smart ones. Hit So Hard not only deals with Schemel’s life and career, but also with what it means to be a woman behind the drum hit. As friend and fellow female drummer Kate Schellenbach of the Beastie Boys and Luscious Jackson says in the film, “Obviously women have stamina, they give birth.”

At the film’s core is Hi8 video footage Schemel shot during her tenure with the band. We see the various members of Hole and grunge royalty like Love’s husband Kurt Cobain and members of Sonic Youth and The Lemonheads cavorting backstage and enjoying their moment in the spotlight. The bands that made up alt rock’s first class came from the lo-fi world of punk rock, and their low expectations meant that fame and fortune was as confusing as it was exciting. Drugs neutralized such conflicting emotions and helped them through high-pressure recording sessions and non-stop touring, but at a terrible price.

Patty Schemel grew up in Marysville, Washington, a small town suburb, north of Seattle. She began playing drums around 11, experimenting with drugs a year later, and by high school realized she was a lesbian. A misfit in her conservative hometown, she found solace in punk rock, playing in a succession of Seattle bands and made the acquaintance of pre-fame Nirvana. According to Courtney Love, she was briefly considered as the group’s drummer, but later ended up in Hole, on Kurt Cobain’s recommendation.

The members of Hole are active participants in the film, talking on camera about their experiences. As you might expect, Love commands the most attention, tossing off hilarious one-liners, like describing the band’s first album as, “I am announcing my persona as a cunt.” Schemel joined the group in April of 1992, as they began writing material for their major label debut. Four months after joining, singer Courtney Love gave birth to her and Kurt Cobain’s daughter, Frances Bean Cobain. Home movies reveal the troubled grunge icon as a funny, attentive father. Unfortunately, the good times wouldn’t last.

Crystal meth fueled Schemel and new Hole bassist Kristen Pfaff during the recording sessions for 1994’s Live Through This. Love, on the other hand, preferred the numbing high of heroin, with Erlandson known as the band’s most “sober” member. One week before the album’s release, Cobain committed suicide. Schemel entered rehab for the first time soon after. Upon her return, Pfaff accidentally overdosed on heroin and died. Two months later, they replaced her with perky Canadian Melissa Auf der Maur, and went on tour to support the album.

Schemel’s sobriety lapsed somewhere on the road. A consummate professional, she realized the negative effect drink and drugs had on her drumming, and would wait until after the band played before “going crazy,” but eventually sunk into full fledged heroin addiction. Another stint in rehab resulted in a couple years of sobriety, but she lapsed again before the band started recording 1998’s Celebrity Skin. The exacting standards of producer Michael Beinhorn led to her being replaced by a session drummer on the actual recordings. She was offered the chance to remain with the band as a touring drummer, but quit and after another rehab stint “took a trip to Crack Heroin Island and stayed out there for a long time.”

Within a year of leaving the band, Patty Schemel was homeless, doing whatever it took to survive on the streets of Los Angeles and feed her addiction. After bottoming out sometime in the early 2000s, she entered rehab one last time and is now over a decade sober. The film’s finale finds her happy teaching drums to young students, taking pride in her female pupils, operating a doggy daycare business and getting married and having a child.

As a piece of filmmaking, Hit So Hard: The Life And Near Death Story Of Patty Schemel is flawed. The editing is clumsy, jumping around chronologically, with needless title cards, which muddy the narrative. However, as a viewing experience it is engrossing and satisfying. Schemel and the other members of Hole are likable and good storytellers. You root for them as they go from the top of the pop charts to the depths of drug Hell, and hope they come out alive, which they do for the most part. In the end, the film is a fascinating first-hand look into the grunge epoch, when music history was being written by the day.

Benjamin H. Smith is a New York based writer, producer and musician. Follow him on Twitter:@BHSmithNYC.

Watch Hit So Hard on Amazon Prime Video