How Billy Corgan and Kurt Cobain nearly patched up their relationship: “It was professional”
The relationship between Billy Corgan and Kurt Cobain was a strange one, and the relationship between Corgan and Cobain’s wife, Courtney Love, is perhaps even stranger. Having had a brief romantic fling with Love in 1991 before she left for Cobain, Corgan was largely resentful of the Nirvana frontman for not only having stolen his girlfriend but having been his closest competition throughout his career.
The two were not on speaking terms for the longest time, but while his feelings towards Love have always ebbed and flowed from affectionate to downright hateful, his relationship with Cobain, despite being cut short, appeared to improve and remain that way until his passing.
The Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana weren’t exactly always in the same lane creatively but were often attempting to appeal to the same fanbase with their contemporary takes on what rock music should sound like. It wasn’t necessarily a verbal or physical feud, but Corgan saw Cobain as something of a threat and someone who had inspired him to always try that little bit harder.
The Smashing Pumpkins’ first two albums, Gish and Siamese Dream, came out in the same years as Nevermind and In Utero, respectively, and the Nirvana records outsold the Chicagoans on both occasions. This wasn’t something that caused bitterness between the two parties, but did continually push Corgan to be increasingly ambitious with his songwriting and sonic adventurousness.
However, despite there being something of an ongoing rivalry, due to Corgan’s occasional closeness with Love, the two eventually managed to patch up their differences and became cordial with one another towards the end of Cobain’s life. Speaking on the Allison Hagendorf Podcast last year, Corgan opened up about this sudden change in the dynamic between him and his former adversary, saying that he rarely ever talks about how the two repaired their relationship.
“Towards the end of his life,” Corgan began, “we kind of made this weird peace. Whatever that was seemed to go away, and it was very nice and friendly.” He would quickly add in a very contemporary fashion that they were not ‘BFFs’ and that he would never refer to their relationship as having been that way but that there was a noticeable difference in their rapport. “I’m not saying we sat there and talked about the moon and stars,” Corgan added, “But it went from ‘I don’t like you, and I know you definitely don’t like me,’ to ‘how are you doing, is everything cool, yeah we’re good’. It was professional.”
As their bond grew closer, the tragic news of Cobain’s death by suicide would send shockwaves through the music world, and Corgan was one of the first to find out about his passing. Recalling the moment he heard the news, he said, “I think we were playing in Baton Rouge, Louisiana that night, and I picked up the phone and it was my manager at the time, and he said ‘Kurt’s dead’. I wept, and I’m not a crier. I wept openly.”
While the death of someone he had begun to form a friendship with was hard for him to take, it didn’t go any distance to repair his relationship with the grieving Love, and both of them have spent the years since hurling fiery insults back and forth at one another, despite even living together for a brief period.
