What is the truth behind the Billy Corgan, Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain love triangle?
The chaotic love triangle between Billy Corgan, Courtney Love, and Kurt Cobain is one of the most dizzying and hedonistic tales in all of rock and roll history, combining three titans of the genre to create a mess of manipulation, deception, and lies. As one of the most debated subjects in the entire music microcosm, it can admittedly be quite difficult to lay out the true timeline of events that ultimately ended in utter carnage – because believing one version of the story is a lot easier said than done.
As such, over the years much has been publicised as to the repercussions of this most disastrous of love triangles, but relatively little has been said, by comparison, on how it all began. After all, the Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana started off playing together in 1991, so how did Love enter the fray to suddenly render the two frontmen mortal enemies? It’s a lot more complex than you think.
Being an up-and-coming, exciting new frontwoman of Hole in the early 1990s, Love had her sights set on the Smashing Pumpkins’ growing cult success around the Chicago scene for more reasons than one. Telling her bandmates that she was taking a trip to see Corgan to convince him to let her group have a slot on his ongoing tour at the time, she set off from LA across the country under the guise of sonic pursuits.
But in reality, this wasn’t the whole truth. Corgan later recalled: “She was in love with me and wanted to come to Chicago to see me, and that’s what she told them [about the tour slot] to get the money. But the frontman was also in for a surprise himself, as he continued by saying: ‘She called me and asked, ‘How do you feel about me coming to Chicago?’, and I sort of ambivalently said, ‘Sure’, and she said, ‘I’m already here, I’m at the airport’.”
Feeling backed into a corner – “Courtney’s not the type of girl [to whom] you just say, ‘OK, let’s just sit down and stay calm for a moment, let’s think this through’… it wasn’t really like that,” he protested – Corgan took Love in, who “turned up looking very sexy and ‘ready to rock’, as we say in Pumpkin land, and I kind of freaked out!”
What did Billy Corgan tell Courtney Love about Kurt Cobain?
However, Corgan admitted that the last thing he anticipated was for his unexpected visitor to “walk five minutes down the block and run into Kurt Cobain. She hooked up with Kurt that night, and they were together, and then the next morning, she called me and asked if she could come over to my place.”
Delivering Love an ultimatum, Corgan told her: “‘Well, if you slept with Rockstar A, you can’t come back to Rockstar B’ – and the rest is history.” He certainly isn’t wrong on that part. Setting off a hurtling chain of events involving drama, drugs, and ultimately Cobain’s tragic demise, the whole mess of a situation between three burgeoning bands quickly became one of rock and roll’s most talked-over exploits, brashly labelling heroes and villains without any real regard for the people behind it.
Orbiting in the same Chicago circles with only room for one of them to make it big in the moment was always bound to be a tense affair between the Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana, but throwing Courtney Love into the mix only proved to be too much of a toxic potion. You might think love triangles were a pure invention of romantic fiction, but if these three were anything to go by, rock and roll was just as shambolic.
