The Truth About Billy Corgan And Courtney Love's Relationship
Courtney Love will go down in history as Kurt Cobain's wife (or murderer, if the 2015 documentary Soaked In Bleach is to be believed), but that tumultuous relationship wasn't her first fling in the tumultuous world of 1990s grunge rock. She was actually dating Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan when she first started having feelings for Kurt. According to Diffuser, she reveals the beginning of the end of her relationship with Corgan in the nonsensical documentary she made about the Nirvana frontman — 2015's Cobain: Montage of Heck. It was 1991, and she had traveled to Europe with the Pumpkins when they went to play some gigs with Nirvana. Although she and Corgan were an item at the time, the moody singer apparently didn't want to pay her way back home, so she ended up taking a ferry with Kurt and the guys.
Courtney said she had a crush on Kurt. "I mean, he was beautiful, and enigmatic, and evasive." Still, he only just caught her eye at the time, planting the seed that would grow into their weird, mutually destructive romance. She remained true to Corgan during the ferry ride, even though he'd abandoned her, but she admitted that the end was nigh. "He kind of lost me at this moment," said Love. "This wasn't the moment that he specifically lost me. That would be about six to eight months later, but he kind of lost me at this moment."
Their "professional" relationship: Love takes credit for Corgan's songs, and vice versa
Even though their romantic relationship ended decades earlier, the two seemed to have carried the grudge well into the new millennium. They attempted to collaborate on what was meant to be Love's 2010 solo album Nobody's Daughter (it was ultimately released as a Hole album, despite not featuring any other original members), but Corgan soon regretted the decision. As The Guardian reported later that year, the pair got into a juvenile tit-for-tat on Twitter, with Corgan telling Love to "go [somewhere] nice and live off [Kurt Cobain's] money." He had apparently changed his mind about the songs he helped her write for the album, having told Rolling Stone that he did not give her permission and had "no interest in supporting her in any way, shape or form. You can't throw enough things down the abyss with a person like that."
In an apparent switch from writing awful lyrics to posting awful tweets, Corgan added a pseudo-poetic insult to his Twitter tirade: "Burn up in the sun that laughs at [you] as equally as it appears to celebrate [you and] sleep knowing [you] have no honour." Courtney compared dealing with Billy to taking "a white hot knife to the belly" (stop, both of you, please, just stop) and then pulled a manic U-turn a few days later, apologizing and claiming that they had "again created beauty from the agony between [them]." (Seriously. Stop it.)
Courtney had one last go at Billy before they reconciled (for now)
The following year, Courtney Love went all Courtney Love on Corgan and the Nirvana guys at a festival in Brazil in 2011. She spewed an angry, most likely chemically fueled tirade about her former grunge acquaintances in front of thousands of fans. "Being who she is," wrote Antiquiet (and those who know anything about Courtney need no further explanation as to why), "the show quickly went awry when Love's signature insane conspiratorial rambling occurred."
After asking the crowd for "a chapstick for [her] herpes sore," she went on to claim that she was Billy Corgan's muse for almost every song on the Smashing Pumpkins' most iconic albums: 1993's Siamese Dream and 1995's Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. She even took credit for the hauntingly overrated line from the chorus of "Disarm" in which Corgan whines: "The killer in me is the killer in you."
In 2014, the pair showed signs that they had maybe finally grown up a little, but just maybe. Diffuser wrote that Love posted a photo of her, Corgan, and Marilyn Manson (yeah, he's also mixed up in the drama) to Instagram with the caption: "See all hatchets buried and true love never dies in the heart." However, the post has since been removed, so there's a good chance those oh-so-moody '90s rockers are back at each other's throats again.