“The two things I remember are the cool guitar stuff… and this never-ending scream”: Billy Corgan on the first time he met Courtney Love and witnessed Hole live

Back in the ’90s, Courtney Love and Billy Corgan ran in similar circles and over the years, their bands – Hole and Smashing Pumpkins, respectively – played on the same lineups, traded bassists, and even became musically interlinked through Corgan’s songwriting contributions to Hole’s Celebrity Skin, their most commercially successful record.

“I'm a smitten indie, wannabe rock star, and I've just seen you play, and, if anybody saw you in the first album era, what it lacked in Beatles chords, it made up for in complete, sheer, visceral energy,” Billy Corgan says on his Magnificent Others podcast, as he describes the first time the two met on October 29, 1991, at the Avalon, in Chicago.

To which Love replies, “I mean, if you're gonna go there, that's why I said with the Kim Gordon era, with Pretty on the Inside, like, ‘This is our own. This is the market. All right, I'm going all the way in.’”

Corgan recalls that, from that early Hole show, the two things he remembers are “the cool guitar stuff happening [by way of guitarist Eric Erlandson], and then this just never-ending scream. It was like white-hot rage, and it was performative, yes, but it was sourced from somewhere.”

As for where the so-called “white-hot rage” was coming from, Love recounts how her childhood trauma, which included her “father giving me acid from about three to six” – shaped her and what would eventually become Hole's rage-fueled repertoire.

“I couldn't afford to not understand the politics [of the music industry],” she asserts – an ethos which also extended to her willingness to recruit Kim Gordon, who she describes as “the gatekeeper,” to produce Pretty on the Inside.

Courtney Love | The Magnificent Others with Billy Corgan - YouTube

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“Try doing indie politics. It distracts so much, every musicality, and so, screaming was my only option – it was something I was good at too, and my lyrics were fucking fire, and I knew they were great.”

She continues, “Even though people love Pretty on the Inside, I could fuck with an R.E.M. song. I couldn't write Killing Moon, but I could fuck with the lesser [Echo & the] Bunnyman songs. I had a guitar player who was really good. I mean, at best, I was a reliable rhythmist... But I understood the skill set. I understood the art... the Peter Buck [the co-founder and lead guitarist of R.E.M.] of it all.

“So I understood what I could do with a good band. But I also understood, this is the market right now, and I'm gonna go all the way in and write great lyrics and do noise music.”

And speaking of the link between the two seminal bands, bassist to both, Melissa Auf der Maur, recently opened up about joining Hole amid tragedy and her “Master’s in Music” with the Smashing Pumpkins.