The Lie People “Wanted to Believe” About Kurt Cobain, According To Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan

Rock stars who die young are often susceptible to warped public perception, and according to Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan, Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain was no different. Some myths about Cobain are more fantastical than others, like the idea that he faked his own death and “came back” as Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo.

Contrarily, other lies were more realistic. These falsehoods, Corgan argued in a 2018 interview with Apple Music, had far more disastrous implications for the music industry as a whole.

Billy Corgan On Public Misconceptions About Kurt Cobain

In the late 1990s, Kurt Cobain and his pioneering band, Nirvana, were at the height of their fame. Hits like “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Come As You Are” transcended musical demographics like age and genre, uniting music lovers everywhere in the gritty, bad-postured, and more than a little moody phenomena that was grunge. With his baggy clothes, greasy hair, and general lackadaisical attitude, Cobain was seemingly the poster child of not caring…or so they thought.

During his 2018 visit to Apple Music’s It’s Electric! with Lars Ulrich, Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan argued that the idea that Cobain didn’t have a tremendous work ethic was demonstrably false. “They wanted to believe that Kurt would roll out of bed, take some drugs, and write a f***ing classic. Kurt Cobain, as a lyricist, as a songwriter, as a visionary, was a f***ing assassin. He was great at what he did, and it’s a shame he didn’t do more of it.”

“He let people believe that he was the guy that was like, ‘Uhhh, yeah, you know, uhhh.’ How many nights do you think there were, long before Nirvana, that he sat in a basement trying to figure out, ‘Why does this chord go with this chord?’ Listen to Nirvana’s early demos. Listen to Nirvana’s first album; listen to the second album. His voice is changing. It’s not just changing physically. He’s finding the character of Kurt Cobain. They want to sit there and talk about, ‘Oh, he did this and didn’t do that, and him and Dave [Grohl] got in arguments. Give me a f***ing break. The great thing is, the public, by and large, really only cares about the music.”

The Nirvana Frontman Wasn’t The First To Hide His Ambition

The Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana occupied the same airspace in the last decade of the 20th century, so it’s unsurprising that the former band’s frontman, Billy Corgan, would have strong opinions about how the public perceived his contemporary—both as someone who admired his work and who had to actively compete with it. Corgan’s stance on Cobain’s work ethic certainly isn’t unique. Nirvana’s band manager Danny Goldberg shared similar sentiments in a 2019 interview with The Sydney Morning Herald in promotion of his book, Serving the Servant: Remembering Kurt Cobain.

Goldberg described speaking to Cobain’s wife, Courtney Love, about her and her husband’s work ethics in their respective bands, Nirvana and Hole. Love talked about wanting Hole to supersede Nirvana before adding that Cobain was “just as ambitious. He just hid it a little better.” Goldberg said, “That was part of his art. He was extremely focused and disciplined about accomplishing what he wanted to accomplish. This is someone who insisted on months of rehearsal before they went to the studio to do a record.”

“[He] had a tremendous work ethic,” Goldberg continued. “And at the same time, he created a character called Kurt Cobain. Hiding some of his ambition was conscious, and it was part of the creation of a persona that he felt that he wanted to create and that he would have admired as a kid. He’s not the only one who did that. I think Bob Dylan and the guys in R.E.M. did it.”

Photo by Raffaella Cavalieri/Redferns