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Smashing Pumpkins leader Billy Corgan has shared his memories of hearing Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit for the very first time.
Corgan shared his recollection with YouTube personality Scott Lipps, who also happens to be his friend Courtney Love's drummer, on the Lipps Service podcast.
The 59-year-old musician recalls that on July 4, 1991 he visited Madison, Wisconsin, to spend the day with his friend Butch Vig, who had produced Smashing Pumpkins' debut album Gish at his Smart studio in the city earlier that year. Vig was back in Madison having spent the spring of 1991 in Los Angeles, producing Nirvana's second album, Nevermind, at Sound City studio.
"The sun's going down, it's a beautiful Wisconsin summer night, and Butch is like, 'Hey, you guys wanna hear the new Nirvana?'," Corgan recalls of the night in question. "And he brings out a boombox. And at that point, how many people had heard ...Teen Spirit? Probably under 10 or 20."
Corgan recalls that when he heard the opening chords of the opening song on Nirvana's album, his immediate reaction was, "Oh, it's Boston, interesting riff." [The riff was frequently compared to the main riff on Boston's 1976 single More Than A Feeling]. "And then it kicks in and I'm like, 'Oh my God, it's my guitar sound!' Butch had definitely taken my way of doing guitars and sort of said, 'I'll put that over here too'."
"But then I heard the song, and you know, it's one of those things where- I don't know know how long ...Teen Spirit is, four minutes? - by the time you get to the end of the four minutes, you're like, 'Okay, that's a classic'. It wasn't like, Hmmm, I want to hear that again, it was like, 'Geez, ok, so he's done it."
Corgan and Kurt Cobain were never friends, largely due to the fact that, ahead of the release of Nevermind, Nirvana's frontman began dating Courtney Love, who had previously been Corgan's girlfriend.
But in 2023, Corgan described Cobain as "the most talented guy of our generation" and said that he cried when Cobain died in 1994 because he felt that he had lost "his greatest opponent."
Corgan's comments came in an interview with Zane Lowe for Apple Music.
Speaking about his competitive instincts, the Smashing Pumpkins' leader told Lowe, "You know me well enough to know that when it's all said and done I want the Pumpkins standing on the top of the heap of our generation. And if that means I gotta write 800 songs to do it, I'll do it. I ain't shy about that.
"I will go down always as saying Kurt [Cobain] was the most talented guy of our generation," he continued. "Kurt had so much talent it's like frightening, it was like a John Lennon level of talent, where you're like, How can you have all this talent? Or Prince, right? But Kurt's not here, you know, sadly... so I looked around, and I was like, Alright, well, I could beat the rest of them for sure."
