Smashing Pumpkins bandleader Billy Corgan has opened up about the sense of competition he had toward late Nirvana mastermind Kurt Cobain. In a new conversation with Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1, the grunge vet revealed that when Cobain tragically died in 1994, he cried "because I lost my greatest opponent."
Corgan prefaced this comment by gushing over Cobain's talent as a songwriter, and underscoring how much respect he had for the grunge pioneer as a musician. But he also characterized his relationship with Cobain in sport-like terms, and essentially said that when he died, Corgan lost his main competitor in the battle for alt-rock supremacy.
"When Kurt died, I cried because I lost my greatest opponent," Corgan told Lowe. "I want to beat the best. I don't want to win the championship because it's just me and a bunch of gabronis, to use a wrestling term. It's like, Michael Jordan, arguably the greatest sports competitor I'll ever see in my lifetime? I mean, you want to talk about an alpha. That guy wanted to win the valet tip. You know what I mean?
"I want the Pumpkins standing on the top of the heap of our generation," Corgan said earlier in the interview. "If that means I got to write 800 songs to do it, I'll do it. I ain't shy about that.
"I will go down always as saying, Kurt was the most talented guy of our generation. 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, sadly. So I looked around, I was like, 'All right, well, I could beat the rest of them for sure.'"
See the full interview with Lowe below, and then watch Corgan pick the 11 greatest metal bands ever.
