Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins wants to take home a piece of alternative rock history: the autographed lyrics of Violetone of the songs of Live Through This of the Hole that Courtney Love wrote about their relationship. The rocker donated it to a fundraiser for the Ellis Park Wildlife Santuary in Sumatra, Indonesia which counts Warren Ellis, Nick Cave's right-hand man and key member of the Bad Seeds, among its co-founders.
The sheet of paper with Love's handwritten lyrics will be up for grabs in a charity raffle which can be entered by purchasing a £10 ticket (three tickets for £20). This is what Billy Corgan did, explaining in a video that «over the course of this week there has been a lot of talk about this auction. I bought a ticket because I would like to win the text. I think it's a guy I know a little about and I'd like to hang him on the wall.”
Violet it is the piece that opens the 1994 album Live Through This. “It's about an idiot,” Love said on the Jools Holland show in 1995. “I gave him the evil eye and now he's losing his hair.” On the occasion of the donation of the text, the singer explained that in reality «it is not only about Billy Corgan, as many think. He talks about sitting on the fire escape of his apartment, sipping cheap wine and taking a Vicodin (ah, the youth!) as the Chicago sun sets, painting the sky an amethyst color.”
In addition to apologizing for the comment in 1995 (“I was being a bitch”), Love explained that he also took inspiration from The zucconeid by the eighteenth-century English poet Alexander Pope and by Emily Brontë, the latter for a part that she then decided to eliminate.
«The piece» says Love again «talks about being in the balance between two boys who represent the angel and the devil that are in me, but also my nature. The line about “Danny's new act” refers to Goldberg (best known for being the manager of Nirvana, ed) or to a drug dealer, another Danny known as Bobby Bones who Flea will remember.”
As for Corgan, in the video he states that he contributed to the writing of the piece with some “heartbreaking couplets. I will always love this song. I love you Court.”
From Rolling Stone US.
