Billy Corgan has entered an auction to win Courtney Love‘s handwritten lyrics to the Hole song “Violet,” which might be about him. The Smashing Pumpkins singer took to Instagram to explain the situation, telling his followers that he bought three tickets to try and win the sentiment memorabilia, with all proceeds going to the Ellis Park Wildlife Sanctuary.
“Hello friends. I have a very special announcement. Check this out. I just bought my ticket for the Ellis Park Wildlife Sanctuary auction for the lyrics for ‘Violet’ written by Courtney Love,” Corgan said in the clip posted to Instagram. “Now, it’s made a lot of press this week that this auction’s going off so I’ve actually bought my ticket because I’d like to win these lyrics because I think it’s about a guy I know a little bit and I’d love to put that on my wall.”
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“Anyway, support this if you want to, Ellispark.org and you can enter the auction as well but you gotta buy a ticket. I got three tickets for 20 bucks So I am in it to win it,” Corgan added.
In addition to his video post, Corgan also took to his Instagram Stories thread to share a screenshot of NME‘s article in which Love gave the outlet an exclusive quote about the meaning of the song. “It’s not just about Billy Corgan, as many might assume,” she said, “it’s about sitting on the fire escape of his flat, sipping cheap wine and taking a Vicodin (oh, to be young!) while the Chicago sun sets, leaving behind a bejeweled amethyst sky.”
Corgan captioned the screenshot: “She forgot to mention that I wrote one of the heart-rending couplets contained therein. But I will always love this song. Love you Court.”
Released in 1994, “Violet” was the opening track to the band’s second album, Live Through This. Love had actually written it a few years prior, however, alongside Hole guitarist Eric Erlandson. It’s long been believed that Love wrote the song about Corgan, whom she’d dated in 1990.
“Sometimes I just channel whatever comes,” she told NME. “I realize my comment on Jools Holland was a bit mean – I was just being bitchy beefy. But someone has to uphold the standards of good faith beef!” Love is referencing old comments she made on Later…with Jools Holland in 1995, when she joked that “Violet” was “a song about a jerk, I hexed him and now he’s losing his hair.”
The pages that are up for auction were ones that Love discovered when she was working on her memoir, Dirty Blonde: The Diaries of Courtney Love. The pages had been inside an old notebook that for years had been sitting in a stolen items locker at a police station but was eventually returned to Love.
The auction is running until Dec. 15, and all proceeds will go to the Ellis Park Wildlife Sanctuary, which is dedicated to caring for rescued animals in Sumatra. The sanctuary was founded by Australian musician Warren Ellis, who is most famous for being a member of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds.
