Billy Corgan happy to build on Smashing Pumpkins’ past
AT some point during the Smashing Pumpkins’ 2018 reunion tour, Billy Corgan had an epiphany. He realised his band was playing to packed arenas in large part because they were doing what he swore he would never do: reunite for the first time in nearly two decades with original members drummer Jimmy Chamberlin and guitarist James Iha and, most importantly, trotting out the hits.
“Whether anyone wants to say these things out loud, you get to a point where the road is so much easier just to become an oldies band,” Corgan remembers thinking at the time. “It’s like the path of least resistance.”
But the notoriously unorthodox and oft-disagreeable singer realised he needed a different plan. He wanted, or rather needed, his band to look ahead. They would make new albums. Expansive ones with serious breadth, like some of their most most-famous 1990s work. “So yeah,” he says now, “I get to be the stick in the mud that stands up and says, ‘No. This is not only the wrong path for me, it’s the wrong read. What people really want from us is to be great.’ “
And so now, on that quest for greatness – more than three decades after bursting onto the alt-rock scene and proceeding to notch four consecutive platinum albums in the 1990s, including two unanimous classics in 1993’s ‘Siamese Dream’ and the expansive 1995 double-LP ‘Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness’ – the Smashing Pumpkins, one of the few bands of their era to remain in the conversation, are still releasing new music. Their latest, ‘Cyr,’ is a sweeping, 20song head trip of a double album, full of synths and eccentric lyrics and released in conjunction with a five-part animated series entitled ‘In Ashes.’
Drummer Chamberlin says everything the band does, for the most part, is a democratic group effort. Or rather, it’s run sort of like a ‘co-op.’ Naturally, Corgan sees it differently. Where the group is headed, well, “it’s kind of up to me to define it through songwriting, I guess,” he offers. “If I can write a certain level of song and have some kind of vision of where we need to go, then everybody [in the band] seems to fall behind me, and we do good work. If I don’t have that vision, or I’m not clear in my thinking, nobody else in the room is going to do it because I don’t think anybody else in the room really understands what I’m trying to get after anyway.”
“I leap in with both feet, and if they follow, great. And if they don’t, that’s their problem,” Corgan continues. ‘In this case’ – meaning the new album – “they were happy, and everything was good, so there was no problem. But I don’t stick around and ask for permission.”
The 53-year-old Corgan has gone down a different path than the rest of his ‘90s peers who are still active, reliably iconoclastic and contrarian in equal measures. During much of the 2000s he released music at a manic clip, mostly under the
Pumpkins moniker, albeit with varying lineups.
Much of that material was met with a tepid to sometimes downright brutal response, leading to a bristly relationship with the press that can turn antagonistic at times. And that’s to say nothing of his antics, which can range from wacky – his gig as a wrestling impresario, writing and performing a musical based on ancient Greek mythology, that viral appearance on the cover of Cat Fancy magazine, declaring himself dead in an 2018 online rant – to alarming, such as his multiple appearances on right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s radio show.
Speaking via Zoom from his Highland Park, Illinois, home this month – after Election Day but before Joe Biden was projected as president-elect by all major news outlets – Corgan is, like many of us were, a bit anxious given an election without a declared winner.
“Of course you’re affected by what’s going on,” he says without naming which candidate he was pulling for. “It certainly stresses me out because you’re dealing with a lot of unknowns.” Corgan believes we’re living in the ‘posttruth era,’ one where fact vs. fiction is nearly impossible to discern. “So yeah, when you’re dealing with what we’re dealing with this week, who is to be listened to? Who is to be trusted? Who is to be followed? Who is to lead? That’s where it’s very difficult.”
His home studio has become a place of solace for Corgan. He regularly logs 10- or 11-hour days when he’s writing and roughly eight or so when he’s in ‘studio mode.’ Quarantine, he explains, has been a rather prolific period for him. He says he’s come to realise that much like a rough Chicago childhood spent largely indoors, he still thrives when he’s inside and the world around him churns.
“Coming from the childhood, I had realised that my creativity was born out of shutting out what was on the outside and going within,” he says. “And oftentimes when things are bad on the outside, that’s when it’s easiest for me.”
To that end, this year alone he’s already penned and put into motion 46 songs, all in various states of completion. Thirty-three of them are slated for a follow-up to ‘Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness,’ and the others are for a sequel to 2000’s ‘Machina/The Machines of God.’ The Pumpkins plan to release the ‘Mellon Collie’ follow-up sometime next year as well as tour behind it (if such a thing is possible), with the ‘Machina’ follow-up to arrive soon after. When asked why he chose to revisit the ‘Mellon Collie’ material now, and especially what spurred him to create new music under its banner, Corgan says it’s directly tied to the current stability in the band, which also includes longtime guitarist Jeff Schroeder, and how it mirrors the band’s dynamic at the time of the initial double LP’s recording.
Corgan says the album that produced some of the band’s most beloved songs – from the howling angst of “Bullet With Butterfly Wings” to the orchestral “Tonight, Tonight” to the wistful masterpiece ‘1979’ – “was a watershed moment. It was a convergence of a whole set of influences and feelings and right time, right place. You have to be the right band in the right place to make a record like that. It’s not something you can just flip a switch, and it happens. There was stability in the band, we had a great producer, a lot of things came together.”
And likewise, the singer says right now feels like ‘a comingtogether time’ for the Pumpkins.
“The band is good. I feel on point. And we’re right at another apotheosis. Which makes sense – we’re at about four-plus years with James [Iha] being back around, and the languaging and the personality balance is there to pull off another big opus. In my mind it was like: ‘Well, this is probably the last opportunity I’m ever going to have. If I’m going to do it, now is the time.’”
In fact, Corgan says there’s no way he would have ever considered making ‘Mellon Collie’ or ‘Machina’ sequels had his original bandmates not been back in the fold. “Partially because I don’t think I would have the pieces in play for what I need, and partially because I wouldn’t want to hear about it,” Corgan explains. “Because you and I both know I could make the exact same record, and depending on who is on the record it would be viewed in different ways. It’s just the reality of it. It’s like ‘Beverly Hills Cop’ without Eddie Murphy or something. You get into that kind of discussion. And I got tired of that discussion.” — The Washington Post