For those of you just catching up, we've broken down my lengthy interview with Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan into themed sections: The early years, talk of their new album, and now, he touches upon his South Florida connections, the lasting quality of the Pumpkins, and how he feels about the indie scene.
Though several SP fanatics criticized my mentioning Radiohead in the previous Q&A in the comments section (here's another segment, as well) -- which, by the way, was my objective way of trying to have Corgan bring up the digital Machina 2 digital release -- I think they'll be happy to know that Corgan's hung up his dress and now just wants to be known as the guy in the T-shirt. In this Q&A, Corgan talks recording with old school methods and his love/hate relationship with pretension.
Billy Corgan: I love playing... about a thousand people is
like to me the ideal place. 'Cause you can see everybody, you can feel
everybody. If they shout something, you can hear them. It's sort of got
the best combination of things. Unfortunately it's just economics of
the business are so bad that if you tour that well now, you basically
lose money [laughs]. You can't really do a successful tour that well
now, which is really a shame.
I've been following the Smashing Pumpkins since I was a kid...
like you were my first real favorite band. I own all the albums and box
set, and I used to walk around wearing the "world is a vampire" beanie
everywhere in the steaming South Florida heat when I was a kid.
Wow. That's hardcore. Where in Florida?
I grew up in Miami, actually.
Oh man. My brother lives in Coconut Creek.
That's up north in Broward, not too far up.
I'm down there a lot to see the family.
What's it like to be a part of something that's had such longevity?
You know, it's weird because first things start to kick in that you
can't anticipate. So like let's say positive number one: Now we're
getting to that place where we're getting the kids of fans. So we'll
meet the 16-year-old and he's like, "Yeah, my dad was totally into you
guys, and I'm so excited 'cause this is my first chance to see you."
You get that; then you get the thing of like people that have been fans
for so long that they don't wanna hear anything new. They're over it.
They're just totally over it. They just wanna hear only songs between
the years 1990 and 1995, and fuck all the rest. When you're playing in
1997, you can never imagine getting to that place where your audience
wouldn't wanna hear what you were doing new, which is sort of like
completely counter to why you play. It's weird 'cause all of a sudden
you've got this guy who's mad because you only played four songs from
Siamese Dream and not 11 and could give a fuck-all about the new
album, you know? And you're like, "Whoa, that's really weird."
I don't think it's that they don't give a fuck about your new
stuff necessarily; I think it's just that your old stuff had such an
empowering feeling for so many people that it's hard for people to go
see you and not experience all of that.
Yeah. But I think, umm... And I don't disagree with you, I just
think that an artist is always empowered with the need to sort of find
what makes sense in the moment that they're in, and sentimentality is a
really dangerous thing when it comes to art. With a band that's been...
we're now 20-something years plus, at least in terms of since we
started. There's going to be a level of sentimentality; it's just part
of the game. But if that's the foundation of why you play or what
you're doing... I just refuse to do that.
I agree; I feel like every album you've done, you've sort of changed a little bit, but not in a bad way.
Yeah, changed too much [laughs].
Not in a bad way, I mean like little by little to sort of accommodate the newer generations.
Yeah, I'm influenced just by what's going on in the air. I don't
always listen to everything, but you can just sort of like feel it.
Even just the way music is made now with more computers, it's just
totally changed the way people create music. I mean, the way I create
music is really anacronystic at this point; it's really like a dinosaur
way.
You still create it the old-school way, then?
Yeah. We still use tape. We still have band practice. All the normal things.
Yeah, but every band has band practice, I'd think. Recording the old-fashioned way -- that's crazy.
I know, weird, right? [laughs].
So after Adore, you slowly started to go back into your original groove.
We'd decided as a group that we'd make one more album. I had this
whole concept in mind that never really kind of got worked out. But the
whole Machina album was more to be like a play, and my hope was
that we were gonna be able to play it like a play, almost like a
theater-type thing.
Like in a musical?
Yeah, all the songs were written to be in a musical. So it really
confused people even more, 'cause they were like "What the fuck is
this?"
Yeah, that makes a lot more sense in retrospect.
Yeah,
the whole idea was that the band would go out and pretend... it's
really convoluted, but the simple version was the band had become such
cartoon characters at that point in the way we were portrayed in the
media, the idea was that we would sort of go out and pretend we were
the cartoon characters.
Sort of like how Gorillaz has created the fake cartoon versions of themselves?
Yeah, but our fake personas would be the people that they thought
we were. We would be caricatures of who we really were. So that's why I
didn't explain it when we came out because we were supposed to be sort
of imitating ourselves, but like the silly version, the way-over-the-top version of ourselves.
Yeah, like how you guys came off on the live videos and stuff.
Exactly. Because it wasn't explained, everybody just thought we were off on some weird trip.
And you guys were supposed to do an animated version too, right?
Yeah, actually Sony at the time had picked up an animated version
of the concept, and it was supposed to be made into a cartoon. And they
actually made some episodes, and it never came out unfortunately; the
whole thing went out of business.
I heard little bits and pieces were leaked.
Yeah, I think you can find a few bits and pieces, but it never got
finished unfortunately. That would've at least explained what the fuck
I was trying to do [laughs]. I'm not even sure now what I was trying to
do. But I was trying to do something.
That answers a lot, because there were a lot of fans that were on the fence about Machina because they didn't really know what was going on.
It was a really dark album. If you liked the Mellon Collie/Gish
version of the Smashing Pumpkins, I can see why people were like, "What
is this? This is so weird." It's a very hard album to get into, but the
people that get into it get really into it. What's nice is that bands
that are popular now come up to me and talk about that album because
they found that album sort of like a puzzle. So it's had an influence
on some of the music that's been made in the past five, six years, so that's
been cool. Right now, I sort of don't understand that album, so I'm a
bit confused by it.
Now you're confused by it.
Oh yeah. 'Cause the person who I am today, I wouldn't make those
same choices, so I kind of don't understand why I made some of those
choices, 'cause they seem kind of silly to me now. But at the time, they
made total sense to me.
You're such an opinionated person, between your old blog, your
poetry book, all of your songs, and even your Twitter account, I'm sure
you could probably trace back through all of it and see what you were
trying to get at.
Yeah, I dunno. I dunno if I wanna play in that playground, you know
what I mean? [laughs]. You know, sometimes you see somebody you used to
go out with and you think, "Oh, fuck. What was I thinking?" It's a
little bit like that.
I've actually read a lot of the stuff that you've done back then
and even now. I feel like it never seems to get boring. Why are you so
verbal about everything?
I was really encouraged when I was a child to read a lot and to
speak my mind, you know? I didn't realize that that wasn't a popular
thing to do in the world [laughs].
Not that it's not popular, but a lot of times musicians get yelled at for being too verbal.
Yeah, I dunno. Look, if I had to do it all over again, I'd probably keep my mouth shut.
Really?
Yeah, 'cause I think it's really done a disservice to my music.
I don't think so. I feel like it's helped your fans get to know you better.
Yeah, but a lot of my fans don't like me [laughs]. They don't
understand me, you know what I mean? Look, I love music, and I've been
fans of tons of people, and I can't tell you how many times I thought I
knew how somebody was gonna be and then I met them behind the scenes
and got to know them as a person and I was totally wrong. But I know
why I thought... like if I thought somebody was difficult or hard to
get along with, and then I'll get to know them in real life and they
weren't like that at all, I'll understand why they came off the way I
did. I have lots of friends, and I mean they all think I'm opinionated,
but they don't think I'm the person I'm portrayed to be in the world.
But once you become portrayed like that, it sort of becomes more about
that. Like most interviews that I do, 50 percent of questions have to do with
me, my mouth, and the things I said and not so much about music. It's
obviously part of who I am, and I'm not trying to change that
-- nothing's gonna change that. But the musician in me feels a bit like
sometimes the music's been overlooked because of me and my big mouth.
I've actually discussed this with other opinionated bands before,
and they feel like music is a part of their lives, but it's not really
as big of a part of their personal lives in the grander scheme of
things. It's just like a smaller part to the whole.
But music is a huge part of my personal life, so maybe that's where
I'm different. Music to me is like 75 percent of my life. So when 25 percent of my
life overshadows the 75 percent, you can understand why it's a weird feeling.
I feel like that's all helped people see a softer side to you,
though. I just looked at your Twitter account a couple of days ago, and
I cracked up at some of your observations.
Yeah, I dunno. We live in a different world. Celebrity is a strange
thing at this point. We have people who are just famous for being
famous at this point.
So then how do you feel about the indie scene? I've noticed you've poked a bit of fun of it on your Twitter account.
You know, I love that there's an indie scene. I love that there's
indie bands; I love that there's people trying to do new things with
music. I don't like the world that surrounds it that tries to make it
out to be something that it isn't.
Sort of like the underlying pretension?
It's... Look, art on its own is pretentious. I'm pretentious at
times. It's OK; pretentiousness is not a bad word. The core word of
pretentiousness is pretend; it means you're pretending something. I
don't mind pretension. I don't mind that there's a subculture or 40
subcultures and DJs. I think it's fantastic. I think that is the ground
that most good ideas come from, and I love that young people are
excited about music and doing their own version of it, and just like me,
they wanna kill their idols. I think that's totally fine. I don't like
it when it becomes a kind of narcissistic, negative culture that self-justifies itself. Because let's face it: 95 percent of those bands that are
considered indie bands couldn't succeed at a mainstream level. Now they
would probably all tell you "We don't want to," and that's fine; I
understand that. But there are people in the world who have different
types of talent that resonate for different reasons. No indie art band
is ever going to be as cool in my eyes as the Cure. Because the Cure is
a revolutionary band that set up a whole set of different types of
musical influences that a lot of those bands benefit from.
And I think even a lot of subcultures.
Right. So for me, it doesn't take anything away from the Cure's
artistic legacy that they went on to be a very popular band. So to me,
that whole indie versus corporate versus sellout and all that stuff --
I just think it's all a dumb game. I think it doesn't even mean
anything anymore, but people continue to do it because it's good for
their website or blog, but it doesn't really have anything to do with
reality. When an indie band says, "We don't wanna do that; we're gonna
do it this way, and we're only gonna release cassette copies" and stuff
like that I think, "Great, that's what you should do." You should do
what you wanna do. I'm doing what I wanna do. But somehow, when it's
implied that me doing what I wanna do or people like me doing what we
wanna do, somehow we're less than or idiotic or we lack. I think
they're really missing the point.
I feel like you've changed so much in music, and even men's
fashion. It was kind revolutionary when you decided to wear a dress.
What inspired that?
I dunno. We had a guy design... he's actually a very famous
clothing designer now, Olivier Theyskens; he's from Belgium. He
designed the clothes for the whole Machina look. For that, he designed
this whole dress-like structure for me, and at first I thought, "Well,
that's really weird" but I tried it on and thought it looked really
cool. For whatever reason, I thought it worked with my vampire look. And
so when I came back in 2007, I wasn't wearing those types of clothes,
but at some point I thought, "Well that's just better," so I kind of went
back to it.
Are you going to be wearing any of that kind of stuff for the small-venues tour? Or are you scaling it back?
No, no. I'm just going to be the guy in the T-shirt.
Smashing Pumpkins, with Kill Hannah and Bad City. 7 p.m. Tuesday, July 20, at Revolution, 200 W. Broward Blvd., Fort Lauderdale. Tickets cost $44. Call 954-727-0950, or click here.
