The artist Billy Corgan called a “religious experience”
While Smashing Pumpkins’ frontman Billy Corgan might not be everyone’s idea of a guitar god, he’s done an awful lot throughout his career that ought to be enough to make people reconsider this view of him. Upon closer inspection of his guitar work, there are plenty of intricacies that others in the alternative rock sphere during the 1990s weren’t daring enough to incorporate into their compositions that are suggestive of underrated brilliance, yet for Corgan, more people tend to focus on his songwriting capabilities above his technical wizardry.
It shouldn’t all be about flashiness when it comes to lauding the greatest instrumentalists, but when a lot of people come to name their own personal favourite players, it’s those who have a degree of showmanship about them that often get recognised above the people who do the simple stuff exceptionally well.
Also, it’s often the players who have had longer to instil their legacies that are championed more often, and while there has been a gamut of modern players that match the brilliance of those from the ‘60s and ‘70s, many of them are usually excluded from recognition by virtue of the fact that they’ve not been around for quite as long.
That being said, Corgan would have been exposed to some of the finest guitarists from the hard rock and heavy metal heyday growing up. Players such as Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi, Rush’s Alex Lifeson and Queen’s Brian May all rank highly in Corgan’s estimation as the guitarists who helped shape his own tastes, and would likely have been the main inspirations for his own output. However, one guitarist eclipses all of the above as being Corgan’s favourite.
For him, Eddie Van Halen is undoubtedly the greatest guitar hero in his life, and his own experience of getting to meet him and listen to him play from the comfort of his own studio is something that he feels incredibly blessed to have been given the chance to do. Corgan took it upon himself to approach a guitar magazine in America during the late 1990s, and requested that he be given an opportunity to interview his idol on account of the fact that he wanted to introduce him to a new generation of guitarists.
In an interview with BBC Radio 6 Music following Van Halen’s death in 2020, Corgan revealed how the experience of meeting him went. “To me, he really is an alternative guitar player,” he explained. “I know he gets kind of lumped in the other way. And so they allowed me to basically have a four-hour interview with Eddie at his studio. I got to sit two feet away from Eddie and watch him play, and I’m telling you, it was like a religious experience. I mean, the man was so gifted, so kind.”
There’s little argument that can be had to dismiss Van Halen as being an incredible guitarist, and while Corgan acknowledges that some don’t consider him to be truly ‘alternative’, the amount that he would have inspired countless other players in the same vein as Corgan is a perfect indication of why he should be seen in this way.
