The moment Billy Corgan knew he’d messed up Smashing Pumpkins: “I was burning my bridges”
The tragic thing about Billy Corgan is that a lot of the time, he sounds like someone who genuinely didn’t want to become the tyrannical dictator of The Smashing Pumpkins he became in the late 1990s, and some would say it remains to this day. Of course, we have only what he says to the press to go on about this, and there are many people who would say you can trust Billy Corgan about as far as you can throw him. However, there is a very real love not just of rock ‘n’ roll in the way he speaks but also for the creative process of rock ‘n’ roll.
As befitting a man who grew up worshipping the giants of 1970s hard rock, he seems to value having lieutenants in his band that he can always rely on. There’s a reason that to this day The Smashing Pumpkins are “a band” and not his solo project, even if the lines between the two are gossamer thin these days.
Despite that, there are still legions of fans who maintain that the “real” Smashing Pumpkins features James Iha on guitar, Jimmy Chamberlain on drums and D’arcy Wretzky on bass. Anything else is a mere tribute act, no matter how involved Corgan is. There’s even a hint that one of those people is Billy Corgan himself.
In an interview with Uncut Magazine conducted in 2013, as the band were touring their then- recent album Oceania, Corgan was asked about this very directly. In 1996, Chamberlain was sacked from the band after a heroin overdose while on the road touring their masterpiece Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. In the interview, Corgan was asked if this crippled the band.
How did Billy Corgan cripple the Smashing Pumpkins?
He responded with refreshing honesty, saying, “Absolutely. I should’ve quit right then. Instead, I doubled-down on a bad situation, and it got worse. The band went into a Cold War vibe. People stopped talking. And with walking away from rock stylistically, I was burning my bridges.” The news about Chamberlain, along with Mellon Collie’s follow-up, Adore, which was a move from rock into more electronic and industrial textures, was the final straw for many fans of the band.
They saw this as Corgan taking full creative control of the band. Historically, The counterargument for this is that Corgan always had full creative control of the band, and those folks aren’t wrong either. It’s to the point that Corgan pretty famously plays everything on Pumpkins records that isn’t drums. However, they’d always worked on the songwriting together as a band, and Corgan would (sometimes) listen to his bandmates when he was going off a deep end.
Above all, that Chamberlain’s overdose led to his sacking and not a period of time away from the band to get clean, though, says a hell of a lot about the way Corgan saw the band at the time. He’d taken the Pumpkins to the very top of the rock scene, and he felt like they could go even further at his beck and call. The tragedy of the Pumpkins, though, from Corgan’s perspective, was that they never quite got to the level he felt they could go.
Perhaps if he’d allowed himself to be reined in by his bandmates a little more and showed them a little more compassion, perhaps they’d get to the level he envisioned for them. After all, word is that Corgan was desperate to get the famously reclusive (not to mention famously anti-Corgan) Wretzky back in the band for their ‘Shiny and Oh So Bright’ arena tour in 2018.
It all speaks to a man who can’t let himself be as liberal as he wants to be. Considering that controlling streak may have curtailed what it was possible for one of the most exciting and original acts of the 1990s to achieve, that’s just sad for all of us.
