How Billy Corgan’s father almost destroyed his chances of being a musician
If there’s one thing that’ll bring any rock star right back to earth, even one like Billy Corgan, it’s getting them to talk about their parents. For one thing, it’s the ultimate equaliser. No one comes across as an iconic beacon of rock ‘n’ roll genius when faced with someone who used to take them to school. As one of the premier philosophers of our generation once put it in a tweet, “I can’t believe my grandmother’s making me take out the garbage. I’m rich fuck this. I’m going home; I don’t need this shit.”
However, it goes even deeper than that, doesn’t it? After all, what creative career isn’t a desperate plea for your parents to notice you deep down? You’re either fishing for their approval or disapproval, and one way or another, it all comes back to them. One of the best examples of this is Smashing Pumpkins‘ main man, Billy Corgan.
Who’d have thought that a famously difficult man, obsessed with having his own way, with a desperate need for his own genius to be acknowledged, would be a seething mass of daddy issues on the inside?! In fairness to the lad, he’s at least not pretending he’s not. He was disarmingly open about his relationship with William Corgan Sr in a documentary series called Rock Icons.
The discussion of his father begins with one hell of a quote. Corgan looks slightly wistful as he says, “My father was my idol; he was, from my perspective, a living, breathing rock star. He looked like one, he talked like one, he acted like one, and he did drugs like one.” Corgan Sr wasn’t just a fellow musician but a guitarist and a singer, too. Unlike his son, though, he was a jazz musician, touring and performing throughout Corgan the younger’s childhood.
By the elder Corgan’s own admission, this meant he wasn’t there for much of his son’s childhood. However, when he was around, there wasn’t a huge connection between father and son either. William remembers his son as “kind of introverted… he didn’t speak much, he didn’t really show much interest in music or anything like that.” This was thrown in Corgan Sr’s face almost immediately, though, by a fateful test that his son completed at school.
Billy explained that he was given a test where three tones were played on a tape player, and the kids were tasked with asking whether the middle tone was higher, the same, or lower than the others. As he later explains, with no small amount of relish, “A week later they called my parents from the office and said ‘your son has scored the highest score ever recorded in the state of Illinois.’”
It is highly praised, but this is where the story takes a turn that nearly derailed Billy’s musical future before it even started. He goes on to say, “So, the principal told my father, ‘Your son is most likely a musical savant, and he needs to go into music construction immediately.’ I took the paper home to my father, who took one look at it, said, ‘It’s too expensive and threw the paper away.’”
However, the touchpaper had been lit. While the rest of Corgan’s education was a standard American public school education (that’s a free education, confusingly enough for our English readers), the knowledge that he had that understanding of music captivated him. Despite his father’s best efforts, Corgan would still become the leading light of alternative rock we know today. Most importantly, though, he would also make peace with his dad, coming to respect him as a musician and a man later in life.
