The surreal story of how Billy Corgan’s family won the lottery
Billy Corgan is one of rock music’s most controversial and outspoken figures. Best known for being the frontman of The Smashing Pumpkins, the band first achieved critical and commercial success in the 1990s thanks to a string of lauded albums, most notably 1993’s Siamese Dream and follow-up Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. Though loosely labelled as alternative rock, their work has also incorporated elements of shoegaze, grunge, prog rock and psychedelia. Corgan is the band’s chief songwriter and only constant member.
Despite fronting one of the most commercially successful rock groups of the 1990s, Corgan has long been an unpredictable figure. In recent years, he has appeared as a guest on the alt-right conspiracy show InfoWars, started his own pro wrestling company (National Wrestling Alliance), released a 138-minute long rock opera, launched an interfaith website devoted to ‘Mind-Body-Soul’ integration and played an eight-hour gig based on Herman Hesse’s 1922 novel Siddhartha. The Smashing Pumpkins’ 1994 single ‘Disarm’ was also banned by Top of the Pops because of its lewd lyrical content.
Over the years, Corgan has openly struggled with anxiety, depression, panic attacks and suicidal thoughts, becoming a strong advocate for the support networks of these conditions. He puts much of his mental health struggles down to his relationship with his father and the abuse he suffered at the hands of him. The complexity of their relationship was made clear in a wild story Corgan told during an interview with Howard Stern in 2023.
In the interview, Corgan explains the extent to which his father’s life had spiralled out of control and how he would regularly steal money from his son. “My father had come out of jail, and he was living in some sort of drug den underneath the train tracks in Chicago,” he explains to Stern. “We had some occasional contact, but it was very distant. One day, he called me and said: ‘Can I take you out to dinner?’ Sure. He showed up, new clothes, new car, and I said: ‘Did you rent this car?’ He laughed and said ‘sorta’.”
Corgan goes on to recall how his family members kept asking him whether his father had won the lottery. Corgan kept telling them no, but upon hearing the question so many times, he decided to ask his dad himself. Finally, his old man revealed that he had won the lottery: his wife’s aunt recently won $27million in the Florida state lottery. “He and his wife went from a drug den to being set up and taken care of for the rest of their lives,” adds Corgan.
So why didn’t Corgan’s father want him to know about the huge win? The reason, as with many aspects of Corgan’s life, came down to his tumultuous relationship with his father. “My father didn’t want me to know because [he thought] I would ask him for the money back that he stole from me,” reveals Corgan. “So he hid the fact that his extended family had won the lottery so he wouldn’t have to pay me back the thousands of dollars he stole. That’s how my father’s brain worked.”
Though it’s easy to mock Corgan and his unpredictable behaviour, once you learn more about his troubled childhood, you begin to understand the profound impact it had on his life. While that alone can’t explain away some of his most controversial moments, stories like this are a timely reminder that even the biggest and most successful musicians out there have their own demons, which they’re trying to control every day.
