“Bad people”: The dreary death of alt-rock supergroup, Zwan
As any longtime fan will know, Billy Corgan was actually pretty busy during his Smashing Pumpkins interregnum.
His old day job finally ground to a halt with a certain level of acrimony in 2000. Only several years earlier, the Smashing Pumpkins had been whisked away from the Chicago underground to one of the key forces of the US alternative explosion, 1995’s Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, topping the Billboard 200.
Through Adore’s vampiric goth U-turns and Machina/The Machines of God’s detour into dystopian prog narratives, Corgan announced their farewell show at their hometown’s Metro club and triggered a flurry of solo and side hustles.
There was 2004’s book of poetry Blinking With Fists, the synth-heavy TheFutureEmbrace, a plethora of soundtrack work, and the beginnings of his business interests in professional wrestling. Sticking out like a sore thumb was Zwan. An often overlooked venture despite its hype at the time, Corgan and Pumpkins drummer Jimmy Chamberlain managed to corral a solid team for their Zwan supergroup, boasting Slint’s David Pajo and Chavez’s Matt Sweeney on guitar, and A Perfect Circle bassist and future Pixies member Paz Lenchantin.
They packed a fair amount in across their two-year blip of an existence. Over a hundred shows, the sole Mary Star of the Sea album, and a winning Saturday Night Live slot seemed to mark Corgan’s next major chapter as an artist. Yet, the former Pumpkins frontman had pretty much nuked the project once it began taking off, citing the band members themselves as the main reason for Zwan’s implosion. What actually happened?
With characteristic snark, Corgan was more than happy to sling some mud not long after. “The music wasn’t the big problem,” he told the Chicago Tribune in 2005, “It was more their attitude. ‘Do we have to practice? I’d rather be hanging out at [Chicago bar] The Rainbo.’ Lifestyle stuff.”
Corgan then went in for the kill. “And then you get into what I would call cataclysmic behavioural stuff. Sex acts between band members in public. People carrying drugs across borders… I just tried to do what I’ve always done, which is to patch it up and roll it out. You go into a denial state. I got snookered in by really bad people.”
It’s an extraordinary claim. The best artists in the world may have skipped band practice for a night out, but open sex between the band? Drug smuggling? Corgan’s never been one to shy away from a dramatic spat, whether for a little wrestling jostling in the press’ ring, or to fuel his own self-aggrandisement. Whatever the case may be with the lurid Zwan claims, it’s a version of events scoffed at by Lenchantin nearly 20 years later.
“This is so Billy-esque,” Lenchantin told Rolling Stone in 2023, concluding, “He liked conflict. His thing was, ‘If we’re going to fight, let’s just do it in the media.’ And he has a voice in Chicago with the Chicago Tribune. That’s the way he communicated with people. That’s how he broke up the band.”
