The song Billy Corgan called “the most exciting” thing he ever recorded
He may be the brains behind one of the biggest and most beloved rock bands of the 1990s, but being Billy Corgan doesn’t seem to be much fun, does it? I’m not even talking about the fact that The Smashing Pumpkins‘ discography isn’t exactly a bundle of laughs.
I’m talking about the fact that Corgan approaches fronting his band with all the scowling determination of a grimdark fantasy protagonist. Doomed by the narrative to shoulder an unbearable burden of glorious purpose, one that you can never let anyone else in on, lest it all fall to ruin.
In fairness to the lad, The Smashing Pumpkins doesn’t seem to be anything other than a gigantic drain on the very life force of anyone unlucky enough to play in them. Even when they were nominally a band, Corgan was still very much El Capitano, to quote the true rock god of our times, Dewey Finn. Corgan didn’t just write the songs that made up Gish and Siamese Dream, but produced them alongside Butch Vig and played every instrument that wasn’t the drums on them, too, which guitarist James Iha and bassist Darcy Wretzky weren’t thrilled by.
Yet still, Corgan pushed on, taking control of the band by any means necessary. To be clear, this wasn’t just Corgan being a tyrant. Drummer Jimmy Chamberlain is one of the great sticksmen of his generation, but he’d disappear from the band for days at a time to feed a catastrophic heroin addiction. Iha and Wretzky were an on-again, off-again couple in the band’s early days, so Corgan felt like he had to take full control of the band for it to get anywhere. After making that decision, he never really stopped feeling that way.
This is a shame because, for all the cracks one can make about The Smashing Pumpkins being just another gloomy grunge band, the actual music has moments of heart-bursting joy and scale. ‘Today’ may be a sarcastic song about Corgan’s annihilating depression, but on the surface, one can almost take it at face value with its sackfuls of gorgeous hooks. Same with ‘Cherub Rock’, ‘Disarm’, and countless other cuts from the band’s early records, and the scale was only going to get bigger going into their third album.
Which song excited Billy Corgan more than any other?
In 1995, the band were already one of the most beloved alternative rock bands around, but that was nowhere near enough for Billy Corgan. It was stadiums or bust for him. The Smashing Pumpkins were either the biggest band in the world or a failure. For their next album, Corgan wanted the band not to be compared to Hüsker Dü, REM or his eternal albatross, Nirvana, but to the classic rock bands that made him want to be a rock star in the first place.
Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness was to be an album less in the lineage of Candy Apple Grey and Murmur, but more Physical Graffiti and The Wall. A sprawling double album that covered basically every genre of music that Corgan had ever looked twice at, from the heaviest metal songs the band ever recorded to their gentlest pop songs and everything in between. Including some of their best known and loved songs like ‘Bullet With Butterfly Wings’, ‘Zero’ and a song that Corgan spoke to Guitar World about the creation of, ‘Tonight, Tonight’.
The epic ballad became arguably the centrepiece of the whole album. Marked out from the album’s guitar-driven heaviness by its most famous feature, the orchestral backing brings the song to life. In the interview, Billy Corgan said, “I have to say that recording to a 30-piece string section was probably one of the most exciting recording experiences I have ever had.”
It comes through on the record, too, a genuinely transcendent moment that puts Corgan, if only for a moment, at the level he wanted to ascend to as an artist. So you see, being in the Smashing Pumpkins wasn’t all bad. Just mostly.
