The bands who inspired Billy Corgan and the first Smashing Pumpkins record: “Monsters of rock”
Podcaster and possible Bill Burr sibling Billy Corgan is one of a shrinking number of famous people on the internet who was famous before the internet properly existed. And yet, at the age of 58, he doesn’t come across all that differently from the baby-faced, long-haired, cocksure kid who started the Smashing Pumpkins back in 1988.
At the time, Corgan’s hometown of Chicago, despite its rich musical history, was not producing a wealth of successful rock bands. That’s not to say there wasn’t a ton of talent walking its streets, however.
It’s quite within reason to say that, on some random day in the early 1980s, a teenage Corgan could have crossed paths with fellow Chicago Cubs baseball fans and future rock legends Eddie Vedder, Tom Morello, and Steve Albini, not to mention Dave Grohl, who regularly came to town to stay with his cousin, and famously attended his first ever rock concert, Naked Raygun, at the Cubby Bear bar across from Wrigley Field. Most of these guys eventually found their way to the West Coast. Billy stayed put.
By the time Corgan gathered together the core four of the Pumpkins, with guitarist James Iha, bassist D’Arcy Wretzky, and drummer Jimmy Chamberlain, he was only 21 years old but already laser-focused on his mission.
“Success to me would be to be able to put out the exact type of records I want to put out and play the shows I want to play and have people accept that,” he told the Chicago Tribune in the summer of 1990, before the Pumpkins had even signed a record deal. “If you’re doing exactly what you want to do and you’re getting support for that, then there’s no reason to do anything else.”
In their first two years of existence, the Pumpkins had become regulars at Chicago’s Cabaret Metro club, also a short walk from Wrigley Field, and had nabbed slots opening for the likes of the Buzzcocks and Jane’s Addiction. Never feeling like they’d been blown out of the building by the headliners, Corgan was poised. He also saw it as a good sign that nobody seemed quite sure how to classify the Smashing Pumpkins’ sound.
“We’ve been called everything from neo-glam to hypnotic drone grunge,” Corgan told the Tribune, sounding like a future podcast host in training.
By the end of 1990, the Pumpkins would be signed to the indie label Caroline, and in the early months of ‘91, they’d head up Interstate 90 to Madison, Wisconsin, where they’d record their debut album Gish with producer Butch Vig, just weeks before Nirvana would record much of Nevermind in the same studio.
Corgan would be linked to Kurt Cobain in many ways from the point forward, but the two men were not coming from the same places in terms of leading influences. While Kurt was a bit more of a punk and indie kid, famously listing albums by the Vaselines, Flipper, Frogs, and Bad Brains among his all-time faves, Billy saw his band as carrying the torch for a more totemic element of the rock pantheon.
Specifically, when chatting with the Tribune in 1990, Corgan mentioned his personal influences as “‘60s mega-rock bands like Cream, Black Sabbath, the Stooges, Blue Cheer, Led Zeppelin—your monsters of rock.”
Corgan and Cobain did have the Stooges in common, and while Billy always resisted being grouped in with the alt-wave led by the Seattle bands, he also had a similar loyalty to his own hometown, despite many people advising him to head to New York or LA.
“When [Smashing Pumpkins] got together, people kept drilling one thing into my skull—’You’re never going to make it if you stay in Chicago’—and I chose not to believe it,” Corgan told the Tribune in 1991. “There’s an awful lot of whining in this town from bands who, let’s face it, aren’t very good. The idea of the Pumpkins from the beginning was to not care about Chicago as this oppressor, but to be the best band we can, because if you’re good, the word will get out—and it did.”
