The one grunge musician Billy Corgan called the most talented of his generation
The 1990s were the decade of the slacker. The movies came from Kevin Smith and Richard Linklater. The fashion was plaid shirts and ripped jeans. But above all, it was the music. The 1980s had been all about the surface—polished to perfection, playing to the rafters, with every hair in place and a shredding guitar solo at every turn. The ’90s, especially grunge, looked back, scoffed at the excess, and responded with ungodly noise from a Jazzmaster. That is unless you were Billy Corgan.
There have been five-star generals who took their jobs less seriously than the Smashing Pumpkins main man. He was the man who took Kevin Shields’ meticulous, grandiose walls of guitar noise and mashed it up with Prince’s domineering perfectionism. A man who could look at the contributions of a drummer as phenomenal as Jimmy Chamberlain and could say, “No, do it my way”, with a straight face.
Fair play to the lad. It led to some of the most celebrated music of the decade, but anyone could tell that the fact he wasn’t top dog weighed on him slightly. By slightly, I, of course, mean that he had all the intense, single-minded ambition of a contestant on The Apprentice and the charm to match. That was what set him apart from the rest of the grunge scene. He wasn’t a punk kid who would shun all accolades and success.
This was a guy who wanted to play guitar after seeing a Gibson Flying V at his mate’s house, if he could be like his classic rock heroes, he would. So, to come to prominence in the 1990s was probably the cruellest practical joke the world could play on him. To make a name for himself at exactly the right time that he could brush the edge of his wildest dreams, but there was always someone better.
Someone that he was almost always compared to. Someone more like him than a lot of people realized but, in most cases, was his complete opposite. The absolute pinnacle of the 90s slacker dream, Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain. It’s clear that even today, Corgan still measures himself up to a standard set by Cobain. Try as he might to throw up a white flag and appear as a humble guy, conceding to the more talented legend who had gone far before his time, but he still can’t help but take credit for their success.
In an interview with Rick Beato, Corgan talks about a conversation he had with legendary producer Butch Vig, who at the time had helmed The Pumpkins’ debut album Gish, and was in the process of making Nevermind with Nirvana. Corgan claims, “Butch says, ‘you wanna hear the new Nirvana?’… it’s ‘Teen Spirit’, and when the song kicked in I said, ‘You ripped off my guitar sound, motherfucker!’”
Later in the same interview, Corgan tries to save face, saying, “It’s not that I wanna take credit… Kurt was easily the most talented person in our class.” However, he’s still fundamentally saying that the producer of the greatest guitar sound in rock history cribbed it from him personally. Never change, Bill.
