The Smashing Pumpkins album Billy Corgan called “eight months of insanity”
For most of the general populace, Billy Corgan will also be associated with his brief rule of the alternative rock world in the mid-1990s. In the immediate aftermath of Kurt Cobain’s death, the entire genre of rock needed someone to take over as the figurehead. Corgan and The Smashing Pumpkins had already established themselves as one of the primary contenders to the alt-rock crown, and with 1995’s Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, they reached a peak that would never be equalled.
“Mellon Collie was eight months of insanity, but in many ways that record changed my life much more than Siamese Dream did,” Corgan told Matt Stocks in 2016. “The record has now gone diamond in America, and I think only 26 records have ever gone diamond in the US, which is 10 million albums sold. That’s insane to me, because it’s really a dark record. But Flood [producer Mark Ellis] really gave me the encouragement to take chances, and when you think about the songs from ‘Zero’ to ‘Bullet With Butterfly Wings’ and ‘1979’ to ‘Tonight, Tonight’, that’s a really wide range of music, and he followed me down every road”.
Across nearly two hours of music, Corgan and the rest of the band unleashed 28 songs that varied in style, speed, genre, and just about every conceivable notion of what a rock band could do. The expansiveness and indulgence were part of the point: Corgan never shied away from the fact that he wanted to make something incredibly grandiose.
“With Mellon Collie I wanted to make an album that sounded like The Wall, and reached an entire generation in a particular way,” he claimed. “I wanted to reflect the suburban malaise of disenfranchised youth, and the socio-political climate of those Reagan to Clinton years in America. This was pre-Internet remember, and people didn’t really know how to find alternative culture. So I knew there were a lot of kids out there like me who sort of existed in this bubble in the suburbs. And living in the suburbs in America at that time was like death.”
“Your future was totally laid out for you: you were going to go to high school, then university, then you were going to get a good job, get married, have kids, and then die,” Corgan explained. “There was no bigger dream than that, and people didn’t have the lifestyle choices that they have today. So when I talked about those feelings very openly, it obviously connected to that generation in a very big way.”
Even though he remained proud of his band, Corgan did have a hard time getting away from the box that The Smashing Pumpkins, and specifically the success of Mellon Collie, put him in. Corgan has three solo albums to his name, plus a brief dalliance with the supergroup Zwan. But to most of his fans, it always comes back to the Pumpkins.
“Not to be snobby about it, but when I took time away from The Smashing Pumpkins I had a big pile of money and I thought, ‘I’m just going to do what I want to do’. I never in a million years thought that people wouldn’t let me move on,” Corgan complained. “Jack White fans let him move on from The White Stripes, but people would not let me move on from The Smashing Pumpkins, and what was strange about all of that is that I wrote all the songs and helped produce all the records.”
“As far as I was concerned, it was time to move on. But no matter where I went it was always, ‘Pumpkins! Pumpkins! Pumpkins!’ I think part of that was the rise of the social media age, and the beginning of everyone having their opinion in the pot,” he thought. “So to the unsophisticated that hadn’t followed Adore or Machina, I was still the ‘rat in the cage’ guy. They couldn’t get beyond that, and suddenly their opinions seemed to matter, whereas before you wouldn’t have heard their opinion and it wouldn’t have mattered. Ronnie James Dio said it best: the mob rules.”
Check out ‘Bullet With Butterfly Wings’ down below.
