Smashing
Pumpkins Look Back in Wonder
by David Fricke
from Rolling Stone - January, 2000
"I feel pretty comfortable walking away from these songs," Billy
Corgan says calmly. It is the afternoon of December 2nd, his
last day as the singer, guitarist and songwriter of the Smashing Pumpkins. In a
few hours, the band will play its final show for
1,100 adoring fans at Cabaret Metro, the Chicago club where the Pumpkins made
their official debut on Oct. 5, 1988. But
Corgan, thirty-three, speaks with the certainty of someone who -- after five
studio albums and more than twenty-five million
records sold worldwide -- has had enough. "I couldn't have gotten through
these last two years," he says in his hotel suite, "if I
didn't know it was going to come to some conclusion."
That night, Corgan is a
different man. At the Metro, the Pumpkins play a four-hour, thirty-five-song
marathon covering the
extremes of their canon: the epic swirl of the 1991 B side "Starla";
the punk sizzle of "Cash Car Star," from the free Internet
LP, Machina II/Friends and Enemies of Modern Music; a nine-song set of acoustic
pathos. Special guests include pop-punk
rascals the Frogs, Cheap Trick guitarist Rick Nielsen and Corgan's father,
guitarist William Corgan, who plays with his son on
Billy's memorial hymn for his late mother, "For Martha."
But Corgan, wearing a long
silver tunic that makes him look like a papal Ziggy Stardust, can't bear to
leave. He brings guitarist
James Iha, drummer Jimmy Chamberlin and bassist Melissa Auf Der Maur back onstage
for half an hour of "Silverfuck," from
1993's Siamese Dream. "Let's rock one more time," Corgan yells before
the last crash of drums and guitars. "Not for you" -- he
beams at the crowd -- "because you get it. Let's rock one more time for
all those people who don't get it, who don't understand
that music overcomes all this fucking bullshit." As the other Pumpkins
walk off, waving goodbye, Corgan stays to shake hands
and bathe in the fans' love. He bows, hands over his face. When he straightens
up and pulls his hands away, the sweat pouring
down from his shaven head is overrun with tears.
Chamberlin later says that
he ran the gamut of emotions that night: "A myriad of everything the band
is - the happiness, the
sadness, all of the polar opposites of the heart." The drummer, 36, also
started crying when Iha publicly thanked absent bassist
D'Arcy Wretzky, who co-founded the band with Corgan and Iha but who left under
clouded circumstances in 1999.
"I just wanted to
mention her," Iha says a few days after the show. "Regardless of
whether she's not playing with us, she's still with
us. She was really important to the band." Otherwise, Iha, thirty-two, is
not into the "mystification," as he calls it, of the Pumpkins'
end. "It makes me self-conscious. I would have just announced it after the
last concert. I would have sent out a fax: 'To whom it
may concern. . . .' "
In his hotel suite, Corgan
recalls the day, last May, near the end of a U.S. tour, when he decided to go public
with the news on
Los Angeles radio: "I called Kevin Weatherly, the program director at
KROQ, and said, 'I have a favor to ask. I want to come in
tomorrow and announce the band is breaking up.' He was like, 'Can you repeat
that?'
"It was two
things," Corgan goes on, running a hand thoughtfully over his clean white
scalp. "The band was being judged by this
idea that we were still trying to grasp the brass ring, which we knew we
weren't." In fact, Corgan, Iha, Chamberlin and D'Arcy
had agreed in late 1998 to disband after one more album, Machina/ The Machines
of God, and a world tour. "And there were the
constant rumors with kids. Every time I stepped out of a door, it was, 'Are you
guys breaking up?' I'm not a good liar. It felt weird
to look in a kid's eyes and say no."
When Corgan talks of the
"slowly deteriorating state" of the Pumpkins, he is not referring
only to public history: the 1996 fatal
overdose of touring keyboard player Jonathan Melvoin; Chamberlin's two years in
exile for drug abuse; D'Arcy's exit. There were,
Corgan says, "many unresolved issues - mainly, for me, musical. Being this
paternal figure doesn't work. It's like, 'Now, class,
please pay attention to this next chord sequence.' And the band doesn't
rehearse as much as it used to. When we had no money,
no nothing, there was nothing else to do but be grungy and be in a band. Now
there are many other options: 'I could be skiing.'
"I tried to take a
progressive step with Adore," he says, referring to the band's 1998 album
of gothic balladry, "and internally didn't
get the support I needed. I got the support on a conscientious level: 'We're
behind you on this.' But without Jimmy there, and
James and D'Arcy not particularly motivated, for whatever reasons, we never got
into that next complete musical agenda."
Machina was to be the
Pumpkins' grand finale. Corgan wrote the songs on Machina and Machina II --
forty tracks in all -- as a
"Ring Cycle" starring the Machines of God, a fictional band portrayed
by the Pumpkins in much the same way that the Beatles
played a marching orchestra on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Each
Pumpkin was to have a tailor-made character.
"James would have been this superaloof rock guy in high heels and a
cape," Corgan says. "D'Arcy would have been this
superspace queen. And it would have been 24/7" -- not just onstage and on
record but in "all of the interviews and language."
Corgan even drew a flow chart of the story's seven stages, with connecting
arrows to each song title.
"Unfortunately, the
band didn't completely follow through," he says with a sour laugh. When
D'Arcy quit, the project "became
more about survival - internal spiritual survival." (Auf Der Maur,
formerly of Hole, replaced D'Arcy, knowing it would only be for
a year of touring. "She's learned in the vicinity of fifty or sixty
songs," Corgan says admiringly of Auf Der Maur. "She said that at
the height of Hole, they knew fourteen songs.")
The Pumpkins briefly
considered issuing a double CD of Machina material, a la 1995's Mellon Collie
and the Infinite Sadness, and
then offered their label, Virgin, a two-for-one concept: Anyone who bought
Machina would get Machina II as a free download.
Virgin passed, so Corgan decided to put Machina II on the Internet for anyone
who wanted it. "I'm thinking, 'This is pretty fucking
good, I want this music out,' " he says of the sequel. Twenty-five vinyl
copies were pressed up as a limited-edition set -- an LP
and three EPs ("Technically the B sides," Corgan says) -- and given
away to fans.
Looking back, Corgan believes
some of the hard-pop songs on Machina II -- such as "Real Love,"
"Cash Car Star" and "Let Me
Give the World to You" (first cut in a different version for Adore) --
would have made Machina a more commercial record.
According to SoundScan, Machina has sold 510,000 copies in the U.S., a
precipitous drop in sales from Mellon Collie (4.5
million) and Adore (1.1 million). "It was like watching your kid flunking
out of school after getting straight A's for ten years,"
Chamberlin says sadly.
But at the last Metro show,
ticket holders received a free CD that showed just how far the Pumpkins had
come in those years: a
recording of the quartet's first Metro gig, in 1988. The seven songs are
rickety Cure-style indie rock with teasing hints of the
double-guitar howl that would bloom on the Pumpkins' 1991 debut album, Gish.
Within six months of that Metro date, the band
had dumped that material, and Corgan had written all-new songs. By the
mid-Nineties, the Pumpkins were the most consistent
hitmakers of the alternative-rock explosion. Their December 2nd set list was
packed with the evidence: "I Am One," "Today,"
"Disarm," "Cherub Rock," "Bullet With Butterfly
Wings," "1979."
Corgan's ambition "was
a phenomenal thing," says Metro owner Joe Shanahan, who booked that '88
show and was an early
supporter of the Pumpkins. "Billy took flak from a lot of locals, because
it looked like he was ego-driven. But he wanted
something better for his band. He wanted to take it to the mountain."
William Corgan,
fifty-three, can attest to that, saying, "From sixteen years old up, Billy
knew exactly what he wanted to do, how
he was going to do it." William points out that Billy, an honor-roll
student in high school, chose not to go to college even though his
grandmother left him a small inheritance for tuition when she died. Billy used
the money to finance the Pumpkins' first single, a
version of "I Am One" issued on the Limited Potential label in 1989.
"We had fights about
it," William admits. He now feels nothing but pride. "Billy is very
hard to deal with. But he expects that level
of excellence in others. If you're not prepared to deal with that, there are
going to be problems."
The Pumpkins' individual
futures are up in the air. Chamberlin, an auto-racing enthusiast, has received
an offer to race at the
Sebring Grand Prix in Florida this year. But he has no plans to leap right back
into rock drumming. Iha is opening a recording
studio in New York with members of the bands Ivy and Fountains of Wayne.
"I'll probably do another solo album," he says. His
first, Let It Come Down, was released in 1998. "But I don't feel the need
to hit the careerist high road right now."
Corgan insists he will take
some time off: "I envision myself laying in a bed and not having to get
up." But he has already met with
record labels about a solo deal and talks of working in a musical language
different from that of the Pumpkins. He also expresses
little remorse for the passing of alternative rock. "My mourning of that
era is over," he says. "Pick up the pieces and let's make
something new."
Still, he could not resist
one more fond goodbye to his first golden era. One night last year, before a
European tour, Corgan wrote
his final Pumpkins song, simply called "Untitled," which the band
recorded and sent to Chicago radio shortly before the December
2nd Metro show. Although not available as a commercial single,
"Untitled" sounds like a lost hit from Siamese Dream -- buzzing
pop with thick layers of guitar and the soft-loud dynamics of classic alt-rock.
"I still believe in
the Alternative Nation," Corgan insists, "even if MTV doesn't run the
program anymore. I will stand for that, I will
speak for that. If I'm your whipping boy or poster child, fine. But the one
thing you can't take away from me is I was there. Our
band was there. We fucking lived it."
DAVID FRICKE
(December 22, 2000)
-Taken from Rolling Stone