Smashing Pumpkins interview: Billy Corgan on how he got his band back

by Bill Palmer

“This will ultimately be judged,” says a relaxed yet confident Billy Corgan, “on whether this is a doorway to a whole ‘nother vein of work and great moments and great concerts or whether it was just a glimmer of hope and then unfulfilled potential.” Seven years ago he publicly declared that he wanted his band back. And while it’s been a long road, this week’s release of Oceania finally and unequivocally cements the return of the Smashing Pumpkins. The public has placed the album near the top of the charts. The critics are lining up to sing its praises. And it finally puts to bed the question of whether he could pull this off with a twenty-first century lineup.

The iconic midwest rock band emerged in the early nineties as both a counterpart and a counterpoint to the grunge emanating from the northwest, creating a distinct sound and legacy. But like so many bands from that decade they weren’t quite able to escape it, opting to break up at the turn of the century. Reuniting five years later, the Pumpkins still had their original lead singer, lead guitarist, and primary songwriter – but that all came in the form of Billy himself. Drummer Jimmy Chamberlin was the only other heyday member to come along for the new ride, and after their 2007 album Zeitgeist, he left the building. That makes Oceania the first Pumpkins album not to feature any of the other original members. But the new blood has been a positive.

“They’ve brought a renewed enthusiasm into my love of the band and my interest in continuing,” Billy says of bassist Nicole Fiorentino, guitarist Jeff Schroeder, and drummer Mike Byrne – the latter of whom was two years old when the iconic Pumpkins album Siamese Dream was released. “That’s sort of at this point the unwritten story. There’s obviously a lot of focus on me. Having a twenty-two year old drummer who’s excited to be there, wants to be there, wants to get on stage, looks forward to the day, that rubs off on me. I look at Nicole who’s thirty-two, she banged around in indie bands for over a decade, toured with Veruca Salt for awhile and went through the whole thing where her family doubted whether or not she’d ever fulfill her dreams and whether she was just going to be one of those broke musicians working as a waitress in LA. This is a big moment for her to step into the light, and she deserves being there. And somebody like Jeff who’s stood next to me now for six years and has been through the whole bullshit of being called a rented musician and being almost dismissed like he’s a prop up there. He’s a very skilled musician. This is a big moment for all of them, and I’m able to tap into their enthusiasm and their excitement and their hopes and dreams as part of my own.”

Whereas the late nineties Pumpkins sound had shifted to a more electronic basis and Zeitgeist was downright apocalyptic, Oceania marks a general shift back to the dreaminess of the band’s earliest albums, but with a new equilibrium. “This is the mood that the four of us create,” Billy says. “Jeff and Nicole and Mike all love shoegazer music. Someone just fucks around with shoegazer vibes every once in awhile, and we say ‘We should play more of that, that sounds good.’”

His penchant for ethereally cerebral lyrics hasn’t changed. New songs like Panopticon leave one tempted to run for the dictionary, and in this instance the word in the title is a prison system where the guard can watch all inmates from a single vantage point. The song is too upbeat to be about prison life, however. “It’s not just the literal meaning. It’s the idea of the all seeing eye. Its symbolic origins are from the all seeing eye, this idea that all of us are being sort of watched all the time.”

So is he the one being watched or is he the watcher? “I’d have to think about that,” he admits. “I’m always a bit naive in that I don’t think about my lyrics until I start getting asked questions, and then I completely don’t have an answer. I’d have to really look at the lyrics. I guess if we’re trying to be intellectual, there’s a line in there about ‘There’s a sun that shines in and there’s a world that stares out at me.’ That’s probably the key to the idea that in this case the sun is representative of the source or god. I feel like there’s something beautiful coming in from the outside, yet the feeling of the world watching me, looking at me, judging me, doesn’t feel so nice. I guess I’m comparing and contrasting the idea of there’s a good watching and there’s a bad watching.”

The lyrics to Oceania may consciously make more sense to him as time goes on, if past albums are any indication. “I’ve found that I trust my intuitive process with lyrics. I’ve been surprised many times when even with the Pumpkins reissues I have to go back and sort of recheck the lyrics because there were typos back in the day, and of course I’ll read through stuff and I’ll be like ‘Wow this is actually on point to what I was feeling at the time.’ But if you had asked me at the time, it was vague then. I think it’s just the unconscious process of an artist to be attracted to things or feel things, but not really know why that communicates. I love the way Keith Richards plays guitar. No one would say Keith Richards is a better guitar player than Jimmy Page, and I love them both, but there’s something about the way Keith communicates on the guitar that I always loved. But why does he play guitar that way? Do you know that I mean? It’s a feeling, it’s a sense of things. I just go with the feeling.”

The string of reissues, still underway, has given Billy a chance to reexamine his entire body of work. Despite his creative focus on the present, digging through his own past is a task he’s come to enjoy. “I’ve taken a really personal possession of it,” he says of the process which has thus far worked its way up through Siamese Dream. “I’ve spent about twenty hours a week there for a few weeks on the Mellon Collie and Aeroplane reissues. I think I’ve located something like seventy-five to eighty unreleased alternate mixes, demos, a lot of cool stuff there because it was a very productive period. I’m really excited about that. I love the opportunity to recontextualize the work, introduce a new set of fans to some of the edges of the Pumpkins that get left by the wayside in the modern version of ‘you’re the Rat In A Cage band.’ There’s a lot to the Pumpkins, just when I discovered the Who or the Beatles or the Doors or something, I think there’s a great journey there if a fan wants to take it.”

“It certainly brings up a lot of weird emotions at times, because I have memories come up and I think of long weeks in the studio by myself hating my bandmates. Those feelings come up. But mostly it’s a nice feeling.”

In the process he’s come to view some older songs differently, not only adding them into the 2012 touring setlist but approaching them live from different angles. “Recently we’ve been playing X.Y.U.,” Mellon Collie’s twenty-third track. “Part of what happened was X.Y.U. was recorded live in the studio by Flood and Alan [Moulder], and so I found an alternate version of the song earlier in the day that was being semi-improvised and I was sort of impressed by where the song ended up because I heard all these versions where we were just kind of fumbling around. It reconnected it to me with the interpretive aspect of the song, and so that kind of influenced the way we’re playing the song now. We’re not just trying to play the karaoke version just like the album, but we’re actually trying to reinterpret the song. And so now every time we play the song live it’s different, which is what the point of the song was in the beginning.”

The rebirth of a Mellon Collie track in the midst of the Oceania era is perhaps fitting in light of the sheer number of listeners and reviewers who’ve pegged the new album as the band’s best work since its 1995 seminal double album. Ask most any veteran musician how they rate their latest album and they’ll nearly always try to find a way to spin it into a standard promotional answer. But the ever honest Billy Corgan offers a more textured viewpoint. “The way I rate my albums is, what was the point of my album and did we manifest that? Gish wasn’t meant to be Siamese Dream, it was meant to be Gish. I think in that way I’ve never made a bad album. I would say the album that was the least fulfilling of its potential was Zeitgeist,” voluntarily criticizing his own album even after I’ve made clear that I had some degree of affinity for it. “I think every other album was in the range of its potential as an A or a B. I wouldn’t necessarily rate Zeitgeist as a C, it just didn’t hit its potential and it kind of got lost somewhere along the way in the process. Some of the best songs are in the demos that didn’t get recorded and that kind of shit. I think it’s up there, but I also think it has to do with familiarity. There’s a certain ring here that people are comfortable with, and I’m okay with it or obviously I wouldn’t have put it out. But I think The Future Embrace was a great album, and it was completely overlooked, my solo album. Over time now, over the last seven years, now people are starting to really get into it because it’s got a bit of a visionary aspect to it. So again, what was the point of the album?”

“The mainstream always assumes that every album you’re throwing yourself out there with your bust, and I’m not that type of artist. I pick my spot and I go for that spot, and I rate it on whether or not I hit my spot.”

The commercial success of Oceania thus far is notable for the fact that its release was not fronted by a traditional lead single. Instead the band’s advance promotion included offering a live stream of the entire album, a rarity for iTunes, allowing potential buyers to hear the entire thing before deciding whether to plunk down their money. Was he just that confident in the material? “Yeah,” he says matter of factly. “The old model, which you could argue served me pretty well at some point in my life, no longer is serving me at all. I thought how many times am I going to step up to the same position with the same thing to offer, and be told no? Varying degrees of no. In the music business it’s either yes or it’s no. There’s really no in between. It’s either yes or it’s like get the fuck out of here. So I thought if I’m going to step into this and we’re going to make a demand of the audience like we’re going to ask you to listen to the whole thing, what’s the causal point of exchange? We’re going to have enough confidence that this is worth more than this. I’m a good singles writer. I feel like I can write a single any time I want, if I really really want. And I’ve done it. It’s not a big deal. But I feel that the single and the moment of the single and the culture around the single and why the single matters has really reduced why the album matters for an artist like myself. And I’m no album champion anymore. But the point is we just had to step up and say look, we’re worth more than about 99.9% of what’s out there, and to demonstrate that, because there’s an inherent value in an artist these days that’s able to create something with depth. You can say you don’t like it, you can say it’s a bunch of shit, but people do hear the work. There’s a big difference between the kind of work that we did on Oceania and some ProTooled up fucking robo-record. I think those things still do matter at a kind of a street cache level. We’re seeing shifts where street cache actually does mean something. Pure respect does mean something. Having some values in the world beyond whether or not you can sell a fucking record does mean something. So we were ready to say look, it’s all right here. If this can’t get it done, it ain’t gonna be about one song. It ain’t gonna be about a clever marketing campaign. Whenever other things would come up, I kept saying to the people I was working with behind the scenes, the album has to be the centerpiece of this and if it isn’t, I don’t care, it doesn’t matter to me. Thankfully I found people that were willing to back me up on that.”

“So far it feels like a win,” he says of this new Pumpkins era which has largely shifted the public conversation about the band from the past to the present and has suddenly repositioned him as a twenty-first century vital figure. Yet even as one of the last men standing from rock’s last golden era, he has no intention of going the diplomatic route. “I’m just going to get on with doing what I do,” he says, “which is making music and causing trouble.”

Is that trouble intentional, or is it just a byproduct of his inherent honesty?

“I think it’s a bit of both. I don’t respect rock music when it doesn’t have an edge to it. I’m surprised that it’s become so corporate and so buttoned down. The lack of political commentary, the lack of social commentary, is kind of shocking to me that we would have regressed as opposed to going to a more sophisticated place than we were in the nineties or, say, the sixties. That’s just the way it is, I guess. To me, I’m in my own world. I don’t identify with a lot of my peers who said one thing in the nineties and are now doing the exact opposite. I basically have always said what I was going to do and did it. You could argue whether I was effective in it, and I will tell you where I thought I was ineffective in it. I see where writers will try to conveniently strip me of my accomplishments, or my favorite one where they beat me over the head with my own accomplishments. It’s an interesting paradigm there where you’re still here and you’re still living your value system and someone keeps telling you that your value system isn’t their value system, but my argument is that my value system works for me and obviously it resonates with somebody. And I think that’s what’s great about the new world order. The people who resonate with your value system, your musical vision or whatever, they’ll find you, you’ll find them, and you can run a happy business and you don’t have to go out there and embarrass yourself by doing a bunch of shit that you shouldn’t be doing when you should be focusing on your music.”

And yet there are still music industry factors which must be strategized around. Two years ago he gave up on the album concept and began releasing what was intended to be a forty-four song collection of new Pumpkins songs one at a time, each as they were completed, as free legal downloads. Oceania consists of, technically, songs eleven through twenty-three of that Teargarden By Kaleidyscope collection. “I don’t know,” he says when asked about the download totals from the first ten free songs. “I’ve never looked.”

“I do know that they weren’t connecting the way that we wanted them to, but I don’t regret them at all because I think it dialed me back in with the audience. And I don’t mean in a reactive way, like ‘oh they didn’t like this, let’s try this.’ I saw where my audience was so stuck in the past that they literally couldn’t hear a good song ,” he says with a laugh.

“I think there were ten official Teargarden releases,” he says. “In those ten there was at least two or three really good songs. And I saw where people were just like nope, nope, nope, nope. I get to the point where, okay come on, really? You want to go to this level? It’s like when you’re arguing with somebody and there’s nothing you can say where they’ll listen to you, and that fantasy of the old band is going to come back, or Billy’s going to end up in a defeated ruin as some sort of vindication of the old band. I just knew that wasn’t going to happen, but of course they didn’t know that. I just needed to kind of get back into contact with the street feel of my audience. I learned a lot about, not the technology, but maybe the way technology is permeating culture, where it works and where it’s an illusion. So I think we were able to come to Oceania with a really clear vision of what we wanted to do, why we wanted to do it, where we musically were focused, and where we weren’t going to sort of bother. I think that did help.”

So will he resume the one-off song releases, or will the remainder of the Teargarden era come in the form of complete albums? “I’m kind of mulling that around. There’s a lot of demos that are really fairly quality at least in terms of the songs. They’re just interesting, dusky sketches. The problem with the world we live in now is everything is judged so fast so hard and is given too much power, for lack of a better word. Three months from now I would love to just reach in and toss out a couple of those demos from 2009 so people could hear some different songs, maybe some things that helped lead to Oceania. But then invariably some asshole with a blog is going to write about the new Smashing Pumpkins song and how it sucks. I’m mature enough now that I don’t really care, but at this point we’re in a positive place and maybe we just need to play a positive game. Maybe we just need to be like everybody else and shine it up real nice and bright before we put it out. We definitely want to do another album. We’re already talking about starting to do some demos in August. It’s tough. I do want to put out some of this stuff that I’m sitting on. I do want to finish the project as I sort of originally sketched out. But right now we’re riding a wave and I’m not really sure where that wave takes us.”

That wave appears to have set up the Smashing Pumpkins as a not just viable but vital band in this century. “The day before Oceania came out every conversation was about something to do with the past,” he says of the album press tour. But now, “because Oceania is generally being received as a credible work, it’s shifted the conversation into the present.”

Still, one inescapable link between the Pumpkins past and present is that the bass player, from Darcy to Melissa to Ginger to Nicole, has always been a woman. Does having a female in the room affect the interpersonal dynamic of the band, or has it always merely been a bigger deal to those of us on the outside looking in? “I think the way you asked the question is the way I would like that question to be asked. Usually it’s put in an almost sexist way, again, like she’s sort of a prop up there because she looks good kind of thing, and fill in the blank of which bass player you’re talking about. I like the way you asked the question because there is something about having a woman in the band that brings a different perspective, a different resolve, a different strength. If it was just four men I don’t think we would be as strong a unit. Nicole brings a sensitivity, a determination that is strictly earthen and of the best of the feminine spirit. And I think that is a blessing. I don’t see it in any other way. She brings her experience as a woman to the table, just like Mike does from when he was working at McDonald’s, and we draw from that. Jeff is Korean and German, but he brings his experiences of having a Korean mother. He brings that to the table. We draw from each other. That polemic and that dynamic, however you want to quantify it, it does add up. It means something.”

It seems everything is going right for him. He finally has the bandmates he’s always wanted: “They’re helping me erase a lot of the bad memories.” CNN wants him as a featured talk show guest so he can talk politics. Even his long suffering Chicago Cubs now have hope: “I actually got to meet Theo Epstein the other night at a charity event that we played at in Chicago, and obviously very bright, knows what he’s doing, and we’re in the right hands.” And it doesn’t hurt that, as he points out, people are approving of his artistic direction the most thoroughly since the mid nineties. “That’s a nice feeling,” he admits. “I’m able to say that because I haven’t had that feeling in seventeen years.”

But none of what’s going right for Billy Corgan in 2012 is going to matter to him unless it can be parlayed into more. I thank him for the forthright nature of our conversation. “This is the honest answer to a slightly different question,” he volunteers. “I think what’s really exciting about this album is it sort of opens up a doorway to more great work. I think there’s some great work here, but I don’t think you can evaluate Oceania on whether it’s incredible or paradigm shifting. It’s going to take awhile even for me to feel that.”

“I would love it if we look back in ten years and see Oceania in the same way we see Gish or something, as a beginning of a new journey. I’m excited about that and I’m hopeful for that. If it’s just another hoorah, a fading hoorah, that doesn’t do much for me. I really want it to mean something more in the long run.”

SmashingPumpkins.com • iTunes • Twitter • Facebook

About Bill Palmer

Bill Palmer is Editor in Chief of Beatweek Magazine. His editorial contributions include interviews with musicians and iPhone industry coverage.