Smashing Pumpkins

Interview, Feb, 1996 by Ray Rogers

When we approached the Smashing Pumpkins about doing this story, bandleader Billy Corgan himself called up to ask why Interview was interested in his band, declaring authoritatively that "Interview's only interested in the beautiful people." This from someone who dictated what photographer and makeup artists we would employ for this shoot - not to mention bandmate James Iha's runway swaggering for his pal, fashion designer Anna Sui. (The recently shaven-headed Corgan would later tell me that he chopped off his long mane to "de-emphasize part of [my] vanity.") But we thought this special beauty issue was precisely the place for the Smashing Pumpkins. Often the most startling works of beauty are made by the most tortured - and occasionally the most torturous - personalities.

Nothing could have prepared me for Billy Corgan's performance the day we met at Pumpkinland, the band's warehouse studio in Chicago. Self-assured to the point of arrogance, the group's singer and songwriter is one big talker. This man desperately wants to put his mark on the map - not only to join the rock pantheon, but to rule it - and has clearly modeled himself after the gods of rock's '70s heyday - Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, and Pink Floyd are all touchstones for his work. With the release last fall of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (Virgin), a whopping double scoop of classic, raging rock anthems and somber ballads, he came close to proving that he's not all talk. Despite the fact that it feels uneven and is almost overwhelming, the double record debuted on the Billboard charts at Number One. The definitive teen album of the moment, it gives voice to the rage of all the rats in their bedroom cages across the land, to borrow from Pumpkins lyrics.

It is in this great expression that the real beauty of the band's difficult persona lies. Whether lush or jagged, the Pumpkins' songs are so personal that their exquisiteness lies not merely in the sequence of notes but in the listener's own relationship to Corgan's deep well of anguish. Though disconnected and detached in person, he is able to write songs that form a conduit straight to his audience, and with that comes a painful but undeniably beautiful kinship.

RAY ROGERS: You've said that [your last album] Siamese Dream was born out of a lot of personal and band-related crises. What was the impetus for Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness?

BILLY CORGAN: It was basically a big "fuck-off" to anyone who has doubted us as a band. In a positive way, I wanted to really embrace the notions of creativity, to just go as far out as we wanted to go and not get too hung up about the commercial aspects.

RR: What kinds of doubts are you talking about?

BC: Doubts about the band actually coming together to make a record. I wanted to squash all that like a bug.

JAMES IHA: It's a double record - that just doesn't happen if people aren't together on every level.

RR: Billy, you got a lot of criticism last time around for playing some of the guitar and bass parts [on Siamese Dream]. How did you react to that with this record?

BC: We worked out systems by which those things wouldn't happen this time. Nobody understands the scenario: We were under different pressures, different economic constraints. Not everybody moves as quickly as I do. James comes up with great ideas; it just takes him twice as long as it takes me. So I try not to penalize anybody for the speed at which they move.

JI: It doesn't really take me twice as long.

BC: It's a general comment.

RR: What is the focus of your work?

BC: It's strictly band music. We're not standing on indie credibility, we don't have punk-rock roots, we don't have anything political to uphold. That's not to say that personally we don't have those things, but we've always felt that the band had to be the purest thing to sit at the top of the mountain.

RR: How competitive are you with other bands?

BC: Not at all. The bands that we respect, we have no sense of competition with. The bands that are phonies, and have no shred of originality to them, we're competitive in the sense that we want to fucking squash those people. But that's not real competition.

RR: That sounds very competitive to me.

BC: I don't understand. Why is that competitive?

RR: "We want to squash them." How is that not? [JI laughs]

JI: [shouting] We must go out there and crush them! Pull out their skulls!

BC: It's not competitive because it's not born out of respect. So when I say I want to squash them, it's that I want us to be so real and so good that it just makes them look like the carbon copies they are.

JI: We put on our big helmets and get on our horses with our big lances. We're ready to joust.

RR: Are you guys the Led Zeppelin of the '90s?

JI: Yes.

BC: . . . He says without pause. We're the Jefferson Airplane.

JI: Yeah, that's cool.

BC: But we don't have Grace Slick. James will be playing the role of the siren. [all laugh]

RR: Do you see yourselves in a tradition of rock 'n' roll that's not really happening right now?