Time Out at 40

Billy Corgan | Roger Ebert | Lupe Fiasco

Billy Corgan
From their auspicious start to their current reawakening, Smashing Pumpkins' only constant has been Billy Corgan. Control freak, genius, jerk – however you peg him, the guy’s left behind a river of great songs and for that he’s our hero.

Who are your cultural heroes in Chicago?
That's a good question. I don't really know. I don't do interviews much any more so my ‘interview brain’ isn't working so well… I have your basic average heroes, such as John Lennon and Bob Dylan, but that's not very unique.

How about here in town? Is there anybody that you've looked to over the years? You're a Cubs fan, right?
I am, but I don't even know how I would choose anyone from the organization. Feature continues

Do you have a favourite place in Chicago that you always come back to? A place that's an emblematic, quintessential Chicago experience for you?
The place I think of most is Wrigley Field. I used to go there with my grandmother when I was young, and she was the person who turned me into a Cubs fan. She lived on the Northwest Side, so we would take hour-long bus rides to Wrigley Field, and it was sort of an all-day thing. We would get there really early for batting practice, and then watch the whole game. We'd even stay afterwards and try to get the autographs of the guys leaving. Wrigley Field was probably my first experience of Chicago as a symbol.

Do you still like to go back there? Has it changed too much, or is it still a great day out?
I love it, and think it's fantastic. The only thing that bums me out is that the little kids have to be around so much swearing and inappropriate behaviour I see in the stands. Wrigley Field used to have a real family atmosphere, and that's been lost. I find myself getting really uncomfortable thinking about, like, a seven-year-old that's coming to the park for the first time, and they're excited because they're seeing Alfonso Soriano but there's some guy shouting, swearing and saying inappropriate things. I have a hard time with that.

There was a time when everything in Chicago was about The Smashing Pumpkins. I wonder whether that's even possible anymore, with the way people listen to music.
To answer your questions slightly differently, I think it's hard to create that kind of regional attachment because the culture has become kind of homogenised through information. It's become national gossip, national sports, national politics. I'm not saying that people don't care about regional things, but they don't seem to be as regionally identified. When we used to tour around America, you really noticed how different people were and how differently they would dress, and how different the food was in each place. Now when we tour America feels sort of ubiquitous.

The same shops, the same people, the same clothing…
Yeah, it's weird. I feel that something has been lost in that. Maybe that has something to do with why people didn't understand the Chicago songs – it just didn't feel personal anymore.

Tell us a little bit about what is coming up for you. How are you keeping yourself challenged, and what kind of projects are you excited about right now?
It's sort of ambiguous. We have all these big plans. We're planning on recording a multi-year concept album that would be released in pieces. We have a documentary coming out at the end of the year, which is about when we played 11 shows at the Fillmore in San Francisco and nine shows in North Carolina. Those are the two preeminent things on the dock right now.

You've taken a lot of criticism for Pumpkins line-up changes over the years. A lot of bands change line-ups: members will die and be replaced, or people will be swapped out and nobody says a word. But it seems that every time you sneeze with the Pumpkins it causes some kind of consternation. Do you have a sense of why that might be?
You know, I think it's a pretty simple thing. When the band started, two of the musicians were good musicians, and two of the musicians were okay musicians. When we found ourselves recording, the producers that we worked with said, ‘These other two musicians aren't competent; why don't you just do it?’ It put me in a really awkward position. It was basically choosing the best foot forward of the band as far as a representation musically. There was also the internal idea that everyone in the band should play their parts. That's pretty standard, there's nothing avant-garde about that. What happened was that we kept it a secret because we didn't want people to think poorly of us. But basically Jimmy and I were making the records. When it came out, it came out of the bitterness of the other two band members portraying it as something they'd been fucked over on. Then it turned into that I was some sort of monster who wouldn't let anybody play on the records. Where the psychology reverses – and I think to answer the question, which is not an easy question to answer, but I've had a lot of time to think about it – is that it's hard for people to understand that I'd done all that. It almost becomes this kind of suspicious thing, like there must be a catch – but there isn't a catch. Two people pretty much made all the Smashing Pumpkins music. So when we put the band back together... we consider ourselves the rightful heirs of the musical legacy. We created it. We didn't create it alone, but we created the majority of it. But maybe it's not even that simple.

The irony of it is that you were trying to do an act of kindness on some level by keeping them in the band . But when it came out, you're suddenly a monster instead of somebody who was trying to take the middle path.
Right. I had this really deep sense of loyalty, and maybe that's a Chicago thing. I tried to keep our band together, and I saw it as the price that we had to pay to be able to compete with people who were more skilled. Then you find out years later that the guy you thought played on this record didn't play on it at all, or that the background vocals were done by studio musicians. You find out all the other stories from all the other bands as you go along. The general public doesn't even realize how much is manufactured, how much is not real, how much is faked. But you can't run around and tell people, ‘Hey, you're being unfair.’ It sort of just goes with the territory. It's made me appreciate what really matters. If you'd asked me 20 years ago whether I would have chosen to be in this position, the answer would be no. But it's made me appreciate things. You have to know inside yourself what you have and what you haven't done, and whether or not you get credit for it, or if someone tried to take it away from you, there's not much you can really do about that. To be a man is just to walk through life and know who you are. And I know who I am, which is why I no longer really feel the need to defend myself and it's the reason why I don't really do interviews anymore. There's nothing to defend. I think I've shown, amongst all my drama, that my predominant focus is the music. I'm not a perfect person, I didn't come from a perfect family, but I came from a place of wanting to make music. I can stand on that better than I can stand on any other idea.

Interview by Frank Sennett.

www.timeoutchicago.com/heroes

Billy Corgan | Roger Ebert | Lupe Fiasco