Back around the time the Smashing Pumpkins were conquering the world in the mid '90s, I'm not sure anyone would've guessed that Billy Corgan would approach middle age and his second decade as a public artist quite as he has. Of all the artists from America's '90s alt-boom, Corgan remains the most relevant and vital -- even if the road to this point has been uneven, it still feels totally plausible that Corgan has another masterwork in him. And part of that vitality comes from his willingness to just do a bunch of kinda crazy things and just ride with them to see how they play out. That includes the ambitious initial concept for the Teargarden By Kaleidyscope project (the most opaque title Corgan's offered in a career full of them), but it also includes improvisational synth performances, posing with his cats, writing a "spiritual memoir," and starting an indie pro wrestling league and then deciding maybe that it'd be cool to have a reality show about said wrestling league. With all his various interests, it's somewhat surprising Corgan still has time to write Smashing Pumpkins music, but he's got two records on the way. This is in addition to having spent the last several years preparing a massive, exhaustive reissue of 1998's misunderstood Adore. (If I could rewrite my Smashing Pumpkins list from last year, I have a feeling I'd rank it above Gish and Pisces Iscariot -- aside from Zwan, it is perhaps the most underrated and wrongfully maligned work of Corgan's career.) Corgan's been considered many things in his career, but no matter your stance, you couldn't say the man is anything short of magnanimous with his creative output and activity. I found him to be the same in conversation -- far more affable than his old reputation would suggest, never offering an answer that didn't feel as brutally honest as it was exactingly thought-through. We spoke for twice as long as we were supposed to, digging into the past as well as discussing what's on the table for the future of the Smashing Pumpkins.
STEREOGUM: Hey Billy, how are you doing today?
CORGAN: Good, I'm almost halfway [through] my book, which has been a monumental effort. So, about one more day and I think I'm at the official halfway point, which is really exciting because I started like four years ago. It doesn't mean it took me four years to get halfway, it took me [four years] to where I could finish halfway.
STEREOGUM: I was going to ask you about the book a little later, but since you brought it up, let's talk about it now. I saw it described as a "spiritual memoir," and I was wondering if you'd tell me a little bit more about that, or about the style of the writing.
CORGAN: Of course, I've never written a book before, so it's sort of an evolving process, but the reason I sort of qualified it as a spiritual memoir is I wanted people to know up front that I'm not writing the book from the perspective of, you know, a "celebrity life." Because I feel like I've read those books, and actually I do like reading some of those books, particularly old ones from the '30s and '40s, but I just didn't want it to be that book, because it's not really about naming names. It's more about a spiritual journey a la Siddhartha, where you start one place and you end up somewhere else and you kind of just chart the process. And of course it involves all sorts of things I "believe" -- in quotations -- happened, but, you know, life being a dream, can't say they happened for sure.
STEREOGUM: So it's not going to strictly be an autobiography then. It sounds like it'd be a little more interpretive?
CORGAN: I wanted it to be emotionally honest without having to be honest to the truth, and what I mean by that is -- having been in bands, having been in long-term relationships, everybody has their version of what happened, and rather than try to write something that was a constant defense of my position, I've just written it from the standpoint of, this is what I feel I've experienced. What is my sensory recall, and then I guess you could say part of what the book explores is that our perception of memory changes vis-à-vis our own place and our own spirituality. Just how a person can look at a tragedy in a spiritual light as a positive experience as opposed to a negative one. And being in a very material life -- which, public life is ultimately very material -- it's hard to quantify the experience without going into some sort of version of the dream because it literally is like a dream. I will look up stuff that happened to me and my memory of it is probably as clear as a dream. So I write about it almost like it was a dream, because in a way it is a dream. It's hard to explain any further than that, because at the end of the day, it's still storytelling, and ultimately I'd say the book is a work of fiction and is more like a fable than a "here's what happened," like a court of law transcript. I just think there's no way to do that with as much as I've experienced. And I'm not interested in writing that book. Luckily I found a publisher who understood that that was the book I wanted to write. I had no interest in writing the book that most people write.
STEREOGUM: The title is going to be God Is Everywhere From Here To There, right?
CORGAN: It changes, but as of right now it's back to that title. [laughs] I lopped off the "God" for a while but somehow it came back. It's back to God Is Everywhere From Here To There.
STEREOGUM: Do you mean "God" in an abstract spiritual way or in a more defined religious sense?
CORGAN: Well, I start from this, which is that I think God is imbued in everything. And I qualify -- when you talk about God in public, people automatically flash into their own belief system or they start rejecting the one they think you have. I'm ultimately a pagan, I don't really subscribe to any particular religious dogma, so when I say "God," I can replace it with the word "Truth" or "Love." I basically see God as an absolute, by which you can contrast your position. And then by extension, the world's position. So when the United States does something and cites God, it's hard for me to measure that, because in the absolute, I don't see how the absolute would condone using drones to kill somebody. So it gets into that kind of qualifier for me, and the book does kind of document that sort of transitional space of how I began to process this vast material life that I entered into thinking I was going to have a spiritual payoff. Which gets into the classic rock 'n' roll stuff of the Faustian bargain. You sign a deal with a devil and somehow you think it's all going to work out for you in the end, and there are very few rock 'n' roll tales that end where that works. Most end exactly as you imagine they would.
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STEREOGUM: So you're about to release the Adore reissue, and you're also working on one for MACHINA, correct?
CORGAN: Yeah, we've just now started to dive into the deep end of the pool on that one. But the plan there is to actually ... the record was written as a pseudo-rock-opera type deal, and when the band completely fell apart in the middle, the album never really got finished in the way I'd written it, so I view it as kind of an unfinished album. So the idea is to still present it in its original form, MACHINA I and MACHINA II, kind of like the other [reissued Smashing Pumpkins] albums, but at the same time present it in what we would call a finished form.
STEREOGUM: So what spurred on the decision to do that and Adore? Because there's no real anniversary moment or anything like that. So why did you want to return to those albums right now?
CORGAN: It's a really long story, but essentially, at different times we've discussed with then EMI, now Universal Music Group, the notion of a reissue campaign, and there was a lot of back and forth on what that meant. I refused to do the typical run and dump, you know, throw a couple extra tracks on an album and call it a reissue. I wanted something much more comprehensive, and then in the middle of all that, which was an extensive negotiation with what was then the old label, then the two ex-band members de facto sued the label, who in turn sued me. Which threw this massive wrench in the works, and then that had to be sorted out. So by the time this all finished and everything was tied up with a bow, I got a lot of time to think about what I wanted to do, so this is a really direct reflection of what I planned to do for years and years, but the amount of work involved has been way more intense than I ever would've imagined.
STEREOGUM: In what sense? Just the digging back through all the old material? Or getting to the point where you were even able to start the project because of the legal stuff?
CORGAN: It's more just like ... you say something simple like, "Hey, where's that reel?" and then somebody comes back and goes, "It's missing." [laughs] And you don't know, because you haven't looked for it in fifteen years, you don't know where it went. Currently, on MACHINA, I think there's about seven reels missing. As in "probably stolen." So you're trying to create sessions from old Pro Tools files. It's a lot of stuff people don't need to hear about, but it becomes a lot of detective work. And then by the time you get stuff compiled, it gets into, same subject, your memory vs. reality. You thought some track was great, and then you listen to it and you realize you never finished the vocal. So do you put it out half-cocked? Or do you say, well, it's a document like any other, and I still think it's interesting if you're a fan of this album because it shows something that was a dead end. And then there's other stuff where fans come up and say, "Gosh, I can't believe you didn't put that out," and it was something that was finished, and I go, "Eh, I don't think it held up over time. I think we can live without that particular one." So it's a bit of decision-making on stuff that you think would go on, that it would be a no-brainer, that you leave off because in your eyes it doesn't really add value to the package. And then looking for stuff that is illuminating. My general approach being, if you're a fan of a particular album, not only would you be reminded of why the album was good, but then you'd sort of feel the big moat around the album that maybe illuminates the process in and out of the album in a way that would also make you appreciate the album more.
STEREOGUM: There were a lot of different things going on in your life and in the band at the time, and I know dreamlike memory could kind of make it hard to qualify now, but how were you approaching or thinking about music differently at that time relative to the other Pumpkins records? I'm interested in how the process was different for you on a personal level than the albums that bookended it.
CORGAN: We had actually discussed taking a more radical approach before we did Mellon Collie. And in a rare moment of democracy, we actually voted to make one more quote-unquote "rock record," which became the Mellon Collie record. Because I was ready to jump more into the experimental end in '94. So now fast-forward to '97, Jimmy's out of the group, the band relationships are in a different place, obviously the band's coming off the massive run of Mellon Collie. Now I felt like, now I've got both the musical opportunity, because the band's no longer intact, and secondarily -- and I use this word jokingly -- kind of a mandate from the public. Like, "Oh, we like your experimentation," because obviously "1979" had been a big hit song, which was more electronic. "Eye," which came out before Adore if memory serves me correctly, was also a hit song -- which was also electronic, which I'd basically done on my own. So I had this, uh ... a little bit of swagger, like, "Oh, I can pull this off. I can transition the band out of a traditional rock band into something more experimental." And even though you wouldn't hear it in the record, I was thinking like, you know, what the Beatles did with Sgt. Pepper's. Why can't we make a really different type of record? So that was my thinking going into it.
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STEREOGUM: Given the time elapsed and hindsight, what kind of position does the album occupy for you now in the grand scheme of the Pumpkins discography?
CORGAN: I think it's probably the most important album, and what I mean by that was: the first three Pumpkins albums were very much about, "Gotta get on MTV, gotta win, gotta beat the other bands." It was very ambitiously minded. And, that Faustian bargain, we got everything we bargained for. We got the good and the bad and that path, which is well-documented, pretty much blew the band up internally. So Adore is kind of the moment where I decide, "Right, if I'm going to keep doing this, I've gotta do it in a way that's more personal to me." I don't mean personal like personal songwriting, I mean personal to how I would dream of making an album. How I would like to work. What I would like to hear at the end of the day. It's a really big leap into the abyss of, "OK, let's see where that takes me." Of course, I didn't think it through. I was so in my mind at that point that I thought there was no way that I could fail, so when the album quote-unquote "failed" on a public level -- and, by the way, ha ha, only went platinum, which when you consider the numbers people do these days ... that was a massive disappointment to our label. I mean, massive. They basically, from that point on, went off the band.
STEREOGUM: And that's why they wouldn't release MACHINA the way you wanted, right?
CORGAN: That's a longer story, but sort of yes and no. And probably better told when that album [reissue] comes out. There's also an element there of, no one really saw that the music business was about to take a nosedive. Those were early indications of those things, but we thought we were just caught up in a bigger wheel. Now you can look back and realize that there were other tidal forces that were kicking in, etc. etc. But in this moment, you're coming off this massive success, and you know, there are those personal moments where you invite your management in to hear the album, you're halfway through, and they walk out looking like they've seen a ghost, because there goes the mega-tour, there goes the easy opportunities. And sometimes people forget that, you know, essentially all I needed to do was make Mellon Collie More and I would've been totally fine. As you see today, bands continue to make the same record, and they're sort of rewarded for it. This was a huge risk to take, I was sure I was going to pull it off, and I really didn't. The only thing I would say in the positive about it -- in the context of the conversation we're having -- is the album sounds amazingly contemporary now. Which is really funny. So in a weird way, maybe now, with this particular spotlight, we'll find the right kind of audience, for it because it actually does sound -- in terms of production, space, approach -- it's much more commensurate to what's going on in music today than it was in 1998.
STEREOGUM: One of the other questions I was going to ask you, and this might be different relative to the career narrative in the late '90s vs. what you just said about it sounding very contemporary, but do you regret any of the extreme aesthetic decisions you made between Mellon Collie and Adore?
CORGAN: Oh, yeah. I really think, I mean, if we're talking about it strictly on the ambition tangent, it was a huge mistake. If we were talking about it like The Art Of War, right, I basically ceded my position in the world. I surrendered my position in the world willingly without any real plan of how I was going to get back to it if I wanted to. I burned a bridge so hard. I ran around, I did stupid stuff. I would do interviews with like, Howard Stern, and I'd go on and I'd say "Rock is dead." I was being quite dramatic about the whole thing, you know? Because I really wanted to make this statement. Which was silly because in essence, once I burned the bridge, there was no going back. And on that level, it wasn't very wise. Because the way the music business works -- and this is inside baseball stuff -- but the way the music business works is, the minute they perceive that you're done, like D-O-N-E done, I mean, everybody but everybody stops answering your phone call. And in context, I had six or seven years where they couldn't answer my phone call fast enough. So I went from having a lot of latitude as an artist, a lot of resources as an artist, to literally I cut off almost every version of it and put myself in a very dire position, put the band in a very adversarial position, and then you look like you're fighting shadows on the wall. You look kind of dumb.
STEREOGUM: In terms of the more aesthetic end of it and what you were saying about it being more contemporary, I remember you once commented on the mixture of folk and electronic music, and the idea that it was supposed to sound "ancient and futuristic" at the same time, and I was wondering if you thought that's what was successful about Adore, if that part still holds true.
CORGAN: I think that's the part that forever works.
STEREOGUM: When you talk about using this re-release to shine a new light on the album, are those the qualities you think translate well to today?
CORGAN: A lot of it was rooted in folk music. And folk music has kind of a spooky timelessness to it, and I think that probably more than the production keeps it ... it doesn't grow too old. I listen to Mellon Collie sometimes and I think, "Wow, some of that stuff's so dated," because it was so of its time. I think Adore's sort of past-futurism kind of works. It's strange. It's hard to say because ten years from now I might say the exact opposite.
STEREOGUM: Do you feel MACHINA has a similar quality as a sidelined Pumpkins album that might wind up having a more out of time quality?
CORGAN: I think when I finish putting it back together, I think I'll be able to pull that out of it. I don't think as it exists, in the current frame, the raw MACHINA II and the quote-unquote "finished" MACHINA I, I don't think people would get that. The funny thing is, musicians get it. I mean, and maybe you do too. But most people, it's too strange for them. They can't grasp it. It's too dark, too alien. And I hear that more now than I did in 2000 when I was like, "What the fuck? Why don't people understand? I'm an artist! This is what I do." Blah blah blah. I get it now. There's a certain thing in pop, that you've kinda gotta lead people to the water a bit, and MACHINA definitely -- in the context in which it exists now -- it doesn't do that. It doesn't really invite you in. It kind of punches you in the face and expects you to sit and listen for two hours. And I think that that was unwise.
STEREOGUM: What I'm curious about there is whether you think Adore was the outlier in the original lineup output in the sense that, you know, it doesn't sound of its time necessarily.
CORGAN: I feel they're all outliers, they're just judged on their success. And I literally, if I'm being hubris-filled about it, I would say, when I cared about being successful, to make sure that the communication level on the first three albums was clear, I had a lot of success, and when I didn't care as much on the fourth and the fifth albums, I kind of got what I paid for. I thought I had enough juice to carry through, to have people listen to the album twenty times. And to give it some cultural context of the times, there were other more edgy, arty bands coming out at that time that were getting that kind of audience, who were listening to records twenty times, so it was strange to me that we weren't able to get that. Even our own friends were rejecting albums like Adore and MACHINA after one listen, which was really strange to me, and then they'd turn around and tell me how some other band, they couldn't stop listening to them. So there was a cultural confusion there for me at the time. But again, I blame myself. I think I, more than anybody, offered something that was too hard to follow. Too confusing to follow. And when I think about the Adore box set, I think it leads you a little bit easier to that well, and of course, time has helped too. But MACHINA, I think it's really going to behoove me to figure out how to do that so that it will finally get heard in the same context of the others, because, I mean, this is a really strange thing, we'll even get stuff from the record label that will talk about the band's reissues, and they won't include MACHINA. The album's treated like it never even came out.
STEREOGUM: Yeah that is the odd thing about that one. People almost talk about it like it was some online fan-club release that didn't count as part of the canon.
CORGAN: I feel the same way. It's this weird thing, it's almost like I only made four albums with the original lineup or whatever variation of it, and we made five. I guess, if I'm being a propagandist, my hope here is that by the time this reissue campaign ends, all five albums will be taken in the same light of studiousness. Because all five were tremendous efforts, which I drew from different sources to make, and which I think all stand up in the test of time. I mean, every album has its pluses and minuses, but I see them as all equal levels of work in terms of commitment, and it's cool because I see this weird thing happening with musicians of this generation -- I don't know what to call them anymore, we're running out of letters. Is it Generation A again? But this generation in particular really responds to MACHINA, which is pretty cool, particularly the musicians. That tells me that the work is there and I've just gotta clarify it. I like old movies, and yesterday I was watching this Gloria Swanson movie called Queen Kelly, which is one of these weird films that was never finished. They pulled the money. So you can buy this reissue, which is this incredibly expensive, elaborate, half-finished movie that has no ending. And it's obvious they spent gobs of money. Watching it, I couldn't help but think of something like MACHINA. It's this expensive, unfinished movie that I've gotta figure out in an economical way, way past its due date, how to finish. I'm really up for the challenge to see if I can.
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STEREOGUM: Where did the bonus disc titles for the Adore reissue come from? Do they have any roots in the original sessions?
CORGAN: Those are just inside Pumpkins jokes. People come and say, "For identification purposes, can you give these extra discs titles?" And it's kind of like, "Uh, OK." They're kind of inside winks to old Pumpkins jokes.
STEREOGUM: Amongst the band and your crew, or the fan community?
CORGAN: The fan community. There was a certain mentality I used to approach those things with, so it's like putting on the old hat one more time.
STEREOGUM: Did digging back into this era of your career influence what you were currently working on?
CORGAN: No, not really. As a general comment, the one thing I'll say about the reissue campaign, because I've been on it I guess now about four years. So this stuff is kind of constantly up in my face, I have to constantly deal with issues involved in these reissues. It makes me really appreciate how hard we worked, and it kind of kicks me in the pants that, if I'm going to do another album, I have to work just as hard. I can't work one ounce less, if that makes any sense. It's like, if you're going to do this, you have to do this. That's what album commitment looks like. In essence, don't use the excuse of low record sales in this era or your own personal bummer trip about the way the culture has responded to music in general. Don't use those as excuses.
STEREOGUM: OK, cool. If you're open to talking about them yet, I was also curious about the two albums you have coming out next year.
CORGAN: Actually, the first one, Monuments To An Elegy, has been bumped up to, at this moment, December 9th. It's funny, I put some of that information on a weekend post ... it's interesting how the internet works. I put that on a weekend post and nobody picked up on it.
STEREOGUM: Yeah, I'm surprised I hadn't heard about that. So this is the one that's nine songs, right?
CORGAN: Yeah, it's nine songs. I actually got to play the unmixed but finished version the other night for Tommy Lee when he was in town. I played it for him after the Mötley Crüe concert here in Chicago.
STEREOGUM: What was it like working with Tommy Lee?
CORGAN: It was an awesome experience. He really reminded me of what I loved about his work with the Crüe. He plays with a real passion and a real sense of moment, and not every drummer plays like that. It's a real unique gift he has. It's hard to put into words, but when he plays on these songs, they feel like they just sparkle to life. I mean, obviously, he's a great drummer and he's a super heavy-hitter and all that stuff, that's no surprise to anybody. The surprise to me working with him up close in the studio was the way he captures a moment. And he does it so effortlessly, it's almost hard to believe. But he just does it, it's in him. And we've gotten to be a little bit close in the process, and we've kept in touch afterwards, which is really nice. I really treasure him as a friend, I love him as a person. You don't have that connection with every musician you work with. We just really hit it off, so I hope to work with him more.
STEREOGUM: Do you want to have him tour with the Pumpkins?
CORGAN: You know, I wouldn't put that on him. [laughs] He's on this massive tour, this last Crüe tour. Let's say he wasn't, I don't know, that's a different vibe. At the end of the day, Pumpkins is very much my world, and the last thing Tommy needs is to deal with me. I'd rather keep him on the side of the fence of buddy and confidante. Right now the only person quote-unquote "in the band" is Jeff Schroeder. And that's a relationship we built over eight years. It's taken time to find the right balance between all those forces -- my world, his world -- to where he feels super motivated and comfortable and has really taken on this leadership role in the band to push me back to a place of complete dedication. It's not as simple as adding someone to the mix and expecting it all to balance out. And Tommy's had a lot of experience, you know, and so ... I just can't even imagine asking him to be in that situation. Now, a gig here and there, or have him join us for a few songs, that would be really fun. I would love to do that. But the idea of going on a tour, that's a huge commitment that you really have to consider the whys and wherefores. That's why I laugh. I wouldn't put that on a friend.
STEREOGUM: How would you describe Monuments To An Elegy sonically?
CORGAN: It sort of sounds like all the records at the same time, but it doesn't sound like any other record I've made. Other people have said that too. It feels up in a way that's hard to describe. It's very much alive. Tommy has a real role in that. I don't know, when you get into qualifiers ... and this is a more general comment -- when you say rock 'n' roll these days, what does that even mean? When pop acts -- pure pop, not crossover -- when pop bands use guitars like we used them in the '90s and people yawn because it doesn't mean anything anymore, what does it mean to say, "It's a rock 'n' roll album." What does it mean to say it's a pop album? Pop is what? All those beautiful women singing in unbelievably high registers about love and loss? I don't even know how to quantify the music other than to say: it sounds like Pumpkins music. And that's the one bit of feedback I could tell you that I've gotten from other people. When they hear it they're like, typical dude talk, "Fuck yeah, it's a Pumpkins album!" Somehow Tommy being in that mix sparkles back to life that thing that reminds you not of the past, but reminds you of why the Pumpkins are different than other bands.
STEREOGUM: Do you feel like that wasn't present on Oceania?
CORGAN: I think it was and it wasn't. Oceania was very much about, for me personally, reconciling with the past in the way I made peace with it. To glom it to another artist's journey for a second. I'm a huge Neil Young fan. There was a moment in the late '80s where Neil Young made peace with Neil Young. He went back to the way he played guitar before, and he started kind of writing not the same songs but Neil Young-type songs, and everyone was like, "Oh, he's back to being Neil Young." Whatever that meant. And then he had this tremendous amount of success which now, in hindsight, you realize it didn't really sound like his old music. But yet, in his making peace with what he'd done, he'd sort of rekindled something both within himself and within the public. Oceania was, for me, a similar journey. It was like, "OK, I'm not going to avoid this guitar sound because it reminds people of Album 2." I'd been in that headspace for a long time. It was almost like, "I'm not going to give you what you want because I know you want it. If I give you what you want it's almost like I'm admitting defeat and I'm not going to admit defeat, so fuck you!" [laughs] Oceania was like, I'm just going to do my thing. If it works, great. If it reminds you of the past, cool. I'm not going to worry about it. I'm just going to do my trip and be cool with it.
STEREOGUM: Did that make you feel a little more liberated going into the upcoming albums?
CORGAN: I'll tell you what, when you hear the new one, you'll hear that I am way past that point. We are full guns throttled.
STEREOGUM: So there's the other one, Day For Night. Was the pairing of the two just because you had two records you wanted to make, or are they at all related thematically or sonically?
CORGAN: If I was in another era, I probably would've done a double album to say everything I wanted to say, but there's no way that's working today. There's no way. Plus, the speed at which everyone digests information, which is what, 24 hours? Or less? Imagine working for two years on a double album and having 42% of the universe go, "Nah, not interested," overnight. And then wait fifteen years to have a conversation with someone like you, you know what I mean? To talk about what might've been. So, being a little more street smart these days, I thought: right, we'll separate out the work, we'll give it some breathing space, we'll work hard to make sure that there's no filler, and we'll take advantage of -- at the time, it would've been 2015 -- having two spotlight moments on the Pumpkins.
STEREOGUM: Do you think Day For Night is still going to come out within twelve months?
CORGAN: I think the second one will come out within nine months of the first one. I have a show at Ravinia on August 30th here in Chicago, so we're all over that at the moment because it's more acoustic stuff. And then I think we're going to take one week off, because Jeff and I have had no vacation, and then we'll start on Day For Night. The second week of September.
STEREOGUM: Do you consider them sister projects?
CORGAN: Oh, absolutely. The hope would be that, if someone was to listen to them in a row, you'll hear a particular journey.
STEREOGUM: Are these at all related to Teargarden By Kaleidyscope or is that project on hold now?
CORGAN: To me, Day For Night is the end of the Teargarden project.
STEREOGUM: So it's the EPs, Oceania, and these two will conclude it?
CORGAN: Yeah, but there's also like 60 demos or something that are unreleased songs. I mean, there's a lot of songs where I went in for an hour and I did a quick demo and I don't like the song. But there's some really quality stuff in there, maybe not as finished as I'd like. When I do what we'll call the Teargarden box set someday, the hope is to put all that stuff together. Because, as I said at the beginning of the Teargarden project, I looked at it like, OK, I'm going to take this journey, and when this journey is over -- which it now will be with Day For Night -- it will be the beginning a new era of what the Smashing Pumpkins could be in the 21st century, or it will be the end. In big capital letters. Goodbye, I'm done. And it's pretty much worked out that way, so I feel like it was a good thing to do, because when I started Teargarden I was not motivated at all. Jimmy had left the band. There was this whole thing about "Why would you continue with the name?" and all that rigamarole, so it was like: OK, I'm going to take this on. I'm an artist, I want to face my fear here, which is: OK, what does it mean if I'm the only one left? What does it mean to continue? What does it mean if they throw rocks at you if you play "Tonight, Tonight" and call it the Smashing Pumpkins as opposed to Billy Corgan? All this bullshit that we have to deal with in modern life. Fake opinion as opposed to reality. Which, of course, reality is now basically fake opinion. So I've taken that on. Teargarden was really about facing all of that in a very real way and not shying from it.
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STEREOGUM: So now that you're approaching that conclusion, do you think it is going to be the big end in capital letters, or do you think it's going to be a new phase?
CORGAN: I honestly think it has a lot to do with how the records go down. When I say that, people get really cranky. Because the way they take that is: you're going to let other people dictate to you what you're going to do. And the answer is: that's not it, I just don't feel like running uphill anymore. Obviously I've got lots going on, there's lots I could do. I played a big solo show here, I'm doing synthesizer work that I'm starting to release. I constantly talk to people about projects that may never happen or are in and out. I could busy myself for the rest of my life with things other than the Smashing Pumpkins. I want Smashing Pumpkins to really be what Smashing Pumpkins was designed to do, which is to be in the moment. Now, if that is naïve, i.e., if you have a legacy like the band had in the '90s or whatever, and you ultimately cannot find the balance on that and basically the public says, "Look, that's the way we see it, it ain't gonna change, yeah, we'll make exceptions for these other artists, but as far as you go, you have not proven to us that you can do blah blah blah." Whatever those qualifiers are. I'm cool with that. I want the Pumpkins to be joyous and an artistic vehicle to break down whatever. The fake wall. I don't see being a raconteur in the way I used to be. I don't think that's what the band is meant to be. The band should be a happy, joyous thing that's about creativity, art, and in the case of Tommy Lee, friendship, kinship, creating new relationships. Which is what the original band was about. So, that's it. Basically, it's going to go down the road one way or the other and at the end of the process, it will be, "Wow, he's done it and I'm really curious what he's going to do with the Pumpkins in the future now that he's in a more collaborative mind," or "Is he going to make that new album with a pop singer" or whatever crazy thing I dream up. Or, is the Pumpkins basically relegated to being the band you want to see at the festival because they're going to play those songs that you grew up with. It's literally that simple. Anybody who thinks otherwise, is naïve. And I may be naïve, but I'm not that naïve. I've obviously been very adamant about not wanting to be an oldies act. Not wanting to be an artist who goes up there and has to play his old albums to generate, let's call it, "A level attention." I still believe I'm more than capable of writing big songs. I still believe I'm more than capable of generating big moments. I look around, particularly at my contemporaries, and I'm not scared to look in the mirror, let's put it that way. I don't see where the big competition is right now. Now, you could argue there's plenty of competition from the younger kids. And there should be. They should want to murder people like me. Because I represent that which they need to shove out of the way. But I'm not shaking in my boots at what's coming down the pike from my contemporaries. In fact, generally speaking, I'm more embarrassed than proud about what my generation has done with this particular era of material culture by just going out and quote-unquote "giving the public what they want." That is completely counter-intuitive to what the generation was marketed as. I use the word "marketing" on purpose. That generation was marketed and sold as being counterculture. To have that generation now go, "Welllll, we've gotta pay our mortgage." You know? Every week in my life, I have one of these types of phone calls: You know, if you'd just go out and tour on Siamese Dream, you'd make a lot of money. As we say in Chicago: no shit, Sherlock. My point in saying this is, that's why we are where we are. If we're going to be the Pumpkins, we're going to be the Pumpkins, whatever that means in 2014. We're going to be a rocking, creative, cool, fun, worth seeing, worth paying attention to unit, or we're going to be the guys who show up every three or four years at the festivals and play those songs. By the way, I probably won't be smiling.
STEREOGUM: I've always thought of the Pumpkins as a very album-focused project, especially as we're taking a look at this Adore box set and these two upcoming albums, and I was curious with you being a '90s artist how you felt about Spotify and iTunes and how you think about Pumpkins continuing on and fitting into this new landscape.
CORGAN: That's a really good question. Having given a tremendous amount of thought, my answer is: I think you just have to do your own thing.
STEREOGUM: I think you went in this direction for a bit with the earlier phases of Teargarden, but do you want to explore different formats and structures for releasing Pumpkins music, or do you want to stick with more of the album format?
CORGAN: I like a project-based format. What I would say there is, I'm actually more interested in going the other way. I'm more interested in doing more elaborate projects that would probably take more time. Maybe at the end of the day I'll have to do those under my own name or a different name and not Pumpkins. But I'm much more interested in doing really elaborate projects. I think there's an audience out there that is interested in super high qualitative things, if you're able to then turn around and figure out how to take something that's really qualitative -- let's say, I don't know, I did a four hour album about Vikings. You have to have some mind in there that most of the general public will only have heard the one song. So if you make the four hour opus about Vikings and you expect most of this crowd out there to listen, they're not going to. So what you have to do is you have to accept that you have to give them something so that it might lead them to your big opus, and if it doesn't it doesn't, and if it does, cool. But not go out there with an expectation, which is what I used to do, and then get super bummed. Because let's face it, the votes are in. This is a fast consumption culture. It's only going to get faster. Once you get into more refined search engines, if you're not in somebody's search engine, you won't exist. You won't exist. If they say "I don't like grunge," you won't exist. Your name? News about you? The new song you're putting out? It'll never cross their feed even if it's the style that they like. So I think you have to accept that that's just the way it is, and that's what I mean, you just have to do your own thing. I do go back to the Field Of Dreams quote, which I think is a beautiful thing: "If you build it, they will come." And I will say, using Adore as maybe the last word on that, I made a really solid -- some say brilliant, some say the best record I ever made -- and over sixteen years, people have come. The energy around this reissue is actually higher than all the others. Which is very interesting, because Siamese and Mellon Collie were huge records. But I think those are not as curious to people as Adore because Adore, the story's still kind of untold. And maybe there's still gas left in the tank to tell a new story, where with the other albums it's kind of like, what you'd expect. It's thoroughly explored, and this guy loves it and this guy says it's a piece of shit. Basically, the votes are in. Adore is one of those things people aren't really sure yet. They're still not that definitive ... the other day I was joking with a musician, and I said, "At least I made two great albums." And he said, "What do you mean? You made three, maybe four." If you count MACHINA. We were talking about the '90s, but ultimately what I'm saying is, the read on my career arc, which is like "He made three ascending things and then he fell off the fucking face of the earth," that may have been a press creation. The story on Adore was Icarus -- he flew too close to the sun, let's watch him fall. I got calls from the record label [in 1998] like "Wow, this record keeps selling." "Wow this record just turned platinum, can you believe it?" And I was like, "Uh, yeah." I think that was the beginning of the digital age, where that clicker mind was coming in. So what happened was, because of technology and the way people were starting to communicate, the initial verdict on Adore was: "This is a piece of shit." It wasn't like, "Oh, this is kinda weird." It was, "This is a piece of shit, what the fuck has he done?" Once that vote goes out, which we now really understand in the digital age, it's almost impossible to change people's minds.
STEREOGUM: I agree with what you're saying. With Mellon Collie and Siamese Dream there was less left to say, but this one's an interesting one to revisit and reevaluate the story.
CORGAN: That's what I mean. I think that's why there's so much interest around Adore, because I think there's a sneaking suspicion that maybe this is like -- you know, there are bands that have those albums. That when people go back they go, "You know, now that I think about it ... " And then all my reactions to the negativity make a little bit more sense. Because from the inside, I thought I'd made a very strong record. Literally I would do interviews and the first question would be, "So how does it feel to have such a massive failure?" You're like, "Uhhh, yeah, it's great. I really love being humiliated in public. Especially after I just came off of selling a gazillion records. I love it. I'm a masochist, this is awesome!"
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The Smashing Pumpkins' Adore reissue is out 9/23 via Virgin/UMe.
