TOC's cultural heroes: Billy Corgan

Editor’s note: This is the second expanded interview with one of our 40 cultural heroes: The icons of Chicago who keep this city’s artistic pulse steady. What follows is a conversation with Billy Corgan conducted by our editor-in-chief Frank Sennett. This interview took place prior to both the Smashing Pumpkins show at The Venue inside the Horseshoe Casino and this week's announcement of their upcoming shows at the Auditorium and Chicago Theatres. Below, Corgan discusses his Chicago folk song project, protecting the reputations of his band members and how "it’s hard for people in Chicago to even understand" the current state of the Pumpkins.

TOC: The Pumpkins are about to play a big local show. How are the rehearsals going?
Billy Corgan: Very good, and very long— about seven hours a day.

TOC: Who are your cultural heroes in Chicago?
Billy Corgan: That’s a good question. I don’t really know. I don’t do interviews much anymore so my “interview brain” isn’t working so well…

TOC: How about people you grew up listening to? I know you’re a big sports fan, too. Were there any people in Chicago who turned you on when you were growing up, or even now?
Billy Corgan: Well, I have your basic average heroes, such as John Lennon and Bob Dylan, but that’s not very unique.

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

TOC: Let’s move on. Do you have a favorite place in Chicago that you always come back to? A place that’s an emblematic, quintessential Chicago experience for you?
Billy Corgan: The place I think most of 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 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 autographs of the guys leaving. Wrigley Field was probably my first experience of Chicago as a symbol.

TOC: Do you still like to go back there? Has it changed too much, or is it still a great day out?
Billy Corgan: 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 behavior 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 7-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.

TOC: How about a personal moment in Chicago that really defines the city for you? Was there a particular Wrigley moment, or a gig?
Billy Corgan: Well, I was born in Columbus Hospital, which is now closed. It’s right across from Lincoln Park. This is kind of a strange memory, but it’s kind of  emblematic of what Chicago represents to me. I was having a really hard time in my life, and I went to Lincoln Park just to walk around. I was thinking about my life, and where it had gone and where it hadn’t gone, and I looked up and I realized that I was standing in front of the hospital where I was born. It was just one of those moments that struck me as quintessentially Chicago. It has an unassuming quality where you can find yourself back to where you started without really realizing it. That’s what I like about this city.

TOC: Being a famous person, who everyone wants a piece of on some level, is Chicago still a comfortable city for you to be in— when you’re riding the train, for example?
Billy Corgan: I basically stopped riding the train when I was 19. I used to have the big goth hair, which in 1986 was not a real good move, if you can imagine, so I stopped riding the train about that time. I find I’m treated very well in Chicago. There’s a lot of love for the band there. But I do find though that we’ve got too outside of our home culture for us to really be understood in Chicago anymore. I’m not saying that nobody understands, but there was this moment in time when we seemed in synchronicity with the city and where the city was going. But at some point the city kept going one direction and we kept going another. There was a crossover point, but now I feel that we’ve really become more of an international group with an international set of values. I feel, at times, that it’s hard for people in Chicago to even understand what we’re going on about.

TOC: Could you be a little more specific about how the values have changed?
Billy Corgan: Having grown up working-class, and around working class people, there was a kind of ‘Icarus’ thing, where it’s like, “Enjoy your time flying close to the sun because eventually you’re going to crash and burn and come home.” In any career there are times when you go up, and other times when you go down, and when we went down it was almost as though there was an inevitability attached to it— people were like, “Yeah, we knew you guys were going to come back down to earth.” Meanwhile, the band is continuing to grow and prosper around the world, but Chicago still seems attached to this idea that we never got back up, which is really strange. I don’t take it personally, I see it more as a working-class type of thing. I think that’s why so many people leave Chicago. They find they can’t get away from that. They almost have to go and create a new fantasy away from it, because in Chicago you’re constantly reminded— through commentary and things people say—that it is a working-class city. Working-class values are interesting in that sense of “work hard" equals struggle, equals you maybe will succeed, but if you succeed there is a time limit to that.

TOC: They want to remind you that you’re no better than anybody else.
Billy Corgan: Yeah, and I don’t take that personally because I really understand it.  I grew up in that, but I find it really puzzling because here’s a band–last year we were headlining some of the biggest festivals in the world, 60,000, 80,000 people, and it seems hard for people here to fathom that the band continues to have another life and presence away from the city that’s not of the city anymore. It’s weird, because I still live there. I get a lot of people asking, “What are you guys doing? What are you up to?” And I’ll be like, “Well we just got back from a massive European tour.” “Oh really?” It’s like out of sight, out of mind.

TOC: What part of town do you live in these days?
Billy Corgan: I’m up north of the city.

TOC: A few years ago you played a solo acoustic show featuring your folk songs about Chicago. What kinds of things were you writing about, and is it still a project you are pursuing? What spurred you to start doing that?
Billy Corgan: I felt very inspired because I had gone through a really serious depression after the break-up of a relationship. I was really in a bad place, and had pretty much moved out of the city. But at one point I had to come home and lick my wounds, and found that the city really embraced me on an emotional level. It wasn’t like the people on the street; I just felt embraced by the place. So this project was my way of honoring what I thought was great about the city. I started writing about stuff I had never though about writing about: the Chicago fire, the Leopold and Loeb case, the Cubs and Sox rivalry. I wrote about fourteen or fifteen Chicago-related songs and I did one performance at the Metro. I had planned on putting it out, but I found that the response to the songs and the direction I was going in was so underwhelming that I just got really disappointed and put it all away.

TOC: Do you think you’ll revisit that at some point?
Billy Corgan: The plan now is to let it sit for a while, and maybe pick it up and do a part two. To put maybe seven years or so between them, and then maybe make a documentary. I have all the footage from the first cycle. That’s the plan now, and it’s the best-case scenario I can think of.

TOC: It sounds interesting, I’d like to hear those.
Billy Corgan: Again, I think it goes back to that working-class thing. I felt that I had done this really important work for the city about the city, and I can’t say nobody cared, but no one seemed to emotionally connect to it. I take responsibility, since I’m the artist. Maybe it was the wrong time for it. But I found it really puzzling. It was certainly during that time when there was a tremendous amount of focus on whether or not the Pumpkins would get back together, and no one seemed to want to let me just be me. So I just kind of of gave up on all that.

TOC: Was it a folk thing?
Billy Corgan: All solo–well, mostly solo, acoustic performance, yeah. I felt that it was really strong work so I found the reaction to be really puzzling.

TOC: Are there any other musicians that you know who you’ve shared it with, and who have gotten into it?
Billy Corgan: I don’t know what anybody thinks anymore. It’s such a world of diverse opinion and heightened kind of niche thinking, that I just don’t know what to think anymore. Every day I hear two opposite opinions about what I do.

TOC: What’s interesting about that niche opinion thing is that I was here when everything in Chicago was about you guys. I wonder whether that’s even possible anymore, with the way people listen to music.
Billy Corgan: 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 homogenized 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.

TOC: The same shops, the same people, the same clothing…
Billy Corgan: 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.

TOC: There’s been a lot of film action with your music. Some Smashing Pumpkins songs have been used in recent film trailers, like The Watchmen. What is it about the music that works so well with film?
Billy Corgan: I don’t know. I feel really fortunate to have these opportunities. It’s done a lot of good.

TOC: It’s a way to turn people onto the music who might not have known it otherwise.
Billy Corgan: We’ve sort of lost the lost the old systems of MTV and radio play being the dominant ways to reach people. Everything has become sort of timeless. Like, they’ll use a Led Zeppelin song for Cadillac or something. It doesn’t seem old somehow; it seems just about right. Maybe there’s a timeless or atmospheric quality in the music that people are attracted to. I feel fortunate that there continues to be a high level of interest in our music and my songs twenty years later. It’s been a long journey.

TOC: As far as playing around town, do you have any favorite venues in the city?
Billy Corgan: I’m very closely connected to Metro for a variety of reasons, and I think it’s the closest Chicago comes to a magical venue, where the venue creates an opportunity that is unique. I don’t think there’s any other venue in the city that does that.

TOC: 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?
Billy Corgan: 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 a 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.

TOC: How do you keep yourself challenged creatively in general?
Billy Corgan: It’s a gift of always wanting to communicate. I can’t help it. I am a big believer in God, and looking at God’s Kingdom and the amount of diversity in creation, I think you can never run out of things to talk about. Whether it’s writing songs about fishes, or stars, or whatever. I know this is plugging, but we also have a new single coming out in September, “G.L.O.W.” That’s going to be our only release for the rest of the year that’s new music. There’s also the Fillmore stuff, but that’s from a year ago.

TOC: The single is a Pumpkins release?
Billy Corgan: Yeah. And what’s interesting about the Fillmore thing is that I wrote about 15 songs in 5 weeks. Those are all in the movie, too. And we’re trying to do the whole film-festival bit with that.

TOC: As much of a creative force as you are in Pumpkins history, you’ve taken a lot of guff for lineup changes over the years. A lot of bands change lineups: 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?
Billy Corgan: 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 wanted 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. That turned into a thing like 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.

TOC: The irony of it is that you were trying to do an act of kindness on some level. Instead of pulling the Band-Aid off and telling them to go, you kept them in the band and did it like that. But when it came out, you’re suddenly a monster instead of somebody who was trying to take the middle path.
Billy Corgan: 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.

TOC: Sometimes it takes that kind of experience to boil it down to that.
Billy Corgan: Right.

TOC: You’re opening up a venue at a nearby casino. What do you think of the place?
Billy Corgan: I haven’t seen it. I’ve heard a lot of good things. It’s a new concept: that casinos have entered the rock world as a place to play. It’s a relatively new thing. We’re all kind of feeling our way through it.

TOC: How do you feel about it?
Billy Corgan:If they want you to play, and the door is open, I don’t see what the problem is. If it’s a great venue, and the fans walk out of there feeling like they got what they paid to see, then I have no problem with that. I don’t care if it’s the back of an ice-cream truck, or the United Center. At the end of the day, you’re just trying to put people in a place where they can enjoy music. Maybe it takes venues like this, with the kind of resources that they have, to create the maximum enjoyment for an audience. To get people to see shows again, because attendances across the board are down. They might be up for the big stuff, but it’s down overall. Anything below, like, the Billy Joel level, bands are struggling to give people reasons to get out and see artists. A lot of musical heritage and legacy is being lost because people just are giving up.

TOC: So if this works, all the better.
Billy Corgan: Yeah, but again, it’s something you’re kind of feeling your way through. In rock & roll there are no ideals. I came in as a very idealistic young person, and trust me—there are no ideals. At some point you just accept that you have to hack your way through the jungle sometimes. If a casino is willing to step forward and say it’s important to have you play to help us launch this thing correctly, then that’s a lot better an offer than we’ve got in other places. I’m not just talking financially, I’m talking about the energy behind it. There’s a lot of apathy in this country toward art. I’m not just talking about music, but art in general. Kids not going to art classes anymore, you see art consistently on TV being made a spectacle of, or sold out for things that are cheap and lesser-than. We still represent our city very well. We are still a world-class artistic entity, and whether or not the people in our city get that, that’s fine with us. But we’re still out there representing our hometown.

TOC: Do you think this might open the door for you to play more shows around here?
Billy Corgan: We’ve been looking for the right situation to play in Chicago proper for a year and a half. We’ve basically we’ve that it’s going to be November. So, we’re coming. The question is whether it’s going to be at the United Center or Allstate Arena. But we’re definitely going to do a 20th anniversary show in Chicago this November.

TOC: Is there anything else you want to tell these working-class mugs and middle-class fans that we haven’t covered?
Billy Corgan: No (laughs). I think I’ve said enough!