[February 10, 2011] Billy Corgan
has been working steadily with Jeff Schroeder on the "Teargarden
by Kaleidyscope"
series which is now up to volume 2 of a projected
11. The band's founding bassist d'Arcy Wretzky was in the news in
early
February, when she was arrested and incarcerated on charges of "Animals
Running at Large." Apparently her horses escaped from their
paddock and ran amuck in Berrien County,
Michigan (not far from Chicago), and she never paid the fine.
After missing four court dates, she surrendered to the sherrif's office
in Van Buren County, Michigan (the next county over, where she lives)
and is serving six days' jail time. As if just being in jail
isn't humilating enough, her extraordinarily unflattering mug shot
ended up all over the internet, including here on this page:
[April
27, 2010] The Smashing Pumpkins broke up again in 2009. However,
Billy Corgan has decided to keep working (somewhat sporadically)
under the Smashing Pumpkins name, although sometimes he uses the band
name "Spirits in the Sky" instead. He seems to be working in a
60's psychedelic-pop nostalgia groove. To tell you the truth, I kinda
lost track of what he was up to. The SmashingPumpkins.com website
which had been an encyclopedic portal for all things Crushing
Gourd-related, decorated in neo-Socialist reds and blacks, is now a
simple site dressed up in hippie-dippy pastels. He is currently
working on a project entitled "Teargarden
by Kaleidyscope." Volume 1 of a projected 11 volumes will be
released as a "very
limited edition collector's EP.
[It] will be packaged in a beautiful collector's silk-screened wooden
box. Each box will contain a 4-song CD, a vinyl 7" and a
hand-carved obelisk." The announcement doesn't say who will be
carving the obelisk.
Billy
has recently become the slightly less-famous half of one of the most
incongruous pop-music romances of all time, right up there with Cher
& Gregg Allman, or Doris Day & Sly Stone. He
got involved with Jessica Simpson. Or maybe they are just good
friends: he told a
Chicago
Tribuneinterviewer
in February 2010,
"The stuff that I've
seen doesn't have any bearing to the reality that I'm in. It's
like being in a cartoon. It has nothing to do with what's really
going on or how I feel."
[Jan.
1, 2009] I originally created this page way back in November 2004,
when the Smashing Pumpkins seemed to be permanently broken up. Two
years later, in the fall of 2006, Billy Corgan and Jimmy Chamberlain
put a new version of the band back together, without James Iha. This
seemingly ad hoc edition of the band seemed to have been created just
for a 2007 tour, which in turn just seemed to have been undertaken as
a means of cashing in on the continued popularity of the band's early
material— but the new band kept going after the summer 2007 tour.
The band recorded several singles and did a 20th
anniversary tour in 2008— and Billy Corgan has occasionally tried
to stir up controversy by (amongst other things) announcing that he
would never make any more albums and that he was tired of the old
material.
Billy's subsequent LiveJournal blog posting : Kot
painted an unflattering view of Corgan, so Corgan tries to paint a more
flattering self-portrait. He also tries to explain why James Iha and
d'Arcy Wretzky are not in the new band: "There were no conditions
ever put on a return. They simply didn't even want the conversation
with us. I can now say definitively that they aren't ever coming back.
Period. There is no maybe. If the door was once open to at least have
the conversation and consider the possibility, it is now closed. For
good."
The
Smashing Pumpkins are back in business. Only two of the core members
of the band are involved with the current incarnation— i.e., lead
singer Billy Corgan and drummer Jimmy Chamberlin (who have regularly
been working together on a variety of projects ever since the band
broke up back in 2000.) But this is still exciting news.
A new album entitled Zeitgeist
was released in July 2007, supported by a six-month-long world
tour. Jimmy and Billy are joined by bassist/vocalist Ginger
Reyes (continuing a tradition of attractive female bassists) and
guitarist Jeff Schroeder, as well as keyboardist/ vocalist Lisa
Harriton. The new configuration of the band debuted at Le
Grand Rex in Paris on May 22, 2007 to what an official press
release described (with absolute objectivity, I am sure) as "a
rapturous response." The band toured medium-sized venues in
Europe before doing an extended residency at the Orange
Peel in Asheville, NC. On July 7 (07-07-07), the Smashing
Pumpkins were one of the headliners (along with Madonna,
Al Gore, and
Spinal
Tap) at the worldwide Live
Earth 2007 festival.
In July, the band did a second residency at the Fillmore
West in San Francisco. Then, they played the Virgin
Festival in Baltimore on August 4 and 5, where they were
co-headliners with the Police. The Pumpkins had slightly higher
billing: their show will be the climax of the second day. After the
Virgin Festival, the Crushing Gourds returned to Europe for a series
of arena dates and festivals, followed by a fall tour of North
American gigs. The journey ended in Dallas, on November 18th.
After a couple of months off, the band continued
touring, starting in Prague, continuing throughout Europe before
heading off to New Zealand, Australia, Mexico and even Costa Rica.
While the band was in Australia, there was a brief brouhaha when the
band supposedly announced that they would not be making any more CDs.
Even though the comeback was a success both commercially and
artistically, the band was without a record deal because their
one-record deal with Warners Bros. to put out Zeitgeist
was not extended. And there was a rather odd lawsuit with their
previous label, Virgin Records: Billy & Jimmy were angry because
Pepsi
and Amazon.com
were using their old material in a "Pepsi
Stuff"
promotion. The lawsuit was more sensible than it sounded at first: as
Billy explained in a Billboard
magazine interview in March 2008 there has been an ongoing
dispute over what to do with the old material. In a March
24 blog entry, Jimmy said (using several extra exclamation
points): "Although we may not use the album or full
length cd as a format anymore, WE WILL WRITE AND RECORD MUSIC
UNTIL WE ARE DEAD!!!!!!!! WE ARE NOT GOING AWAY!!!!!!!!" So, the
band will still be releasing CDs, but they will be self-publishing
them.
The Smashing Pumpkins and the Police were not the only legendary
bands who reunited in 2007. Spinal
Tap also reunited. You
almost have to feel sorry for the Police. They used up almost a
quarter century patching up their differences, and in a normal summer
they would have been the biggest thing on the arena circuit. After
all there are only three defunct bands on the planet bigger than the
Police. But then not one but TWO of them stole the Police's thunder.
(The Police's remaining rival — the Beatles — chose not to
reunite. However, the band's two suriving members — Paul McCartney
and Ringo Starr — have been worked with the Cirque de Soleil on a
show entitled "LOVE"
which incorporates many Beatles songs.)
My
novel The
Forgotten Liars takes place mostly in 1979
and it has a Smashing Pumpkins-like flavor, even though I started
writing it long before James Iha and Billy Corgan even met each
other. (It is romantic yet cynical, and a little too ambitious for
its own good.) For a variety of reasons, it seems only fair that I
should add some Smashing Pumpkins-related content.
Unfortunately, aside from saying that they are one of my favorite
bands, I don't have much that's new to say about them. That's OK,
though, Billy and James and the others do a pretty good job of
speaking for themselves. Especially Billy. All I need to say is that
they are arguably the most important rock and roll act ever to come
out of Chicago. (It's hard to think of one which comes close, since
for some reason rock and roll is just about the only artform where
Chicago is not a world leader. Yes, Michael
Jackson did start his career a couple of exits up I-90 in Gary,
Indiana, but he split for Neverland back when he was four feet tall
and still recognizeably human. And, the Blues
Brothers were great musically as well as comedically, but they
weren't really a rock and roll band per se. Amongst 1990s
rock acts, it's hard to think of many Chicagoans who come close to
the Smashing Pumpkins' stature. Aside from college-rock ikon Liz
Phair and industrial heavy metal noisemakers Ministry.)
If you have heard them on the radio and are not sure what CDs to
get, I will arbitrarily say that the first CD to get is Pisces
Iscariot,
which is a raw and rocking anthology of B-sides, demo tapes, etc. The
band's magnum opus was 1995's 2-disc Mellon
Collie and the Infinite Sadness,
which includes the song "1979."
Their second album, Siamese
Dream, is
a more succinct statement in the same vein as Mellon
Collie and the Infinite Sadness.
And the other records I didn't mention are all great, too.
Their life story has been told many times, and will be told many
more times in the future, and it is far from over anyway. So I don't
have to go into a lot of detail.
The story began in Chicago, in 1988, when two struggling
singer/guitarists (and occasional college students) named James Iha
and Billy Corgan began playing together. Soon, they recruited James'
then-girlfriend D'Arcy
Wretzky to play bass, and a slightly older acquaintance named
Jimmy
Chamberlin to play the drums. After a couple of years, the band
made a low-budget EP (Lull)
and an equally low-budget full-length album (Gish.)
The relative commercial success of Gish garnered them a deal with
Virgin
and they subsequently put out the intricately-layered and highly
radio-friendly Siamese
Dream. The band was supposed to release their next album in
time for the Christmas 1994 season, but Mellon
Collie and the Infinite Sadness turned out to be a 2-CD epic
which didn't come out till the fall of 1995. So, in late 1994,
assorted B-sides, demo tapes and other oddments were hastily
assembled into Pisces
Iscariot, which is in fact their greatest album. Mellon
Collie, when it finally appeared, was a massive success on every
level. It was well worth the wait.
But then tragedy struck during the Mellon Collie tour: in July
1996 a member of the band's entourage died of a heroin overdose in
Jimmy's hotel room in New York City, and Jimmy himself came close to
dying as well. (The other members of the band, none of whom were into
drugs, were staying at a different hotel across town.) Jimmy got
kicked out of the band and also faced a variety of criminal charges.
The band continued for a few years with a variety of different
drummers. The original quartet reunited briefly in 1999, but then
d'Arcy Wretzky left the band, to be replaced by Melissa
Auf Der Mar. The last official CD was 2000's Machina.
The band also put out a rarely-heard follow-up entitled Machina
II. It was released in the form of exactly 25 copies and no
more of a 2-vinyl-LP set. These analog LPs were digitized (with the
band's blessing) and MP3s can be found on the usual illicit venues —
as well as on
the band's own web site. .
D'Arcy has remained completely retired from the music business,
but the other have been involved in various projects. In the summer
of 2005, Billy released his first solo album, The
Future Embrace. As part of the hype surrounding its release,
Billy took out newspaper ads with an open letter to his fellow
ex-Pumpkins, calling for the band to get back together. Jimmy (who
had been working with Billy all along) immediately said Yes. James
and d'Arcy remained silent, as did Melissa Auf Der Mar.
In the spring of 2006, plausible media reports began circulating
(e.g., an
April 21, 2006 MTVNews.com story) that the band had reunited and
had gone back into the studio. The old SmashingPumpkins.com website
was revived, albeit with only minimal content at first. (The address
had been pointing to Billy's
blog for quite some time.) It is unclear who, aside from Billy
&
Jimmy, was involved with the recording sessions, although it is known
that they worked with producers Roy Thomas Baker and Terry Date.
In late March 2007, the name of the album— Zeitgeist—
was announced, along with a release date— July 7, 2007
("07-07-07"). In May 2007, Billy and Jimmy went on tour,
accompanied by three talented but relatively little-known backup
musicians.
BillyCorgan.LiveJournal.COM:
This really is his LiveJournal. This site is where he made a rambling entry
on February 17, 2004, where he denounced D'Arcy as a "a mean
spirited drug addict, who refused to get help." He also complained
about how, at the end of the band's last show on December 2, 2000,
James "thanked d'arcy on stage, but not the 2 men standing next to him."
http://www.MySpace.com/gingersling : Ginger Reyes's MySpace page.
Includes some of her solo material: she sounds a lot like Madonna, but
actually has a stronger (though less distinctive) voice. She's very
good.
VH1.com page about the Smashing Pumpkins' VH1 Storytellers
episode. Billy tells the stories behind the compositions of several
of his songs: e.g., "The memory behind ['1979'] is that I was about 18
years old, driving around, it was raining heavily, and I was sitting in
the car at a traffic light. That's the memory — the sort of feeling of
waiting for something to happen, it's not quite there yet, but just
around the corner. That's the memory I wrote the song from."
ZwanMusic.ORG: site for
a shortlived band which Billy Corgan and Jimmy Chamberlin put together
in the early Oughties. This was an odd project. The band had half of
the founding members of the Smashing Pumpkins, and had a very similar
format. However, the band never covered any of the old Smashing
Pumpkins songs in concert. In any case, this site has a great "Smashing Pumpkins News
Archive" page, featuring clippings dating all the way back to a Van
Halen record
review 16-year-old Features Editor Bill Corgan wrote for his high
school newspaper.
Starla.ORG: Ultimate
Smashing Pumpkins portal, with links to dozens of other sites.
Blamo.ORG: Penultimate
Smashing Pumpkins portal, with links to tens of other sites.
Jimmy
Chamberlin Complex web site: all about Jimmy Chamberlin's post-Zwan
and post-Smashing Pumpkins band.
The Pumpkin
Vault: a song list complete through February 2000. Still a useful
resource.
Silent
Poetry: a detailed database covering every song known to have been
recorded by the Smashing Pumpkins (even if only on live bootlegs.)
Includes lyrics and random notes. A labour of love by someone whose
real name seems to be Brian Tomchick.
[February 10, 2011] Billy Corgan
has been working steadily with Jeff Schroeder on the "Teargarden
by Kaleidyscope"
series which is now up to volume 2 of a projected
11. The band's founding bassist d'Arcy Wretzky was in the news in
early
February, when she was arrested and incarcerated on charges of "Animals
Running at Large." Apparently her horses escaped from their
paddock and ran amuck in Berrien County,
Michigan (not far from Chicago), and she never paid the fine.
After missing four court dates, she surrendered to the sherrif's office
in Van Buren County, Michigan (the next county over, where she lives)
and is serving six days' jail time. As if just being in jail
isn't humilating enough, her extraordinarily unflattering mug shot
ended up all over the internet, including here on this page:
. 
was released in July 2007, supported by a six-month-long 
and 
which is a raw and rocking anthology of B-sides, demo tapes, etc. The
band's magnum opus was 1995's 2-disc 
which includes the song "
is
a more succinct statement in the same vein as 
Arggh!
I'm sure it's a perfectly wonderful page, however. 
