Corgan Explains Why He's Keeping Smashing Pumpkins Name

Tweet

Billy Corgan defended his decision to keep performing under the name the Smashing Pumpkins in a long, rambling blog post last week on the band's official Website, telling fans that even though drummer Jimmy Chamberlin — the Pumpkins' last original member not named Corgan — left the group, the band will still make music fans will hopefully deem worthy of the Smashing Pumpkins moniker.

"What the future holds is unknown to me. I am 100pct committed to the future of SP. I can tell you that. 100pct!! I've never been happier about being in SP, or a part of SP, than I am now," Corgan wrote. "The music I am making sounds like The Smashing Pumpkins. It doesn't sound like solo work, I can assure you of that." Corgan adds that he's wrestled with what to do with the Pumpkins name since Chamberlin was first fired from the group in 1996 and then when original members James Iha and D'Arcy left in 2000. (Chamberlin rejoined the Pumpkins in 1998, but left earlier this year after deciding he could no longer just "cash the check").

"The idea of identity is a strange one to tackle. For many years, I treated the idea of the band named The Smashing Pumpkins as an existential concept that existed away from my being and body... " Corgan wrote, hinting at his one-off supergroup Zwan. "The music that came out of this being and body. I've called the umbrella the songs came out under different names but to me I guess there really wasn't a whole lot of difference. As they say, a song is a song."

"I will never say to you what people say to me all the time, which is that 'I am the band'. I am not 'the band', I am just the leader of the band," Corgan adds before finishing off his long post with references to holistic living and wrestling catchphrases. As Rock Daily previously reported, one of those band members that Corgan is "just the leader of" may be Chamberlin's 19-year-old replacement, Mike Byrne.

Related Stories:
• Smashing Pumpkins' "Drummer of the Future" May Be 19 Years Old
• Billy Corgan Talks Future of Smashing Pumpkins in Long Message To Fans
• Jimmy Chamberlin Explains Smashing Pumpkins Split, Says He Can't "Cash The Check"

• 
  MUSIC 100 Greatest Debut Albums
• 
  MOVIES The 10 Best Zombie Movie Scenes
• 
  TV The Most WTF? Moments of 'Mad Men'
• 
  POLITICS No Price Big Banks Can't Fix

Song Stories

“The Everchanging Spectrum of a Lie”

The Joy Formidable | 2011

The opener off the Welsh group’s The Big Roar album was an epic one, but the band was worried that track had polarized fans. “The first song is eight minutes long,” Rhydian Dafydd, the Joy Formidable bassist, said. “If you did that in the Seventies people would be, ‘Whatever.’ You do it now, people think, ‘Holy s---!’ Some people think it’s the f---ing greatest track on the entire album, and some people think it’s f---ing boring. It’s that element of needing to challenge people.” The band concluded through the song’s lyrics that love was the “everchanging spectrum of a lie.”

More Song Stories entries »

Twitter