Smashing Pumpkins Give Away Rarities in New Record Club

Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins

Daniel Boczarski/Getty Images

The Smashing Pumpkins' Billy Corgan is one of the most prolific and generous songwriters in rock, so it's not exactly a surprise to find him giving away free music. The band's latest free music initiative is the Smashing Pumpkins Record Club – or SPRC – a new project in which Corgan will dole out unreleased recordings from his extensive vaults. The first two tracks available from the club, demo versions of early Nineties tunes "Drown" and "Geek U.S.A.," can be downloaded for free if you enter your email address to the site.

In a video address to his fans, Billy Corgan revealed that the project came about from digging through his archives to find bonus material for forthcoming reissues of the band's catalog. "Part of what we're going to do with the record club is that we're going to provide certain materials that the band worked with to make its decisions," says Corgan. "Though it's at a little bit of lower fidelity than what we'll eventually offer the songs at, you get a sense of what the band was listening to at the time."

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Corgan also says that he recently unearthed several hours of Gish and Siamese Dream-era recordings that will give listeners insight into the band's writing and arranging process at the time. These tracks may be offered as "audio documentaries," showing how songs came together.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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