Corgan's Fury: Exclusive Q&A

This week, the Smashing Pumpkins filed a breach-of-contract lawsuit against their former label, Virgin Records, alleging the band's name was used without permission for a Pepsi promotion. Band leader Billy Corgan called up Rolling Stone from a bathroom in Australia to explain his side of the story and wound up dishing dirt on his career, explaining how the Pumpkins will release music in the future and offering an opinionated take on Amy Winehouse, Radiohead and the state of the record industry: "I don't think the Beatles would be making an album right now."

Tell us about your personal perspective on this lawsuit.
We've been treated very poorly by [Virgin] as a label for years now. Even when we were going to put the band back together, we went to them for the umpteenth time and said, look, it's a natural thing to want to put out a best of, and they keep telling us nobody cares. And then to turn around and use us like this against our will obviously shows you how full of shit they are, because obviously you have value or they wouldn't be trying to make money on you on the side. And in our case we actually have the right to say no to these types of things. They had to ask our permission to put our music on iTunes. So this is just them getting really sneaky trying to push stuff through, because the only place they're going to get money now is from corporate sponsors.

And look, it's no secret that the record labels are out of touch. They've lost money continuously for seven or eight years and they continue to hold on to the Titanic. This is just another indication of them thinking that they can get away with whatever because they're the big old record business. You know, Josh Homme from Queens [of the Stone Age] came out talking about Interscope, Trent Reznor ... It's a very difficult position because whether it's blogs or people posting on Web sites, fans can get very frustrated about what they perceive about how you do your business, not being aware of how we continually have a gun pointed at our head.

Did you approach the label with your concerns before filing the suit?
No, because it's like talking to a brick wall. These people, they treat your music like it's worthless and they treat you like you're even more worthless. And that goes for our current label, Warner Bros., too. There's no passion. There's no love. There's no respect. It's just, like you're just a number. You might as well be some cookies, or a rock. I really think it's total arrogance on their part. I think they just thought they could get away with [using our music for the Pepsi promotion] and we wouldn't do anything about it. And luckily enough we have the ability to do something about it.