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Billy Corgan is sitting in almost total darkness, talking about the end of things. One of them is his interest in writing pop songs. The other is his band, the Smashing Pumpkins.
"I've taken pop songwriting as far as it can go," the singer-guitarist declares. He points at a copy of the band's new album, Machina: The Machines of God, on the table in front of him. "This is pretty much the end of the line."
Corgan, who turns thirty-three in March, is wearing black from chin to toe: turtleneck sweater, boots and pants with a long flap hanging from the waist, creating a sari-like effect. The only light in the room - an empty loft in a warehouse on the West Side of Chicago, Corgan's hometown - comes from a ¯ickering candle at his elbow and a weak winter sun rapidly setting outside the window. But it is enough to illuminate the grin on Corgan's pale, round face."This is so typical of me," he says, laughing. "After our first album, Gish, came out, a lot of the press said I couldn't write a pop song. Which I took as a great insult. 'Yeah, I'll write pop.' Lo and behold, I become the best alt-pop writer of my generation."
There is a self-mocking lilt in Corgan's voice, enough to assure you he's being at least partly ironic. But he's got tunes to back up the boast: "Today," "Disarm," "Bullet With Butterfly Wings," "1979," to name a handful. He's also got the numbers. The Pumpkins' 1993 hit, Siamese Dream, and their '95 two-CD set, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, have sold a combined 8.8 million copies. Even 1998's Adore, a solemn affair and a relative commercial disappointment, has gone platinum. "But I don't have anything more to say within the idiom of pop," Corgan claims. "I don't know where else to go."
As brick walls go, Machina is a feast of hard-rock candy: the fuzzy bark of Corgan's and James Iha's guitars in "The Everlasting Gaze" and "Age of Innocence"; the sharp choruses and Jimmy Chamberlin's galloping drums in "Stand Inside Your Love" and "Wound." There is also art rock - the ten-minute epic "Glass and the Ghost Children" - and narrative conceit. Machina is an intricate Corgan discourse on, among other things, faith, need, resurrection and the alchemical powers of rock & roll. Imagine Pink Floyd's The Wall rebuilt in the battered image of grunge - heavier, punkier, self-involved but not self-pitying.
Corgan shakes his cleanshaven head in genuine indecision when asked whether this, his last pop-song album, is also to be the Pumpkins' sayonara. "I go back and forth," he admits. "I'm fully convinced that bands, in the modern era, are not good for more than three records. We should have stopped after Mellon Collie, but we didn't.
"So we're back with a vengeance," he says with evil glee. "See, now we're pissed off, so you get the full weight: 'We shoulda quit, you wanted us to quit, but we didn't. We're gonna make you pay.' "
Corgan's mixed emotions reflect the hurricane spin of Pumpkins life during the past fifteen months: forgiveness, gigging and jubilant studio labor; a crucial loss, a new member and a nasty business spat.
It all began on November 2nd, 1998. Over lunch at the Mondrian hotel in Los Angeles, Corgan and Chamberlin spoke face to face for the first time since July 1996 - when Corgan fired his drummer for chronic drug abuse and the latter's part in the fatal accidental overdose of Jonathan Melvoin, the group's touring keyboard player. Chamberlin says Corgan got right down to business at that meeting: "When he said, 'When we make the new record,' it was like" - Chamberlin smacks his hands together in a thunderclap - "because that's something I hadn't heard in a while. It's like when someone says, 'Will you marry me?' "
The following January, Corgan, Iha, Chamberlin and bassist D'Arcy rehearsed together for the first time since Chamberlin's dismissal. "We did one of those get-acquainted jams on the first day," Iha recalls. "We all looked at each other and went, 'Yeah, that's exactly the way it used to sound.' " In April, the band publicly celebrated Chamberlin's reinstatement with a triumphant back-to-the-bars tour, then went to work on Machina - recording nearly forty new Corgan songs, of which fifteen made the final cut.
"Jimmy's coming back was Billy's point of focus for what the record could be," says Flood, who co-produced Machina with Corgan and also worked on Adore and Mellon Collie. "Which was to make a band record reminiscent of very early Pumpkins in intent and emotion. Somebody described the album to me as a Smashing Pumpkins greatest-hits album - without any of their greatest hits being on it."
The euphoria of reunion did not last. In September, D'Arcy - whom Corgan once called "the most rooted person in the band" - quit after ten years' service. The thirty-one-year-old bassist made no public statement; a terse Pumpkins press release simply confirmed her departure and promised that the band would tour behind the new record.
(As Rolling Stone went to press, Chicago police reported that D'Arcy was arrested there on January 25th and charged with drug possession after crack cocaine was found in a car in which she was riding. D'Arcy declined, through her lawyer, to comment on her arrest. Attempts to reach the band for reaction were unsuccessful.)
Corgan quickly recruited Melissa Auf der Maur, an old friend and Pumpkins fan who had just left Hole, to fill the breach. But on January 11th, just as the Pumpkins hit the road in Europe to promote Machina, the group's new manager, Sharon Osbourne, abruptly resigned after four months on the job, issuing a statement that cited medical reasons for her decision: "Billy Corgan was making me sick."
"Billy Corgan doesn't need a manager - Billy micromanages himself," explained Osbourne, the wife and manager of Ozzy Osbourne, the next day. "There was no reason for me to be there. Billy is incapable of taking comment, especially on a creative level. He is incapable of even listening to it." Contacted in Europe, Corgan declined to respond to Osbourne's charges.
But back in Chicago, sitting in the dark, Corgan reflects on Machina's rough birth and chuckles. "There are no happy endings in our world," he says. "The hero always gets shot at the end of our movies.
"It's the DNA," he suggests. "We've imploded, what, four, five times? And we're still standing. Like cockroaches." Also, he confides, "there's something dangerous about it that appeals to me personally."
"We're a dramatic band," Iha concedes. "There's an edge to the things we do, stuff Billy says. We're getting older" - Iha also celebrates a birthday in March; he will be thirty-two - "and there's so much bullshit just to get a record done, all this stuff surrounding a big rock band. But once we start playing, it's pretty good.
"Basically," Iha concludes, "there's no reason to stop."
"It's like living with a ghost," Chamberlin, 35, says of the Pumpkins' dark karma. "You might be scared at first, or think your life's a drag, but after a while you're friends with the ghost. And the music goes on, which is remarkable - the power of music to overcome what human beings can't seem to overcome."Chamberlin's return has plainly revitalized the Pumpkins. Top-loaded with spiritual gravity, Machina is still an impressively physical record, thanks in big part to the bright, precise aggression in Chamberlin's drumming. In comparison, Adore - made, in Chamberlin's absence, with interim drummers and rhythm machines - is "a broken record," Corgan says. "My heart was broken. It was about showing the broken pieces.
"But I was very proud of the fact that we didn't try to be the Smashing Pumpkins, the ones that sell a lot of records. We became what we became. We lived with it, we rose with it, we fell with it.
"You just move on," he continues. "Last night, I was sitting in the car, it was cold, someone was smoking, and something about the combination made me think of my mother. I wish my mother was alive. But she isn't." Corgan pauses thoughtfully. "I personally can't live life in a deficit situation."
[Excerpt From Issue 836 — March 16, 2000]