Born-Again Corgan
Still, Corgan returns to the subject and shadow of the Pumpkins with little prompting. He describes his fruitless attempt to get the band’s label, Virgin, to release the Pumpkins’ last show (all four hours and thirty-five songs) as a live album: “I kept trying to set the timetable. They wouldn’t pull the trigger.” He also runs down some of the ammo he’s got for a box set someday: two dozen demos predating the Pumpkins’ 1991 debut, Gish; 160 hours of rehearsals for the 1995 double CD Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness; fifteen unreleased songs written for the 1998 gothic opera Adore.
“It’s no great mystery that the Pumpkins were everything to me,” he says. “I was totally burnt after that last show. But after four weeks, I started writing songs. That was weird. In the Pumpkins, when we came off a tour, I’d already be writing for the next thing. This time, there was nothing to write for.”
Sweeney ran into Corgan at a Christmas party in New York at the end of 2000. The two had been friends, on and off, since meeting at a Pumpkins gig in New Jersey in 1991. Sweeney loved the Pumpkins’ long guitar solos; Corgan was a fan of Sweeney’s punk group, Skunk. “He seemed pretty bummed,” Sweeney says of Corgan’s mood at that party. “I said, ‘Congratulations on breaking up the band. It’s good to move on.’ But he didn’t seem to know what to do. He seemed adrift.”
Corgan considered retirement. He even tried it, wandering through Italy in the late winter of 2001 with his girlfriend, Yelena Yemchuk. Corgan also met with several major labels, packing what he admits was a threadbare proposal: “There’s no band, no music yet. Do you want to sign me?”
He did have a name — Zwan, which came to him in Italy — and by the spring of 2001, something to go with it, after a writing session with Sweeney and Chamberlin at a studio outside Salt Lake City. A year later, Corgan was still without a record deal but was recording Mary Star of the Sea with his own money and a pool of, by Chamberlin’s count, a hundred new songs. “It’s not too different from the way we started the Pumpkins,” Chamberlin says. “We played for two years and saved every dime we made — $30,000 — to make Gish.”
Corgan also surrounded himself with equals. Pajo was a star in his own right; he played guitar for proggrunge legends Slint. Lenchantin, the Argentine-born daughter of concert pianists, played bass in the Tool splinter group A Perfect Circle; she is also a classically trained violinist. And Sweeney, Corgan says admiringly, “can hear a Thin Lizzy song one time and play it back perfectly a year later. He can access all sorts of information on the fly.” Another token of Corgan’s esteem: When Sweeney quit his day job managing Andrew W.K. to join Zwan, Corgan advanced him money to live on while the band was getting off the ground.
“I’d heard what a tyrant Billy was,” Pajo says, acknowledging well-known tales of Corgan playing all of the guitar and bass parts on Pumpkins records. “But he never said, ‘Play this, play that.’ The hardest thing, sometimes, was Billy’s delivery. He’d say, ‘You’re playing like shit,’ when I actually was.” Pajo laughs. “But I’d be like, ‘Can you say it in more motivating words?”‘
“I really wanted to be in another band,” Corgan concedes. “I love the romance and safety of a band” — which doesn’t mean he misses the Pumpkins. Corgan says he’s had no contact, other than business exchanges, with Wretzky or guitarist James Iha since the end of that group. “I exhausted it,” he says of his former life, “and left it. Zwan is more akin to my real self, the guy who watches sports and stuff. It’s closer to me at nineteen than the guy at twenty-eight, with all of that gravity.”
If you don’t believe him, look at the band credits in the Zwan CD booklet, where Corgan lists himself as Billy Burke. Corgan grins. “Billie Burke played Glinda, the good witch, in The Wizard of Oz,” he says. “I’m tired of playing the wicked witch.” “God doesn’t care how you do it. Just do it.”
