Audio By Carbonatix
Billy Corgan is trying to stay humble, but it’s getting tough. The mercurial lead singer/songwriter/personality of the Smashing Pumpkins is becoming a rock star. The band’s debut record Gish is doing well, and the group is about to embark on its first national tour.
Even critics love the Pumpkins. Actually, “love” is not exactly the word for what some critics feel. That term implies a stirring in the chest, and that’s a little north of where a recent live show struck one Chicagoland critic:
“Spewing out a technicolor, omni-maxed, sense-a-round oceanic vision . . . his love swelling from nearly undetectable traces at first, to grow and grow and soon curl over like a huge fat wave created from the sucking, dark undertow of pain . . . the blackness now being transformed into a flowing, heaving, undeniable and then overwhelming feeling of true love.”
Whoa! You may remove your body-condom now. It takes a hell of a band (and a blind editor) to inspire this kind of orgasmic verbal puking. Featured in this month’s Nocturne, a publication that bills itself as “Chicago’s Nightstyle Magazine,” this is the kind of bodily-fluid-laden prose that most bands never even dream about. But for Corgan and the rest of the Pumpkins, acclaim has come fast.
In the past two years, they’ve leapt from garage flowers to national act. Along the way, they’ve recorded the most popular collectors’ single on the Sub Pop label, opened a tour for Jane’s Addiction and made a full-length album that may well be the debut of the year. And, of course, there’s the slobbering critic.
“Yeah, that piece is pretty sick,” Corgan says, giggling nervously. “That guy really has a thing for me. I’ve never seen a concert review, or any music piece, with that much lust in print before. It’s poetry. But it’s scary.”
Things first got scary–in the sense of “successful”–for the band earlier this year when Seattle’s Sub Pop Records released its tune “Tristessa” as part of Sub Pop’s ongoing singles’ series. Happy with the exposure, but disappointed with Sub Pop as a label, the Pumpkins scrapped their dreams of working with the label and began playing a series of Chicago-area showcase gigs. Majors like Warner’s and Geffen made offers, but Corgan decided that an indie like Caroline could provide an environment in which the band’s uniqueness would be an asset rather than a problem. Gish–no relation to actress Lillian; the members just like the word–has proven strong enough to land the band a “New Faces” shot in Rolling Stone and launch it on its first national tour.
All this attention has inflated Billy’s hat size a notch or two–he speaks in terms of being the band “visionary.” This kind of ego could become a problem someday, because the rest of the Pumpkins–bassist D’Arcy, as Darcy Wretzky calls herself; guitarist James Iha; and drummer Jimmy Chamberlin–are a tight, accomplished bunch. But for now Corgan is riding high, enjoying the attention. He’s intelligent and funny in conversation, with an idea of what the dark side of rock stardom can do.
“I’m not going to lie to you, there are things about being a rock star–yeeeessh, what a disgusting term–that are real attractive. But you have to see in other people where stuff like that Nocturne piece comes from. And you have to look inside and see in yourself why you want to hear it.
“We’ve become a buzzy type of band–people are talking about us,” he says. “But we’re hyped a lot more elsewhere than in our own minds.”
Corgan’s Jim Morrisonesque personality and appearance–he really is pretty–would be just frosting if it weren’t for his songs. Stylistically, they are much more finished and mature than those on most first records. They also exhibit a bizarre split personality. On one hand, they are shamelessly and passionately Seventies-retro–lots of big, Black Sabbath-style guitar overdubs and bullet tempos a la the Stooges.
But there is also a dreamy, ethereal side to the music that sounds like the Beatles after they returned from India. Raga-rock isn’t new, but unlike most of the bands doing it, the Pumpkins know when to end the loopy solo and mix it up. They work at giving it an edge. As a songwriter, Corgan’s greatest strength is his ability to make obvious influences–some of the most infamous Sabbath/Purple/Led Zep protometal guitar licks, for example–sound fresh. The band is constantly on guard against sounding too Seventies.
“Sometimes when we practice and it starts sounding too much like the Stooges or Sabbath, I’ll say, `Let’s stop right now,'” Corgan says. “But I think with any band and the vibe you’re trying to create, it’s inevitable that you reach back. I mean, there are only so many grooves in the world.”
Produced by ex-Spooner member Butch Vig, who has also done records with Tad and the Young Fresh Fellows, Gish has a rich, clear sound. Lyrically, Corgan has a lot of fertile ideas and isn’t afraid to bare his soul–although not as forcefully as that overheated Chicago writer seemed to feel. Overall, Gish is a remarkably consistent and coherent record that ranks easily as one of the year’s best debuts.
As a live band, though, the Pumpkins’ dreamy and driven sides mix into a fierce, assaultive whole. “Gish is pretty cool and calculated,” Corgan says. “Live, we kind of peel your head off. And with that kind of aggression comes sloppiness. A lot of the intricacies get lost live.”
Corgan admits he’s a serious guy, and tends to ramble off into complex psycho-socio analyses of his music. Combined with the mysterious titles, the sudden rise to fame and the ever-expanding ego, Corgan’s thoughtful approach has opened the band up to complaints that it’s committing the fatal flaw of taking itself too seriously. It’s one of the prime tenets of pop culture that rock ‘n’ roll has never, ever been serious about anything but abandon, rebellion and making money. Still, Corgan gets even more serious at the suggestion that he doesn’t have a sense of humor. “I wasn’t aware that having humor in my music was a necessity,” Corgan says, the irritation rising. “I mean, how can they say we don’t have a sense of humor? Didn’t we put a goofy photograph of James and D’Arcy’s dog inside the CD book? And what about that little untitled, unlisted song that closes the record [a silly-song bit after the last track on the CD]? It’s a joke. If you don’t get it, well, sorry. I don’t owe anybody any explanation as to why I want to be serious. I don’t have to add humor to make people more comfortable with my music.”
Although he repeatedly denies that the band is his solo project, Corgan has, with a lot of luck, masterminded the band’s career. The son of a professional jazz guitarist, Corgan was “listening to Sabbath’s Masters of Reality every day by the time I was 9 years old.” After playing in what he nows calls “a fucked-up mess, a total disaster of a band,” Corgan met guitarist James Iha in 1986. Adding beautiful, blond-hair-in-the-eyes bassist D’arcy and drummer Chamberlin in 1988, the Pumpkins made an almost immediate dent in the Chicago music scene. They opened for Jane’s Addiction their fourth time playing out. “Kick-start” is too pale a term for what that choice gig did for the Pumpkins. Soon they were playing all over Chicago and word was starting to creep beyond the Cook County line.
Not one to dwell on the past, particularly while the future is shooting by like it is right now, Corgan is already deep into thinking about the follow-up to Gish.
“I’m just waiting for everybody to hate the next record,” he says. “We’re right on the cusp where we could go a little more commercial and sell a lot more records. That makes me want to go down a more ambitious road. We’re not going to re-create ourselves, but the next record needs to be more specific, more impactful.”
“Impactful”? Is that like a smashed pumpkin? “I never smashed a pumpkin in my life,” Corgan says. “But I really like the double entendre that I see in the name. On one hand it’s an aggressive, physical act. On the other, it’s a compliment, like, `Those Pumpkins, aren’t they just smashing?'”
Smashing Pumpkins will perform at Chuy’s on Tuesday, August 13. Showtime is 9 p.m. In the past two years, they’ve leapt from garage flowers to national act.
All this attention has inflated Billy’s hat size a notch or two–he speaks in terms of being the band “visionary.” Corgan’s Jim Morrisonesque personality and appearance–he really is pretty–would be just frosting if it weren’t for his songs.
