"If a man can't keep himself from doing those kinds of things with everything to lose, his band, his life, his status, his economic and whatever future... If he can't stop himself and pick himself up from that, then what's gonna stop him? Us? Us three suburbanites? It ain't gonna happen."
ON THE "DISCONNECTION" LYRIC IN "FUCK YOU (AN ODE TO NO ONE)":
"And with 'disconnection,' we're talking about different levels
of existence here, like in high school. I'd sit and look at that
fuckin' clock and think, 'I'm not gonna make it! I can't make
through the rest of this day - I'm gonna freak out, I'm gonna
fuckin' strangle this teacher, I'm gonna fuckin' shoot this guy
next to me!' Well how do you get through that? You just turn
yourself off. How do you get through, like, your fuckin' parent
beating you over the head? You just shut it off."
"Certainly the media saturation is way worse. Now you turn on the TV, and there's fashion and culture and news aimed directly at 16-year-olds...I've met kids who get laid at 10, 12. I didn't lose my virginity until I was 18. Kids are acting grown-up, but they're not grown-up inside."
"I've thought many times, 'I can't write this,' but on my own little planet I found the courage to write it because it was true. I put aside fear of Father being angry with me. It's hard though; the world pales in comparison with the stature of a parent. In some small-consolation way, my parents feel I'm helping people by giving them something to identify with. They feel proud in a sort of reverse way. My mom's proud of the fact that lots of kids look up to me."
ON SONG TITLING:
"Say you write a song about a chandelier, and the chandelier gives off light. And the light is the color red and red reminds you of the color your not supposed to wear around a bull. So you name the song 'Cow.' "
SAID SOME TIME BEFORE JULY 1996:
"I have always said that if one person leaves, that's the end of the band. I'm not going to carry on with a faux Jimmy or faux
D'Arcy. No fucking way."
ON DEATH:
"I'm not going to die glamorously. I'll probably be eating a
Twinkie, take a bite, and fall over."
ON THEIR PRE-SHOW SOUND/VOLUME CHECK:
"Well, what we normally do, is every city we go to, we hire a
fifteen year old boy and we turn it up until he starts to make a
funny face, and then we turn it up about ten notches louder
then that."
SOME ADDED AND CHANGED LYRICS TO SILVERFUCK SUNG LIVE IN 1997:
"She was my wife,
She was my angel
I put her in a box underneath my bed
There's a difference between her but there wasn't
And this woman broke my heart in 2 and 4 and 6 and 8 and 16 and 64
And i said baby, why must you make me cry
Why must the girls always make the boys cry
And it was blashpemy, it was disastrous and
Unsettled and it broke the pause...
And the disasters unseen.
This was no ordinary girl you see
Why?
Baby, my baby
Well, she's master of the clowns,
Motherfucking nothing
I just wanna fucking be friends
Fuck it all,
She was a fucking whore!!!
Ssssss....
ABOUT THE SMASHING PUMPKINS AS A BAND:
"The whole point of the Smashing Pumpkins was to blow everybody away, so it
didn't make sense to be funny at the same time. We were too busy trying to
pummel your f**king head in."
"Well, we have brought certain things upon ourselves. I've certainly brought things upon us with my mouth."
"We had a wonderful time with this kind of grunge awareness, where suddenly rock was cool again. People wanted to head loud guitars. It was a great time, and I'm glad we were there. But the gimmick part has worn off."
"The weird nihilism that permeates Mellon Collie is extremely relevant to what's going on right now. So many kids are intelligent and articulate, but they don't know what to do with themselves."
"We can look you in the eye and talk to you about life, heart, love rock'n'roll, whatever, but we do not have the moral authority to tell people how to vote or what to do with their bodies. We are just a rock band."
"We're the worst band in America...that makes us the best"
"We've come to the conclusion that we're exactly where we want to be. If you're going to put us onstage for 90 minutes of three hours, we are going to give you more than anyone else, and we are going to kick your ass harder than anyone else. You can laugh at us, poke fingers at us, but for what it is, we're as good as it's going to get."
"You can only be this high-powered mojo rock band for so long, then you just can't look people in the eye. So, we've projected our own demise."
"We are a bit preposterous, but we're also a really special band."
"The Pumpkins love rock-and-roll, we absolutely love it, but we also think it's a flatulent, ego-serving kiddie playground. You can have your cake and eat it too."
"We were just a little immature in the past. I think we actually wanted to create difficult situations for ourselves just to be able to use that emotion for stimulation."
"I don't even want to discuss how many people told me that making an album with 28 songs at this point in our career was crazy. Everyone, including the people at our record label, wanted us to just take a nice, safe path, and produce another album like Siamese Dreams. My attitude was just the opposite. Thankfully, it hasn't turned out to badly."
"Our concerts have it's moments when it's stupid, where it's funny, little cheerleading moments, and there's moments when we are just totally crushing the audience."
"Now we've come to the realization that we don't have to live in a virtual state of anarchy in order to make the music happen."
"There's a lot of chemistry in the band that the outside world could never witness. In our band, D'Arcy is the moral conscience-it's really hard to do something if D'Arcy thinks its f**ked."
"For, like, two years, every interview was, and occasionally still is, "Don't you guys hate each other?"
"As we've gotten older, it's the diversity among us that's made us more of a compete entity. We're not like an untuned motor anymore."
"The music is all we care about - so if that's bad, then we're bad"
QUOTES ABOUT HIMSELF, HIS SONGWRITING AND HIS PAST:
"This friend of mine asked me 'Do you really mean it when you sing "God is
empty just like me"?', and 363 days out of the year, the answer is no. But
those two days I feel it, I feel it pretty intensely."
"There is and will not be any public record on my marriage. That's one thing I have to draw the lines around."
"You know, my father's biggest complaint recently is people keep telling him he looks like me."
"Me and my father have the same slouch and walk. I've been to family gatherings, after dinner, everyone goes into the living room, there will be eight people all sitting in the same Corgan way."
"Back in 1979, I was bigger than most kids by a lot. When I was 12 I led my baseball team in home runs. By the time I was 14, I had been totally passed up. That's when I turned to guitar."
"I was never violent, but I had that streak underneath me all along. People who have known me all my life, when they first saw us play, they were like "Holy f**k". because I'd turn into this beastie. They had never seen that side of me, but I knew it was there."
"I was a jock, but I wasn't on the sports team. I played guitar, but I didn't hang out with the stoners. I just couldn't hang in any way, and when you're young and you can't hang, you oppose. So I was anti-everything, f**k you all."
"Say you write a song about a chandelier, and the chandelier gives off light. And the light is the color red and red reminds you of the color your not supposed to wear around a bull. So you name the song Cow."
"As a 28 year old who's lived long enough to know the difference, I know now that the feelings I felt an 16 were not necessarily correct. But however overly dramatic, the desperation and hopelessness I felt at 16 was my reality."
"The Smashing Pumpkins was never meant to be a small band. It was going to either be a big band, or a no band."
"Music has basically followed a shallow route for 50 years. People come along, do something really cool and different, everyone copies them, the original gets diluted, distorted, and eventually the diluted - in most cases achieves more success than the thing that started it. And I kinda thought the alternative scene was gonna be different: We thought `Brave new world!'
So it's really wierd to be competing against the imitators. It wasn't always comfortable competing against Nirvana, and it was certainly not healthy living under that shadow at times. But at least there was honor in it. We always respected that it was a great band - Pearl Jam too. But competing against Bush?! It's nothing to get your dick hard about, you know what i mean? There's no mojo in that!"
A FAX FROM BILLY TO A REPORTER WHO SAID THE PUMPKINS SUCKED:
"I'm glad that i'm such a good rhymer,
better than being a social climber,
just because i'm a bit brighter,
than some fucking writer"
ON THE EARLY CHICAGO SCENE:
"I'm like the Fugitive, running from the one-armed indie-rock community"
"I almost feel that we're more powerful being acoustic than we are electric."
"I have a hard time thinking of men trying to sing my songs, because I think my perspective is definitely feminine."
ON PLAYING LIVE:
"I think it's probably because we didn't do dumb things like, `Wave your hands in the air' that we suffered a little, but I would rather suffer and not be a fool."
"If there was a simple ethic for the band, it was that we want to be able to do whatever we want to do." "I reached a point in my life where I felt like I was living through some old character."
"The closer I get back to being who I really am, the stronger the music gets."
"The simplest way that I can understand therapy, is that we're born a certain way, we're taught to be something different, and we spend our whole lives trying to unravel it."
"I've become the guy who's like a complaining, whining neurotic."
"The world is not set up for a band like the Smashing Pumpkins---it's set up for bands who can play the angle better."
"When you move artistically, the natural inclination is to denounce everything that's gone before."
"On an idealistic level, doing a double conceptual album is totally uncool, but I'm gonna pull it off."
