Learning how to play the music biz game early in their career, the Smashing Pumpkins, led by Billy Corgan, took their local Chicago sound of metal, alt-rock, psychedelia and dream pop, and sold their music to the masses.

The band continues to mold and morph their music to appeal to an ever-changing musical ear, as they take their heavy rock sounds and combine them with the '90s answer to disco -- electronica. Like most bands, the Pumpkins' road to success was long and grueling. And it started in small clubs in the Windy City.

Corgan grew up in the Chicago suburbs; his father was a guitarist who played in local R&B clubs. Corgan began playing in his teens after exposure to "just about everything."

"Around the house," he recalls, "there were records by the Delfonics and Stevie Wonder and later, Led Zeppelin, Hendrix and the Beatles. And I was hearing '70s radio: Cheap Trick, the Raspberries, etc."

Working in record stores also helped Corgan to "detect parallels between Hendrix and John Coltrane, or Sinatra and Miles Davis." Soon he had arrived at a crucial truth: "Great music completely obliterates any conceptions of genre." Such genre-busting, the deliberate erasure of stylistic boundaries, would characterize Corgan's own sound.