And it's really worth to read it if you like Billy Corgan (he talks pretty much)

December 1995

Guitar World

In the grand tradition of the Beatles' White Album, Pink Floyd's The Wall and Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation, Smashing Pumpkins place their bid for rock greatness with Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness, a sprawling two-disc tour de force.

The head Pumpkin is dressed in a doublebreasted, maroon corduroy jacket and boldly striped trousers that look as though they once hung in a wardrobe belonging to the late Rolling Stone Brian Jones. Corgan's wispy hair is dyed a glaring artificial auburn. Like a lot of great, tortured songwriters, he seems ill at ease within his own body. His quiet, precise voice and deep, grayish green eyes seem at odds with the tall, somewhat hulking frame he's been given for this lifetime - perhaps by some cosmic snafu.

Corgan is attended by an efficient-looking blonde woman who silently dispenses vitamins, mineral water, fruit and supportive vibes. The author of angst anthems like "Disarm" and "Today" seems almost cheerful - the genial host - as he leads me around the room, pulling out arcane, dust-encrusted fuzz pedals and guitaristic curios.

"We call this the 'Mayonaise' guitar," he says, extracting a pawnshop-special Kimberly from its case. "It's got those micro_ ne pickups. I bought it for 65 bucks and I've used it on about four songs, so I guess it's paid for itself."

A mint-condition Hamer makes its appearance. "Rick Nielsen gave me this guitar," Corgan says. "It's really nice."

The old brick walls rising around Corgan may have endured some "really awful jams," the guitarist alleges. But they've also witnessed some brilliant work. The Pumpkins' rehearsal space was the recording site for much of their new album, Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness, easily one of the most ambitious, epic records of this decade - a sprawling 2-disc song cycle that flaunts the full scope of Corgan's songwriting prowess. There's everything from piano ballads to the shy-trippy guitar rave-ups that have won Pumpkins their honored place in the alternative rock pantheon. There are also moments of Beatlesque music hall whimsy, Queenish massed guitar grandeur, and to that sub-aquatic textureland where Prince and Jimi chase foxy mermaids through eternity.

Produced by the British dream team of Flood (NIN, U2, Depeche Mode) and Alan Moulder (Curve, the Jesus and Mary in, My Bloody Valentine), the record is one whopping huge canvas, which Corgan and co-guitarist James Iha have covered with every guitar color at their joint command. The size of the project necessarily made Mellon Collie the most band-oriented Smashing Pumpkins album ever, with strong contributions from Iha, bassist D'Arcy and drummer Jimmy Chamberlin.

James Iha arrives at the Pumpkins' rehearsal hall a few minutes after Billy, dressed in a plaid hunting jacket whose trim cut suggests that the garment has probably never seen the inside of a bait-and-tackle shed. At the moment, Iha's hair is dyed in alternating rows of pale blonde and reddish dark brown. His compactly elegant form, high cheekbones and sculpturally perfect features make it easy to see why his friend, designer Anna Sui, recently used the guitarist as a model in one of her fashion shows. But James is no effete, pampered poster boy - he's basically just a regular dude from the Midwest. Like Corgan, he's got a flair for self-deprecating humor and subtly devastating one-liners.

"Yeah, I did some glamorous catwalk thing," he admits shyly.

Corgan seems very interested: "How'd you feel without a guitar, though?" "I thought I'd be fine. But once I got out there, I was just another skittish supermodel. It's scary to think of how much we rely on the guitar as some kind of crutch/mom/dad/phallus/prop thing. You sit there all the time in the studio with one. You sit at home with one. You go onstage with it. It's like..."

Billy Corgan finishes his sentence for him: "It's like...'Fuck you, I got a guitar!'"

there is, in fact, a song called "Fuck You" on Mellon Collie and The Infinite Sadness. But there's also one called "Beautiful." It's that kind of record - all-encompassing.

GUITAR WORLD: Did you know from the outthat this was going to be a double album?

BILLY CORGAN: Yes. We almost had enough material to make Siamese Dream a double album. With this new album, I really liked the idea of creating expanded forms in which to put other kinds of material we were writing.

GW: Was there a concept from the start?

CORGAN: I did start with something of a conceptual basis, but I found out pretty quickly that I couldn't force myself to write to anything that specific. So it ended up being more about trying to write a lot of songs and then picking out common themes and maybe trying to steer certain songs toward those central themes. The end result is conceptual only in that sense.

GW: There are images that seem to anchor the whole thing.

CORGAN: Yeah, like "emptiness," "nothing," "nowhere," "zero." [laughs]

GW: Actually, there's a really wide emotional range. Everything from, "there is a love that God puts in your heart" ["Take Me Down"] to "love is suicide" ["Bodies"]

CORGAN: Well, James wrote the "God puts love in your heart" line. And I wrote the "Love is suicide." Therein you have the Smashing Pumpkins dynamic. Positive J and Negative B.

JAMES IHA: [sarcastically] The light and the dark.

GW: Do you subscribe to the theory that the artist has to be perfectly happy in order to create? Or the other theory that says the artist has to suffer?

CORGAN: I think there's validity in both. Obviously, if you're tormented, you're going to get some kind of weird, deeper resonance in your music. But if you're really tormented, you're usually too overwhelmed to write a song about it. You don't really have the energy to be thinking about your music or your career when you fucking hate your life. I find it's best for songwriting when you're in a kind of middle spot - not terminally depressed, but not really happy either. 'Cause when you're happy, who wants to sit inside and work?

GW: So you need to get some distance from suffering before you can write about it.

CORGAN: Sure. I think when people get into the lyrics on this album, they're going to think I'm in a very bad way. But in a lot of ways, the album is a commentary on things that have already passed - things that have happened and have been assimilated and digested. I'm commenting on ground I've already been over - not necessarily where I am right now. But it's seen through the lens of where I am right now.

GW: If someone were to run a computer scan on the lyrics for this records "belief" and 'pretense" would certainly rank among the most commonly occurring themes.

CORGAN: I think that's a valid point. I think anyone in our position- i.e., in a successful rock band - is sensitive to the integrity issue. On the one hand, we have a rare opportunity to be creative and live a very exciting kind of life. On the other hand, we're basically asked to repeat the same thing over and over again, at a consistent level of quality. And those are, in my mind, opposing factors. Creativity is not necessarily about repetition. But great artists, of any time period, often find themselves in a position where people desire what they do so much that they're forced to repeat themselves. Jimi Hendrix used to play matinee shows, you know? It's unfortunate, but a lot of times you're surrounded by people whose interests are best served by making sure you keep repeating yourself. The thing that makes the whole engine go - which is creativity - seems to be not as important as going out and making money. And I think that's also symbolic of life. You have to make the choice between living life to its fullest potential or going out and paying the bills. Everyone faces that. Not just people in bands.

GW: With this new record, I think you've found a way to satisfy people's expectations of a Smashing Pumpkins record without repeating yourself.

CORGAN: Well, we really went into the record with the notion that this would be the last Smashing Pumpkins record. I mean, we plan on doing another record, but we don't plan on doing another record as the band that most people know. This kind of approach, style, music... everything... is going to change.

GW: Are you disbanding? Is that what you're saying?

CORGAN: No, you misunderstand. I'm saying we've reached the end of one creative ebb and flow. And it's time to go down a different musical path. Our options are either to disband, or to force ourselves to go in a different direction. We've got a lot of different viewpoints on the culture at the moment. We believe that, to a certain degree, we're taken for granted. It's hard to explain, but you just reach a point where you know it's time to move on.

GW: What were you reading when you wrote this album?

CORGAN: A lot of spiritual stuff. The Vedas, the Upanishads [two Hindu texts], Christian martyrs... There's this amazing book, a 4,000-year-old Sanskrit Yoga thing, translated so that it can be understood by a modern Western person. But it's a very simple, small book. A friend gave it to me, and I read that over and over. It has a lot to do with balancing earthly demands with spiritual receptiveness. And where God fits into that. So there was a lot of that. Soul searching's not the right word. I was trying to untangle things.

GW: I ask because the language of the songs very pre-20th Century at times. "Cupid de Locke" is probably the most obvious sample of that. Or even a phrase like "suffer my desire" ["In The Arms Of Sleep"] has a very archaic ring. People don't talk that way today.

CORGAN: I don't know. In the past, I probably could have given you more conscious connections between songs and their specific inspiration. Like before Siamese Dream, I was reading a lot of William Burroughs. So there was a definite connection between that and the album. But with this one, I can't really say I felt any of that. I basically kind of write in a bubble.

GW: What are you reading right now?

CORGAN: Comic books, mainly.

GW: Was the whole Mellon Collie album written before you started recording it?

CORGAN: No. We wrote a lot while we were recording, actually - it was pretty much the first time we ever tried to do that. Flood really encouraged the idea of not having every day just be devoted to recording time. We would work on normal recording for five or six hours, but then the band would just jam for a couple of hours, or work on a new song or something. Working like that kept the whole process very interesting - kept it from becoming a grind. It did start to get grindy at the ends It that's inevitable.

GW: How did you get involved with Flood?

IHA: Billy and I are both real big fans of his l work. I'm sure both of us own at least 10 CD's that Flood has worked on. And they're I different. Not typical rock bands - all every individual.

CORGAN: So I approached Flood about doing the album. I told him about the double album, which he thought was a good idea. He accepted the challenge of it. We discussed where it could work well and here it could go completely wrong. We started sending him demos and talking on the phone.

GW: One tends to think of him as a real sonic manipulator.

IHA: That's the tag that people put on him - that he sits around with synthesizers all day. But he's not really about that. He knows how to do that stuff, but he's just as much into having a rock band play live the studio. He's very open-minded.

CORGAN: Whatever works. We did things like sampling aerosol cans and the sound of scissors being opened and closed. On the song "Cupid," all the percussion except the drum kit is stuff like this: [Corgan picks up a jar of vitamins and shakes it rhythmically. And it was real freeing, sonically.

GW: Why didn't you work with [producer] Butch Vig this time, as you had on all your previous albums?

CORGAN: To be completely honest, I think we'd become so close with Butch that it started to work to our disadvantage. You get to the point where you don't even say anything, 'cause you know all the body language. So the communication starts to diminish. We'd worked with Butch from the time we did our Sub Pop single ["Tristessa" b/w "La Dolly Vita," 1990]. So it wasn't really a decision about him as a producer I just felt we had to force the situation, sonically, and take ourselves out of normal Pumpkin recording mode. I didn't want to repeat past Pumpkin work.

GW: Was it a challenge coming up with guitar arrangements for so many songs?

CORGAN & IHA: [In unison] Yeah.

IHA: But here's what was cool about it: in the past, everything had to overdubbed and layered-guitar overkill. That wasn't really the train of thought this time, although we did that, too. But there are some songs with just one guitar track. "To Forgive" has just one live electric guitar take.

CORGAN: But then there'd be a song like "Jellybelly," where Flood said "On this song, you need to do the "Pumpkin guitar overdub army" thing. You'll hurt the song if you don't." So it was a good, healthy balance.

IHA: There's a lot of rock songs on the album, but we tried to avoid typical rock soloing. The approach to leads was a lot different. Most of them are left of center.

GW: Did you two guys divide the soloing duties?

IHA: Not deliberately. But it kind of came out half and half in the end, I guess. For example, on the song "Muzzle" Billy plays the first solo, and towards the end of the song there's an outro solo that I play. That's just the way it seemed to work best.

CORGAN: A lot had to do with the way we were working. There was recording going on in two rooms at once. I'd often be in one room, doing a lot of singing or working on an arrangement. And all that time, James would be in the other room, working out lead guitar ideas. Maybe a whole eight-hour day of putting different leads and things on tape, over the basic rhythms. Because of all the other responsibilities I had, I wasn't focusing on the lead guitar as much on this album. And James had more time to explore guitar ideas than he'd ever had before. In the past, we were always dealing with such time constraints that it was way easier for me to play something immediately. But James always has really good ideas.

GW: Does Smashing Pumpkins feel like more of a band now?

IHA: Yeah. This record really was conducive to that whole feeling. There were just too many songs for one person to do everything. I think the record really conveys a band feeling.

GW: Did any circumstance arise where you two played together? Interlocking guitars on a rhythm track, for example?

IHA: A few were done live like that. "X.Y.U." was.

CORGAN: We're pretty firm believers in super-tight rhythm guitar playing. There's definitely a poignancy to four people playing together in a room - the feeling that you get from the miasma of everyone's own rhythms against one another. But if you're not specifically going for that kind of feel, then you've really gotta build the song from the bottom up, layering the rhythm guitars one track at a time, very precisely. To me a song like "Jellybelly" is most effective when it's built like that - super-tight chopped rhythm playing honed to a razor point. Played live, it's powerful but, to me, not as effective.

GW: Was the two-room scenario a Floodian strategy?

CORGAN: We'd talked about that even before Flood got involved.

IHA: It was almost necessary. Otherwise it would have taken too long to make the record.

CORGAN: After Siamese Dream, I tried to figure out ways to lessen the basic tension that develops during the making of a record. And to me, the biggest offender was the insidious amounts of time that everyone spends waiting around for guitar parts to be overdubbed. There were literally weeks where no one had anything to do but sit and wait. What's the old expression? "Idle hands make for Devil's work." The two rooms were a way around that endless waiting.

GW: Were any core guitars or amps used to make the record?

CORGAN: It pretty much broke down to my live rig and the Siamese Dream setup which is this Marshall head I have [an '84 JCM 800] that's been used on literally everything the Pumpkins have ever done. We call it the "soul head." I bought it off some stoner guy. Saw an ad in the paper and bought this half stack. The cabinet ended up being used on 90% of the guitar tracks for this album, and the head on about 30%. The other main rig was a Marshall rack preamp and Alesis compressor - which, for some reason, really sounds good with guitar - into a Mesa Boogie head. That's the basic sound. And for a lot of stuff I used the same '57 reissue Strat that I did most of Siamese Dream with. We probably used 20 different electric guitars and 10 different acoustics on the album. We lined them all up in a row.

IHA: We'd take five guitars and try them all until we'd narrowed it down to the one that was best for the part being worked on. We never had the luxury to do that in the past- neither the time nor the money. But a lot of times we'd end up going with the guitar that would stay in tune the best. I have this early Eighties Les Paul Custom - a silver sunburst - that we used a lot, not only because it has a great Les Paul sound but also mainly because it stayed in tune. Basically, we used Strats and Les Pauls.

CORGAN: And of course we've got the full pedal army. Between the two of us, we've got 30 or 40 pedals.

GW: What's the sickest pedal that you own?

CORGAN: The Fender Blender. Kevin Shields [of my Bloody Valentine] told me to get one. It's just the destructo pedal of all time. Listen to the song "Bullet" - at about two-and-a-half minutes there's a part where the key changes and it comes in all loud and thick and the speakers sound real distorty. That's that pedal. There are so many weird harmonics in the thing that if you turn it up a certain way, you get distortion beyond distortion. It makes the guitar sound almost unintelligible .

GW: Is all that front-end gain - from all dose fuzz boxes - the key to that supersaturated Smashing Pumpkins distortion?

CORGAN: To be honest with you, the basic sound on this album comes from that amp rig I told you about, with the Marshall preamp and Mesa/Boogie head. You just have to take the time to tweak it to get the most gain and then figure out how to get the most gain out of the combination of guitars you're using. I think most people do a very poor job of that. They get something that sounds like it's really exciting and distorted, but when you really listen to it, it's crap.

IHA: That's the worst thing. All these alternative bands with big hits right now, they think if they buy a Big Muff and a Marshall stack, they're gonna get the "Kurt Cobain sound." But they just don't know what to do with it. I mean the Big Muff was cool, but you just hear it so much now. And people use it so poorly. Just on and off. They seem to think they're cool just because they have one.

GW: So which song on the new album has the greatest amount of guitar tracks?

CORGAN: I think "Thru The Eyes Of Ruby." In the end, I think Alan [Moulder] said there were 56 guitar parts on there. "Jellybelly" had lots of guitars, too. That's your typical 8 song with a lot of what we call "drop in" leads. That's where you're between verses and you want to play something for just eight seconds or so.

IHA: We did a lot of layering with E-Bows on this album, too. Like the middle eight in "Here Is No Why"; it's got 14 tracks of these little two-note E-Bow figures. And the song with the most effects pedals, would probably be "Tales Of A Scorched Earth." There's this one ridiculous solo where we had like 20 things chained together and it was just going Unnnnoohhhhh [does a convincing impression of an aroused mastadon] when the guitar wasn't even on. We plugged all this stuff in, then we had to leave the room. It was so loud.

GW: Do you ever detune for things like "Jellybelly" - the chunka-chunka thrash numbers?

CORGAN: Yeah, yeah, we use the "grunge tuning."

IHA: Dropped D-only the first string.

CORGAN: Yeah, but then we detuned everything on the album down a half step. So, like, the bottom string on the bass was E flat. And the dropped D stuff is really C sharp. We just wanted to make the music a little lower, that's all.

GW: Do you guys have similar musical tastes? Do you share guitar heroes?

CORGAN: I think we're pretty much in agreement on the old stuff we like. We're both big fans of the same old bands, like Sabbath and the Jefferson Airplane.

IHA: The older I get, the more I appreciate [former Rolling Stone] Mick Taylor.

CORGAN:Yeah, when you're younger you can never appreciate how good a guitar player Mick Taylor was. But when you grow older, you start to appreciate a contribution to a song. You move away from just a solo thing.

GW: Although live with the Stones, Mick Taylor was always soloing all over the place.

CORGAN: Was he?

IHA: Oh yeah, all over the place. On record, it was different.

CORGAN: See, I didn't know that. Fuck him, then.

GW: Did you guys say you like the Jefferson Airplane?

CORGAN: The old stuff. They were pretty cool. Obviously, because of where and when we were born, I think we just sifted through a lot of music we'd heard about and found the stuff that we liked. I used to work at a record store so I'd tell James, "Check this out, you'll really like this." With a band like the Jefferson Airplane, there's stuff in there that's genius. And then there's stuff that's total crap - just obvious, drug-induced, hazed-out, no-thought-about-anything crap.

IHA: It was cool to be rock geeks, 'cause then you found out what was actually good about all these old school bands. But most kids today wouldn't give two shits to listen to all that stuff.

CORGAN: Everybody always points to the supposed influence of those bands on our band. But I think we took our cues more from asking, "What makes this band good here and makes them suck there?"

IHA: Like the Jefferson Airplane have this totally rocking live album, Bless Its Pointed Little Head. And it's totally rockin'. They had a funky drummer, an amazing bass player, and it's some kind of weird San Francisco pre-Blues Traveler thing. And there's actually a song on there that had this thing that we always wanted to do...

CORGAN: We actually tried it!

IHA: At the end of this total space-jam song, Three Fifths Of A Mile In Ten Seconds," it stops and you hear the crowd start to clap. And all of a sudden the drummer goes into this ridiculous drum roll...

CORGAN: And then they do the big ending. And the audience goes crazy! And we were like, "What an excellent way to end a song. We gotta use that!"

IHA: We tried it onstage - in "I Am One," but we could never make it work

CORGAN: We were no Jefferson Airplane. It was so bad. We'd planned on doing it two nights in a row in Chicago. It was terrible the first night, so we didn't bother trying it the second.

IHA: It was a great idea when they did it, though. I don't know how they did it. It just sounds so... fabulous.

CORGAN: The other thing is, go back to the Eighties and what do you find that's worth listening to? You can say there was some good Blondie stuff. There were things like Television that certainly hold up. But not with the same amount of depth and wealth that there was in the late Sixties and early Seventies. It's hard to be, like, Generation X and not wonder why things are the way they are. So exploring these things in some way explains how we got to where we're at. I think music is a great barometer for culture.

IHA: I think Nathan Larson from Shudder To Think is one awesome, totally rocking guitar player. He's got a very unique style, which mixes in some jazz ideas. He has a real hard style, but then he plays all these intricate, mellow things. Every other rock band now is just Nirvana chord, Nirvana chord...

GW: Smashing Pumpkins is one of the groups that relegitimized heavy metal.

IHA: I beg your pardon. Although there are some pretty good Judas Priest grooves on this new album. I can point out which songs.

CORGAN: Don't!

IHA: This is a small sore spot between us.

GW: You know what I mean. You were among the first alternative rockers to mention people like Ozzy and Black Sabbath with anything other than contempt.

CORGAN: Well, I've always said that you can certainly quarrel with Black Sabbath's Satanic politics, or Judas Priest's pseudo leather man aspects' But what drew me to that music as a kid wasn't what they were singing about - although that did hold a kind of kiddie fascination for me. People attach all this other schmaltz to the music, which is understandable. But the fact of the matter is that Unleashed In The East is a great fucking rock record. Masters Of Reality by Black Sabbath is an amazing-sounding record. There's no getting around it. That power is universally appealing. I think you can see that in the fact that Pantera is probably the best heavy metal band right now. You can certainly quarrel with their non-P.C. aspects, but the fact of the matter is that nobody sounds fuckin' heavier and meaner. That's why I like them. The only new guitar player I like is Dimebag Darrell. Darrell is just the shit. Flood loves Pantera. When he found out I was a Pantera fan, he literally jumped up and down. He told me that when he was working on NIN's Broken with Trent Reznor, they had to drive 20 miles every day. And every day they'd listen to Pantera's Vulgar Display of Power. Flood and I went to see Pantera I think it's really dumb when people try to turn sound i into a political question. All we ever wanted to do in this band is kick people's ass. There's something funny about loud drums and rocking guitars that seems to assist that process.

GW: Billy, you've been highly critical of your own work in the past. Do you feel like you've done it on this album? Have you satisfied your own expectations?

CORGAN: I think this is absolutely the most solid representation of everything we've ever been. I think it represents periods of the band that have already come and gone. For example, I think in '92 we were the best rock band that we ever could have been. I don't mean that to sound self-deprecating - a bad reflection on what we are now. But in '92 we had total attack, style, thinking - we were extremely aggressive onstage. To me, that was out peak as a rock band. Unfortunately, I don't think we ever got that on tape. And I think there's a representation of that aspect of the band on songs like "Fuck You" and "Jellybelly." I think I finally got that on tape, albeit after the time when it was most alive. We play better now, but we don't have the same attack. So I really think this record is a big exclamation point on seven years of Smashing Pumpkins.

GW: The idea of the big, concept double album - where everybody talks about what it means - belongs very much to another era of rock. Was that a concern of yours?

CORGAN: I knew people were going to have questions, problems, be antagonistic about it... whatever. But I really just decided not to care. If it was about some bloated concept, I could see people having problems with it. If it was three-quarters jack-off soloing, I could understand people being antagonistic toward it. But it's not, and I'm very proud of the fact that it's song after song all different, all trying to say something different, yet all adding up to a fine idea, like a long novel or something. The fact that that comes with a package that's associated with the Seventies, I don't really care about. I see the pitfalls in it, but we addressed those and got around them as best we could. I think the record ended up being a double album more like the White Album than like The Wall. Whether the record proves itself remains to be seen.

GW: When we last spoke, in '93, you said, "I'm sure that, in three years, rock will be passe again."

CORGAN: [Shrugging] Well, I'm a prophet. I think we're headed right to disco. We've had our little rock explosion. And, unfortunately, we're coming out of it even more jaded about rock than we went into it. The cliches are even more obvious.

GW: A return to disco. Is that how you see the Tricky/Portishead thing?

CORGAN: No. Honestly, I'm excited about that Because I think that's a natural assimilation of technology and a multi-cultural worldview of music. That's even possibly where I may be headed - the Billy Corgan version of that. When I say disco, I mean things like ABBA. Ace of Bass. That nameless, faceless synth pop for the masses. We're gonna get it all over again. And it's gonna be even worse. That and maximum AOR. We thought Phil Collins was bad? We've got a whole new generation of that coming, as the supergroups break into their solo careers yet again'

GW: Oh God, please. I hope it's not gonna be that grim.

CORGAN: Leave it to me to paint you a grim picture. What's unfortunate is, if you're a 15-year-old kid right now, and you're looking at how everything is, you're seeing bands being rewarded for copying Nirvana and Pearl Jam. So if you're a young kid, are you going to go in the direction of mimicry or in the direction of your own thing? In my heart I would hope that, if there's any inspiration we provide, it's that there's a point to pursuing your own sick twisted vision of rock. But when you look at the beating we've taken for doing that, I can't imagine that a lot of kids would prefer going down that road. So I think the music scene is even worse off now than it was five years ago. Because, instead of heralding a bright new future with lots of alternatives, we've narrowed the scope even further. Although it's more pleasant to listen to some band copying Nirvana than it is to listen to Phil Collins, it's also more insidious and it hurts even more. Because it's a total blasphemy of what was sacred about that stuff in the first place.

GW: With Kurt's death, do you feel attention is more focused on you to be that kind of figurehead?

CORGAN: No. Put it this way, if anybody considers me a figurehead now, they certainly didn't consider me that way before. I certainly don't want it by default. I'm not interested.

GW: Apparently Kurt Cobain didn't want it either.

CORGAN: I wouldn't jump to that conclusion.

GW: Well, you knew him.

CORGAN: No, I didn't really know him. But I think there is public image and there's thing, and anybody who reaches those kind of heights is aiding and abetting it at some level, however unwitting they claim to be. Put it this way, you don't sit in your room and write one of the best records of your generation by accident

GW: One last thing, do you have any recurring gig nightmares?

CORGAN: I do, actually. I have these insane nightmares. Do other people express these dreams?

GW: Every musician has them, yeah.

CORGAN: The one that sticks out in my mind is one where I'm on stage in, like, a Lollapalooza kind of setting. Big stage. Lotta people. But no one's listening to the band. Everyone's talking. I go up to speak into the microphone and it just falls off the stand. The band is still tuning up. I get the sense that the band's not ready to play the song. I'm kinda frustrated. Don't know what to do. I go to play my guitar and the neck's made of rubber and the strings all start to break. The amp doesn't work... I've had this dream.

GW: You can't depend on anything.

CORGAN: Yeah. I used to have a similar dream when I was little. I'd be shooting a basketball and no matter what I did, the ball wouldn't go in the hoop. It reminds me of that. Just a total anxiety dream. But I don't really get nervous going on stage anymore. So it's really weird. I guess I'm just suppressing.

June 1996 From SPIN

zero worship

Bored with rocking your lights out, Smashing Pumpkins are already looking toward distant lands of alternia we can barely imagine. But as Craig Marks discovers, they're still obsessed by the needy teen within.

Corgan, though, had only just begun. Throughout the following months, the T-shirt could be seen peering out from magazine covers, from CD booklets, and from behind the mike nightly, on tour in support of the band's sextuple-platinum magnum opus, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. You, too, could be a "Zero": At the Pumpkins' February show at the Kawasaki Sogo Arena, just outside of Tokyo, "Zero" shirts were selling for 3,500 yen (about $33) a pop. And if you couldn't score tickets to the show, not to worry: A recent trip to my local Urban Outfitters clothier turned up a well-stocked rack of the silver and black. I couldn't help but wonder about Corgan's relentless, not to mention potentially unsanitary, fascination with the aphoristic garment. "How many of those 'Zero' T-shirts do you have, anyway?" I asked. "Well, more than one, obviously," he answered. Relieved, but still curious, I pried further. "Is it, like, your blankey?" "No. No. No," he countered. "It's just, you know, the superhero needs a costume."

Unfortunately for Corgan and his band, the Japanese have yet to warm to the notion of a 6'4" hairless American superhero. The above-mentioned Kawasaki show was only half-full, and the 2,300 or so attendance were no more than quietly respectful of the Pumpkins' enormously loud and powerful rock show. They dutifully bounce to "Bullet" and to the current single "1979," but whenever Corgan and guitarist James Iha stretched out and conducted mini-symphonies on guitar that were reminiscent of Television's cinemascopic classic "Marquee Moon," the tragically hip Japanese kids looked forlorn, even impatient. This version of the Pumpkins' live experience-two sets: one acoustic, one electric, in sync with the twin discs and moods of Mellon Collie-is taxing both on band and audience, and the crowd in Kawasaki seemed exhausted by the Pumpkins' ambition. Corgan, Iha, bassist D'Arcy, and drummer Jimmy Chamberlin doggedly plowed forward, even digging in their heels for a series of ear-splitting encores. But the musical language the Pumpkins have spoken since their formation in 1987-crudely confessional, defiantly middle-American, staunchly rawk-held no truck with these premillennial youths. And in the end, our superhero stood defeated, though hardly deflated.

Holding court in a hotel bar two night later with representatives from the Japanese branch of the band's label, Virgin Records, Corgan was far from the egomaniacal tyrant he so often is portrayed as. Over diet Cokes and piped-in jazz, he sympathized with Virgin's task of trying to break the Smashing Pumpkins in the Far East. "We're not getting any prettier," he quipped. But Corgan's acknowledgment of the Pumpkins' struggle to win over the Japanese went beyond self-depreciating swipes at his ungainliness; unlike so many artists, Corgan was willing to admit that perhaps the kids were onto something. While the Pumpkins, more popular Stateside than ever before, ready their plans for a highly anticipated 100-plus-date arena tour of North America, set to run from June to December, this recent overseas swing has been fraught with a palpable amount of audience malaise, and that has fed right into Corgan's rather remarkable public decree that the Smashing Pumpkins, as we know them, are o-vuh.

"You can only be this high-powered mojo rock band for so long," Corgan had told me earlier, "and then you just can't look people in the eye. So toward that end, we've projected our own demise. We're thinking, three years from now, are we going to want to do the same thing? No way. We couldn't do it with conviction, so why bother?"

It may sound like commercial suicide for Corgan to futz with such a well-oiled rock machine, but his instincts, however unfashionably brash, have generally proved unimpeachable. He has outlasted grunge, shrugged off punk, and if the future-leaning sampler-pop of "1979" is any indication, Corgan sits in the pole position for the alt-rock race to 2000. Extremely self-assured of his talent and vision, Corgan's relentless drive and ruthless approach to record-making have often come under attack from his more egalitarian peers most infamously, and for the ages, in the swipe Pavement took at the Pumpkins on "Range Life." It was commonly reported that Corgan recorded nearly all the guitar and bass parts on the band's 1993 breakthrough album, Siamese Dream, and while Mellon Collie is a more collaborative effort, all but two of the songs were written by Corgan ("Take Me Down" was written by Iha; "Farewell and Goodnight" by Corgan and Iha; both are tacked on as the final songs of their respective discs).

Such blatant egoism, particularly in combination with mass success, has never sat well with "the coolies," as Janet Billig calls them. Billig, who served as publicist for the band at Caroline Records and remains close friends with Corgan, knows all about "the coolies"; she used to manage Nirvana and the Breeders, and worked with Sonic Youth, among others-bands that typically resented Corgan's gauche careerism. "All the alternative bands hated the Pumpkins," she says. "Part of it was the feeling that they got every single break in the world: opening for Jane's Addiction in Chicago as one of their first shows; after their first record release, the opening slot on the Chili Peppers/Pearl Jam tour; a Sub Pop single; the track on the Singles soundtrack. Anything they could close their eyes and think of wanting, they got.

"But," adds Billig, "a lot of the resentment came from the perception of how Billy treated his band members. And he was like, 'Fuck them, I don't care. I'm going to sell more records than them.' And he did."

When I ask if he learned from the criticism, Billig laughs. "He was driven by it."

While Corgan was busy garnering the enmity of the indie-rock community, bandmates Iha and D'Arcy busied themselves with outside projects. The pair teamed up, along with D'Arcy's brother-in-law Jeremy Freeman, to form Scratchie Records, which to date has released singles from the Chainsaw Kittens, Ivy, and Ful Flej, among others. D'Arcy found time between world tours and band crises to marry Kerry Brown, a drummer with the band Catherine, and the two bought a farmhouse in Michigan City, Indiana, a couple of hours' drive from the Pumpkins' Chicago rehearsal space. And Iha dipped his sandaled toe into the fashion waters, turning up on designer Anna Sui's runway last spring, while recently turning down an offer to appear in a CK One fragrance ad. "It's a fun thing to do," says Iha of his stint on the catwalk, "but you bring on the wrath of Rock. Music's more important."

The band seems to agree on this point. The front they seamlessly presented to me was one of shared purpose and downsized egos: For example, they insisted that they be interviewed en masse. But after sitting down with three quarters of the Smashing Pumpkins for a pair of conversations- Jimmy Chamberlin was laid up with the flu-I was most reminded of an Eastern European country trying out capitalism for the first time, and realizing it's trickier than it looks. Both Iha and D'Arcy remained fairly quiet throughout, as much there to monitor Corgan as to contribute. Corgan, on the other hand, was annoyed that the interviews weren't longer. "That's all?" he wondered when I shut off my recorder, a hint of anger in his voice. (The only question Corgan refused to answer concerned the dissolution of his four-year-old marriage. "There is not and will not be any public record on my marriage," he insisted. "That's one thing I have to draw lines around.") Despite Corgan's genuine and heartfelt attempts to include his mates, he didn't quite have the hang of it yet. It was as if, by acting like a democracy, the Smashing Pumpkins hoped to at last become one.

What's your perception of the media's perception of the Pumpkins?

Billy Corgan: Well, I'll give you the short list. We're too serious. We're assholes. And we all hate each other.

Is any of that fair?

Corgan: Well, we have brought certain things on ourselves. I've certainly brought things upon us with my mouth. But I still wonder, what the fuck did we ever do wrong? All we've ever done is be a good band, make good albums; and be better to fans than most bands have ever dreamed of. We're obviously communicating. People are buying the albums, and we're selling tickets. If we're not communicating to the music intelligentsia, then we just have to accept that, and go around it. Hey, being the Smashing Pumpkins is not so fucking bad. We make a lot of people happy.

How do you answer on the charge of being too serious?

Corgan: I remember reading reviews of Gish: "This band doesn't have a sense of humor." We didn't realize that we were supposed to be funny, too. The whole point of the Smashing Pumpkins was always 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 fucking head in. But we fed into the charge by being overanalytical about the way that we existed and operated. That's stuff we never should have talked about. I never realized it would come back to haunt us. For, like, two years, every interview was, and still occasionally is, "Don't you guys hate each other?"

Besides the band, what do the three of you share in common?

Corgan: I know it's going to sound kind of coy, but what we really share in common is the band. Beyond that, we're pretty different people. We weren't a gang to start with, so at times it's been hard trying to keep the band together. But as we've gotten older, it's, the diversity among us that's made more of a complete entity. We're not like an untuned motor anymore.

What have you learned to admire In, say, D'Arcy?

D'Arcy: Please don't do this.

Corgan: Well, when I was 20 and met D'Arcy, my whole thing was A, music, music, music, 24-7. And I couldn't understand why D'Arcy wasn't music, music, music, 24-7. D'Arcy was like, "I have to have a fucking life. It can't be that way." And at the time I couldn't respect that. But as I've matured, I really respect D'Arcy's strength. She does exactly what she wants to do. D'Arcy showed me that you can have a life and play music. I use music as some kind of weird salvation to get away from my life. But eventually you have to live a fucking life, or you're going to shoot yourself in the head.

D'Arcy: The opposite is true on my end. I take a look at Billy, see the way he is. and it causes me to meet him halfway and say, "Look at this person who works so hard." Everyone always considered me to be a perfectionist, but I wasn't even anything close to the way he is. We try and learn and better ourselves from each other, maybe even from the flawed parts of each other.

What were the three of you doing in 1979?

James Iha: I wasn't doing much. I was in Elk Grove, Illinois, a boring, middle class suburb of Chicago. I remember that me and my high school friends used to go to a friend's house during lunchtime and watch MTV and make fun of, like, Prince and Bruce Springsteen videos, just like Beavis and Butt head. It wasn't a bad existence. But, aesthetically speaking, it wasn't the most exciting place to be.

D'Arcy: I was playing oboe and violin, and doing gymnastics, and my parents took us out of school for a month to travel around Mexico, Texas, and Arizona in one of those pull campers.

Your parents sound pretty bohemian.

D'Arcy: My dad is a very strange man. There's nobody like him.

What does he do?

D'Arcy: Everything. He builds houses, he's a contractor. He wishes he were a cowboy. He goes off and has adventures, looking for the Lost Dutchman Mine on horseback for months at a time. And he has his sailboat racing.

And your mom?

D'Arcy: My mom's cool.

Iha: D'Arcy's like her mother.

D'Arcy: My mom's really cool. [laughs]

Corgan: You know, my father's biggest complaint recently is people keep telling him he looks like me.

D'Arcy: And that bothers him?

Corgan: Yeah, but what bothers him is the notion of him looking like me, instead of me looking like him.

Do you resemble your dad?

Iha: He does more now than he used to.

Corgan: Yeah, but a lot of that has to do with the whole jingly-jangly thing. Me and my father have the same slouch and walk. I've been to family gatherings, and after you eat dinner, and everyone goes into the living room, there will be eight people all sitting in the same Corgan way. [laughs]

Anyway, back in 1979, I was bigger than most kids by a lot. When I was 12, I led my baseball team in home runs. The funny thing was, I dominated physically when I was 12, but by the time I was 14, I had been totally passed up. That's when I turned to guitar.

How has being from the Midwest fit in with who you are and what kind of band you became?

Corgan: We didn't grow up hanging out, being cool, going to concerts. When I met James he was 18 and I was 19, and our exposure to alternative music was the Smiths, the Cure, and some Bauhaus. We weren't aware of some underground New York noise scene, or a punk-rock movement in L.A. We weren't surrounded by a culture that supported experimentation. We were supported by a culture that was like, "I can't come see you play because I've got to be at work at nine in the morning." There's not much of a lifestyle to live - it's fucking cold there five months out of the year - so when we found one, which was the band, we poured ourselves into it. We attached an extremely heavy work ethic to success. If people liked us it was going to be because we had done everything we possibly could to be good. It's been like that for five years: Hard work, hard work, hard work.

Iha: The big difference between the East Coast and the Middle West is that there's definitely an East Coast scene. It's more cliquey. There's an aesthetic pride in playing a certain kind of sound.

Corgan: I recently interviewed Eddie Van Halen for Guitar World. And I told him that I liked the fact that his music has never been elitist. Even though they were fucking cool and looked good and everybody wanted to be them, there was still that element of, hey, everybody can join the party. He said he always felt that they never really discriminated in their minds. Arid I think we're kind of like that. I remember Kim Gordon [of Sonic Youth] once said some horrible thing about having to play to the jock in Iowa, and I always think about that quote, because that jock in Iowa needs someone like Kim Gordon to say there's a better world out there, that just because you've grown up with this mentality doesn't mean you have to be this mentality. And that's the difference. We're saying we identify with you, but we got out. We're not still sitting here drinking Buds with you in the fucking corner. We got out. And that's always been what we're about.

How has the musical climate changed over the past few years?

Corgan: In 1991, at least we were competing with the real deal. Now, we're competing with Nirvana mimics. It's a game you don't even want to play. It's not honorable. If rock's going to evolve anymore - and I'm not so sure it's going to - I think people will start to come at music with more of a sophistication. People are going to tire of the same shit.

Audiences or musicians?

Corgan: Both. I think people are already tired of it, to be honest. We had a wonderful time with this kind of grunge awareness, where suddenly rock was cool again. People wanted to hear loud guitars. It was a great time, and I'm glad we were there. But the gimmick part of it has worn off.

Does that mean that you're growing tired of playing the rawer, more Black Sabbath-like stuff?

Corgan: We still really enjoy playing rock. We love it, seriously, we fucking love it. And we think we're damn good at it. But it's ceased to have the connectedness with the audience that it had even two or three years ago.

What sense do you get from the audience?

Corgan: Been there, done that, seen it, heard it, pissed on it.

Iha: There are so many formulas for writing a typical heavy rock song, and we know how to make a certain brand of it. When we were jamming on a lot of the heavy songs for this record, we kept finding we had to do more and more different, crazy things just to make those songs work.

Corgan: And that's why we publicly made the decision that Mellon Collie is the last Smashing Pumpkins record that will be that kind of rock thing. It's not that you won't hear it in the future in some guise, but we're going to get off this train we've been on, which is to be this seek'n'destroy rock band.

How do you do that?

Corgan: We're just gonna throw out the rule book and start over. People keep asking us "What is it going to sound like?" We have no idea. I mean, "1979" is probably the only hint, something that combines technology, and a rock sensibility, and pop, and whatever, and hopefully clicks. Between "Bullet" and "1979" you have the bookends of the album. You've literally the end of the rock thing, and the beginning of the new thing.

Who came up with the concept for the "1979" video?

Corgan: That was all mine. The directors [Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Farriss] took my original idea and then added some really good ideas to that. My original tone was a little more destructive, like what kids dream about doing.

Describe a scene that you would have included.

Corgan: Well, for example, my convenience store scene ended with the store totally destroyed, literally obliterated. I had the idea all along of James as the convenience clerk, and that he would catch some kid shoplifting. But instead of kids doing what you would expect, which would be to shrug and go, "oh, I've been caught." the kid shoves James over and he and his friends just destroy this 7-Eleven- And I thought kids would think, "Yeah, that's totally what I want to do."

Were you like that?

Corgan: I was never violent, but I've had that streak underneath me all along. People who have known me all my life, when first they saw us play, they were like, "Holy fuck," because I'd turn into this beastie. They had never seen that side of me, but I knew it was there.

Why weren't you violent, do you suppose?

D'Arcy: I'm the violent one.

Corgan: I'm a Pisces, and Pisces have this weird inability to be completely spontaneous. We're too conscious of our actions. I've always been way too sensible for my own good.

When I was growing up, kids like those in the "1979" clip, with that kind of petty mean streak, acted out the destructive fantasies that all of us felt occasionally.

Corgan: Right. Who gets totally worshiped in high school? The stoners. On a surface level, the football players are the stars. But deep down it's the full-on stoner guys that are the rock stars of high school.

But you weren't the stoner, either.

Corgan: No, not at all. I was the closet everything 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, fuck you all.

What do you think is different about being a teenager now than when you were teenagers?

Corgan: 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. It's taken a little bit of the naivete out of growing up, so people are growing up faster without the skills to actually deal with the world. 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.

D'Arcy: The grown-ups aren't even grown up.

Corgan: So it's making even more fucked-up grown-ups. Look at the people of our generation - Jesus Christ! Look how many people are on drugs, or are crazy. It's scary. This is not normal. It comes from the pretense of thinking you know what's going on. TV makes you feel like you belong to a culture, or to a thing, but it's not really there. It's in your head.

Were you thinking about some of these ideas about youth when you wrote Mellon Collie?

Corgan: Absolutely. I think we have an interesting perspective, because we're right on that generational lip. Not to draw some big huge line in the sand, but I remember before videos, and I remember after videos. James and I have talked about this. What did you do when you had an album when you were little? If there was no video, and you couldn't see the band on TV, you sat and you just at that fucking album. Over and over.

Do you think that there are now too many choices for kids growing up?

Corgan: No, the choices have always been there. It's the lack of mystery, the lack of discovery. And I really think it's freaking people out. 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. They're not grounded. They don't feel connected with their family. They don't respect school. And this is why we have people paying way too much attention to rock bands. Because there's that instant identity.

Do you have a feeling as to whether you need the fans more or they need you more?

Corgan: I've gone back and forth on that. I've certainly said things like "Why do I need 1,000 people validating my existence?" But I also think people need people like us....

D'Arcy: It doesn't have to be us.

Corgan: That's right. It's not about us, the Smashing Pumpkins.

D'Arcy: They need someone.

Corgan: Look how quickly people moved on past Kurt. As important as Kurt was, people moved on. He still has a relevant place, but that need is so strong that they could only dwell on him for so long and they're on to something else. It's just human nature.

Do you worry about how you'll react when those thousand people might not be there?

Corgan: Yeah, but it's kind of a morbid thought. I'd rather think about people like Tom Waits and Neil Young, who are in this other stage of their careers and they're doing it with such dignity that it makes them even cooler. Looking at that gives me humility when I go on stage. It makes me think "Well, I ought to really play a good fucking concert. I'm going to do my best to make this real." At least when it's gone I can look back and know that I took advantage of the situation, that this is not something you just fucking piss away. There's a deeper meaning in all of this.

Does it seem genuine to you to be a political band?

Corgan: No. It's just not right. 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 attach ourselves to things that we consider nonpolitical, like AIDS-related charities or homelessness. Both James and I have disabled brothers, and we've done stuff for the disabled in our community.

How has having a disabled brother shaped you?

Iha: Well, talk about humility. I remember kids used to make fun of the handicapped bus. It still instantly puts a knot in my stomach 'cause it's just so mean. How big of an ego trip can I go on when I've grown up around someone for whom ego trips are not even part of their consciousness?

On Mellon Collie, the lyrics tend to fall under two distinctly disparate categories: hopelessly nihilistic, or hopelessly romantic. Was that by design?

Corgan: I pushed both ends out as far as I could.

Are they exaggerated?

Corgan: Yeah, at some level. But it's done on purpose.

For the point of...?

Corgan: For the point of making the point. Take the nihilism. As a 28-year-old who's lived enough life to know the difference, I now know that the feelings I felt at 16 were not necessarily correct. But however overly dramatic, the desperation and hopelessness I felt at 16 was my reality. So now, if I'm going to go there, I've got to really go there.

As you've matured, has it become more difficult to write lyrics like "You're all whores and I'm a fag / And I've got no mother and I've got no dad."

Corgan: No, because those things are still a part of me. I just don't feel them as intensely as I once did. This friend of mine asked me, "Do you really mean it when you sing 'God is empty just like me'?" [from the song "Zero"] Now that's a pretty over-the-top line. And 363 days out of the year, the answer is no. But those two days that I feel it, I feel it pretty intensely.

How do you guard against coming across like a victim?

Corgan: That's pretty tough. You have to be able to say to yourself, "Am I saying these things to communicate with a higher purpose, or am I just saying them to be shocking?" I try to always keep it in the realm of having some other meaning that can be attached to it. People have tried to paint me as some kind of weird cathartic machine. But I've never done it just for me. I've always had a higher consciousness.

How would you sum up the band's state of mind right now?

Corgan: We've come to the conclusion that we're exactly where we want to be. If you're going to put us on stage for 90 minutes or three hours, we are going to give you more than anybody else, and we are going to kick your ass harder than anybody else. You can laugh at us, you can poke fingers at us, but for what it is, we're as good as it's going to get.

Impact Magazine July/August 1996

SMASHING PUMPKINS - The Last Gasp, Kick and Punch?

Billy Corgan says that since he has already subverted classic rock, influenced Nirvana and done orchestral rock epics, there's nowhere else for the Smashing Pumpkins to go with rock. So what's next? Maybe...disco?!

"We're our own opening band," quips Billy Corgan, perched with an acoustic guitar on a tall stool on the stage of Toronto's Phoenix, where the Smashing Pumpkins played a two-night stand back in January. The band performed only a handful of epic shows of familiar and fresh material for what Corgan refers to as the "true blue fan element," ardent Pumpkinheads who had been panting for new music and were rewarded last October with the release of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, the band's third studio album.

The beautifully packaged, panoramic two-hour soundscape containing 28 tunes on two discs elicited many descriptive summations from critics, ranging from "sprawling genius," "courageous" and "oddly beautiful" to "indulgent," "pretentious" and "bloated." But the naysayers have been pretty well drowned out by the sound of cash registers ringing in sales of over 6 million in the U.S. (the album hit double platinum in Canada before any other territory), far exceeding sales of the Pumpkins' breakthrough album, Siamese Dream, which hit it's stride when they headlined the 1994 Lollapalooza tour.

The Pumpkins played less than a dozen gigs between the end of Lollapalooza and the beginning of this year, but instead of settling back, they kicked into an even higher gear. The monumental task of writing and recording a double album so soon after touring would have caused burnout in many bands , but the Chicago sons and daughter - Corgan, bassist D'Arcy, guitarist James Iha and drummer Jimmy Chamberlin - not only saw it through, but are now following it with a massive North American tour.

Even through a crappy personal cassette player, layered over the dull drone of the plane en route to Chicago, the music on Mellon Collie sounds inventive, wide-ranging and tuneful. At the interview Chamberlin is a no-show, while D'Arcy and Iha are attentive, nodding and adding the occasional aside. But Corgan does most of the talking. There is a hint of a chip on his shoulder, although it's diminished by his earnest charm, his disarming honesty about his ambition and his desire to explain himself completely. With a buzzed haircut to match, he explains how he created his own kind of concentration camp to get this album made.

"I started working almost immediately after Lollapalooza," he says. When you haven't written in a while, it's really hard to write more than a couple of hours a day. I got to the point where I was writing four hours a day, then rehearsing for four or five hours. Which doesn't sound like a lot, but in terms of head time it's exhausting. By the end of the album I was working 16-hour days and sleeping four hours - for like 60 days straight. I can't conceive of how I could do that, but it kind of builds to that."

When did he know that Mellon Collie would be a double album? "We had a meeting where I outlined what I wanted to accomplish," he explains. "It's hard to explain the subtlety of this, but often I'll articulate what I think we should do, and then everyone else say aye or nay. As long as everyone agrees that's the way to go. I laid out a couple of different options. 'Do we want to totally move on and be another band right now? Or do we want to finish the Smashing Pumpkins thing?' Everyone thought that was the right thing to do. That was the whole mentality going in, to write the last Smashing Pumpkins album."

While the first two Pumpkins albums were produced by Butch Vig, this time the band worked with Flood and Alan Moulder. "The whole thing with Flood was, he had proven that he was capable of assimilating everything that needed to be assimilated, from huge string arrangements to rocking drums to technology," Corgan says. "You name it, the guy's done it. He's a pretty brave man. He was absolutely the right person. And we got Alan partially because of the work he'd done [mixing] on Siamese Dream, and he and Flood are old friends, that that helped it along too."

"We recorded ourselves just on cassette or eight-track," says Iha. "Some songs changed a lot, but some of the rock stuff was closer to the demo and sounds more like a live band. That's the great thing about someone like Flood, because he could step back and see the big picture, see that some of the songs needed to go in a different direction."

With a double album there's a danger of repeating yourself, but the Pumpkins presumably wanted to have as much diversity on Mellon Collie as possible. "Actually, about two months in we started doing test albums," Corgan recalls. "One night Flood and Jimmy and I piled in my car and drove around for three hours and listened to the whole thing, trying to get an impression of how it was flowing, what was working and what wasn't. At that point we had to cut some. We felt it was really important that it flow, that it not get boring, that it not suffer."

Still, the band admits that it is difficult to absorb the whole album at one sitting, especially the first time. "People just don't have that kind of time, to just sit and only listen to music," acknowledges D'Arcy.

"It is a lot," admits Corgan. "There's a lot of emotional material. But it's not that we're expecting it be listened to all at one time. That's not really the point. The point is - it's like a book, with different stories. You can read one or you can read them all. And this is where the idea of the pretentiousness of it all kind of escapes me, because it's there if you want it. And it's only going to be about one-and-a-half times the cost of a normal CD. So it's not even going to be times two. So the band's made a commitment on a musical level and also on an economic level. The thing I'm most proud of is that if you do listen to it all, when you get to what would be the fourth side there's actually different things. It's not just a repetition. We don't just go into this space jam for hours."

Corgan has said that he usually has one epic per album, but there's a few on Mellon Collie. "Well, three in 28 songs is pretty good for the Smashing Pumpkins," he says, laughing. "We may get around to that yet - the four-hour thing, the Don Giovanni opera epic."

Corgan sings some songs in his lower register, which he for some reason doesn't use that much, saying it's his "insecure register.

"My voice splits into octaves when I sing - especially up high," he explains. "It's very weird for me to sing low because I don't really have it. 'Beautiful' was very difficult to sing because [tries singing it and wavers] I don't really have that 'low' to go to. I'm walking right on the tightrope of where my voice disappears, whereas when I sing up higher it's not a problem."

One little ditty that caught my ear was "Cupid de Locke," which has strumming harp sounds and Shakespearean-style lyrics. I thought it was kind of sweet and funny. "I'm glad you reacted that way, because that was kind of my intention," Billy says. "I was reading something with these words 'doth' and 'thou,' and I thought it would be kind of cool to write a little love sonnet with that in mind. So I wrote this two-paragraph thing with this very colorful language, not really intending to put it in a song. Then a week later we started playing the music of the song, and I remembered I had this thing. And basically it's as I wrote it. I had to fix only a few little things."

It certainly not a very "rock" song, which makes me think of Corgan's comment that after this album, the band will have exhausted the rock thing. "I think the context I mean that in is ROCK as we understand it, which is like classic rock, ending songs with a bang - all that stuff," he says. "I think we've exhausted our ability to translate that into something different. And I think it behooves us to, um, move on and invent something new.

"If the Smashing Pumpkins were formed to subvert classic rock into something different, which is what a lot of other bands of our peerage have basically done, there comes a point where you realize that you've come to the end of that road. Let's face it, I mean, ROCK has reached its wall. And the good things that came out of the early-90's bands - so often imitated now that you can't even differentiate dynamically - the dynamic that was 'Teen Spirit,' or some of the stuff that we did on our first record, is such a standard cliche now that I'm almost embarrassed to use it. That's part of the problem that I have with 'Bullet With Butterfly Wings.' It's like, I helped invent the cliche and now I'm embarrassed to use it.

"It's the difference between keeping your ear to the ground or living in your own world. I could go around beating my drum about how Gish was a ground breaking album, and how it's no mystery to me that Gish was made before Nevermind. Gish-era Pumpkins was ahead of it's time, and we were beaten into the ground for being a retro band. I could toot that horn all I want, but it doesn't change the fact it's no longer moving me. And it's certainly not moving the people that we're playing to, like it once did. I think this is the final gasp, punch and kick from us, and then we'll just do something different. It doesn't mean it wouldn't be intense, but it won't rock in a conventional way."

It does feel like bands are rising and falling faster than ever. "I think we're headed right back to disco. It's like 1974 all over again. Here comes KC and The Sunshine Band. I really think we're going to have to have that, or another KISS. That's my prediction."

But there was punk happening too. "There will always be cool stuff going on," Corgan acknowledges. "But to me, Cheap Trick is one of the greatest bands of all time. Most people couldn't tell you that. It's not even that they would disagree; they don't even know. If Cheap Trick were a new band right now, how big would Cheap Trick be? They would be humongous, they wrote nothing but fucking pop gems. Timing, context has a lot to do with what's perceived. And unfortunately we're living in an age when the perception is extremely skewed. I mean, everybody wants to talk about this punk movement. It's no PUNK MOVEMENT. I read a telling interview with Mick Jones of The Clash, and he said a lot of these bands are really good but they're not saying anything. We were on a mission, we had social changes, we had agendas, we had causes, we were fighting against something. These bands aren't fighting against anything. They're just riding on the road that's already been paved. And he's right. Everywhere I turn it's like, punk rock punk rock. Nirvana, Green Day and Rancid. Explain it to me, I don't understand..."

There's a lull in the Smashing Pumpkins' set, and I'm thinking of yelling something about the essence of punk. Then I turn around and spot Geddy Lee of Rush, sitting two seats away. Maybe Billy was right.

But the gentleman bouncing toward reception with his daughter on his shoulders is Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth. And the bit of head not completely swallowed by her enormous down jacket, itself being swallowed by an overstuffed lobby chair belongs to Bjork. Standing next to a trolley overflowing with luggage is a mystery wrapped in an enigma in wraparound sunglasses: Beck. The guy beaming in the corner looks like a Buddhist but is actually a Beastie Boy (though Adam Yauch happens to be a Buddhist as well).

The weirdest sight is of movie stars Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell -closer to this establishment's customary clientele - disappearing into an elevator. All these modern rock gods and goddesses (and Goldie and Kurt) are here for the Tibetan Freedom Concert, organised by Yauch to draw attention to the physical and cultural genocide that threatens Tibet after three brutal decades of Chinese occupation. The two-day event is being touted in the media as Alternative Nation's very own Woodstockcum-Live Aid, and a scan of the talent roster seems to encourage such a grand delusion. The above will be joined by, among others, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rage Against The Machine, Foo Fighters, The Fugees, Yoko Ono, John Lee Hooker and A Tribe Called Quest to fill a bill more diverse than Woodstock or any of the Lollapaloozas to date. All this and Smashing Pumpkins too.

It has been arranged that I will meet with the four Pumpkins individually: second guitarist James Iha first, then bassist D'Arcy; drummer Jimmy Chamberlin and finally leader Billy Corgan. Knowing that I will see a proper date later in the tour I decide to keep these first encounters brief and breezy Soft-spoken and reserved, James Iha becomes slightly more animated when discussing Scratchie, the record label he and D'Arcy have a stake in. Its eclectic roster already includes dance singles, reggae, mainstream guitar pop and even committed alternative fringe-dwellers Chainsaw Kittens and The Frogs. On the subject of Burt Bacharach, Iha rhapsodises about what he expects the Bacharach/ Noel Gallagher collaboration will yield. Noel probably needed Hal David more, I venture. At this, James begins bombarding me with whole verses of Chairman Noel's poetry I am informed that D'Arcy has a headache, but that Jimmy Chamberlin wants to see me. He's apparently flying back to Chicago immediately after the gig; something about "getting his boat into the water".

In room 620 the drummer pushes aside a ravaged room service cart and gestures for me to sit. A big band and Duke Ellington fan, Chamberlin is confident, no-nonsense, and seems happy to be given the opportunity to talk. Read with the knowledge of what will transpire within a month, his comments are ripe with sad ironies that at least one of us could never have imagined at the time.

"We've got some heavy changes ahead of us," he nods. "Mellon Collie was our final statement as a rock band. We're all in our thirties or approaching 30 [Chamberhin is 32, Corgan 29, D'Arcy and Iha 28], and we don't want to end up like those older bands that are out there pretendin' they're still rockin'. It's not natural. We've all made enough money to take care of ourselves now so we're free to approach the music from a purely artistic standpoint. I'll admit that I had my reservations when this band started out. But as me and Billy did more and more together it became obvious that we were cut from the same cloth. Very few drummers get to step up and test their fullest capabilities. Those who get that chance are very fortunate."

And what next musically for the Pumpkins? "I don't know what it's gonna sound like. I can't even say for sure that it will be the band as you now know it. All I know is that musically it can't be about influence anymore, it's gotta be about soul. Beyond that, any-thing goes. It could be two pieces of sandpaper and a fuckin' tin whistle, who knows? But I'm hookin' forward to findin' out. This band has never been about playing it safe..."

Give or take Oasis. The Smashing Pumpkins are the Alternative Rock Band of the Moment. They should have earned that distinction based on the commercial and aesthetic triumph of their double CD Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness, a bold move in these meek times and one that not even head Pumpkin Billy Corgan's admirers held out much hope that he'd pull off. Instead, this musical triumph -which has turned the Pumpkins into the kings of the arena hill Corgan always predicted they'd one day be - has been overshadowed by the tabloid-magnetic tragedy of hired keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin's death from heroin and alcohol poisoning on July 12, and drummer Jimmy Chamberlin's dismissal from the band five days later.

I braved The Smashing Pumpkins' dizzying orbit twice in recent months; in San Francisco in June for their appearance at the ballyhooed Tibetan Freedom Concert less than a month before the trouble, and again in late October after they'd regrouped in the wake of the July tragedy. This was only the latest in a series of misadventures to have befallen the quartet-turned-trio that rose through a Chicago indie-rock scene they were never part of to become kingpins of an alternative rock scene they feel no greater affinity with. Each of their three studio albums -Gish (1991), Siamese Dream (1993) and Mellon Collie (1995) - has moved increasingly heavier tonnage but has actually improved musically as well. The Pumpkins have progressed from a punishing Sabbath Floyd mutation to a unit that can reference Beatle and Brian Wilson sophistication and still dole out punishment with the best of 'em. In the process Billy Corgan has become the consummate rock'n'rohh record-maker. But a price has been paid every step of the way: emotional splits, chemical excess, nervous breakdown, Courtuey Love.

Many will tell you that Corgan's habit of dissecting his band's affairs under a public microscope has only made a bad situation worse. Every band has its peaks and valleys, but never before have I seen a band that suffers them simultaneously with such regularity It would be easy to write them off as too much trouble, but the music's too damn fine.

'This is for Tibet...or Tourette's," Quipped guitarist Stephen Mallunus as Pavement kicked off their early afternoon set at Golden Gate Park. Though there would be moving and sometimes horrifying speeches between bands, this is what passed for wisdom from the musical sector on day one. The event wound up drawing 100,000 people and raising $800,000 for the cause, but one suspects that what this mainly proves is that in Alternative Nation it is much easier to raise cash than consciousness.

"We were getting along horribly. The drummer was not showing up. I couldn't get anyone to focus. I wasn't being the nicest person…."

It was a curiously flat afternoon. The speakers were treated with considerably more respect and the music with a bit less enthusiasm than I'd expected. The abbreviated sets on alternating stages kept things moving, but apart from the sparks Foo Fighters and hip hop court jester Biz Markie worked hardest to generate, nobody seemed interested in going anywhere. Outside of the potential MTV video-bites down front, the music was mostly a sonic backdrop against which the crowd milled aimlessly. It felt less like a mini-Woodstock than a maxi-version of the all-day shows now staged by alternative rock radio in every city so that the bands the station has "helped" can "thank" them by playing gratis. The Smashing Pumpkins were among the flattest notes.

Positioned just before the closing Beastie Boys, they took the stage to more squeals of anticipation than greeted any other act on the day His skull shaven, and dressed entirely in black, Billy Corgan looked like a Dark Monk. And when the band tore into Bullet and Zero - the heaviest hitters on Mellon Collie - the Pumpkins appeared to have the muscle to back up their leader's image. Then some genius in the moshpit threw something at the stage. The Pumpkins promptly shifted into their noise epic Silverfuck, an odd choice after only three numbers. They might only have played it for 20 minutes, but it seemed to lumber on forever. Used to climax their full-length concerts, here it was employed as an extended fuck-you to the mosh agitators. When Silverfuck finally ground to a halt, someone among the waiting Beastie Boys on the adjacent stage shouted, "Enough of this shit!" I was inclined to agree.

Showered and refreshed after a hard day's Silverfuck, though still dressed all in black, Billy Corgan strides purposefully across the lobby. He offers a dead handshake, the kind you give your dentist We are seated in a corner of the restaurant that has been cleared for our summit. Corgan is one of those hyper-conscious individuals who can give you his undivided attention while one eye discreedy sweeps the room for any sign of movement.

The previous month, a 17-year-old Dublin girl had died from injuries sustained in the mosh-pit at a Smashing Pumpkins show The band had never encouraged this senseless alterna-rittial, but now they are vehemently opposed to it. This is only the latest in a series of bones Mr Corgan has had to pick with the infrastructure of Alternative Nation.

"I've never quite understood," he begins evenly, "how you're supposed to be 'independent' when all you're doing is kow-towing to an alternative master. From the very beginning it was, 'You guys are playing guitar solos - no no no. Your songs are too long - no no no.' I kept thinking, Why am I in alternative music if I'm just gonna have to follow somebody else's rules? That's why it never bothered me when those people called us a retro band. I openly admit that I was always attracted to the Beatles/Hendrix kind of creative values. In some ways I probably have idealised that mentality but what better mentality is there? I really miss the day when people made complete albums. I don't think it's such a bad idea to have a concept occasionally."

Noting that he had announced his intention to record a double CD before he commenced work on it, I wonder if going public with that concept was Corgan's way of locking himself into the challenge.

"Absolutely," he laughs. "A friend asked me why I say all these things, and I told her, because then I'm forced to do them. The band had a meeting about it, but of course it was after I'd already declared that this is what we were gonna do. I was frustrated by the fact that we were getting lumped in with everybody I was sick of hearing Nirvana/Pearl Jam/Pumpkins/ Stone Temple Pilot/Soundgarden. No slight against any of those bands, but I've always felt we came at it from a completely different angle. I didn't feel we were getting the recognition as, and I know you're not supposed to say it, but.. art. The idea was to try to do something completely overwhelming, so that even if you don't like the band you couldn't deny us our place as individuals. It started as a pissy I'm-gonna-show-you thing; that's where the public declaration came in. It was like challenging a guy to a fight, except I was challenging myself to the fight. "The first reaction - and this even came from my friends - was that I was gonna fuck it up. I almost felt like people were licking their chops: 'Here's our chance to really stick a fork in this fucker.' Right? But when people heard it and had to realise that it was a step beyond what they thought we were capable of; it turned the tables. We had put our money where our mouth was; or should I say my mouth..."

Since Mellon Collie seems to represent the Pumpkins at the peak of their powers, it must have been designed as his farewell to the band. No? He winces but faces the notion head on. "No, only to that particular idea of what the band is. But that could possibly be true if the band doesn't rise to the challenge of the next phase, which is likely to be more reliant on technology and place a little less emphasis on creating a band dynamic. For lack of a better analogy it'll be like the Wild West for a while. Roles will not be defined. I've spoken to Jimmy about what it might be like if there was a lute keeping the beat; what would he play? Or say there was a synthesizer playing the root bass notes; D'Arcy could play whatever she wanted a la Peter Hook, or something. It's up to them to define their roles. If they don't, then I will," he shrugs.

This raises the subject of an old wound, one that still causes The Smashing Pumpkins a fair amount of pain. Under pressure to deliver a knockout second album for their major label debut, Corgan very publicly vented his frustration with his bandmates' work ethic, and wound up playing all the guitar and bass on what became the double-platinum Siamese Dream. As a result, the musical competence of D'Arcy and James continues to be called into question by their detractors.

"What happened was we were getting along horribly," Corgan maintains. "The drummer was having problems; disappearing, not showing up. I couldn't get anyone to focus on the record, and I wasn't being the nicest person. There was so little spirit for the band from within that I just went ahead and did the best I could. It caused friction, and understandably so."

So did he try to make a great record in the hope that the band would then live up to the spirit of the record? "That's exactly what I tried to do. But that's not easy to explain, so there was some antagonism. When the record was done and we all chilled out, we went out on tour and realised, Hey, it's not such a bad thing to be a Smashing Pumpkin after all. Only us four can really understand. We've healed all that and we're cool. I mean, we could not play Siamese Dream when we put it out. But within three months we could, and three months after that we could play it even better, so fuck it." James had told me the band was taking six months off Jimmy said a year. But both had joked that for their fearless leader it was more likely to be a week. "Right. The classic story is that after 18 months on the road behind Siamese Dream, we came off Lollapalooza and three days later I started writing Mellon Collie. There is no break for me. I'm 29 years old, and every year that goes by I lose some of that chip-on-the-shoulder energy of youth. Now I certainly understand the idea of maturing, and I think I'm making those kinds of transitions. At the same time, there's a part of me that doesn't want to let go of that crazy idea that I sold the band in 1988. It's come true - to a T. I really wasn't wrong. I guessed it, called it, lived it. We maybe could have gone other routes, but whatever, it worked. I won't second-guess it. For me there are no breaks."

New York July 12 "Jimmy's od'ed Jonathan's dead. Cops are here." With those seven chilling words, Billy Corgan was informed that his tightly-plotted scenarios for the present and future Smashing Pumpkins had hit the wall. Jimmy Chamberlin's bouts with heroin and alcohol abuse - and the band's attempts to handle them -were part of the Pumpkins' open book. Until July 12, the book said that Jimmy had been clean and relatively sober for well over a year. It subsequently came out that there had been two major relapses on the band's spring tour, both also involving hired keyboard hand (and chemical dabbler) Jonathan Melvoin. Melvoin, son of one-time Phil Spector sessioneer (and vigorous anti-drug crusader) Mike and brother of former Prince guitarist Wendy, had been fired after the second incident but had talked his way back behind the keys.

Five days after Jonathan's death Jimmy Chamberlin was out of a job. The Pumpkins dismissed their drummer, announced their intention to carry on, and did a couple of selected interviews to explain their refusal to be victimised by rock's ongoing heroin plague. The band's supporters applauded this as sensible and brave, their detractors saw it as cynical careerism. There is seldom any middle ground when the subject is The Smashing Pumpkins. (Chamberlin, arrested on a charge of possessing drugs, has since been acquitted on condition that he undergo rehab until the end of the year.)

Among the most vehement detractors was Chris Robinson of The Black Crowes who insisted in the pages of Rolling Stone that the Pumpkins had fired Chamberlin "not because he was hurting the band. He was a liability financially... Say it! You people are the most corporate thing I've ever seen!" He went on to accuse them, with reference to the drugs, of "talking about things that you don't know about."

The Pumpkins announced the addition of drummer Matt Walker of Chicago band Filter and keyboard player Dennis Fleming of The Frogs, and were back on the road by the beginning of 1 September. Though Corgan had expressed the desire for MOJO to L see a 'real' Pumpkins show he was noncommital when it came to ~ firming a date in October. Finally (and right up against deadline) the green light was given, with the understanding that Corgan was not prepared to discuss the Chamberlin episode further.

CHAMPAIGN. ILLINOS, OCTOBER 25, 1996

This place smells like shit!, Literally. When I got out of the taxi in front of the University of Illinois arena where I was to meet up with the Pumpkins, the scent of excrement hangs so heavy in the Midwestern air that I have to gag Inside the domed facility awaits a different, though related problem

"What's with all these flies?" Shirley Manson of opening band Garbage is using one arm to keep the pests away, so that she can use the other to guide a bite of pre-show dinner to her mouth unmolested. A local explains that the U of I has quite a School of Agriculture, and that we are sitting directly downwind from its award-winning sheep farm. The Pumpkins' performance does not stink even remotely. The liglits go down, the Mellon Collie theme comes up, thousands of cigarette lighters are thrust heavenward, and we're off on one of the best arena rides I've ever taken. In deference to the cavernous hall they stick pretty close to the loud stuff, but with such power and precision that they make this strategic necessity seem like their own decision. And when they segue from their -titanic rearrangement of MC standout Ruby into an unplanned version of Siva from the first album, they even succeed in making arena music that has something more to offer than surface. "Thanks very much for coming," Billy says. "We hope you have a good time. We hope you stupid flicks down here don't hurt yourselves," nodding toward the impromptu mosh-pit (or can anything now so obligatory possibly be impromptu?) that's broken out down front. I hold my breath, but Silverfuck is not forthcoming just yet. The long loud set tells me a couple of important things about this band. Tlie first is that those who've dismissed the musicianship of D'Arcy and Iha simply haven't listened closely enough. Billy may be able to play circles around James technically, but Iha has definitely evolved a style that's an important component of the group's sound. ("It's a really bad guitar technique," he tells me later in mock rock crit, "but so practiced and well-rehearsed that it has now become interesting.")

The other important thing is that Corgan's legendary on-stage rants are, at least for the moment, a thing of the past. Instead he banters, mostly playing straight man to Iha's deranged game show host. "We're like a fuckin' jukebox; we'll play whatever you want," Corgan announces. James elaborates, "Wanna hear any songs by other incredible alternative rock bands? Bush? Everclear? Better Than Ezra?"

"Hey," Billy smirks, "how about The Black Crowes? They're kind of alternative." From the laughs and hisses this elicits, there must be more than a few Rolling Stone readers in the house.

In Davenport Iowa, James Iha paces his hotel suite, guitar in hand. One of his windows looks out on the mighty brown Mississippi River, the other on less mighty Davenport, known principally as the home town Bix Beiderbecke escaped. An Asian-American growing up in a white-bread Chicago suburb, he discovered rock'n'roll through television. He and his brother became fascinated with this iconic Elvis package being hawked on TV, and pleaded with their parents to buy it for them. The parents bought an album, but by some snafu Iha remains unable to account for, the album was Sweetheart Of The Rodeo by The Byrds. James thought it sucked.

Talking about the band's stylistic uniqueness, James recalls the process of auditioning new drummers. "We set aside two days, and gave everybody the same four songs. We picked a handful of people we had known, and the other half were 'pros', who everybody would probably know All the drummers we met seemed like good people. No major psychopaths, at least that we could detect.

"It was a revelation when we started playing with them. We played our four songs and, sure, the drumming was a bit different, but it still basically sounded like the Pumpkins. I'd never really played with another drummer. Let's face it, Jimmy was probably the best musician in the band, but the three of us found out that we'd played together for so long that the chemistry was there. It just sounds like us.

"You know, it could just as easily have been Jimmy who died rather than Jonathan. Had that happened, we would have definitely broken up."

Iha is extremely soft-spoken, but his words harden when he mentions Chris Robinson's comments in Rolling Stone. "He's quoted as saying we don't know what we're talking about when it comes to drugs. Well, he's right. I've never taken hard drugs like heroin or cocaine, so maybe I don't know But I certainly know what it does. I know what it did to us personally and professionally. The subject gets so romanticised in rock'n'roll - the 'elegantly wasted' thing - but it's a totally disastrous, selfish thing to do. We just couldn't go on that way, trying to work around this. Basically, Jimmy overdosed every time we went on the road. What were we supposed to do, lock him in his room every night? We tried almost everything else. It's really important to us to play these shows so that we don't go out as just another casualty of rock excess. It seems totally justified to me."

Like Billy Corgan, James Iha chooses to lose himself in the musical future, both the band's and his own. It probably also explains his growing respect for the singer/songwriter idiom. Asked to name his current faves, the first name he offers is Gram Parsons. I shoot him a quizzical look and he throws up his hands: "I know I know I know Sweetheart Of The Rodeo, right?" And laughs.

"When I first met Billy," D'arcy Wretzky Brown recalls, "I went around to his house because he said he was looking for people to write with. But he said, 'Before we can write together you have to learn these songs.' And he handed me a tape of 40 or 50 songs. Of his. 'We'll start writing when you learn these.' But every week there'd be 10 more new songs. I'm thinking This is completely insane, but I really loved the music!

"He always seemed to have these formulas in his head for what was right or wrong, good or bad, and sometimes he expected us to read his mind. I never could think that way or see things that way. It's interesting because now I think I understand a lot more about it, while at the same time he's struggling to break out of that. Because we're both moving toward each other, in a way; the new places we find ourselves in should be good for both of us.

"To be able to change himself as much as he has, in such a positive way, and grow as quicdy as he ha.... Billy has really accomplished amazing things, and not only as a musician but as a person. I'm proud of him. "

"Take me down James!" Shouts an adolescent voice somewhere in the darkness as the band walk toward the tour bus, a reference to the composition they'd thrown in tonight. On the bus, Dennis and Jimmy Fleming have prepared a special treat. The brothers have been a band called The Frogs for 15 years now with an album, 1988's "gay supremacist"-themed It's Only Right And Natural, to prove it. There will soon be another; on the Scratchie label. Dennis is playing keyboards on the tour; and though guitarist Jimmy makes a cameo stage appearance, he seems to be here for no other reason than The Frogs are inseparable. "Have you two ever lived apart?" Billy asks. "We tried it once for seven months," Jimmy replies dryly "Didn't work out."

Tonight they're showcasing a treasure from their vast library of self-produced art films. It is one of their earliest, from 1980, "so it shouldn't be judged on production values," Dennis intones. In this crude home movie, dolls are manipulated around the back yard 'set' by hands plainly visible, and interact with all sorts of home and garden tools in ways no ratings board would ever approve, dialogue improvised to the strains of bad cocktail jazz. It is hilarious, albeit politically incorrect stuff, it has the band and crew literally rolling in the aisle, It's easy to see what the brothers Frog bring to this enterprise.

This seems like an appropriate juncture to put an ugly rumour to sleep. UK gossip has it that their former drummer was not the only Smashing Pumpkin to enjoy narcotic dalliance, but that Chamberlin was merely the one who fucked up. Utterly false. I have a highly trained eye for such things, and I detected the influence of nothing more powerful than imported beer. It was so clean under this bigtop that I couldn't even score a joint.

After the Frogfest, D'Arcy produces a tape of the most recent X Files episode but Billy quickly pre-empts her: "No, I don't wanna watch that." She rolls her eyes like an indulgent sister and heads for the TV at the other end of the bus. Soon everyone else has joined het; finding The X Files preferable to watching Billy Corgan converse with the man from MOJO.

I ask him how he'd spent the unanticipated break, and he just smiled and reminded me of his no-break style. During that time he'd cut a new Pumpkins song for a film soundtrack, recorded new material and remixed all the tracks for the new B-side box set The Aeroplane Flies High, and composed some electronic score music for a forthcoming Ron Howard film. I wonder if the latter has whetted his appetite for the band's brave new world we talked about in June.

"Well the soundtrack work is very kind of junior techno/progressive shit," he says. "I'm just beginning to get my feet wet. The basic idea as I see it now is to start from the atmospherics of electronic music; people like The Orb who are geniuses at that sort of thing. I want to write really excellent songs and apply them to that process and just keep on applying them until they cease to resemble what anybody else is doing.

"It will mean a complete rethink of the concert thing too. I'm looking forward to some kind of well co-ordinated Floyd future, perhaps even a floating pig of our own. We joked at one point that we were gonna have an inflatable version of James's dog to float around the arena. Somewhere there's an actual blueprint for a 75 by 35ft inflatable dog, with all the costs. But you look at it and go, Maybe not. This is a bit much."

The concept of 'a bit much' somehow leads to the subject of Kiss. "I've gotten to talk to Gene Simmons a couple of times," Corgan tells me. "I really respect the man's mind. Whether you like Kiss or not, you can't deny the vision. Strictly from a PT Barnum point of view, the guy has managed the virtually impossible. And he's a pleasure to talk to. There isn't an ounce of bullshit in the guy

"It was interesting, but I actually had lunch with Gene on the day we fired Jimmy I also got to talk to Paul Stanley a bit; those guys were so great to me. Gene just cut to the chase on it: 'It may seem like a heavy thing right now, but when you get out from under this black cloud and the air clears, you'll feel better. You will feel better'. "Paul Stanley told me - and I don't think I'm betraying any confidences here - about a time when they had to make some similar hard decisions. He then remembered being on-stage one night and realising there was nothing wrong. It suddenly dawned on him that there were no outside problems to distract him from being in that moment. He said that even though it might have hurt the band publicly, he was happier as a person to be in that situation and not the other.

"Being able to talk to people who've been through that was such a help to me. God has a strange way of delivering you into the hands of the right people when you need to hear certain things."

I've always had a pretty good artistic vision about what's coming," Billy had vouchsafed back in June. "Long before Nirvana sold records I said to industry people that there was an untapped audience out there. At that point a hit alternative album only sold 200,000 copies, but you could feel it bubbling under. You didn't have to be Nostradamus; if you were paying attention you knew it was around the corner somewhere.

"I can feel a similar situation coming up. In its current context, rock is basically redundant. The difference in reaction viscerally as opposed to five years ago - no comparison. We used to launch into something like this atomic release of energy, and because most of the people had never seen anything like it, you would just steamroll them. Now that they've seen it from 20 wannabe bands, yours included, it ceases to have that release. The second time you take a drug it's not gonna be like the first. We're now in the fourth or fifth time of taking that drug, and I'm ready to move on.

"I think there's a futuristic music right around the corner. Always with the spirit of rock'n'roll; I don't think that ever changes. But we're headed towards something different and weird and exciting again..."