Illusional Delusion
   
 


The Chicago Band's Turbulent Career

In 1988, Chicago's clubs were still pumping with the dance innovation
that had exploded in the city two years earlier - house music.
Meanwhile, at a Polish bar near the centre of town, the germ of another
sonic revolt was taking shape. In front of a tiny crowd, a lanky,
moon-faced guitarist and his ice-cool, American Japanese sidekick were
whipping up a maelstrom of freeform jazz-punk noise.
18 months later, this embryonic two-man show had evolved into the
Smashing Pumpkins, a proto-grunge quartet with two incendiary 7"s to
their name, including one on the legendary Sub Pop label. Signing to
Virgin (Hut in the UK), they quickly transformed from a dizzying
provincial attraction into one of the world's biggest alternative rock
bands, mixing a barrage of metallic guitar with touches of psychedelia
and jazz dynamics. Their last outing - the 'White Album'-esque "Mellon
Collie And The Infinite Sadness" - has become the biggest selling
double-CD, while their total record sales have now topped the 10 million
mark.But global success has exacted its price. Thanks to the mercurial
temperament of Billy Corgan, the group's creative mainspring, the
atmosphere within the group has been fraught at the best of times. Yet
the: group faced its greatest crisis last summer, when their touring
keyboardist, Jonathan Melvoin, fatally OD'd on heroin in a New York
hotel room. With him was Pumpkins drummer Jimmy Chamberlin, who awoke
from his own drug-induced stupor to alert paramedics to Melvoin's
critical condition.A close friend of Corgan's and in some respects the
Pumpkins' emotional anchor, Jimmy was fired soon afterwards for his
continuing drug use. In one fateful night, the Pumpkins lost two
well-loved members, and pretty much all their self-confidence. The years
of relentless gigging, emotional upheavals and creative peaks and
troughs had finally taken their toll. But don't worry, the Pumpkins will
be soon back ...
Billy Corgan's introduction to music came early. Brought up in the
suburbs of Chicago, he was the son of an R&B musician who earned a
living by touring with minor showcase bands. The family house was filled
with the classic sounds of his father's extensive record collection -
Hendrix, Miles Davis, Frank Sinatra, Muddy Waters -- which Corgan duly
absorbed.Corgan's birth date of 17th March 1967 was just four weeks
after that of Kurt Cobain, a man who would become his friend and
occasional rival, and whose life would display several uncanny parallels
to his own. As with the Nirvana singer, Billy had a disruptive
home-life, being shunted from step-parent to parent and back again.
"That's what's at the base of this," he once confessed to Rolling Stone
"I feel like I was fucked over. I thought, why the fuck did you have me
if you weren't going to take care of me?"At 14, Billy was sent to
psychiatrist by his stepmother (then divorced from his natural father),
who believed he suffered from a persecution complex. As the shrink was
one of his stepmother's best friends, he found it hard to explain that
he thought she was the problem. Music proved his only escape; and after
seeing a neighbour playing electric guitar in his garage, he resolved to
be a rock star. At this time, Billy was enormously influenced by Judas
Priest, Cheap Trick, and the Cure. Deeply intelligent and academically
bright, it was assumed that Corgan would pursue a career in law, but
after leaving school, he got a job in a record store. Now living with
his father, who taught him "the difference between ego and true
playing", he began road-testing his talents as a guitarist with a local
rock band called the Marked - so called because both Billy and the
drummer had strawberry birthmarks (Corgan's is on his hand) about which
they'd been hugely self conscious as kids.In 1987, the Marked moved to
St. Petersburg, Florida in an attempt to escape the Goth-metal
atmosphere of Chicago's indie scene. But within a year Billy was back
home, penniless, sick and disillusioned. His answer to his predicament
was to-lock himself away, to demo an astonishing torrent of original
material. When he emerged he met James Iha, a strikingly handsome
JapaneseAmerican, then playing in a college band called Snake Train.
Sharing Corgan's musical vision of a modern Zepp/Floyd/Queen hybrid, the
two began performing as a due, their first appearance taking place at
one of Chicago's many Polish clubs.In 1988, Corgan fell into argument
outside the city's Avalon Ballroom with D'Arcy Wretzky. A year his
junior, 19-year-old D'Arcy was classically trained musician from
Michigan, who'd played with a French group while travelling around
Europe. UI went around to his (Billy's) house because be said he was
looking for people to write with," she later explained. "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! Every week there'd be ten
more new songs. But I really loved the music." As a trio, the Pumpkins
("It could have been any vegetable,"- Billy would wearily point out)
performed to 50 people at the Avalon with a drum machine for back-up.
They then punted a demo to the manager of the Cabaret Metro, Chicago's
biggest venue, who said he'd book them as support act if they employed a
human drummer.
Corgan called up Jimmy Chamberlin, the son of another jazz and R&B
musician. Following an successful opening slot with Jane's Addiction,
the Pumpkins became the Metro's premier indie support act, propping up
bills featuring That Petrol Emotion and Buzzcocks. With their squalls of
guitar noise, ethereal vocals and jazz dynamics, they soon became a live
attraction in their own right, capable of pulling a local crowd of
around 800.
Around this time, a demo fell into the hands of Mike Potential, from
Chicago indie Limited Potential. He didn't like it, but was ecstatic
about their live show, which he thought he'd check out just in case".
The result was a limited 7" featuring "I Am One" (now rated at �150+) a
song later re-recorded on the debut album; "Gish".
This in turn brought them to the attention of Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan
Poneman of the seminal American hardcore independent, Sub Pop, who
offered to put out a second single. (The label bad, of course, done
exactly the same for Nirvana a year earlier.) "Tristessa" epitomised the
early grunge sound, its barbed-wire guitars sparring with Chamberlin's
powerhouse drumming, while Corgan's whispering, nasal voice articulated
a profound sense of dislocation and loss. It was more a thrilling
statement of anger and frustration, and no one could doubt the group's
awesome potential.
In late 1990, the Pumpkins were perhaps I the hottest unsigned rock act
in America, and with the Andy Gershon/Raymond Coffer management team
(Ian MacCulloch, Cocteau Twins, Love And Rockets) behind them, they
inked a deal with Virgin.

Work began on a debut album, "Gish" named after the silent movie
heroine, Lillian Gish -- in December 1990, at producer Butch Vig's Smart
Studios in Madison, Wisconsin. It was clear the group had evolved
considerably, bringing in acoustic guitars and experimenting with song
structure and dynamics.

"Siva" and "Bury Me" were classic early Pumpkins - all pummelling bass
lines and squealing, pyrotechnic guitars - but "Daydream" and the
quasi-psychedelic "Rhinoceros" denied categorisation, instead offering
an open window to Corgan's startling genius that was to flower 90
spectacularly over the next five years.

In fact, with its wistful, poetic verse, gently cascading Eastern guitar
riff, and thunderous Zepp-style code, "Rhinoceros" remains one of the
great rock songs of the 90s, possibly eclipsing both Radiohead's "Creep"
and Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in its schizoid beauty.
Significantly, in the following months, Butch Vig went on to produce
Nirvana's epochal "Nevermind"...

After "Gish" was unleashed in May 1991, the Pumpkins embarked on a
gruelling 18 month world tour that nearly split them up. In September,
they made their UK debut at the Camden Underworld, which sold out
despite very little press. By this time, Billy was stepping out with
Hole's Courtney Love, and Billy found that a jealous Kurt Cobain,
shadowing the Pumpkins as Nirvana's tour also hit Europe, was penning
graffiti about the couple on dressing room walls.
Meanwhile, The Pumpkins were gaining a reputation as an awesome live
act. "Back then I felt we'd really hit on something," Corgan later
recalled. "When we toured, the band became ultra-aggressive. By early
92, we'd become this lean, mean, on-the-edge, completely rockin'
machine. With a little bit of wizardry and a little bit of sheer Will,
we were either blowing people's minds ... or they hated us."

FORMULAS

"He [Billy] always seemed to have these formulas in his head for what
was right and wrong, good or bad," remembered D'Arcy. "I never could
think that way, or see things that way.

By mid-1992, though, the strain of touring was taking its toil. Jimmy
was hitting the bottle, D'Arcy and James - having been an item and then
splitting up - finding life in the band intolerable and Billy was slowly
going mad. Matters reached a head at the Reading Festival in 1992, when
a wigged-out Billy smashed up his equipment during an ill-tempered set.
Halfway up the bill on the Saturday, the Pumpkins had been expected to
"do a Nirvana", and liven up the event, just as Seattle's grungemeisters
had done the previous year. It didn't happen- and the atmosphere of
failure was compounded by the prescience of Nirvana's headlining slot
the following day. Courtney, of course, was now married to Hurt.

Dejected, Corgan toyed with the idea of splitting the Pumpkins. He
returned to Chicago, split from his girlfriend, and entered a dark phase
of self-reassessment. The pressure was on for a follow-up to "Gish", but
he couldn't write. And then the inspiration came: "Today is the
greatest, days of the year" went the opening lines of the song that
dragged him out of the mire.

It was now early 1993, and Corgan shunning his bandmates - went into
Triclops Sound Studios in Atlanta, Georgia to record the album "Siamese
Dream"; again with Butch' Vig at the controls.

If "Gish" revealed glimpses of Billy's curious, compelling world view,
then "Siamese Dream" proved he was among the best - and most versatile -
songwriters of his generation. Cut during a period when, by his own
admission, Billy "wasn't a very nice person" (he insisted on playing
virtually everything on the record, bar the drums), the album was a
thoroughly modern rock masterpiece, with a raft of nagging melodies,
subtle acoustic and string passages, superb arrangements and a violent
undertow that bullishly re-staked the Pumpkins' grunge credentials, had
they ever been in doubt.

While "Silverfuck" was a monumental axe blow-out, the later singles
"Disarm" and the dreamy "Today" were sufficiently melodic and immediate
to propel them chartwards, their lightness-of-touch providing a sublime
counterpoint to other, more visceral crowd pleasers like the jndie-scene
bashing "Cherub Rock", and "Spaceboy", written for Corgan's younger
brother Jesse, who suffered from a genetic disorder.

On its completion, Jimmy was checked into rehab, and Billy sought
professional psychiatric help, part of a process of spiritual renewal
that saw him reuniting with his girlfriend, Chris, getting married to
her, and buying a house on Chicago's Northside.

The immense success of "Siamese Dream" - which reached No. 4 in the
summer of 1993 - meant another succession of punishing tours. The album
was promoted herewith an acoustic show at Raymonde's Revue Bar in Soho,
before the group returned for two shows at Brixton Academy in October,
during which Billy took the stage for the encore dressed as a clown.
They then jetted out for more overseas dates, including triumphant
homecoming gig at the Chicago Avalon, followed by a Christmas break and
an appearance in January 1994 at the two-week Big Day Out festival in
Australia, with Nirvana, Violent Femmes and Henry Rollins.

The group's March 1994 British dates culminating in four :sell-out shows
at the London Astoria. During that same visit, the group were banned
from Top Of The Pops, after refusing to change the line "cut that little
child up inside of me" in "Disarm", which the Beeb had declared
offensive. The Pumpkins didn't care: one thing they were never about was
artistic compromise.

Between that British tour and the group's - next visit to these shores,
to play the Reading Festival in August, an event occurred which had an
unfathomable impact on Corgan. In April, Kurt Cobain took his own life,
crushed by the contradictions of being a idealistic songwriter caught up
in the enormous, cynical machinations of the music business.

Corgan refused to discuss Kurt's death, but his death seemed to add a
punctuation mark to the dark, self-searching days of grunge. Though
Billy had cited "dysfunction" as his chief creative impulse, he- now
seemed happy and relaxed, chatting to journalists about the therapy he'd
had to confront the demons of his childhood. He was still wary of giving
too much away, though. "After what happened to Kurt, opening up to the
press seems even more ridiculous," he said.

After headlining the U.S. touring festival, Lollapalooza, in July
(Nirvana had been scheduled to top the bill), the Pumpkins returned to
play a blinding get at Reading. With "Siamese Dream" topping critics
polls the world over, the Pumpkins retired to Chicago to work on their
third album, "Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness". Corgan had always
been a prolific writer, but his new-found stability seemed to inject him
with even more creative energy.

Within a few months it became clear that the album was going to be a
double, possibly even a triple. (It ended up as a two-CD and three-LP
affair.)His paymasters, Virgin, didn't seem to object: "Gish" had sold
350,000 copies while "Siamese Dream" had reached doubleplatinum status;
even "Pisces Iscariot" the B-sides collection issued in the States in
1994 and here only last year c had peaked at No. 4 in the album charts.
Whatever the Pumpkins touched, it was bound to sell.

With half of the songs written on piano, and the other half on guitar,
"Mellon Collie" ended up as a as 28 tracker, with an astonishing breath
of styles in evidence, from the lush orchestrations of "Beautiful"
(which apparently came to Corgan in a dream) to the full-on rush of
"Tale Of A Scorched Earth". The album was at its most itchingly
intriguing when Billy forsook the guitar pyrotechnics, and Either
trundled along with a lo-fi, hypnotic pop sensibility, as on"1979", or
experimented with delicate, singer-songwriter arrangements; as on the
aching "Farewell And Goodnight", co-written with Iha.

In fact, it was by far the Pumpkins' most egalitarian work, with Corgan
willingly loosening his creative monopoly. "I want to get the others
more involved this time," he'd admitted to Melody Maker. "I want James
to sing on some of it and I want D'Arcy to sing. I mean, it will still
be my vision, but I want to create surroundings with it that will be
conducive to their ideas too."

Issued in November 1995, "Mellon Collie" proved that Corgan's vision had
been as astute as ever, and the album - produced by Corgan, Flood and
Alan Moulder - became their most successful to date, selling over six
million copies.

Yet with the success came the inevitable pressures of touring, and with
that, the tragedy of Melvoin's death, and the upset of Chamberlin's
dismissal. Perhaps it was the inevitable pay-off for the Pumpkins'
astonishing success, the dreadful price of the kind or pressures only
fame can bring.

The incident occurred during the early hours of 12th July 1996, while
the group were in New York to play the first of two sell-out concerts at
Madison Square Garden, the scene of triumphant performances down the
years by such rock myth-makers as the Rolling Stones, the Who and
Prince.

Melvoin fatally overdosed on a lethal Combination of alcohol and an
exceptionally pure form of heroin, known as 'Red Rum', in his Manhattan
hotel room. Chamberlin, who was at the scene, was charged with illegal
possession of a controlled substance (a syringe with traces of heroin on
it were found in the room), and booked into a special clinic. The
incident followed the death two months earlier of a 17-year-old fan at
their otherwise euphoric Dublin concert. It was a terrible time for the
group, and Billy Corgan eat back to consider the Pumpkins' plight.
Initially, he saw no other option but to await Chamberlin's recovery,
and then go straight back out on the toad. But then it dawned on him
that there as another option, far harder to take, perhaps, but
ultimately more beneficial for his precious group. He phoned the
Pumpkins' manager With these instructions: "sack Chamberlin",

"The subject [of drugs] gets so romanticised in rock'n'roll I that
'elegantly wasted' thing, James The told Mojo. "But it's totally a
disastrous, selfish thing to do. We just Couldn't go on that way, trying
to get around it. Basically, Jimmy overdosed every time we went on tour.
What were we meant to do, lock him in his room every night?"

On 27th August, the tour restarted in Las Vegas, with replacement
sticksman Matt Walker (ex-Filter) and keyboardist Dennis Fleming (the
Frogs). In September, they returned to New York to play the rescheduled
Madison Square Garden dates.This time, the rhythms behind the Pumpkins'
incendiary guitar white-outs weren't quite so confident, the
understanding between the musicians not so intuitive. But at least the
Pumpkins were back where they should have been - at the top.

18 months later, the Smashing Pumpkins have consolidated their
post-Chamberlin line up, and have a new album scheduled for 1998. After
a fresh mini-album "Zero", including a medley of excerpts from some hew
Corgan compositions, and their Contribution to the Batman & Robin
soundtrack, the chilling "The End Is The Beginning Is The End"
(Teitbite), the future looks bright. In October news broke that Billy
had formed a Gary Numan tribute group, the Replicants; though that same
month the group were successfully sued over the death of Melvoin.

RavensZero and I3edazzIed
 
 
 
Favourite links
 

Infinite Pictures

Thru the Pinhole Stars

Email me at:

This page has been visited times.