Billy Corgan

In the big book of Rock Star career templates, there’s a special entry for the middle-aged artist who finds himself standing in the wreckage of the band that made his name, shading his eyes from the harsh glare of public attention, looking for a trail that bypasses the wilderness of VH1-trivia purgatory. On this page you’ll find an advisory checklist of actions said rock star should most definitely avoid, a minefield inventory of pitfalls and rock clichés proven through decades of music history to be the quickest way for an artist to slide headfirst into obsolescence. The text’s skull-and-crossbones header reads: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here, for ye shall be playing your greatest hits at state fairs in no time.”

In the four years since Smashing Pumpkins hung up their alterna-goth jerseys and went their separate ways, Billy Corgan appears to be following this cautionary blueprint like he’s carrying a well-worn copy in his wallet. As devoted fans and casual observers watch in respective worry and scorn, Corgan has seemingly made every eye-rolling move in the book, traveling from Zwan’s rapid flame-out through a poetry collection (2004’s Blinking With Fists) and, recently, venomous Internet blogging, only to land on the inevitable solo career. To the delight of pigeonholers everywhere, it looks like he’s made the expectedly smooth segue from eccentric, prolific, megalomaniac genius to pretentious, bitter celebrity on a downward trajectory.

And yet something about this portrayal doesn’t feel right; it seems too easy. While Corgan’s post-Pumpkins activities have followed a familiar five-step program of recovery from breakup trauma, his attitude in every endeavor appears laced with a shrewd perspective on exactly what he’s doing, a confrontational spirit that undermines the potential caricature his actions threaten to draw.

“At points when I do say to myself things like ‘I’m going to do a poetry book,’ there’s a voice that crops up in my head that says ‘you’re probably going to take shit for this,’” Corgan explains, “‘but you wouldn’t be the walking cliché that you are if you ultimately cared what people think.’ Yes, the facts present these very cogent pictures of ambition, crass decisions, public pronouncements, but it’s the process that forces you into that. As a musician you just want to do what you want to do.”

The artist who deftly soundtracked countless teenagers’ tortured ’90s survival, spent approximately two years wearing a shirt proclaiming him a “ZERO,” and made perhaps the most notorious symbolic hairstyle change in alternative-rock history, now sits across from me in an absurdly incongruous setting—an old-fashioned pancake house in the bricks-and-Borders suburbia of Highland Park, Ill. He’s even more translucently pale than his MTV history suggests, but Corgan in the flesh is nowhere near the ghoul you’d expect from the footage—his floppy Cubs hat immediately unravels 15 years of Vampire King image-making.

Befitting the sleepy charm of the fairly ritzy northern Chicago burg where we chat, Corgan comes off as a man at peace with his surroundings, even when bristling at public suppositions that have nagged him for years and presumptuous interviewers who misinterpret the musical focus of his upcoming solo debut, TheFutureEmbrace. “When I was 25 I felt I had nothing to lose and I made some pretty good art. Now I think I’m back to that point, but it’s a different kind of nothing to lose. Back then it was nothing to lose because I was a piece of shit and nobody cared about me, so what did it matter if I died in a bloody heap of pedals and cords and wires. Now I have nothing to lose because my life does matter, I’m not going to go with the program any more, it’s not interesting to me.”

Though Corgan is still prone to launch a trademark flurry of verbal punches at his favorite targets—former bandmates, uncooperative record labels and the marketing machines of contemporary music—each rant is delivered in an even tone, with a slight grin belying his awareness that he’s giving the tape recorder what it craves. “You have to understand that literally everything I’ve done publicly has caused some sort of lightning-rod reaction,” he confides, and though he repeatedly denies worrying about the public perception of his actions, he doesn’t shy away from opportunities to set the record straight. It’s clear that if the mid-career checklist is indeed buried in his pocket, he’s not just unwittingly checking boxes but actively subverting expectations.

1. Hastily form a post-breakup band.
From the moment the last distorted note of the Smashing Pumpkins’ career trailed off at the end of the band’s marathon 2003 farewell show at the Cabaret Metro in Chicago, the countdown clock began ticking toward what everyone thought would be a fast start to the Billy Corgan solo career. After all, Corgan had long been regarded a solo artist in band’s clothing, reportedly tracking the lion’s share of guitar and bass parts himself while handling 99 percent of songwriting duties. To lock himself in a studio and begin work on The Billy Corgan Experience seemed the next logical step.

Instead, Corgan juked everyone by recruiting a new set of collaborators: “I’ve never really wanted to make a solo record,” he says now, impending releases aside. “I never felt it was necessary. I liked playing in a band; I think that was shown by the fact that I formed another band right after the Pumpkins.” Debuting almost exactly a year after the Pumpkins split, Zwan hit the scene as a supergroup for members of the Sub Pop Singles Club, featuring indie-rock Hall of Famers Matt Sweeney (Chavez) and David Pajo (Slint, Tortoise, Papa M) alongside Corgan’s loyal drummer Jimmy Chamberlin.

While the alternative all-star lineup was reminiscent of certain classic-rock predecessors’ attempts to delay going solo—Clapton & Blind Faith, Crosby & CSN, et al—Corgan insists it wasn’t a conscious effort to draft musicians with history, describing it as more of a domino process of indie-rock networking. Ultimately, however, it was the underground loyalties of Zwan’s component parts that broke up the band, according to an obviously still-miffed Corgan.

“They proved me right, which is that the whole indie thing is just a pose. I can’t say that about everybody, but our general feeling in the Pumpkins always was that people took the indie route because deep down they knew they didn’t have the talent to make it on the mainstream level. And those people proved to me, that deep down they know they don’t have the talent, or the focus, or the true love of people to want to really get out there and try and connect with people. It’s really about them. And fundamentally Jimmy and I disagreed with them.

“If you’re going to play music at a high level to a large audience, it can’t really be about you. You have to make it seem like it’s about you, but it has to really be about others, it’s really about sharing. And their indie-cred mentality really is about, ‘What’s it got to do with me?’ and ‘Can I find people who agree with me, who think like me, who dress like me, smoke pot like me?’ They’re just assholes. It’s simple. I could go on with a thousand stories, but you can put that in big capital letters: THEY’RE JUST ASSHOLES. They really didn’t care. They didn’t really care about the music, they didn’t really care about the fans … They really just want to live like pieces of shit and live their little weird creepy lives. End of story.”

Then again, Corgan’s fanbase was hardly clamoring for Zwan to have a run as lengthy as the Pumpkins’. Zwan’s Mary, Star of the Sea sold disappointingly despite a strong MTV and rock-radio push, and critically it was considered less than a complete return to form. With a three-guitar attack and a sunnier tone to Corgan’s songwriting, Zwan seemed less a fresh new project than a reaction to the popularity-shedding latter days of Smashing Pumpkins, which found the band exploring increasingly dark territory and Corgan incorporating more and more electronic textures.

Today Corgan admits regretting the Zwan era. “I’m glad that people got something out of it, but it was a total waste of my time. But maybe it was something I needed to do, to figure out there were things I cared about, or to appreciate the band that I was in.” Over in less than a year, Zwan dissolved when bassist Paz Lenchantin left with Pajo to return to his Papa M projects. Once again, Billy Corgan had lost his band.