Billy Corgan has revealed that fans of The Smashing Pumpkins still come up to him to complain about the band’s appearance at the 1994 Lollapalooza Festival.
Back in 1994, Nirvana were still riding high as one of the biggest bands in the world. So, when the travelling music festival, Lollapalooza, rolled around that year, organisers managed to snap the group as the headline act. Sadly, the band would withdraw from this spot just days before frontman Kurt Cobain’s tragic passing.
As a result The Smashing Pumpkins were elevated to the role of headliners, and for the most part, it was pretty good. However, as frontman Billy Corgan explains, his onstage actions still result in people complaining about the festival even today.
Speaking to Beats 1’s Zane Lowe in anticipation of The Smashing Pumpkins’ new album, Billy Corgan revealed he was pretty antagonistic towards audiences in the early ’90s.
“We made Gish which was at the time was the biggest-selling independent album of all time,” Corgan said. “We followed up with Siamese Dream, which pissed off all the Gish fans…because it wasn’t proggy or psychedelic enough. It was too poppy.”
“It made us an international band, and what did we follow up with? A way darker, sprawling double album which kind of went the complete other Dark Side Of The Moon of the record we just made. We were never designed to stick in any one spot.”
“We’d go interview with NME and they’d make fun of us,” he continued. “We’d interview with the New York Times and they’d make fun of us. We’d go interview with the Village Voice and they’d make fun of us and we’re like, we’re literally DIY musicians riding around in a van and this is the music we choose to play, and somehow it wasn’t indie enough or it wasn’t cool enough and that steeled us to be a completely contrarian unit… now we were sort of angry.”
However, as Billy Corgan explains, this anger manifested itself during the Lollapalooza Festival, where he says he ‘went after’ the audience at all of the 42 stops on the tour.
“The apotheosis of it all was Lollapalooza 94, which is kind of what has sent us careening into the Mellon Collie album,” he recalled. “We’re headlining the festival, and originally – let’s not forget – it was supposed to be Nirvana, Pumpkins, Beasties. And obviously that didn’t happen.”
“So okay, we’re headlining what became historically the biggest Lollapalooza ever. And there they are. There are the same football players that used to bully us in the hallways,” Corgan explained. “Every other band in my estimation, and I don’t mean to throw shade, this is the way I read it at the time because this is the mindset I was in, everybody was cool with going along to get along. Because it was a wave, right? Let’s just ride this wave.”
“I looked at it as like, ‘No, you’re the enemy and we are here to take you on.’ And to this day, I still have people walk up to me at airports going, ‘man, I don’t know what that was about.’ There are people to this day, and again I usually meet them at airports, who refuse to ever see the band or listen to the band after that show.”
“You’re talking about 43 shows, one was cancelled due to rain. So 42 times, I took the mic and went after that audience.”
While Billy Corgan also opened up about the group’s new album, and the “hundreds” of finished songs he has in the vaults, he also again discussed the absence of original bassist D’Arcy Wrrezky from the group’s (mostly) reunited lineup.
“The whole thing broke down when we had to start talking about time, and reality, and opportunity,” he explained. “And, of course the business part of it all, and there was a wide, wide gap between what I thought was a reasonable expectation of ability given that she hadn’t been on stage in 19 years”
“But she suffered from incredible stage anxiety. We’re talking like a ten out of ten, and that was that was part of the equation always. So when you saw her on a stage, she was inwardly going through a lot more than you would have thought because her state her stage demeanour was very icy. People used to call her Ice Queen… That was a cool nickname the fans gave her, the Ice Queen.”
The Smashing Pumpkins’ new album, Shiny and Oh So Bright, Vol. 1 / LP: No Past. No Future, is set to be released on November 16th.
Check out The Smashing Pumpkins’ ‘Zero’:
