TSP Media - Billy Corgan Sun-Times News

April 19, 2004

BY JIM DEROGATIS Pop Music Critic

headline: Post-Pumpkins and post-Zwan, BILLY CORGAN is putting what he has learned into his first-ever acoustic performance and a new album

Seven months after the demise of Zwan, the band he started after the end of the Smashing Pumpkins, Billy Corgan will take the stage at Metro tonight alone with an acoustic guitar and a new set of material that pays tribute to the city he calls home.
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Welcome to the third phase in the career of one of the most
successful and ambitious musicians that Chicago has ever produced.

"This is the first time I've ever played solo in Chicago, unless you
count something at the Avalon on open-mike night in like 1988, and I
don't think that qualifies," Corgan says with a laugh.

In his typically driven fashion, the 37-year-old singer and
songwriter is actually juggling several projects at once, and the 12
songs that he'll perform for a sold-out crowd at Metro is only one of
them. What he calls "the Chicago set" probably won't be included on
his first official solo album, which is due to be released by Warner
Bros. later this year, but it will likely surface as part of a
separate DVD.

The Metro show is being filmed for that project. As a warm-up, Corgan
played six smaller shows last week in a space that used to be a
neighborhood church before an invited audience of 20 fans each night,
and those were filmed as well.

The Chicago set has developed naturally over the last 3-1/2 years,
Corgan says.

"I have this sprawling group of acoustic songs, but at the core of it
is this group of songs about Chicago," he says. "I thought, 'I like
the idea of a really nice, cohesive thing,' and when I saw that, I
focused on it and I wrote more songs with that in mind.

"In essence, the Metro show is like the premiere of the entire 12
songs together, and I'm really proud of it. Whether or not it
resonates with anyone outside of Chicago, I don't know. It's not like
a Broadway thing or anything -- it's just all songs that are sort of
at their core spiritually connected to Chicago. There's one song
about the Cubs, there's one song about what it's like to be in a long-
distance relationship and live in Chicago, there's one song about
Leopold and Loeb.

"I always found when I would travel, over and over again, people
would say to me in Spain or something, 'What's Chicago like?' "
Corgan continues. "It's so hard to explain, because they've been to
New York or they've been to San Francisco, but Chicago has such a
particular essence. I thought this was a really good way to
articulate the Chicago feeling, which is this odd mixture of violence
and a hard-work ethic. You know, I'm Irish and Italian -- I grew up
in Chicago, and my family was very much like, 'You work and you die.'
Not everybody grows up like that, and it has a particular sort of
drilled mentality. And then we go through this death cycle every year
with the winter, and then we come out in spring and we're
like, 'Yeah!' "

Corgan is simultaneously working in the Smashing Pumpkins' old
Chicago studio space, crafting his debut solo album with co-producers
Bon Harris (formerly the driving force behind industrial-rockers
Nitzer Ebb) and Bjorn Thorsund, a recording engineer who worked with
both the Pumpkins and Zwan.

"I'm working in this totally different way than I've worked in the
past -- not just because I'm solo, but literally a different artistic
application," Corgan says. "I guess it would be slower at the
beginning and faster at the end, where usually it's the other way
around -- it bogs down once I hit the studio stage. This is the other
way: We're trying to accelerate that process, and we're just kind of
getting ankle-deep now."

Though Corgan describes it as "a rock record," he's reluctant to say
anything more about his solo album just yet, including whether or not
he's playing all of the instruments himself.

"I don't want to talk about exactly what I'm doing because then
everybody will think they know what it's going to be," he says. "I
can honestly say that I feel it sounds pretty different -- not just
different from what I've done, but different from everything that's
out there. And I'd rather work on the element of surprise on this
one."

Finally, despite the harsh criticism that he received in some corners
of the poetry world when he did his debut reading at the Poetry
Center of Chicago last September, Corgan is looking forward to the
publication of his first book, an as-yet untitled collection of his
poems, scheduled to coincide with the release of his solo album. But
he has actually been garnering more attention for writings of a
different sort of late.

The artist has been using his Web site (www.billycorgan.com) as an
online diary hosting frequent musings on key issues in his life --
including his version of the stories behind the ends of the Smashing
Pumpkins and Zwan. He has made headlines in music-industry gossip
columns in the last two months with bitter posts that blamed
guitarist James Iha for the end of the Pumpkins and "immoral"
behavior on the part of Zwan bandmates (excluding drummer Jimmy
Chamberlin) for the end of that group.

Corgan's often bitter criticisms of his former bandmates has prompted
some fans and industry insiders to speculate online about his state
of well-being.

"I've never been happier in my life," the singer insists. "The things
that I'm saying are the things that I've repressed out of these sorts
of misguided senses of loyalty. I've covered for a lot of s---, and I
took the s---, and that goes back to some old stories in my life,
dating back to stepmoms and things like that. I just kind of woke up
and thought, 'I'm not going to cover for these people any more.'

"You reach a point where you're just like, 'All right, I've got to
get all of this off my chest, and I don't care,' " he continues. "I'm
happy to do it in this context because normally if I was doing this
it would be in the context of trying to sell a CD, and people would
say, 'You're just saying this because you want attention' -- the
Courtney Love syndrome."

Instead, Corgan says, he's just writing on a Weblog, like tens of
thousands of other "bloggers." "And it's totally balanced with
writing about my cats and writing about my spiritual pursuits and
things like that. It's a part of my life that I wrestle with, just
like I wrestle with my childhood, my failed marriage, my failed
relationship with my ex-girlfriend [photographer Yelena Yemchuk]. I
wrestle with it, and I'm just trying to create an equilibrium. When
it comes to the public facet of my life, well, I can suffer, or I can
speak my peace, and I think speaking my peace in a non-promotional
way is completely fair and appropriate."

Corgan, who was raised as a Roman Catholic, says that spirituality
has always been a big part of his life, but he is only now becoming
comfortable with talking about it.

"It's just a part of my life that I've kept hidden," he says. "I
think what's been painful in my life is not who I am, but who I am
unable to reveal--because I've been afraid, or because I think
something bad is going to happen. And I've reached a point in my life
where it's like, 'OK, if you're not going to be yourself now, when is
that supposed to happen?' "

As for his particular beliefs, he says, "The Church to me is just a
rat's maze. I'm totally down with Jesus -- that's somebody that I
look up to and understand. He registers with me, but then again, so
does Buddha." Corgan recently wrote on his Weblog about a weeklong
trip to Hawaii with Sonia Choquette, a self-described Chicago-
based "psychic and heart-centered revolutionary teacher of six-
sensory living" who has written eight New Age self-help books.

Meanwhile, life back on earth has been pretty good for the rock star:
Early this year, he paid $6.8 million for an 18-room lakefront
mansion in the northern suburbs -- the tenth-highest purchase price
for a home in Illinois history.

"This is a wonderful dream: I'll hopefully find a beautiful, loving
partner who happens to be female, have some children, build a studio
in my basement, and never leave, except to come down to Wrigley Field
once in a while," he says.

"There is not a very good long line of artists who have proven post-
30 that they've got the goods," he adds. "So it's hard to say with a
lot of credibility, 'Yeah, I'm gonna be different.' I think I will,
but until I prove that, it just sounds like a bunch of hollow words.

"Rock is very much a young man's game, for all the right reasons. We
always said, 'Young, dumb and full of c---.' There's something about
wanting to get laid and wanting to get paid and wanting to beat
somebody else's brains out with your guitar that creates great music.
But I'd like to prove that I can still do something good."

BILLY CORGAN

When: Tonight, 8 p.m.

Where: Metro, 3730 N. Clark

Tickets: Sold out

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