things Billy Corgan said to Kim Thayil in Australia in 1994 poll

like getting hurt in their hearts

hearing people talk about how offended they are that other people are being offended getting pretty old at this point

Are you offended by it?

Billy does talk some garbage, doesn't he. I miss the days when you'd only hear from him in an MTV interview or a magazine.

saw this on twitter, billy has always been really good at relating to women
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1qIhtKkrnuM

oh my god, all the interviews from that day are amazing. they all make me wince. like when he makes the "I'm Ono-Corgan" joke and then does the "went over your head" gesture - christ, fuck you billy.

even better: Billy mistakenly refers to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds as a British band, and Cave just obliterates him:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQ6SuW7RDKI

never really got into his music, but i don't think my friends who did were under any illusion that he is not a huge turd

thing is if he and not cobain had died just after their followup to the breakthrough album i think his rep would be a very very different thing. sweeping genius, ambition, the sensitive shy perfectionist aiming for the stars etc. etc. gish, SD and MCIS is a hell of a run (as the current albums poll thread suggests), not even getting into the b-sides and such. he had something really really special. then, very suddenly, it seemed to dissipate.

what's particularly sad about the spaceboy becoming lindbergh, or howard hughes, or whatever, is that so much of what was brilliant in his music was how it spoke to being a picked-on weirdo without just wallowing in self-pity or anger, though those were unmistakably part of the mix. despite all the rage, he actually spoke up for fey romance and dreams and being, well, different. to use an appropriately high-school reference, he was piggy, but also simon, and when he was angry it was only due to the wounds inflicted by the jacks of the world. siding with the bullies against those who speak up for difference is a real woodstock-attendees-voting-for-reagan kind of sad if predictable disappointment.

thing is if he and not cobain had died just after their followup to the breakthrough album i think his rep would be a very very different thing - hahhahaah NO. this dude was marked as a clown from day fucking one. that he's gone alt-right is something but hardly surprising considering how much the anti-liberal resentment that fuels it resembles his anti-cool resentment since whenever some skater punk laughed at him for loving boston in middle school. dude's always been a superior fuck w/ an inferiority complex. for a minute there he figured out how to update boston for the 90s. then the 90s ended.

xp otm.

he's often said that Lollapalooza 1994 was a turning point for him. when he saw the same jocks and football players that used to beat him up for having a funny haircut out in the crowd, he realized then that the dream of the "alternative nation" was basically bust. the urgency in MCIS and in making this gigantic, grand, final statement as Smashing Pumpkins Mach I was because he saw himself and all the other original Gen X bands on a sinking ship. he burned brighter faster.

he was marked as a clown by indie elitists for being openly careerist and embracing all the wrong things in his music - guitar solos, studio perfectionism, candor, Boston and ELO worship. "Cherub Rock" is his rebuke toward Albini and Cosloy and a world that never accepted him.

guitar solos, studio perfectionism, candor, Boston and ELO worship

lol yeah none of this in Nirvana, nope

xxxpost i think you're right on about the inverted resentment projected back as right-wing persecution complex stuff. not so surprising in that sense.

xxpost and yeah that's right - he was marked as uncool not only by the jocks or whatever, but by the cool kids. he's a goth basically and for my money those pumpkins are the best (and basically the only) goth rocks i need.

he came off as a clown in a lot of lights but maybe more often as a control freak crazy person that everyone hated. which i think if he'd died would have at least some body of people praising him as a misunderstood perfectionist genius who squeezed everybody dry trying to create a crystalline magical music the likes of which we didn't deserve and could never be achieved or something. i mean rock's pantheon is full of raging assholes and pretentious little shits. but maybe this is another post derived from recently viewing the doors, i mean at least in that movie jim morrison was just transparently awful at everything he did and in particular a pathetic and self-important 'poet' but it sure didn't stop him from being worshiped for a very long time.

i mean look at the kim thayil story around which this thread has based. i've always lolled but the lols have also always made me just a little uncomfortable. corgan sounds exhausting but is it worse than the reporter who clearly is trying to piggyback on some OTM remarks of thayil's (which i imagine delivered in a kind of chilled-out 'look man, you just need to chill out' kinda way) in the only way that second bananas know how, by joining the beating-up on the guy marked as the loser of this little social encounter and clearly the less 'cool' musician. ha ha, that guy's feelings were hurt, what a wuss, and did i mention that i am drinking with the rock stars and he ordered a girl drink?

xxp yeah, none of it is. Cobain played anti-solos. Corgan was a shredder, a recovering metalhead. Sure, Cobain was very serious about his craft, but he didn't spend twelve hours doing four bars of vocals or three seconds of guitar. He also didn't layer his guitars 40 times over. Cobain and the rest of Gen X had a measured sort of candor, Corgan said whatever he was thinking at the moment, often at his own expense. And no, Cobain never openly worshipped Boston or ELO, even if they vamped on "More Than a Feeling" once or twice at a show.

morrison could sing, was cool, was new, and was sexy so he's up four on corgan. add in the doors wrote better songs, were better musicians and the mystery is even closer to being solved. morrison gave us patti smith and iggy pop, corgan gave us the dude from our lady peace.

none of that's unique to Corgan, sorry. even if you can drill down into specific differences in approach between Corgan + Cobain there were loads of recovering shredder metalheads about at the time (lol Thayil's a great example), tons of studio rats over-emoting, grunge was rife with it.

xps

Corgan's string-laden ballads just put him closer to Axl Rose than Cobain is all

yeah i can remember peter buck circa monster talking in an interview about this disconnect he felt w/ the altrockers that were coming up at the time cuz they were all recovering (or nonrecovering) metal nerds which the closest any of the rem guys got to that was a love for aerosmith (hardly surprising since buck and stipe formed a friendship over mutual ny dolls love).

90s alt rock bands pretending to be "too cool" to sit through interviews on MTV that they were still doing anyway was the most annoying fucking thing ever

tbh i think the road toward redemption in the eyes of the ghost of altrock authenticity past and a change in reputation for corgan would've been more thru a long term journey then him dying after that stupid batman song or whatever. pearl jam were regarded much more suspiciously than smashing pumpkins (who for whatever 'this guy's an obv clown' aspects had had some success pre-nevermind and filled a recognizable college rock slot, had played the club circuit), ppl might have rolled their eyes at smashing pumpkins but pearl jam were regarded (esp among ppl for whom altrock authenticity was an actual thing) as this obv corporate attempt at buying the altrock revolution, cobain compared them to night ranger and though he apparently maybe later kinda took it back (or so i've heard, idk) the tag stuck. over time though pearl jam made more interesting records, fought several good fights, used their success to help other (cooler) acts be it sleater-kinney opening slot or an appearance on a mike watt record that paid watt's bills for god knows how long. they kept working and kept making solid records and generally, as much as could be expected from a rock band w/ a high degree of earnestness, didn't act like huge douchebags or pompous clowns. at a point if you still really had a problem w/ pearl jam it probably meant you were an asshole. corgan took a different route, retreating from taking chances the minute one slight risk (let's be honest - adore isn't exactly fucking dazzle ships) didn't pay off to his satisfaction, broke up the band that he treated like a solo project, blamed the world for his failures, lamely reunited the band only this time made it even more of a solo project and turned it into the most boring version of smashing pumpkins imaginable (who would've guessed that an alice in chains reunion w/ new singer would yield much greater dividends), watched relatively fail as well, blamed the unworthy world for that, and throughout this treated the musicians he worked w/ horribly. then he found out about chemtrails.

i've read comparisons to poster children, but i'm not really hearing a particular sonic similarity. if smashing pumpkins were nirvana, would they be the pixies?

good points on pearl jam, i remember there were a couple Nirvana stans i knew in high school who despised eddie vedder and when cobain died one of them wrote "it should have been ed!" on a wall in the school hallway. i always liked them maybe a bit more than nirvana, and definitely more than SP, because i liked the sort of watery sound of 'ten' and the occasional folkiness of 'vs' and the weird shit on 'vitalogy' not to mention the guitar jams on that album. SP always sounded a little strained to me and their rock sound felt a little thin, and i never really liked corgan's vocals. but '1979' is really a great tune and video.

tbf it should have been ed

vedder always seems like a pretty genuinely nice dude

ayeeayayeeeeeaaaaahh he does

the cast of friends were into pearl jam

i mean the characters

Pearl Jam is plain oatmeal, Smashing Pumpkins are Capn Crunch

cereal sucks

ppl might have rolled their eyes at smashing pumpkins but pearl jam were regarded (esp among ppl for whom altrock authenticity was an actual thing) as this obv corporate attempt at buying the altrock revolution, cobain compared them to night ranger and though he apparently maybe later kinda took it back (or so i've heard, idk) the tag stuck.

can remember cobain calling them "a nice rock band that everybody likes." but, even to my young yokel ears, it seemed like PJ were the more dad-palatable version of a real thing but it was stone temple pilots that were the hollywood mock-up, a year later (though i really liked them at the time)

i tried going back to siamese dream and wow did it age badly. really plodding and leaden; 'disarm' is still great though.

when i heard "alive" for the first time i thought of bad company

hearing people talk about how offended they are that other people are being offended getting pretty old at this point

― AdamVania (Adam Bruneau), Thursday, April 21, 2016 7:00 AM (13 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Are you offended by it?

― the joke should be over once the kid is eaten. (chap), Thursday, April 21, 2016 7:15 AM (12 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i'm bored by it.

it's boring. it's a non-complaint. what, people have too much free speech? give me a break, guy who is a famous rock star on his third interview with a famous radio star.

@ balls - maybe we're talking about two different groups of people? i'm thinking of the millions-strong masses who definitely did NOT think of eddie vedder suspiciously but rather as a rock savior and Serious Voice For A Generation, Man or whatever. like i'm sure within certain ILM-ish bubbles, pearl jam were seen as hacks but that's not how john q. rock fan thought of them. they symbolize being ANTI corporate, "they faced down ticketmaster" "they didn't make videos" etc. etc. and it's john q. rock fan that i imagine canonizing died-too-young genius billy corgan in this alternate reality.

isn't there a recent thread re: albums/projects/whatever where the critical/commercial floppitude drove the artist to "never again!" and they never recovered their confidence/finger on the pulse/whatever?

Albums that poisoned the artist

that's it. thank you!

he's often said that Lollapalooza 1994 was a turning point for him

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qIhtKkrnuM&app=desktop

omg i had never seen this before (though had watched Corgan's awkwadr interviews w/Boredoms, etc, from the same show) and it is EXCRUCIATING, Corgan being incredibly insulting and dismissive to D'Arcy, sly reference to her wedding, dismissing the fact that girls saw her as an empowering presence (Corgan: "someone should be inspired musically, and not... what would be the word be?" D'Arcy: "..." Corgan: "Male or female-y"), and her having to tolerate because the guy is her boss and her wage. It's like some scene out of the Office with Corgan as Michael Scott.

i love how he prefaces D'arcy getting lots of letters from girls with "not that it's the biggest deal in the world"

God, what a fuckwit.

Yeah, me too, because their headline set here suuuuuucked.

to this day I consider this the worst show I have ever seen (as I think I've said before)

lol that really is seriously Office-y

wd probably vote for the claymation line as my favourite if polled

"You'll never work in another place like this - fact. And you'll never work for another boss like me, someone who's basically a chilled out entertainer - fact."

http://static.spin.com/files/2015/07/Billy-Corgan.jpg

Yeah, me too, because their headline set here suuuuuucked.

to this day I consider this the worst show I have ever seen (as I think I've said before)

― Οὖτις, Friday, April 22, 2016 1:04 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

which stop(s) on the tour did you guy see? curious to hear these shows, most of Lollapalooza gigs were taped. IMO it's my favorite live era of the band, they were absolutely FEROCIOUS, Billy was out of his mind on amphetamines during that whole tour (2004 quote: "I don't remember much about Lollapalooza. I remember a lot of pink and purple pills.")

A friend of mine saw the first Randall's Island, NY show on August 5, 1994, and he hated it, never listened to the Pumpkins after that. That show was indeed a total disaster, they left the stage after only an hour, abandoned songs, ended with a limp cover of Thin Lizzy's "Dancing in the Moonlight." But the next night, determined to prove themselves, they played the best show of the Siamese Dream-era. It might be my favorite Pumpkins performance ever, because they were at their best when their backs were against the wall. Here's a blurry but still watchable tape of that whole August 6, 1994 show:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niNEndXNMfs

Concord Pavilion in California. I'll see if I can find my other posts on that show

I can't find them but my memory of the show is something like this: extended clip of car chase scene from Bullitt plays for like 10 minutes, band comes out, the sound is awful, Corgan flails around like an angry 13 yo and then berates the audience for not appreciating him properly, a bunch of songs are started, interrupted and some are not finished (incl "Today" I think), a bunch of shitty soloing, extended diatribes from Corgan... just so bad.

holy shit, was it one of the shows at the Shoreline Amphitheatre on 8/27 or 8/28? SPFC doesn't list any dates on the Lollapalooza tour in Concord? From your description, that could be the 8/28 show, which is another one of my favorites - everyone was sitting down on the lawn and halfway thru the set Billy just goes "since you're all totally bored we're just gonna play a bunch of songs you don't know," and they play a lot of Gish stuff and songs that would end up on Pisces Iscariot. Amazing show. I realize it's probably not the show you were at but check this setlist out:

http://www.spfc.org/tours/date.html?tour_id=378

ah right yes it was the Shoreline

Fantastic Voyage [Coolio] (tease)
Voodoo Child (Slight Return) [Hendrix] (tease)
San Francisco [McKenzie] (tease)
(jam: "Concerto in C Minor")

this shit was excruciating