Billy, idol

MANILA, Philippines – This week marks the first time for Billy Corgan and the rest of The Smashing Pumpkins to be in the Philippines.

They are set to rock away at last to a Pinoy audience at the Smart Araneta Coliseum today, August 8, starting at 8:30 pm — following the gig’s postponement yesterday due to metro-wide flooding. 

Yet, as the incisive, 45-year-old Corgan tells RAPPLER during a 30-minute press conference on the eve of his Big Dome gig, he has long been oriented in Philippine culture, thanks to Filipino-American friends and acquaintances from his younger years.

“I grew up around a lot of Filipinos in Chicago,” he says, “I learned that among them, the family rules. Some of my best friends in school and now are Filipinos, and I have much respect for the family values and the culture.”

He adds, “I’m embarrassed it’s taken 20 years for Smashing Pumpkins to come here,” pointing that it’s mainly about “the reality of getting around the planet with 20 people and 12,000 pounds of equipment.” 

Thanks to a Filipino best friend, Corgan even briefly worked at a Pinoy restaurant in Glendale Heights right outside Chicago.

“At one point, I was eating something that resembled chicken nuggets while cleaning the kitchen,” he relates. “I was cleaning, eating, cleaning, eating. At the end of the week, I got paid two dollars an hour and I told them, ‘I can’t work for (just this much)’ and I was told, ‘Bro, you’re family.’ Now there’s a Filipino answer.” 

A better Pumpkins stew

Singer-songwriter-instrumentalist William Patrick Corgan is the sole original member of The Smashing Pumpkins, which he formed with guitarist James Iha in 1988. They were later joined by bassist D’arcy Wretzky and drummer Jimmy Chamberlin.

The band made its recording debut in 1991 with Gish, an album that introduced the Pumpkins’ trademark melding of classic rock, spacey soundscapes and often dreamy, melancholy lyricism.  

The Smashing Pumpkins gained greater audience acclaim with 1993’s Siamese Dream.

The band would attain commercial apex with their 1995 epic Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, catapulted by its majestic track “Tonight, Tonight” and the song’s A Trip to the Moon-themed music video. 

While Corgan is clearly the band’s prime mover, fans have favored the Pumpkins as a unit, in part given the musical and visual complement of Wretzky’s doll-face features and Iha’s discernible Japanese ancestry to Corgan’s own, perpetually shaved head.

But the quartet had also been plagued by individual and collective dilemmas, such that — some more albums later — Corgan’s co-members jumped ship and the Pumpkin head was compelled to break up what remained of his band in 2000.

Corgan did not stop making music, even dabbling to the hilt in electronic music via his lone solo album, 2005’s TheFutureEmbrace. But that same year, Corgan announced the resurrection of The Smashing Pumpkins, even if Iha and Wretzky were unwilling to rejoin. 

The band’s current lineup slowly took shape in the second half of the 2000s. 

Part-Korean guitarist Jeff Schroeder was in the reformed Pumpkins’ touring lineup in 2007. Drummer-vocalist Mike Byrne first jammed with Corgan in 2009, as part of the tribute band Spirits in the Sky. Bassist-vocalist Nicole Fiorentino, who had been an alterna-rock player via Veruca Salt and other bands, was hired after successfully auditioning in 2010. Fiorentino and Schroeder are 33 years old, while Byrne is 22.

“They’re not intimidated by me, nor should they be,” Corgan clarifies between sips of tea to help nurse a flu.

“We work like a family. We have musical and personal respect for each other, and it’s coming out in the music. Nicole, Jeff and Mike were all fans of the band and have had different experiences as fans.

“Jeff, for example, has watched us live during the Siamese Dream and Mellon Collie periods and knows what the band was like at those times. They know the value of The Smashing Pumpkins, and they see their roles now as not just fans but as messengers.”

Across the oceans, across generations

The Smashing Pumpkins had been darlings of the alternative rock scene that hooked in teenage eardrums across the globe in the 1990s.

Yet Corgan is conscious of the fact that catering to his longtime fans as opposed to creating new ones is just not right.

“I condemn anyone who’s in the business of just playing their back catalogue,” he states, pointing out that it would be best if his comeback-happy ’90s peers “can get back to a place where they can make great music but for this time. We have to be conscious of today’s 16- to 20-year-olds, that we don’t come in and steal the experiences of today’s kids (by dwelling on the past).” 

Corgan is likewise aware of how complex an endeavor music-making has become in the last decade or so, resulting in sonic artists’ having to find ways to keep up in a world where technology and the Internet have rendered albums and even singles nearly obsolete.

It is this pragmatic weight that partly informs Oceania, the band’s newest studio album and its first with the current Pumpkins cast.

Oceania (pronounced “Ohsee-yanee-yuh”) is actually part of what has been reported as The Smashing Pumpkins’ huge work in progress, a 44-track concept album titled Teargarden by Kaleidyscope (as Corgan prefers to spell it).

All this is a grand realization of Corgan’s being “dead set on making an album where every song is just as valuable as any other, ignoring the typical claptrap you hear about needing a single.”

Indeed, Oceania comes off like one extended, hazy rock opera of sorts, even if favorites may arise among the album’s listeners. Corgan himself expresses fondness for the title track and “Pale Horse,” as these “connect to me personally.” 

Moreover, it is a fulfillment of Corgan’s aforesaid aim of connecting to both his earlier fans and the new-millennium youngsters.

“The album is a journey and it touches on how we’re connected yet physically isolated, about this dissociative sense of reality. It’s like a Stanley Kubrick film where there’s this top layer of story and a subconscious level underneath. I don’t completely understand it myself.” 

And to further his aim of connecting to young and not-that-young generations of Pumpkinheads, the band will be performing all of Oceania’s tracks in order at tonight’s concert, with the second half of the gig devoted to a helping of the best-known tracks from the SP discography. 

While rendering the new album in full onstage may be viewed as a means to sell the disc, the exercise is clearly more in line with the notion that hit-making is not part of Corgan’s agenda — at least not anymore. (“[We’re playing Oceania in full] because you need it. I can see it in your eyes,” Corgan tells me in jest at the presscon.)

Soup of the night

Corgan also says that “We made Oceania assuming that people would listen to it just once,” alluding to the Internet era’s shortened attention spans.

“With live gigs, we are able to display the depth of the work. And what I really care about is if people are connecting to the music on a personal level, of whether (say) it makes them think of their grandmother who just died.” 

The band also encourages tonight’s audience to do some live tweeting — to tweet photos of the show as it happens with the hashtag #SPPH. The band will retweet the best photos via @smashingpumpkin.

“It’s a way of getting people together,” Corgan explains.

This concert could also be one primordial experience: Just as such a soup promotes the emergence of life forms, witnessing the Pumpkins in action could inspire many Pinoy spectators to consider becoming musicians themselves.

To such would-be artists, Corgan cautions and advises that “It’s difficult to break in but it’s important to be individual. Be uncompromising in your musical vision. Don’t Americanize yourself, don’t be some Brit-pop crap. Be more than a musician; be more socially integrated into people’s lives and not pander for sales.”

Overall, “I expect an enthusiastic and emotional show,” the tall dude muses about The Smashing Pumpkins’ live debut on Philippine soil. “I know it’s gonna be a great experience.”

For him, the gig’s true success “would be if we could come back every two years. We need to keep making music and we need listeners. It’s international fans that keep us going.” – Rappler.com