Smashing Pumpkins Filmed Playing ‘Gish’ In Studio

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The Smashing Pumpkins have released a new video where Billy Corgan shows James Iha his Gish guitar in the studio that he recently got back after decades. In the video Corgan plays Gish guitar riffs, and he is also seen writing a new Smashing Pumpkins song with Iha. Iha joked that it felt like they were on an episode of Antique Roadshow. Corgan said it feels full circle as the next Pumpkins album will be guitar heavy, and that he looks forward to using the Gish guitar onstage again.

The Stratocaster guitar was the impetus behind the guitar sound on The Smashing Pumpkins’ 1991 debut album Gish, and now he plans on using the guitar as a key component for the band’s next album, tentatively set for release in late 2019. Could we see a recreation of the Gish guitar sound?

“I’m literally gonna take it somewhere, and get it fixed up,” he says in a new Rolling Stone interview. “And I’ll start using it. It’s a really valuable guitar to me. And I mean, the timing is sort of strange, and auspicious, and so I take it as a sign that it’s supposed to be part of what we’re doing.”

The new material is shaping up to be Shiny and Oh So Bright Vol. 2 but with a shift in direction.

“It’s very guitar-driven,” he says. “Again this guitar showing up, it’s kind of like back to the beginning of why I played, and if there’s anything that we hear from people who love the band, they want more, not less, of what we do. So I’m just in there riffing away. If you had told me 27 years ago that A) the guitar would come back to me some day and B) I would still be in a band with James [Iha] and Jimmy [Chamberlin], I wouldn’t have believed you in either count,” Corgan says. “So I think it’s cool we’re still playing and that the guitar is going to be a part of the new record, and I think it’s pretty cool that we’re still rocking, to quote James [Iha].”

Corgan said he’s thrilled to have the guitar back.

“It’s an incredible story,” Corgan says. “And I’m really, really happy. It’s a happy day.”

Perhaps the most incredible part of it all is that the guitar was ostensibly stolen in the first place; it’s an instrument worthy of a story by Homer. Corgan recalls that about 10 years after Chamberlain sold him the instrument a person he didn’t know asked him if he still owned his guitar. He then described the one that Corgan just got back. “He said, ‘I lent it to Jimmy, it was actually my guitar,’” the singer says. “And I said, ‘Oh, I feel so bad.’ And he wasn’t mad. He was like, ‘Oh, that’s OK. Jimmy’s my friend. If Jimmy sold it to you and you used it, that makes me happy.’

“But that’s the guitar’s circuitous history,” he continues. “Jimmy procured it and somebody procured it from me, and now it’s back. This guitar has a certain magical mystery to it. It changed the fortune of my life. So that’s why I felt it would come back to me. It was like the talisman or something, like in Lord of the Rings. It was meant to come back to me.”