By SMASHING PUMPKINS, exclusively for Alternative Nation
D’arcy Wretzky: If you’ve seen The Princess Bride where they talk about one couple in ten lifetimes doesn’t get the shot at true love. Almost nobody ever finds people, that when we would jam, and we would click, it was just magic. The feeling was just amazing, that’s a better drug than anything.
Melissa auf der Maur: Jimmy Chamberlin and Billy Corgan are such an intertwined musical force.
Billy Corgan: For people who think I’ve not been in a collaborative frame, they’re sadly mistaken. Jimmy Chamberlin [is] one of the great collaborators of my life.
D’arcy Wretzky: So many [Smashing Pumpkins] songs [I love], I can hardly remember which [is my favorite]. When a song comes on the radio of ours, I’ll be like, ‘That sounds pretty good, that sounds familiar! Oh, that’s us!’
Melissa auf der Maur: In the case of the Smashing Pumpkins, I was basically a Pumpkins fan that got to live my dream for a moment [as bass player from 1999 to 2000].
Ginger Pooley: It was so amazing to be that tight as a band [in 2007 to 2008 when I played bass]. We were like a machine.
Nicole Fiorentino: This band has always been fond of risk-taking.
Billy Corgan: I just think you’ve got to move at the speed of the world, or you look kind of flat footed and antiquated. I think we’ve found a nice balance of what we do well, and the speed of the world. So it’s hard to talk about, because at the end of the day, people either get it musically, or they don’t. There’s times where I’ve been certain that people would get it, and they don’t, and there’s other times where I thought nobody would get it, and they do. So I’ve learned to kind of not guess on that any more.
All FAQ’s are exclusive Alternative Nation quotes.
FAQs
James Iha: That was a really long time ago, I don’t remember exactly. The song has a special tuning, or at least the main rhythm guitar does. I think I just came up with that tuning and came up with those chords and did a demo of it, it was an instrumental demo of the song. I played it for Billy and he liked it, he came up with the vocal melody and the lyrics. We worked on the arrangement together. [But] as far as how I write now, it’s different. It depends really, sometimes it can be chords which is what “Mayonaise” was, or it can be coming up with music on the fly in the studio. It can be different instruments, it could be a keyboard, it could be a beat. It happens in all different ways.
Billy Corgan: Honestly, it hasn’t changed at all. Pretty much the same, it tends to start with an idea, and kind of what road we went down. There’s different arguments for whether or not it’s better to demo a song and bring it in, or have an idea and come in fresh and let the song go wherever it wants to go. I would say these days, it’s better to let a song go where it wants to go, because the minute you demo a song at home, it kind of becomes its own thing, acoustic guitar and vocal. People will listen and they think that’s the way you want the song to go, then you have to explain what you hear in your head. So sometimes if you come in with an idea, and you know what it is, and if you hook up an electric guitar instead of an acoustic, or you get a beat going on a drum machine, or you play the keys on keyboard as opposed to the acoustic guitar, suddenly you’re in a different kind of emotional terrain. Then you’re reacting as a songwriter to what you’re hearing, and then there might be something there that’s attractive to you. The one thing I would say is that everything tends to need to happen quickly, whatever that feeling is that you get when you’re on a good idea, you have to kind of codify it very quickly. If you let it linger, it sort of ebbs like a conversation, you’ll remember a few things, but you won’t remember the pure essence of the conversation.
D'arcy Wretzky: [I left the band] more towards the end of the recording actually. We probably did most of it before the tour, and I was told by both James and Billy that they were going to change my basslines and re-record them, but for the most part they didn’t. It was mostly my stuff, and they actually sent me some of the Gold records from it.
James Iha: All three of those people are really talented producers [for Gish, Siamese Dream, and Mellon Collie], they know how to make great records. They know how to get the best out of the band, help the band, and become the 5th band member. They can all see the big picture, every one of those three people that you mention do all of that.
Billy Corgan: Excellent drummer. We got along fine, beyond that I don’t know. He’s not an easy person to get to know, as a lot of people are, which is a quality that I’ve grown to appreciate in people as I’ve gotten older. At the time, I was probably a little bit more like an excited puppy, because I was a fan, and I was excited that he was playing on the record. I do remember particularly, we tracked “For Martha” live, the whole band. James, D’arcy, and Matt were in the other room, and I was in a sort of isolated room playing the piano live. I do have very good memories of that, because it’s like a 7 minute song, a really difficult song to get the right emotion to, and it took a lot of focus on his part to get such a great take.
D'arcy Wretzky: The thing with that was I was going through a really bad time, I didn’t know what was happening, I was having a nervous breakdown. I had 30 plus panic attacks a day, I didn’t know what it was, it was terrible. The day after the tour, I had tried to quit two or three times, but it’s difficult to do when you have everybody, my husband, my family, telling me, ‘No, no, just wait until the next record. All of these people are depending on you, all of these people who work for you guys, don’t just think of yourself.’ I just should have left a couple of years earlier. After the KISS shows in LA, Billy and James came over to my apartment and told me they would give me three months off. That was in the spring. Even before that, I met some people who were [setting up] a movie with me and Jeordie [White] and Mickey Rourke. They actually wanted me to get in touch with Melissa auf der Maur too (chuckles). So I was going to continue with that, and when Billy found out I was working towards doing that, he was furious, and had someone call me. They said, ‘Billy thinks that if you’re well enough to do a movie, you should be well enough to be in the studio. So you have to come back.’ I said, ‘Tell Billy to call me himself then.’ Billy would never call me himself; he would always have somebody else call me. Anyhow though, when Billy fired me, James went along with him, because he said he thought that’s what I wanted.
Billy Corgan: The thing with the Rick Rubin version, which I did like, was that it was so much more plain than the rest of the album, which now doesn’t really bother me. But at the time, as soon as the record company brass at the label started leaning towards “Let Me Give The World To You” as being the first single from Adore, my reaction was kind of knee jerk, ‘The only way I’m going to prevent that is if I pull it off the album.’ Because I thought it wasn’t going to represent the album that I put so much effort into making, which was this future folk [thing], whatever trip I was on. As far as your other question, I don’t know. I think I didn’t finish the version that is on MACHINA II until after MACHINA I was done. Maybe it was because in my mind, it was an ‘old song,’ so [I thought that] it [maybe] didn’t belong. Honestly, I can’t remember too much about that. I do like the version on MACHINA II as well. The funny thing is, despite its strange history, it’s one of my favorite songs I’ve ever written. (Chuckles) So why I’ve treated it so, I don’t know.
Billy Corgan: I think it was simply a divide in what was the future of the band in terms of work and intensity. I think Jeff and I felt in order to push the band forward, it was going to take a Herculean effort. I don’t think that Mike and Nicole necessarily felt the same. Not to say that they weren’t committed, they did commit, and did a great job for what they were committed to. But there are those points in every relationship where you say, ‘In order to get here, we have to do X.’ And they didn’t particularly agree with Jeff and I’s version of that, and having been through it before, as I have, I basically said very simply, ‘There is really no other way. You can’t be weekend warriors in a band like The Smashing Pumpkins. You have to go all the way in.’ There was some reluctance on their part to go all the way in, and I respect them for that, and that they have other things that they want to do in their life, and they should do their things.
Richard Patrick: There’s a lot of fucking anger. You know I was talking to Billy Corgan about it. He was like, [Does Billy Corgan impression] ‘Dude I love that song it’s a huge departure but you’re going to piss off the fucking heavy fans.’ He’s like ‘people don’t realize, when I wrote Today it’s about gouging your eyes out, it’s about fuckin trying to find happiness.’ That’s the thing, kids don’t realize that there’s a lot of fuckin darkness in Take a Picture.
Brad Wilk: That was such an amazing musical experience for me [drumming for The Smashing Pumpkins from 2014 to 2015]. Gish was probably the last record that I sat in my room and played drums to, when I used to just play to records. I think that Billy Corgan is such an amazing songwriter, and really unique, and I think that Jimmy Chamberlin is a phenomenal drummer, so to get in his head, and really learn the songs that I played with them that he was a part of, was an amazing experience for me that only made me a better drummer. My whole goal playing in that band was learning Jimmy’s parts to the best of my ability, but without losing my own personality, and bringing a heaviness to those songs, that’s something that I could have added to those songs, but Jimmy Chamberlin is just phenomenal. Playing with that whole band was just an amazing time.
