After criticizing Pearl Jam a few years ago, it appears that Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan is now on good terms with Eddie Vedder. In a new Deleware Online interview, it was revealed that two of the last prominent surviving singers of the Grunge era caught up at a recent Roger Waters show.
The interviewer asked, “One of the things that makes me a fan of yours is your outspokenness. A few years back you were on Stern and answered his questions honestly leading to headlines like, ‘Billy Corgan Disses Pearl Jam, Foo Fighters On Howard Stern.’ We never get to hear what happens after you leave the studio. Are you getting texts from people angry at you? Are your publicists freaking out?”
Corgan responded, “Nobody says anything to me. In fact, I just saw [Pearl Jam frontman] Eddie Vedder a couple of weeks ago at a Roger Waters concert and he said hello and we caught up. So, it’s not as bad as it necessarily plays out in public, but knowing it plays bad makes me not want to do it. I don’t want to be part of the negative culture. I don’t want to be part of that anymore, so I’m not going to be that guy.”
Corgan also said even dating back to his youth, he’s never felt like he fit in.
“No. I was miserable. I had a good peer group, even if they didn’t understand when I would go on about [German philosopher Friedrich] Nietzsche or The Doors. [Laughs.] But I wasn’t a misanthropic character. I’ve always been a social being and make friends easily — and repel people easily because I’m opinionated. People who are intelligent, tend to be attracted to intelligence. People who want to score cultural points even at the high school level, it becomes about you being a polemic figure because you’re not willing to fit into a group. When I played basketball, I was the guy with the hair down his back. I didn’t fit into any particular culture, but that turned out to be emblematic of the world I was going into with music. I’ve never fit into any musical sphere. I’ve been lumped in quite readily and quite unfortunately, but to this day people still don’t know what box to put me in and I’ve been doing this for 30 years. America is hell-bent on destroying the individual. I don’t know why that is. But if you can survive the gauntlet of people trying to cripple your individuality and come out the other side, you almost get rewarded for it.”
