Smashing Pumpkins drummer Jimmy Chamberlin discussed his connection to other grunge era drummers in a new WGN Radio interview.
“What was great about it, from a drummer’s standpoint, is we were really catching a wave. Me, Steve Perkins from Jane’s, Grohl, Matt Cameron…we were gonna be the guys to eliminate hair metal, we were gonna play this polyrhythmic, syncopated, cool stuff with lead guitar solos.”
He also discussed the success of Siamese Dream and Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.
“We knew that we were good, we knew that we were dangerous. I knew that I could play. I knew that ‘Geek USA’ was gonna be a rollercoaster ride that most people hadn’t been exposed to. I knew that songs like ‘Soma’ were gonna catch people off guard, songs like ‘Disarm’. We had a deep bench, because of Billy’s ability to write both things that were very symphonic, and things that were kinda rooted in Judas Priest.
The parameters in which we could operate were so wide, because I could go from brushes to 2Bs in a heartbeat, we could roll songs like ‘Soma’ out, or ‘Mayonaise,’ and go to a ‘Geek USA,’ which a lot of bands really couldn’t….when people ask me ‘what parts were most challenging?’, it was really songs that were more symphonic, like ‘Tonight, Tonight,’ or ‘Porcelina,’ or those types of songs that really required you to come up with things that were compelling.”
He later said, “The thing they don’t prepare you for in rock and roll school, when you sign up as a teenager, is the other 22 hours of the day. You’re in a very high octane emotional state, because of your job — that’s your job, to be in that state, and create in that state.
So you have a lot of that stuff on tap, which doesn’t really prepare you for the world everybody else lives in. ….I don’t drink or smoke or anything, for 15+ years now, when my daughter, my oldest was born, my wife and I decided we would raise our kids without escapism. Nobody tells you what they did after they got to the top of Everest.”