Charting a Life in a Post-Pumpkins World

Billy Corgan sits in the penthouse of a posh North Side hotel, a visitor in the town he has called home since he was born here in 1967.

“It is kind of weird,” he says in his suite, glancing out the window at the gray city by the lake that has been the setting for countless Smashing Pumpkins songs. “Technically, I’m outta here already.”

Corgan, 33, looks particularly slender, almost feminine, on this beastly cold morning, his shaven head protruding from a woolen turtleneck sweater. In a few days he will leave for destinations unrevealed to figure out the rest of his life, a life he has resolved will not include the Pumpkins, the quartet he turned into one of the most artistically accomplished, commercially successful rock bands this city has ever known.

But first there is the matter of the final show, Saturday at the club where it all began, Metro. The concert will close the books on the Pumpkins saga: 13 years, 17 million albums sold and a music community divided between those who see Corgan and the Pumpkins as a groundbreaking band and those who see them as careerist caricatures.

One thing is certain: The Pumpkins are leaving on an artistic high. The music on their two latest releases, “MACHINA/the machines of God” on Virgin Records and “Machina II: The Friends and Enemies of Modern Music” (available only via MP3 download at various Web sites, including https://www.spfc.org and https://www.metrochicago.com), is a densely detailed rock opera that finds the band in peak form, mixing rich, goth-rock atmospherics with scorched-earth guitars, fragile folk ballads, electronic experiments and hallucinatory excursions that go far beyond the psychedelia of the Pumpkins’ 1991 debut, “Gish.”

Corgan is happy with the work that he and the Pumpkins--drummer Jimmy Chamberlin, guitarist James Iha and bassist D’Arcy Wretzky (replaced on the current tour by Melissa Auf Der Maur)--have accomplished in their waning days. He is less certain about what lies ahead. “I haven’t been this unstable in seven, eight years,” he says. “The band coming to an end is a very stressful idea to me. I know it’s the right thing, but I’m wondering what it means.”

As Corgan pours hot tea, the singer-guitarist who defined Chicago rock in the last decade pondered where he’s been with Chamberlin, Iha and Wretzky, and where he might go without them.

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Question: What next?

Answer: I plan on publicly taking the year off. I need to create a little bit of space between me and what people think of me. I want to be sure if I play music again that I’m really confident about what I’m doing. Because whatever I do first, that’s what I’m going to be labeled as. Just like with the Pumpkins--the first impression we made still exists in a lot of cases.

Q: Was that a good thing?

A: On the artistic, musical end, it was the right thing to do. On the personal end, it’s always been a pain in the . . . .

Q: But the band seems less like a dysfunctional family these days.

A: I think it’s beyond dysfunctional. . . . [laughs] The things that are broken will never be fixed. I wasn’t lying a year ago when I said that things were pretty good in the band--they are. But like any band, the friction in the band, the volatile nature of the band, is oftentimes the spark. Finding that spark without D’Arcy [who left the band after “MACHINA” was completed to pursue an acting career] hasn’t been as easy. More than anything the band’s inability to maintain a consistent lineup of four people is the No. 1 factor why we’re breaking up.

First we lost Jimmy [he was fired in 1996 for drug abuse, and reinstated in 1998]. He was the engine in the band, and everybody could hear on “Adore” [the one album the band made without him] how Jimmy’s lack of presence changed the musical picture. And D’Arcy had a balancing effect within the band, and it’s not the same without her. The four Pumpkins had something, and having to go the last four years over the last two albums with an incomplete lineup in my mind has really drained me down.

Q: The themes on [the last three albums] are broader, more openhearted and optimistic, and less about Billy Corgan the tortured artist walking through the firestorm. How much of that was brought on by your mother’s death in 1997?

A: My mother’s death has been the most cataclysmic event in my adult life. Right behind that is Jimmy’s departure and what happened to him, which was very traumatic, and my getting a divorce, which was the end of whatever idealism I had. And massive fame. They all met at the same moment. When my mother died, I was still on tour, still enjoying the crest of the success that came after “Mellon Collie” [“Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness,” released in 1995, became one of the biggest-selling double CDs ever]. When those three, four roads converged at one point, it turned me into more of a human being.

Q: You recently revealed that you contemplated suicide shortly after “Gish” was released, and “Today” is the song and “Siamese Dream” is the album that came out of that experience. It was a breakthrough album commercially for the band, but on a personal level, was it more like a form of therapy?

A: That was the turning point in my life, the point where I decided to fight to be who I am. And the fight continues. It’s so hard to put into words, but when you’re an abused child, the confidence to express yourself is so low, and you’re worried that if you do express how you feel that you’re going to get killed. It’s like life and death. So breaking that threshold at that time, really speaking my mind on “Siamese Dream,” of how I really, really felt, was like a life-and-death issue for me at the time.

Choosing to finally speak my mind was my way of saying I wanted to live. But it was terrifying. It was totally terrifying. If you look at some of the lyrics on “Siamese Dream” and “Mellon Collie,” there are some heavy indictments of my family, myself, my eventual wife. It was hard to write that stuff and then go back into life. It’s one thing to be an arty songwriter and say all this stuff, it was another thing to show up for Christmas and my mother would be holding Spin [magazine] and asking, “What did you say here?” That wasn’t easy.

Q: Yet you’ve talked about feeling more emotionally disengaged from the music now.

A: Absolutely. It has to do with what’s going on inside the band. The moment we stopped fighting is the moment that the band began to end. The moment we stopped fighting for something better.

Q: Isn’t that also a function of maturing?

A: Yes. But you have to believe in the highest things. And with that comes a vulnerability and a level of pain that is very hard to live in all the time. To be in this band since [it hit the public eye in] 1991 has been a very, very vulnerable time for all of us. We’re not asking for sympathy, but it took its toll. You’ve got to gamble to win, and rock ‘n’ roll is not about taking the easy way. Nobody wants to see conservative moves. They want to see boldness. They want to see death-defying acts, and that’s what you have to give them.

Q: You talk about the band’s psychological casualties, but there was also a very real casualty: Jonathan Melvoin [a keyboardist hired for the “Mellon Collie” tour who died in July 1996 of a heroin overdose]. Where does he fit in with the band’s legacy?

A: He doesn’t fit in at all.

Q: Why not?

A: Because he was a friend, and nothing more than that. There are a lot of things I’ll never talk about, but he doesn’t fit into the band. He was a person who came into our lives for a very short time, and he left good things and bad things. But as far as I’m concerned he’s not a part of the history of the band. The history of the band is James, D’Arcy, Jimmy and Billy.

Q: But his death had a huge effect on the band. It led to Jimmy Chamberlin leaving the Pumpkins for two years.

A: It’s not something we talk about, and it’s not something we talk about because it doesn’t have much bearing on the band. It had a bearing on us personally, but not on the band.

Q: Will you keep working with Jimmy?

A: Yes. Jimmy, [keyboardist] Mike Garson and I are going to do an all-instrumental progressive-rock band. We’re not looking for a record deal. . . . We’ll do something on our own, indulge our ‘70s fixation.

Q: So you’re really not going away?

A: [laughs] I’m not going to stop working. The question is, what does that mean? In public or in private? Am I still going to try to be a rock star, or just declassify myself into a lower ring of hell?