The Smashing Pumpkins - The Same Old Rain (chicago magazine)

By: Robert Kurson

Marlo Macaisa avait exactement deux amis en 1985, quand il était senior au Glenbard North High School de Glendale Heights. L'un d'eux, Bill Corgan, was an undeniable, self-described dork. One night, Macaisa recalls, he and Corgan stopped at a neighborhood McDonald’s and bumped into a handful of Glenbard North football players. Then, as now, jocks held a low opinion of dorks. The alpha jock expressed his feelings about Bill.

Sensible dorks remain silent in such situations. But Corgan—bright, morose, too tall, and crushingly self-conscious—either had been pushed too far or didn’t care anymore about consequences. He offered his own remark.

The jock spat in Corgan’s face, a cheeseburger-and-ketchup hocker that just hung, while the jocks howled and Macaisa and Corgan stood paralyzed. “We were helpless to do anything about it,” Macaisa says. “We just stood there. Neither of us ever acknowledged that it happened. Not that night. Not ever.”

Around that time, the honors world history class at Glenbard North took a field trip to the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago. When it came time to go home, an elderly tour guide ran onto the bus with news that a student had vandalized the restroom, covering the floor and walls with toilet paper. Teacher John Slusser wrote Corgan a detention, but punishment seemed beside the point to this student. “Bill said, ‘Give me ten years and I’ll be at the top,’” Slusser recalls. “It was like Babe Ruth pointing to center field.”Today, Bill Corgan is Billy Corgan, the 33-year-old leader of the Smashing Pumpkins, and arguably the biggest rock ’n’ roll star ever to come out of Chicago. The Pumpkins have issued six albums that together have sold more than 20 million copies, including Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, the best-selling double CD ever. Legions worship Corgan’s intellect, absorb his perspective, feel his pain. Countless others deride his mawkish lyrics, distrust his mammoth ego, resent his seeming unconcern for those around him. Few, however, deny Corgan’s presence. An intellectual presence. A troubled presence. An enigma.

“The guy just loves to be miserable,” says Jim DeRogatis, the Chicago Sun-Times pop music critic who has generally praised the Pumpkins’ music but has nonetheless managed to be barred by Corgan from Pumpkins shows. “His shtick is, ‘I am Alfred, Lord Tennyson. I can hear the pain of the flowers and birds and my love.’ He’s a drama queen.”

“Billy only wants one thing—to write the best rock songs that have ever been written,” says Chris Holmes, a long-time friend of Corgan. “He is singularly focused, and it’s frightening sometimes—he wants to be immortal. But it’s nothing different from how Michael Jordan approached basketball. And we worshiped Michael for it.”

Billy Corgan and the Smashing Pumpkins have always been a gothic tale, a long-running serial of high drama punctuated by nervous breakdowns, suicidal impulses, drug overdoses, and fantastic bursts of inspiration. Recent episodes have included bassist D’arcy Wretzky quitting the band under mysterious circumstances, then getting arrested in Chicago for buying crack cocaine. The band’s new manager quit in January after just three months on the job: “Unfortunately I must resign today due to medical reasons,” Sharon Osbourne wrote in a press release. “Billy Corgan is making me sick.” And in February, the Pumpkins released their newest album, Machina/The Machines of God, which spurted to number three on the charts, then fell disappointingly back to number 20, then to 41, all in less than five weeks. Some people speculate that it’s over for the Pumpkins.

In the months ahead, as the band tours the world and the postmortems come in on the new album, the world will decide whether Smashing Pumpkins matters anymore. To Corgan, a man of passion and intellect who embraced rock ’n’ roll to overcome a horrible childhood, the world’s decision might literally be a matter of life and death. Corgan and his bandmates would not talk to Chicago for this article—he is said to be angry that the magazine ran a picture of his Lake View house in 1995. But Corgan’s public comments over the years, along with interviews with his acquaintances and friends, tell a remarkably consistent story: Rock ’n’ roll has been his only salvation.

Released in February, the new Smashing Pumpkins album was free-falling on the charts by early April. Machina/The Machines of God had sold just 314,000 copies in its first four weeks, far fewer than the band’s previous CD, Adore, which itself was considered a commercial disappointment. Throughout his career, Corgan has made it known that he will not abide commercial failure. Before the release of the album Siamese Dream in 1993, Corgan said, “If this record’s a failure, it would be the end of Smashing Pumpkins . . . they’d be looking at me like I was a loser, and I couldn’t deal with that.” Of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness he said, “If it’s considered a failure, it’s time for this band to be gone.” Those who know Corgan take him at his word.

Machina is “a really good, meaningful, thoughtful record,” says Chicago Tribune rock critic Greg Kot. “But Billy has said that if the band is not on the mountaintop, not moving forward, it would die. I could see him thinking this is the end of the run, that it’s time to move on.” Yet Corgan has been surprisingly optimistic about the record’s reception, telling the Sun-Times that “it’s probably one of the happiest periods in the band.” An enigma.

In the early seventies, along the tame side-walks of Chicago’s northern suburbs, no kid had a cooler dad than Billy Corgan. Bill Corgan Sr. sported the era’s ultimate bad-ass uniform: butt-length hair, earring, full-length fur coat, a purse. Best of all, he rocked. A touring guitarist with early seventies supergroups Rufus and Chicago, Bill Sr. lived the life you are supposed to get out of your system before a kid calls you Dad. Nightlife, drugs, babes, parties—Bill Sr. dug the scene and brought the good times home. If the lifestyle meant divorcing Mrs. Corgan and sending little Billy to live with Grandma, hey, it’s only rock ’n’ roll.

But Grandma wasn’t up to the job for very long. Nor was Great-Grandma. Mom gave it a shot, then Dad, then a painkiller-addicted stewardess Bill Sr. had married and divorced. Five homes in his first five years. A quiet child.

By age nine, Billy found himself living with the stewardess and helping to raise his half brother, a kid born with a rare genetic disorder that doctors warned would cripple him. While kids at school fretted about baseball cards and Star Wars masks, Billy’s worries were more basic: Does anyone want me? Why am I put together wrong? Why don’t I feel right about myself? His natural parents lived nearby; why did neither raise him? That rejection, he figured, hurt worse than dying, since it happened every day. “He was hurting at home, there’s no question about it,” says Macaisa, today a real estate agent in suburban Bartlett. “He lived in constant fear and apprehension. I don’t doubt for a moment that he felt great pain and alienation. It was real.”

“Bill had things going on at home that other people didn’t,” says Elaine Sofferman, briefly Corgan’s girlfriend at Glenbard North and now a Chicago area attorney. “You could tell there was something wrong. This was something much deeper than the typical teenage rebellion stuff. And he was a thinker, brilliant, which made everything harder on him.”

Unwanted by the world at nine, Bill discovered, as he later put it, the “incredible, wonderful heaviness” of Black Sabbath, the sinister British heavy metal quartet, and his universe changed. Hendrix, Boston, the mope-and-gloom rock of the Cure, WEFM, WMET, The Loop’s “Kick Ass Rock ’n’ Roll”—these became Bill’s armor in a lonely world. He refused, however, to pick up an electric guitar—the natural next step for a kid who has fallen in love with rock ’n’ roll—because, he would later say, musicians seemed evil to him. They led bad lives. But at 15, he witnessed a classmate cranking power chords on a V-shaped electric guitar in a basement. Incredible, wonderful heaviness. Life.

As a rock star, Corgan would describe his childhood as if he were still nine years old: I was born a freak and raised to fail, he would say. No one wanted me. I found identity in music. I found salvation in music. To many, such weepy soliloquies branded Corgan the equivalent of Don Quixote with a guitar. But the words rang true to those who knew him. “Bill was a serious person,” Sofferman says. “He said what he meant.”

Corgan spent eight hours a day practicing guitar and deciding to become the biggest rock star in the world—nothing less would save him. He quit basketball and a dishwashing job to protect his guitar-strumming fingers. He meditated deeply, somberly, about which Judas Priest guitarist—K. K. or Glenn—whaled hardest. And he made a plan.

High school might have been misery to Corgan, but at least it was a place to go. After graduation, he chucked his honors transcript and moved in with his father, who made ends meet by playing whatever temporary guitar gigs he could find. There, on the Northwest Side, Billy mastered the depressed arts—sleeping days, bumming out, playing heroic guitar solos no one would hear. Through sheer will, he recruited a drummer and bassist and formed his first band, The Marked, so named for the conspicuous birthmarks of two of its members. (Corgan’s, a strawberry blotch, runs up the length of his left hand and onto his arm.) “Music was the only thing in his life,” says Dale Meiners, who played bass for The Marked.

The band rehearsed what Corgan called his “Hindu-influenced gloom music,” then moved to Florida to find stardom. Instead, they found few gigs, a diet of mini-doughnuts, and hard floors for beds. After nine months, Corgan moved back to Chicago, friendless, jobless, and near anorexic. “Bill was only 19, but he seemed like he had already lived forever,” Meiners says. “He had an old soul.”

Corgan spent the next two years depressed and behind the counter of The Record Hut, a dilapidated, now shuttered used record store on Broadway. There, the gawky, six-foot-four suburban kid witnessed the birth of a new rock movement. Alternative rock shunned the Hollywood airs of the eighties hair bands and the arena-sized ego and bombast of the seventies megagroups. What mattered most to Alternative pioneers like Seattle’s Nirvana and New York’s Sonic Youth was a studied authenticity, a conviction that in order to be meaningful, the music must scorn commercialism in all its forms. To a kid with Black Sabbath in his bloodstream and superhero guitar solos in his heart, the rise of Alternative rock must have seemed a mixed blessing.

Sensible would-be rock stars took stock of the new movement and changed their stripes. Corgan stayed with what moved him. He would form a band according to his vision—melody, guitar solos, poetic lyrics. A five-year plan. International superstardom. Greatness or nothing.

Sometime in 1988, Corgan met James Iha, a 110-pound Japanese American guitarist and Loyola University graphic arts major who had been playing in the local punk outfit Snaketrain. Iha disliked Corgan from the start—who was this guy with the grandiose vision and the Stalinesque five-year plan? Still, Iha recognized in Corgan’s music and intensity of purpose a quality anathema to Chicago, where the Alternative ethic—appearing not to care—had become a second skin. These songs, this mélange of melody and heartache, moved him.

The two guitarists débuted by playing gigs at tiny Chicago saloons, relying on an electronic drum machine for rhythm and the usual half-dozen patrons for encouragement. One night, as Corgan later told a local music magazine, Empire Monthly, he went to see the Dan Reed Network play at the Avalon nightclub. There, a young woman with waist-length blond hair and bottomless blue-green eyes raved about the band—a band Corgan despised for its phony stage persona. D’arcy Wretzky, a Michigan girl trained in classical oboe, didn’t take kindly to Corgan’s suggestion that her opinions were ludicrous. Still, she managed to inform Corgan that she played a little bass, and agreed to listen to the pyramids of homemade tapes he had made of his own songs. D’arcy heard heart and meaning in Corgan’s music, and joined his band when he asked. The group would be called Smashing Pumpkins. Smashing as in “wonderful.” Pumpkins just sounded like a fun vegetable.

The band made a demo tape, then maneuvered it into the hands of Joe Shanahan, owner of Metro, Chicago’s most prestigious rock club. “I heard the future of rock ’n’ roll on that tape,” Shanahan recalls, pulling from his desk that first Pumpkins demo, its cover hand-lettered by Corgan “Billy’s Demos.” “I told them, ‘Get yourself a drummer, and I’ll make the Metro your home.’ I couldn’t believe how this kid Billy played guitar. There was no limit to how big they could get.”

An acquaintance recommended that Corgan recruit Jimmy Chamberlin, a jazz drummer and graduate of Joliet Catholic High School. Chamberlin had never played a lick of rock music. No matter—D’arcy couldn’t play much bass, and Iha was shaky on guitar. Shanahan awarded the band a sweetheart gig—opening for Jane’s Addiction on Thanksgiving eve 1988. The Pumpkins earned $100. It was only the fourth Smashing Pumpkins show ever. Behind Chamberlin’s brute-force percussion, the band’s dreamy introspection found muscle and stunned the crowd. It was all going according to Corgan’s plan.During the Pumpkins’ infancy in the late 1980s, the Chicago rock scene orbited around two city-based record labels. Touch and Go backed Big Black, The Jesus Lizard, and Didjits—aggressive, antipop acts that shunned melody and harmony in favor of droning, buzzsaw guitar. Wax Trax! threw its weight behind the gothic, industrial sounds of Ministry and Revolting Cocks, outfits that pushed a bullying assault of throbbing anger-rock. These bands had toiled for years, lugging their equipment into back alley entrances of sticky-floored dives like Batteries Not Included, Gaspar’s, and Orphans. With the exception of Ministry, none of the bands had made a big national impact. Smashing Pumpkins played guitar solos and pretty melodies—which irritated the sensibilities of “real” Chicago bands. Billy Corgan announced that he intended for the Pumpkins to be world famous; there are still Chicago musicians who despise the man for that.

Shanahan was just warming up his hype machine. Armed with the Pumpkins’ demo tape, he flew to California and lobbied Andy Gershon and Raymond Coffer, who eventually became Corgan’s management team. “This is the best Chicago band in years,” Shanahan bragged. The men jetted to a Pumpkins show at Metro, treated the band to omelets the next morning at Periwinkle on Lincoln Avenue, then signed the group a few days later.

Corgan chose to release the Pumpkins’ first full-length album, Gish, on the independent Caroline label. At the dawn of the Alternative era, label affiliation was a band’s gang colors, and the coolest bands chose the indies—it made them look authentic, incorruptible, as if they had turned their backs on the Man.

In fact, Corgan had signed a two-album deal with Virgin Records, the international behemoth that owned, but had a hands-off relationship with, Caroline. Some insiders thought Corgan was trying to play it both ways—and exposing himself as a hypocrite in the process. “There are bands here that wish nothing more than to be popular in Chicago,” Corgan shot back in the Chicago Tribune, “It does not matter that they couldn’t get arrested anywhere else. To me, that’s not success.”

Local bands now could be forgiven for loathing Corgan. Not only did he refuse to play by Chicago’s rock rules, which required that he suffer for his success; he refused to play by society’s rules, which asked that a person at least pretend to some humility.

“He’s very serious and totally candid,” says Hank Neuberger, executive vice-president of Chicago Recording Company on Ohio Street, where the Pumpkins have recorded. “There are no games with him. He says exactly what he thinks. What people don’t understand is, that is the way he operates as an artist.”

On Gish, Corgan’s wounded-boy vocal pleadings were layered over a matrix of manic guitars. The album thrilled Alternative rock fans worldwide. The Pumpkins sound was simultaneously brutal and beautiful, and thus reminded many listeners of life itself. “An enormously ambitious album . . . riffy, melodic and shot through with moments of actual beauty,” wrote the Los Angeles Times.

Gish went on to sell 250,000 copies, colossal by indie rock standards. But the process had taken its toll. Corgan had spent four sleepless months in the studio perfecting Gish, rewriting songs 20 or 30 times, obsessing over every note. Except for the drums, he had played every instrument on the record. D’arcy and Iha? Mere window dressing, insiders admitted.

The Pumpkins sold a quarter million records and toured the world for 18 months. Corgan pushed his outfit relentlessly on the road, insisting that the band reproduce on stage the cathedrals of sound he had Frankensteined together in the studio. His reputation as unforgiving taskmaster swelled. “I think [making great music] can be done without us losing our minds completely and getting stressed out so badly that I’m sick constantly on tour,” D’arcy later told Select magazine. Iha said, “It’s like the ratio of fun compared to stress is very lopsided with us.”

And the drama grew beyond the music. During a tour break in Chicago, a foul-mouthed, dirty-haired ex-stripper called at Corgan’s door. Courtney Love, leader of the punk attack band Hole, had flown in to check out Nirvana, which was playing at Metro. Years earlier, she had fallen for Corgan at a Pumpkins show in California and she considered him a genius. Perhaps they’d already had a fling; neither has said. In any case, on this day Corgan had a girlfriend. “Billy sent her away,” Shanahan says. “That night, I took her backstage to see Kurt [Cobain, Nirvana frontman]. The rest is history.” Love married Cobain a year later.

Meanwhile, D’arcy and Iha, who had fallen in love, broke up painfully on the Gish tour. Chamberlin fell more deeply into drugs, the genesis of his coming disasters. Worse, at least to read Corgan’s comments at the time, none of the other Pumpkins could be bothered to contribute creatively. To a man who said he made music to slay childhood demons, the indifference of his bandmates came as a devastating betrayal.

Now Virgin wanted a new record. As the other Pumpkins lazed glamorously around Chicago, Corgan lost his girlfriend of six years, then his apartment. Every note he wrote sounded like a rehash of Gish. It was then, Corgan later said, that he suffered a nervous breakdown. Homeless, he passed days in the Pumpkins’ practice space, then slept nights on D’arcy’s floor. The self-loathing that had been Corgan’s childhood soulmate barged back into his life. He asked Virgin for more time; when the company asked why, he answered simply that he had mental problems. Terrified for his survival, Corgan found a psychiatrist and set to working on saving his life.

Therapy helped. His girlfriend came back; the two would later marry. One day, he wrote a fresh new song. Then more songs, good songs, a true advance in the Pumpkins’ sound. Corgan wrote pages of prose and poetry, then circled the single most embarrassing lines—these would be his lyrics. The record features lines like these, from “Today”: “Today is the greatest / Day I’ve ever known / Can’t wait for tomorrow / I might not have that long / I’ll tear my heart out / Before I get out // Pink ribbon scars / That never forget / I tried so hard / To cleanse these regrets / My angel wings / Were bruised and restrained / My belly stings.” “If a band’s greatness was judged by its honesty,” Corgan said, “I think we’d be near the top.”

The Pumpkins recorded their new CD in Atlanta, far from family and friends and Chicago’s drug scene. But Corgan’s optimism was short lived. Chamberlin disappeared into the Atlanta netherworld for a week, suffered his own nervous breakdown, then checked into a drug and alcohol rehab facility. Corgan again turned into a studio tyrant. D’arcy and Iha dared to watch TV between sessions, meaning they did not regard the music as if their lives depended on it.

Siamese Dream drew rave reviews and débuted at number ten on the Billboard charts in July 1993. Billy Corgan had realized his rock ’n’ roll dream. John Lennon had this moment. When a reporter asked him how the Beatles found America, Lennon quipped, “We turned left at Greenland.” Joy. Celebration. Triumph. When reporters interviewed Corgan, he responded as he had when he was nine: “I’m surrounded by these people who I care about very much, yet they continue to keep failing me. It makes me feel the same abandonment I felt as a child.”

Despite Corgan’s whining, Siamese Dream steamrolled, and the Pumpkins won nominations, awards, videos, a headlining spot on the prestigious Lollapalooza tour. Corgan still couldn’t turn left at Greenland. “I’m 26 years old,” he said. “I’ve got an album that’s just got nominated for a Grammy, sold a million and a half records, I have a home, I’m married, and something still is not right in my head.”

A prominent English magazine begged Corgan, “For God’s sakes, stop sniveling.” Stephen Malkmus, of the popular indie rock group Pavement, ridiculed Corgan in a song, then publicly declared, “I like some Smashing Pumpkins songs. It’s their ideology I despise.” And in a letter to the Chicago Reader that quickly became a rock legend, producer Steve Albini denounced the band’s “calculated and overbearing hype barrage,” and declared the Pumpkins “ultimately insignificant.”

Corgan railed back against critics from the stage, threw tantrums, vowed to disband the Pumpkins. After reading a review of Siamese Dream in the Sun-Times, Corgan faxed critic Jim DeRogatis a letter that read, in part: “Dear Jim: I’m very sorry for you that you are fat . . . please try to find a life for yourself. . . . See you in hell. Best wishes / go fuck yourself, Billy C.” Then he barred DeRogatis from a Chicago show, forcing the critic to review the concert from a lawn chair outside. DeRogatis had given Siamese Dream three stars out of four, but had dared to criticize Corgan’s ability as a lyricist.

After Siamese Dream, Corgan devised a novel recuperative strategy. He would gift the world with a new album, a heart-on-sleeve symphony to angst-addled kids. The record would be larger-than-life, an epic poem of attitude and pretension and beauty and heartache aimed at the tormented teenage soul. Make it a double album.

This time, D’arcy and Iha would play their instruments. Leaning on a new producer named Flood, Corgan and the Pumpkins spent the summer of 1994 in 16-hour studio sessions designed to produce nothing less than the most splendid rock ’n’ roll record of all time.

Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness zoomed instantly to number one. To some critics, Corgan’s singing and lyrics cinched his induction into the whiners’ hall of fame. “Teen angst uncut by humor or irony,” sneered the Washington Post. Even Homer Simpson weighed in during the inevitable Pumpkins guest shot on The Simpsons. “My kids think you’re the greatest,” Homer tells a cartoon Corgan. “And thanks to your gloomy music, they’ve finally stopped dreaming of a future I can’t possibly provide.”

But the hits flowed. Five of them: “Tonight, Tonight,” “1979,” “Zero,” “Thirty Three,” and “Bullet with Butterfly Wings,” in which Corgan laments—without irony—“Despite all my rage / I am still just a rat in a cage.”

For his part, the big Pumpkin had appeared to mellow. During the seven-month, 200-show Mellon Collie tour, he clipped his onstage tirades, ruminated less publicly, and shaved his head—“to curb my vanity,” he said. The Pumpkins had made the biggest-selling double CD in history and were selling out 20,000-seat arenas across the world. They would sweep the MTV Video Music Awards, win seven Grammy nominations, sell more than ten million copies of Mellon Collie. They were getting along and getting inconceivably rich.

One July night in 1996, after the Pumpkins had sold out New York’s Madison Square Garden, drummer Jimmy Chamberlin and touring keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin stepped out to do some upscale shopping. Melvoin, the son of Mike Melvoin, a jazz pianist and an outspoken antidrug crusader, had played with the Pumpkins since the tour’s inception. The shopping spree proved successful—the two scored Red Rum heroin, between 70 and 80 percent pure. No one knows if the sellers bothered to inform the buyers that this heroin was for snorting only.

“Jonathan experimented with drugs a bit, but he was no user,” says a source close to the band who did not want to be named. “But Chamberlin was dangling full membership in front of him. It was like, ‘Stick with me, kid, and you’re a Pumpkin.’”

Back at the Regency Hotel, Chamberlin and Melvoin injected the Red Rum. Both passed out. Twice previously on this tour, once in Thailand and again in Portugal, Chamberlin and Melvoin had overdosed together. On each occasion they had awakened. This time, when Chamberlin arose at 3:30 a.m., he couldn’t budge Melvoin, even after dragging him under the shower. Paramedics pronounced Melvoin dead at 4:15 a.m.

Police arrested Chamberlin and charged him with misdemeanor criminal possession of a controlled substance. The other Pumpkins were rounded up, questioned, and released. Soon afterward, Corgan fired Chamberlin. The drummer’s drug use, the band said in its press release, “has nearly destroyed everything we are and stand for.”

The Pumpkins returned to Chicago and auditioned replacement drummers. Filter’s Matt Walker got the gig. The band resumed the tour. The seeming rush back to glory convinced many insiders that Steve Albini had been right— Smashing Pumpkins were nothing more than “pandering sluts.”

“He calls himself an artist,” says one prominent Chicago rock musician. “But his drummer, his best friend, has a problem, a tragedy. And he fires him.”

“I can tell you that Billy Corgan and the Pumpkins were contacted by a prominent drug interventionist twice before Jonathan died,” says a friend of Melvoin. “This person knew tragedy was imminent. The first time, the band refused his offer for help. The second time, they never answered. Then Jonathan dies and they’re back on the road in a month. Some sensitive artist.” Corgan hardly tried to explain his decision to finish the Mellon Collie tour. Just a few words about duty and fans.

“I remember Bill in his bedroom in high school with his guitar,” says Corgan’s high school girlfriend, Elaine Sofferman. “He was pretty much alone.”

Late May 1997. Metro’s brick walls seem to bend to accommodate a new energy. Prodigy, a British techno band, kick into their first number and the overflow crowd erupts into wild dance. No one at Metro is immune—bartenders, security gorillas, newspaper reviewers—all surrender to the beat. Except one. Against this herky-jerky mass of joyous humanity, Billy Corgan sits erect, stoic, motionless, a bald-headed statue of gloom against a backdrop of ecstatic abandon. He is the biggest rock star in the world. He appears to hate himself.

Corgan’s salvation, as of tonight, should now be complete. Mellon Collie has sold more than ten million copies. Divorced from his wife, Chris, he has fallen in love with a glamorous photographer (whom he was still dating at press time). His half brother, the one doctors said would never walk or talk, has graduated from high school doing both. Corgan will soon play a gig with his dad on this very Metro stage. Millions await his next album as if it were the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s.

Corgan knows he is about to make a new Pumpkins album that legions will deplore. “I felt a lot of doubt for the first time—from the label, from management, from friends,” Corgan told the Tribune. But he will record this keyboard-drenched “arcane night music” all the same. “We’re doing what we want,” he said.

Critics adored Adore. Greg Kot of the Tribune called the album “a gorgeously intimate work . . . a bold musical detour.” DeRogatis gave the album four stars and described it as “the best Pumpkins disc to date.” The public, however, bailed, and the album dropped off Billboard’s Top 40 after just nine weeks. The rejection, as always, found Corgan’s artery. “At this point [our fans] should have enough faith and confidence in us just like I have faith and confidence in the bands that I admire,” he told CNN. “And if they don’t, they’re not fans.”

Even die-hard Pumpkins fans found the self-pity irredeemably ungrateful. Millions had supported Corgan’s every sneeze; they’d made platinum records of his demos and B sides. Can’t this guy lighten up?

“I wrote ‘Mr. Roboto’ in ’82, and that one song alienated 25 percent of Styx fans,” says Dennis DeYoung, leader of the Chicago pop group that dominated the charts in the late seventies and early eighties. “So I know what that feels like to be abandoned by fans. It’s indescribably painful. But it hurts especially when an artist has struggled to create something new, which is what the best ones do. I like the Smashing Pumpkins. But I love Billy Corgan for attempting Adore.”

Even if Corgan’s music had mellowed, its maker had not. He dumped his drummer, Walker, then recruited Kenny Aronoff, who had played with Bob Seger, John Fogerty, John Mellencamp, and other giants. During a Metro show on the Adore tour, Aronoff had the temerity to fiddle with his snare drum while D’arcy introduced him. “Hey!” Corgan screamed. “Nobody plays when somebody in this band is talking!” DeRogatis described the moment in his Sun-Times review as a “flash of the miserable dictator, egotist and perfectionist. You know, the Billy everyone knows and loves.”

Early in 1998, the Pumpkins offered to play a free show in Grant Park. It was to be another goodwill gesture from Corgan, who had decided to donate all proceeds from the Adore tour to charity. Late in May, the city blinked. Fearing uncontrollable crowds it estimated could reach half a million, the Mayor’s Office of Special Events decided against the show. Corgan called it one of the biggest heartbreaks of his life.

Promoters moved the concert to Soldier Field. Tickets went for $30, with all proceeds going to the Make-A-Wish Foundation of Northern Illinois. But this was an era in which $30 bought a ticket to Kid Rock or Britney Spears, performers who played what the kids expected. The show didn’t come close to selling out. Promoters moved the concert again, to the smaller World Music Theatre. Billy Corgan no longer ruled the world.

After Adore flopped, Corgan fired his long-time management company, Q Prime, claiming that the operators were “only interested in me as a commercial act. They have no interest in me or the band from an artistic level.” Then, early in 1999, Corgan did what some considered inevitable and others considered ghastly—he rehired drummer Jimmy Chamberlin.

“It was no surprise,” says a friend of Jonathan Melvoin. “I regard Billy Corgan as a spiritual cipher. I don’t think he ever understood his part in Jonathan’s death. Bringing back Chamberlin is proof of it.”

“Jimmy is a prodigy, a genius, and he makes Billy better. Billy is an artist,” says a source close to the band. “Jimmy raises the bar for Billy, and [for him] that’s all that counts.”

This time, metal would make the music better. Corgan and the band hit the studio last summer and began to record the blistering, barbed wire tapestries that would become their new album, Machina/The Machines of God. Word spread that the Pumpkins had returned to form—no more experimental Adore crap, just a lot of kick-ass rock ’n’ roll.

Machina/The Machines of God, however, would not be completed and released for another six months—still plenty of time for Pumpkins drama. Last September, the group issued a press release: “D’arcy’s gone!” Pumpkins faithful were baffled. Sure, D’arcy had busied herself shooting a movie with Mickey Rourke and tending to her Michigan farm, but she had always seemed the reasonable one, the last one who would ever leave the group. Insiders knew the truth.

“D’arcy had long-standing drug problems,” says a source close to the band. “On the Adore tour, she got nasty. There was a turn in her personality. She was scary.”

“She surrounded herself with lots of drug dealers who said she should be this big movie star and shouldn’t have to take any of Billy’s shit,” says another source close to the band. “She believed them. And that’s death when you work with Billy.”

In January, the ex–Smashing Pumpkin and a friend were arrested after allegedly buying three bags of crack cocaine on the 1600 block of West Grand Avenue. D’arcy’s lawyer cut a deal in narcotics court requiring her attendance in drug awareness and prevention school. To replace D’arcy, Corgan quickly hired Hole’s Melissa Auf Der Maur, effectively stealing Courtney Love’s treasured bassist. Now the Pumpkins needed management. Corgan turned to Sharon Osbourne, the sharp-tongued, no-nonsense woman who had revived the career of her husband, Ozzy Osbourne, the long-troubled Black Sabbath singer. She seemed to be the perfect strongwoman to manage the release of Machina and the Pumpkins’ coming world tour.

Osbourne lasted three months. “I don’t need games in my life,” she said a few days after resigning. “I don’t need stupid little boys making faces at me. He’s a control freak.”

The rock world had a good laugh over that one. Corgan, though, couldn’t just stand there as he had in that Glendale Heights McDonald’s. “Sharon Osbourne is a dishonorable woman,” he said. Then the Pumpkins sued. The stated basis for the suit sounds more like part of a litany of Corgan’s childhood complaints than the stuff of court documents: Osbourne stood accused of “abandoning her charges at a critically vulnerable time and place.”

Chicago is 65 degrees in February, and the Smashing Pumpkins are moments from releasing Machina/The Machines of God. They will celebrate by playing a free concert at Tower Records on Clark Street. By six this morning, lines stretch around the block. By noon, near pandemonium. Tonight, as Billy Corgan takes the stage, he intends to blow people’s minds. He has to. It might be his final opportunity to give the world a reason to care about him.

Corgan puts on a soft show, full of emotion but without the electric muscle the record store kids crave. Many depart the free concert thrilled to have glimpsed their hero, but a bit confused as to his method. They will buy his new record anyway, make it number three in its first week on the Billboard charts. But it will fall to number 20 a week later, then continue to plummet. He will later tell the Sun-Times that he is not worried about the record’s disappointing chart performance—this, from the man who once said, “I don’t want to fade out. I want to burn out or be a cult.” He is the man who once said, “To me, music was about being accepted and escaping from this crummy existence.” And if he needs to rule the world via rock ’n’ roll, if he needs salvation in recognition, today might be his darkest hour.

After the show, one critic mutters, “Same old Billy. A bunch of hype. Kids lined up around the block for the television crews. Then he doesn’t even rock like he promised.”

Simultaneously, Corgan’s long-time friend Chris Holmes smiles. “Maybe it’s me,” he says, watching Corgan walk into the crowd of kids, strumming his acoustic guitar. “But I sleep better knowing someone’s working that hard for rock ’n’ roll.”