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Spinner ups professionally edited videos of Corgan interview

2:35 pm // Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009

AOL’s Spinner.com today shares two segments of video from its December 4 interview with Smashing Pumpkins leader Billy Corgan. PowerPoint-like title cards, a generic soundtrack, and the stark white backdrop behind Corgan are all disconcerting, but the questions are good. Two transcribed portions follow.

From the first segment:

Spinner title card: Why did you announce the return of Smashing Pumpkins on the day your solo album was released?

Corgan: I started having conversations with Jimmy Chamberlin when he was working on his solo record and I was working on my solo record. We talked about the idea of, depending of how the cycles went on those albums, that we wanted to start working on the Pumpkins again, and then we talked invariably about the other former members. It wasn’t really so much planned out as it was sort of an idea, like, “Okay, this is going to happen, so let’s start pointing in that direction.” Part of the reason that I took the full-page ad out announcing that I was going to try to put the band back together was because I didn’t want to go around the world on my solo record and just talk about the Pumpkins as a ghost — I wanted to sort of put it back in, like, okay, here it is again. I wanted to create the proper context that I was in, which was “I’m doing this now, but I’m headed back this way.” It was very interesting to see people’s reactions, because it put a weird energy into the solo touring. Some people were really mad. I thought they’d be excited, but they didn’t want to wait — they were like, “Make it happen now.”

From the second:

Spinner title card: Do you think the media have been fair to you and Smashing Pumpkins over the years?

Corgan: Probably not, but at this point I think it kind of doesn’t matter anymore, because enough things have happened where it exists on its own oxygen. When you’re young, you need people’s approval, you need somebody’s positive reinforcement, whether it’s your parents or it’s the indie mag or whatever. Then you just reach a point where you’re grown up and you don’t need it — it’s nice, but you don’t need it.

I’m responsible in the sense that I’ve created a lot of difficult questions about why I do what I do and what the point is — and none of them are easy, they’re not like, “Oh, he’s like this,” or “He’s like that.” The band was very alternative, and yet at the same time we were very popular. We sold lots of records, but we did things that were completely the opposite of what you were supposed to do to sell records. Always a contradiction, always playing with the energies. You know, in rock and roll, people like really simple stories: “Genius rolls out of bed, shoots heroin, writes a great song — perfect!” Being sober, articulate, shadowy, confusing, religious…these are all, like, “What?” I get why that’s not an easy sell, but I think the work is there.