Ready To Rumble: The Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan Talks Rock, Wrestling, & Stadiums

Since emerging from Chicago in 1991 with their debut Gish and becoming one of the stalwarts of ’90s alternative with 1992’s Siamese Dream and 1995’s Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, The Smashing Pumpkins has been one of rock’s most compelling acts.

It’s not just the band’s unique amalgam of shoegaze, dream pop, psychedelia and straightforward hard rock and metal that’s drawn attention for the last 30+ years. There’s been bilious break-ups. There’s been estrangement. There’s been ambitious albums that critics found off-putting and listeners considered betrayals (the discourse around 2007’s Zeitgeist, for example, is still, frankly, exhausting).

At the center of it all is frontman Billy Corgan. Enigmatic, outspoken, thoughtful, candid. He’s all of these things. Interlocutors — and sometimes, his bandmates — find him equal parts frustrating and irresistible. But they’ve never accused him of being boring, personally, musically or professionally.

Corgan reunited with original bandmates Jimmy Chamberlin (drums) and James Iha (guitar) in 2016 and they’ve proven to be a still-reliable live draw. This summer, they are opening for Green Day on “The Saviors” stadium tour (it’s the first time the Pumpkins have been in a support slot since opening for the Red Hot Chili Peppers in 1992), interpolated with their own amphitheater tour. That followed a strong tour of European and UK arenas that included a $1.2 million gross on 14,140 tickets at Manchester’s Co-op Live June 13, according to Pollstar Boxoffice reports. It’s all in support of their latest album, Aghori Mhori Mei, lauded by critics as a return to form of those classic Pumpkins records. 

“The Pumpkins are, without a doubt, performing at the highest level of their career, both in the studio and on the stage,” the band’s agent, Independent Artist Group’s Michael Arfin says. “This is attributed to Billy’s unrivaled work ethic and dedication to his art.   Since putting the three original members back together in 2016, it’s been a concerted effort to show to the world, once again, what kind of magic this band creates when writing new music and performing live. Younger generations are now discovering them and we are seeing that positive impact on ticket sales as well as other opportunities such as [being the] special guest on Green Day’s ‘Saviors’ stadium tour. The fact that the band just released an album that could arguably rival anything they’ve done to date shows they are focused on the future.”

Oh, and in between all that, Corgan, a well-known lover of professional wrestling, is the president and owner of the National Wrestling Alliance, the oldest pro wrestling promotion in the United States, dating back to 1948. Since purchasing NWA in 2017, he’s been committed to reestablishing its relevance in an industry dominated by the WWE.

Pollstar spoke to Corgan from his home — he was watching his children play in the yard; he’s a doting dad on top of [waves hands] everything else — in between tour stops.

Pollstar: I want to get to the tour and the record but I definitely want to start by talking about wrestling, a passion of both of ours. Who was your favorite wrestler as a kid?

Billy Corgan: When I was really little and watching with my great-grandmother in the early ’70s it was Dick the Bruiser, who was the local legend here. He was nationally known but locally he was like a god.

Does wrestling scratch an itch for you that maybe music doesn’t or is it two sides of the same coin? 

It scratches the itch that music used to scratch.

I don’t feel and haven’t felt for many, many years that music is the wide open chessboard that it used to be. I think it’s become more corporate and more about numbers. 

Yes, you can succeed but it also crushes a lot of the people in the middle of the equation and it’s certainly diminished opportunities for a lot of people at the independent level.

Wrestling still feels to me like music felt in the late ’80s, early ’90s. It feels like if you have talent you can work your way up through a system. The system is complicated, of course, but I really feel that it provides an opportunity. 

Like there is a direct line between “Hey I’m a nobody and I have a dream” and you can make it to the top which in the wrestling business is WrestleMania. 

I’ve known those people who literally were with me 10 years ago in a bingo hall and now they’re on global television wrestling for millions. I don’t feel you have that same opportunity in music anymore as an independent artist.

Those opportunities continue for pop stars but for guitar-based music? Look at the Top 40 right now, right? Where is guitar music? Yet here we are with Green Day selling out stadiums. But basically the worlds [of pop radio and rock] don’t meet anymore, it’s become so bifurcated and controlled.

I really like that wrestling feels how independent music felt to me in the late ’80s. I’m trying not to belabor the point but at the end of the day I have to be able to sell somebody who’s young, “Hey, I can help you get your dream,” right?

I have so many conversations as I go through life where a young artist, 16 years old, 19 years old, who is more on the independent side of the music equation, they come to me and the parents come to me and say “What do we tell our kid?” and I don’t know what to tell you because it’s really oftentimes not about your talent or the quality of who you are as a person, it’s some other set of factors that has more to do with “American Idol” or “The Voice.”

Did you take any lessons from your music career and been able to apply those since you started running NWA?

The thing that probably is most notable is understanding how to play the long game because most of the pressure in the entertainment business is always to take short gains which usually involve lighting yourself on fire and getting attention, but if you look at most artists on the music side who go on to bigger and better things, it’s the fact that they didn’t do that early on and that they stuck with the vision and were able to navigate it and gain leverage in the business because they have some quality that’s very unique. 

So I can sell that to the NWA at large because I’ve been there and I’ve done that.

It’s hard because wrestling has changed even in the last 10 years, much like music’s changed in the last 10 years, so I have to be careful because sometimes I can start doing the “back in my day” thing. But my day is like ancient times in this media landscape.

You talked about the long game. Do you feel sort of a heavy obligation because it’s NWA and your belt dates back to Orville Brown in 1948 and theoretically even before that? Do you contemplate that history when you make your decisions?

It’s so hard to explain but if I was being a bit TED Talk about it, it’s understanding your brand and what you hope to achieve with the brand. Oftentimes when I’m talking to people on the business side of the equation, I say, “Stop thinking about it as a wrestling company and start thinking about it more like a tech startup,” and that seems to be able to help people do the math of what I’m trying to do.

There are a lot of independent companies that gain a lot of attention because they’re able to create kind of a short-term gain, right? “Hey look at this!” Whether it’s death matches or so-and-so just left WWE and now they’re on the independents. If you look at the NWA, we’re charting a very different course. And to the wrestling community, particularly on the business side, they just don’t understand it, because why wouldn’t you chase attention?

I think the answer to that is if you want to play the long game you have to get the people invested in your guys and your girls.

We’ve seen in the last few years, there’s been this nadir of independent wrestling reaching the international stage, garnering a lot of social media, garnering a lot of media attention, but it hasn’t necessarily translated into the business, right?

Going back into the time machine a few years, it was me behind the scenes going “I don’t really think this is going to work at the level that everybody thinks it is going to work.” 

I said it very much feels to me like when an indie band gets hot and everybody starts talking like they’re going to be the next Beatles or Nirvana and then ultimately, when it doesn’t happen, it’s because they’re not able to write hit songs and the reason a lot of those bands don’t try to write hit songs is because they view that as some kind of sellout against their core set of ideals.

The Beatles were the perfect balance of independent spirit and accomplishment at the top level because they could write hit songs and they cracked the cultural code again and again and again. 

To me that’s when culture is at its best: when you bring independent spirit into the mainstream and make the mainstream reconsider the way it views something.

So the NWA has more voices like that. We’re here to write hit songs and win at the top level. I just had a discussion earlier today with an as-yet-unnamed famous network and the discussion was centered around the fact, as I explained it to them, that there’s nothing trendy about the NWA.

This is what the wrestling business was built on: mainstream appeal, from the little kid to grandma.

As I said when we started this interview, I was 4 years old watching television with an 81-year-old Belgian woman who didn’t speak English. So my formative experience in wrestling was seeing this product appeals to me at 4 years old and this product appeals to someone who doesn’t even speak English and is 81 years old.

So I’ve always chased that because I think that’s where the sweet spot of wrestling is, because wrestling really is the universal language. It’s supposed to be a voice to reach everyone and I understand why people want to get trendy and point it in a certain direction and I don’t begrudge them. I just don’t believe that’s where the bigger end of the business is.

OK, now we’re going to do an abrupt turn. What is setlist construction like for you? I get the sense that maybe you want to play the songs you want to play — I may be paraphrasing. You’ve got a great new record but you’ve got 30 years of material so have you figured out the balance or do you even care about that balancing anymore?

Oh no, I care very much. I work harder on setlists now than I ever worked on them back in the day.

So start here: you’re playing guaranteed six, seven songs because they’re quote unquote classics.

So speaking personally: What does that feel like to me? Well, I have an immense sense of pride to stand there and think pretty much everybody in the stadium knows these songs. That’s pretty cool. That means we did something right and so we have a lot of pride. We don’t feel somehow diminished because we quote “have to play a song.” And trust me, as I tried to say in that [Kerrang] interview and it got clickbaited to hell: Anybody who knows me knows if I didn’t want to play “1979,” we wouldn’t be playing it. So my point was if I’m playing it, it’s because I really want to play it.

Somehow that got taken out of context to “I don’t want to play my hits.” As I like to tell people behind the scenes: at least I got hits to decide to play or not. 

For us, it’s about “What story do you want to tell?” So let’s look at [“The Saviors Tour”] set for example.

We open with “The Everlasting Gaze,” which wasn’t a big hit but it was on MTV a little bit. We assume that most of the audience that’s gonna know the song are our fans but a general fan wouldn’t. 

Second song is “Doomsday Clock,” which is off the album Zeitgeist which was very controversial when it came out in 2007 and the album is not even currently available on streaming services. So we play a song that you can’t even get, even if you want to hear it after we play it.

The third song we play is a very Smashing Pumpkins cover of U2’s “Zoo Station” with the drum solo in the middle.

It isn’t until our fourth song that we play a song like “Today.” 

Why would we do that? Why would you play in front of 20,000; 30,000 people who are taking their seats, why wouldn’t we start with a famous song like “Bullet with Butterfly Wings”? 

It’s because we want to say “This is who we are.”

Who we are is just as much playing songs you don’t know as it is playing songs you know. Now, if you are gonna play to 40,000 people and play a song that they don’t know, you got to have some real confidence that what you’re going to play says something to them where they go, “OK, I don’t know what they’re doing but I get it.”

That’s our legacy for over 30 years and there aren’t a lot of bands out there that are willing to take those chances in front of tens of thousands of people, so that’s the way we roll.

At concerts, when I was growing up, you would hear new material or you would hear material you weren’t aware of. A show was a lot more about music discovery. Obviously people are doing music discovery a different way now but  do you still see your sets as a way for even your fans to discover new music and if you’re playing with Green Day for their fans to discover new music? Do you still see the value of using live as a way for people to explore your music?

Not so much anymore and trust me that that angers me and that’s hard for me to say. We’ve had to bifurcate what we’re trying to do. In essence, the live band is one part of the business and the band on record is another and there are times where it works and there are times where it doesn’t cross over, so the live band has to stand on its own as a live band and the recording band has to stand on its own as a recording band.

How do you even deal with that? Obviously you have touring musicians who aren’t with you in the studio but I mean, as a mental exercise, what is that like?

It starts with the level of acceptance where you can sit there and get caught up in the “way it used to be” or you can say we have an opportunity here. 

Here’s somebody who’s 20 years old, let’s say they don’t know any of our songs and let’s say even if they like what we do, they’re not going to run to Spotify and listen to our new record. The one thing we’ve learned in the social media age is engagement is king, so we look at it as can we engage that person into our story, so if they go on and they look up a video or they log on to our social media and just see where we’re at or what we’re doing and look at some pictures: that for us is a win.

In the old days if you’d asked me, I’d say if they don’t go and buy Mellon Collie instantly, then we’ve lost. I don’t think like that at all anymore. That’s just not the way it is you but it starts with an acceptance. You can sit there and say this isn’t right or it shouldn’t be this way, but well…

Look at the disparity between our streaming numbers and our sales in terms of the records. I think last year on Spotify we had 32 million unique listeners and 500 million plays or something. Those are pretty good numbers and those numbers are really up. Our monthly listeners on Spotify alone are up about 30 plus percent in the last couple years.

It’s definitely like the hockey stick to use the climate analogy.

So you could sit there and go, “Oh my God there’s 32 million people just on Spotify alone listening. What are we gonna sell on this new record in terms of CD and vinyl?” 

If you’re going to get lost in that, that’s like old math.

We’ve had a very good conversion rate for young people in the past 10 years if they find us at all. If there’s a social media playlist of a song or if they hear us in a movie, hear us in a commercial, we’ve got a really good rate there where they become real fans.

So that still works for us if they come in contact with us and they’re open, they go down the rabbit hole. Kids will come up to me and say, “My dad introduced me to your band and I love your band so much I got all the records.” And it’s like, oh my God, this is a dream because you’ve been told for 20 years that dream is dead.

That almost goes back to the 4-year- old and 81-year-old, right? If you grab a kid who’s 12 and in 20 years they have kids and then it goes on and on.

I’m trying to paint the positive part of a tough picture. I’ll give you a perfect example and this might sound a little strange but I’m up there in front of 45,000 people, sold-out stadium, packed all the way to the top row and we got an hour to play.

I think we’ve done 13 shows now with Green Day and only one time in the 13 have I said, “Hey we have a new album,” and it’s not because I don’t want to and it’s not because I’m not tempted to, but I still think in some way you’re chasing a pipe dream. 

In our brain, the best way to get them to listen is to be the best possible rock band.

I don’t think that cutting a commercial is going to somehow send them all running to their phones to buy the album.

We got offered by Green Day to use the screen above us where we could put something like “We have a new album out” or put our logo. We’ve got nothing. It’s blank.

Our mentality is let’s seize this moment and trust that if we can still be a top rock and roll band, that will get it done. Don’t feel like you got to be gimmicky, don’t do something silly, don’t do something for social media that’s dumb to get attention.

I know it sounds a little bit cheesy but you gotta trust rock ’n’ roll will get it done.

That’s how you can stay vital as an artist and not just say “I’m gonna play Mellon Collie every night for the rest of my life.”

That’s why we look at set construction. Why wouldn’t we just play a bunch of songs? Why wouldn’t we try to maximize our own catalog?

Because we don’t feel that’s actually what converts people. Our experience has been — obviously it’s different guys, different years, different band members — but our experience has been when we do what we do in the way that only we can do it, that works better than any silly thing you can say or do.

That’s beautiful. That’s what any artist would hope for, I think.

Let’s look at the Stones, which is the greatest touring entity ever created.

Why are people still going to see the Stones in their 80s? Obviously the song catalog is there but why are young people going to see the Stones in their 80s? Because they represent and they embody something that is so singular you have to go and see them, even if you’re in the back of a stadium.

They don’t just kick ass when they’re on stage. Keith’s a living institution, Mick’s still running around like he’s 25, not to mention still fathering children left and right. I guess what I’m trying to say is what do you believe in? What do you want people to believe in? Our thing is rock music, you know? I mean, it ain’t cuz I’m cute.

What I find interesting about your summer is you’re doing the stadiums with Green Day and you’re playing to huge crowds but then you also have your own headline tour of amphitheaters in between. So how do you view those differently?

It’s weird because we haven’t opened for anybody since 1992 so it’s a bit of an adjustment. We’re going on when the sun’s still up and people are taking their seats and it’s not all about you like it normally is.

Then the next night you’re in an amphitheater … where there’s probably 10,000 or 12,000 people to see us and now you go on and you’ve got the lights and the dusk and shadows and all that.

That’s such a great part about an amphitheater show, when the evening begins and the headliner starts. It’s such a cool moment.

Yeah, but it is a different mentality because when you’re the opener, most of the people are there to see the headliner, which is great because they’re filling up a stadium.

What you want to do is win people over who maybe have no opinion or are, let’s say, not positive. You want to walk out of there with more than you came in with. I was a kid once in the audience and watching W.A.S.P.  open for Metallica and my natural mentality was not to like W.A.S.P. because they weren’t Metallica. It’s just opening band problems and it’s fine, we know how to navigate that and we’ve done really well and we’re very appreciative of Green Day giving us the spot, but then when you’re a headliner and you got 12,000 people there and they paid to see you? Well, you better give them a show, you know? They expect to get more than just singing a song, they want to see it. It’s a bit of a reality show up there.

Did you have to think back to 32 years ago and think what did we do as an opener in 1992 and do we try to match that energy?

I went into it with an open mind because I just assumed it’s not going to be an easy walk and, to be fair, [Green Day’s] audience has been really welcoming but obviously we play different types of music so it’s been really nice to play in front of their crowd.

We were about two or three gigs in and I started having flashbacks to opening for the Chili Peppers. I started getting that same feeling. You see the guy yawning and you see the person on their phone and it’s that sort of thing, I’ve got to inwardly navigate this because I have to accept this person is not here to see us.

So what do I do about it? Are they the enemy? Do I have to jump around? You go through this inner checklist of “is this a good thing or is it a bad thing?”

 We saw AC/DC recently play a stadium show in Germany and I was struck by how concise their set was and how little talking there was. It was just like bam-bam-bam and after that show I said to [drummer] Jimmy (Chamberlin) this is the way we’ve got to play opening for Green Day. No talking, no “Hee-Haw” stuff, just get up there and rock and that’s been a good call.

It’s interesting that even at this point in your career, you’re still learning lessons about performance. Obviously AC/DC’s legendary and their live shows are legendary but I guess you can never take for granted that you know everything.

You can see from our recording career we’ve always put ourselves in an uncomfortable position because we feel that’s where we’re always at our best. When we’re too comfortable we actually get suspicious of ourselves.

It’s not akin to laziness, just a feeling that shouldn’t this be harder? So we’ll create challenges for ourselves and it’s been a great challenge and been a really fun summer so far.

You talk about challenging yourself and never getting complacent and, not to put words in your mouth, the new record feels almost out of the garage to me, like maybe you were trying to go back to that place.

We’d gone conceptually about as far as we could go without sort of recentering ourselves and the challenge wasn’t to create a modern rock record by hiring the hot Pro Tools producer of the day. The challenge was: can we refire the same elemental aspects that brought out so much great music in such a short period of time between 1990 and 1996?

What were the inner circumstances? Obviously, we’re past poverty and we’re past doubt but what were the elemental forces that musically set us in motion and created really exciting and enduring music that from a live perspective still holds up really well?

We re-engineered that way of working and it took a hot second to remember and set it all back up but then once we did the results felt not only kind of old school but also modern somehow. Maybe because of everything we had learned in the interim and it had been a good 28 or so years since we really worked that way so it felt fun and fresh. And then even there were moments of “Oh, now I remember why I abandoned this way of working because here’s the limitation to this way of thinking” and so it was an interesting exercise and it yielded fruit. It was a lot of work but I think it was a good call.

It was also a surprise even to those of us who watch this sort of thing because it was maybe a two-week lead announcement and there’s a new record and we’re like, “What is happening?”

That was born of the fact that there was this furious argument going on behind the scenes about how to roll this thing out and the further on the argument went the less I felt it was about where the band was emotionally. So I just woke up one day and I said I just want to put the record out. I don’t care if there’s no physical product. I don’t care that we’re not doing the typical three months, you do the single and then the video and then here comes the album.

I said I just don’t care and to our manager [Red Light Management’s] Bruce’s [Eskowitz] credit, he said, “OK, I’m willing to back you up on this.” Not everybody liked it but that’s what we did and it’s worked so far.

There was talk about putting out the record before the election, factoring in that we’re in this hyperbolic cycle, the ultimate reality show that our elections have become.

Maybe it was because I was back in my old school brain but I was almost like the 26-year-old me was: I don’t care what’s going on, we’re putting out this record now. I don’t care if there’s an election, not an election, I don’t care. I just don’t care.

I just put it out and as blind as this might sound I was just like, it’s just music. 

If it’s good, people listen and if it’s not, they won’t and we’ll just make another record.

We’ve put out plenty of albums that people didn’t like at the time and we survived and then 10 years later they’re like, “Oh, actually this record’s really good.” It’s just music. It just gets so crass.

There was a recent “Lefsetz Letter” —  not my favorite guy in the world but somebody sent it to me — where he was talking about how the new modality is pop stars selling perfume. They don’t really need music anymore as long as they get their brand’s support.

Well, nobody’s calling me up to sell any perfume. I’m here to sell music.

What would a Billy Corgan perfume smell like?

Believe it or not, we just did a candle collaboration with a, I don’t know what the word is, but call it the candle sommelier. The candle company is called Lola James Harper and we did a collab based on Siamese Dream and it’s the two scents of Siamese Dream [“Mais Street” and “Purple Fuzz”] — so you can actually go and buy the Smashing Pumpkins scent if you want to. 

I want to talk about the new touring guitarist because I remember when you guys posted that you needed a guitarist on social media and I was thinking, “I can’t imagine what your email account looks like.” Did like half a million people write in?

There were 10,000 email submissions, but let me make it more personal. I was literally getting these kind of messages [like] from your former dental assistant: “Hey I know we haven’t talked in nine years but my cousin who’s 19 would like to try out. You know, he’s never played in a band but he’s really good on guitar.” It became like a Willy Wonka, golden-ticket type thing. 

It reminded me a lot of the flyers on the telephone poles with “Band Needs Guitarist” with the little slip with the phone number you pull off.

I thought it was kind of fun to do the egalitarian thing of  “Hey, we’re open” and what’s amazing is — and it’s still a work in progress — but all the indications are that we made the right choice [with Kiki Wong].

If we’d have gone to the normal channels, I don’t think Kiki would necessarily have been on that list but because we did it in an open process, Kiki was on that list. I knew who she was because I was already following Kiki on social media and I thought, “Oh great, I really like this person and I’m really curious to see how she would fit in our world.”

She was the first audition of the day and me and Jimmy looked at each other after and he kind of gave me this look like, “Wow that actually might work.” So she became the high water mark by which we judged everyone else as the day went on, and there were fantastic musicians. After we gave Kiki the job, she did this one interview and she said something about, “I know I’m not the greatest guitar player in the world but I really want to learn.” I wrote her after that and I said the reason we picked you was because you’re the right person. You’re the right person for this because the Pumpkins has a way of doing people’s heads — including original band members. 

It’s a very musically stressful environment. Not because of the historical myth that I’m the one applying all this tremendous pressure, it’s that the original band set up a system that in and of itself has a lot of pressure built into it.

We still play that way. It’s sort of an unconscious thing for us at this point, we’re used to it but for outside musicians to come in? Mike Garson, who is most famous as Bowie’s pianist, has played with us at different times and even toured with us in the late ’90s. Mike’s classically trained, a jazz pianist and also played on some of the biggest pop songs of all time for one of the greatest artists of all time in David Bowie. 

Mike would tell us in his Brooklynese, “You guys are fucking out there.” He was like, “I’ve never played with anybody that even thinks the way you guys think.”

I could ask you to explain what you mean, but could I even understand if you tried?

I can give you the concise and most honest answer. When we first started and we were nobodies in Chicago and nobody was paying attention to us, we lit on something which was really interesting. We’re never going to be better than The Beatles and we’re never gonna be better than Black Sabbath and we’re certainly never gonna play better than Rush and I’m never gonna sing better than Robert Plant, so what is there for us to do?

We wanted to do this and we wanted to take it somewhere and back then that would have meant selling out a 1,000-seat club. We weren’t so crazy as to think we’re gonna be on stage at Madison Square Garden. We weren’t dreaming that big.

So we lit on something that was essentially like — and Brian Eno was probably the person most associated with this philosophy — the deconstructionist philosophy, which is we’re willing to do things that nobody would do because they’re not cool enough.

We were taking like UK shoegaze and Sabbath and Rush and Rainbow and the Ramones and we were clashing them together like atoms and just seeing what happened and the more we did it, the more negative feedback we got from the independent community who kept saying over and over again, “You can’t do that. That’s not cool, you can’t do that.”

But the more we did it, the bigger the audience got, so we must be doing something right. The vitriol increased as the audiences increased.

Once we were on the national, international stages, it just continued.

Go back and read any of the press on us in the ‘90s when we’re supposedly at our alleged peak. Think about that. We literally have one of the biggest selling albums of all time and the debate wasn’t about the music. It was about the way we rolled.

The image overtakes what you’re actually doing.

I’m saying this respectfully of these artists. I mean, how many lives has MGK had? How many lives does Halsey have? How many lives does P!NK have? How many lives does Miley Cyrus have? The Bowie-esque changing of the skin. It’s become de rigueur in the internet age, but when we were doing it, it was, “No no no, the Ramones are the Ramones, AC/DC’s AC/DC, Nirvana’s Nirvana. You cannot change your stripes because it’s some kind of inauthenticity.”

We’re like, first of all, we get the point you’re making but everybody’s fake. What is this need to believe that everybody is who they portray themselves as on TV? We hang out with these artists behind the scenes. They’re not these people every second of every day.

I mean, it’s like wrestling, right?

Yeah, you’ve got it! The more we poked fun at the artists and the more we destroyed the idea that you could actually live with the artifice as a transparent idiomatic way of presenting who you were creatively and musically, the more we were ostracized.

It’s the classic thing, like if you were watching a Bruce Lee movie and then in the middle of the fight the guy turned the camera and said “you know this isn’t real and he’s really not hitting me. OK, back to the fight.” The more we did that, the more pissed off people got.

Do you still encounter people trying to pigeonhole you into specific time periods? Or when you go to a festival and somebody asks why Smashing Pumpkins is here and you say “Well, we’re a hard guitar band and this is a rock festival?” It seems strange that people have all these different sorts of stereotypes about your band that are all different.

I don’t like lying with the enemy but to be fair to that constructive critique, we built it, right? We are the masters of the construction. That’s what they get lost in: they actually think we don’t realize that we’re being laughed at.

But, no we’re the clowns who put on makeup to get you to laugh at us to expose the fact that you’re living in a hypocritical structure and this is where we get our energy. 

Hence us playing in front of 40,000 people at a baseball stadium playing a deconstructed version of a somewhat obscure U2 song. 

We know that when we’re playing it most people don’t even know we’re doing a cover. Why are we doing it? Because we want to do it. It’s as simple as that.

A lot of artists say, “We’re playing what we want to play because we’ve achieved this level of success after so long,” but it almost feels like you’re saying “We’ve always done this, we’ve always done what we wanted to do.”

When Jimmy and I brought the band back in 2007, 2008, Irving Azoff was our sort of leading manager when he was running Front Line Management. God bless him, I love Irving, I got a lot of love for Irving. There’s no heat there, to use the wrestling term. 

But he’d say, “You know we get these calls, the promoters are mad because you guys aren’t playing enough old material.” And I’d send him the setlist to show that two-thirds of the set list is old. And he’d say, “Well, you’re not playing enough hits.” And I send him the set list and go “There’s 12 singles on the setlist.” And he’d say, “Well, you’re not playing the right hits.”

You get this shit like that and it’s, like who’s running this show? What does this mean?

And this is where it gets really tricky, because you run into the real cynicism. If you could give them truth serum and get the real truth, the real truth is someone in the chain or all of them have decided that your best days are behind you and your real value is in reaping the past. 

But they don’t tell you that to your face. They lead you on and say, “Oh yeah, sure you got a future, sure, and we’ll put out the new album, sure, sure, sure, sure, sure.” But then you do the math you realize nobody believes and if you look at the Gen X business overall for a good 15 years nobody really believed.

I mean, the last truly huge massive alternative rock record was American Idiot if I’m not wrong.

You may be right. I was thinking about that record today and then I realized how old it was. And then I got sad.

Have you noticed like in the last three or four years all of a sudden, everybody’s waking up and going, “Actually, I do want to hear new Green Day and actually, I do want to hear new Pumpkins?” It’s almost like suddenly everybody’s like, “You know what? That other thing’s too boring. How many times can I see my favorite band play the same songs?” 

And by the way, the young people? They don’t give a fuck. The young people we’re playing in front of? They just want to rock. They’re more interested in the legend than they are the setlist, which is really weird because all we heard for 20 years was “setlist, setlist, setlist” to the point of nausea, and we were never a setlist band back in the day.

So we’re like what the fuck is this? It’s like somebody decides who you are and now you have to be that guy forever and we’re like but that’s not who we are, we’ve never been that guy and then you got Irving on the email chain, “Oh, you know you’re hurting your business blah blah.”

But what I’m trying to say, because there’s no negativity in me at the moment: It’s the positive message of, “We survived it.” Our way wasn’t the right way maybe in 2007 or 2015 but it’s the right way now and then the minute people start connecting the dots then you start turning into an institutional thing like Rush is and that’s reserved for very few artists.

When Bowie died, everybody ran around and suddenly David was a saint and everyone’s crying and I was like, “You remember how you all treated him in the ’90s?”

He got treated like dog shit in the ’90s. I caught David playing European festivals at 6 p.m., third from the bottom of the bill, opening for a band with one fucking trendy hit.

So I don’t want to hear this “legend” because to me David was still David Bowie, he was still Ziggy Stardust. But he got treated like shit because it was “setlist, setlist, setlist.”

I had some private conversations and I was blessed to talk to him about those periods of life and he struggled between ’85 and ’95. He would say “I don’t know what to do anymore because I’m under all these different stresses and you know the legend and all that stuff.” 

And he flirted with retiring and then somewhere about ’95 when he signed with Virgin he started making super highly credible music and those late ’90s albums are amazing. 

I have some private knowledge but I’m speaking more like a fan now but you know it took him going, “I don’t care what you think anymore, I’m just gonna make music that I believe in, even if it’s a little spacey or jazzy or whatever. You know, I’m getting older, my voice is changing and I’m gonna make music I believe in.”

And that broke that spell of [trying to] control David Bowie, the institution: “I’m fucking David Bowie, I control this shit, this is my circus.” 

The last tour he did and I think he knew that it was gonna be his last tour, those shows were unbelievable.

It’s got to be freeing though, but it’s weird to hear about David Bowie struggling with the idea of being in control of himself because the legend of David Bowie is this always-changing, always-controlling the message guy.

We played a TV show with him in France and it’s like 1995. He was playing live and we were playing live and then we were interviewed together. And I went up to him and he was just wearing a blue jean shirt and jeans or something. He looked good but it looked like he was just going to go out for dinner. And I said, “What character is this?” and he goes, “It’s me.” 

It’s crazy. He finally got to be himself.