News 000517-1
BY DAN NAILEN - THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE
Billy Corgan cuts an imposing figure. The tall, lanky, chrome-domed lead singer of Smashing Pumpkins has moved from an early 1990s image as "alternative" rock's pastel-clad flower child to become a Goth dude for the new millennium, looking more like Nosferatu than the mastermind behind one of the biggest bands of the past 10 years.
Revered as the voice of alienated freaks and geeks everywhere, Corgan has earned a reputation as a taskmaster in the studio and ruthlessly efficient businessman, a gloom-and-doom prophet to the disgruntled masses. His image of being difficult to work with was recently abetted when Sharon Osbourne quit as the Pumpkins' manager after only a few months, citing health reasons: "Billy Corgan was making me sick." In other words, Osbourne found Corgan too much of a pain to work with, and she is married to bat-chomper Ozzy Osbourne.
Let it never be said, though, that Corgan lacks a sense of humor. On tour supporting the Pumpkins' latest opus, "MACHINA/the machines of God," Corgan registered at the Atlanta Four Seasons under the name Jake Lee, one of Ozzy's former guitar players.
"I picked one of the people that she hated the most," Corgan said, laughing, in an interview this week. The Smashing Pumpkins play a sold-out Saltair show Wednesday. "Plus, I thought he was a good guitarist."
Corgan's respect for the heavy-metal guitarist is not cool, ironic posturing. The 33-year-old is an acknowledged Cheap Trick junkie and fan of '70s and '80s rock and pop. "MACHINA" marks the band's return to the Big Rock Sound of early Pumpkins gems like "Gish" and "Siamese Dream," while Corgan continues to construct the techno flourishes that first appeared on the multiplatinum 1995 breakthrough album "Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness" and continued on the drummerless, dour "Adore."
As evidenced on such songs as "The Everlasting Gaze" and "Heavy Metal Machine," "MACHINA" was largely influenced by Corgan's passion for 1970s-era Rainbow and Black Sabbath. But Corgan said there were a lot of other albums on his turntable during the recording of "MACHINA" that were probably just as important.
"Every [Pumpkins] album seems to have its pile of records that seem to tick off something in my head," Corgan said. "It's just as much that I'm looking for something as it's looking for me. . . . Like in the artistic world, Picasso would get a vibe and he would study Rembrandt for a year, and he would paint all these Rembrandtesque pictures, trying to get a texture or something.
"That's how it is for me. With this record, it really started with Simple Minds. There's a texture in that '80s sort of sound that I thought was kind of interesting. And then, in the literal sense, we found a way to still get a big sound without having seven guitars playing. We had big sound without density, I guess. So it started with Simple Minds, and I tell people that and they laugh, they don't believe me."
From the time they started recording, the Pumpkins were slammed by indie-rock snobs for Corgan's perfectionism in the studio. Multilayered guitar tracks with an abundance of overdubs and effects just were not cool during the punk-fueled grunge days a decade ago, when the Pumpkins first appeared on the radar, but the record-buying public did not seem to mind. "Gish," their 1991 debut, went platinum, and each subsequent Pumpkins record sold in the millions as well. "For whatever reason -- the chemistry, the way things work -- we've always sort of overpainted our pictures," Corgan said. "I think subconsciously we never thought we would get a fair shake from the critical world, and I think it's almost an overprotective sense of trying to make it sound so perfect that it's almost beyond reproach. And we still get criticized. But that's OK. I still feel pretty confident we're the best-produced band of our generation. And I think that those records are going to hold up very well over time."
"MACHINA" and the accompanying Sacred and Profane Tour mark a rebirth of sorts for the band, aside from the return to a Big Rock Sound. Drummer Jimmy Chamberlin is back in the fold after being fired in 1995 for taking part in the overdose death of touring keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin. And just after the "MACHINA" sessions ended, original bassist D'Arcy Wretzky quit the band. Former Hole bassist Melissa Auf Der Maur took over Wretzky's spot and joined Corgan, Chamberlin and guitarist James Iha in time for the world tour.
After only touring to about 20 American cities on the "Adore" jaunt, the Pumpkins are doing serious road work this time around. They started by playing a series of record stores, including Tom Tom CDs in Sandy, when the new album was released, and they are now in the midst of a cross-country week through venues big and small. Saltair is one of the smaller venues on the tour, but Corgan insisted on stopping in Salt Lake City.
"A lot of markets don't have really good, midsize places," Corgan said. "They either have theaters with 2,500 [seats] or the Lamo-Dome with 10,000. We almost didn't come [to Utah]. I pretty much had to insist we play a place [Saltair] that most people agree is not a great place, but it was either that or not come.
"The Saltair, I went out there and visited it once in 1991 because I was so into the idea of an amusement park on the dead lake. I remember standing there and thinking, 'What a God-forsaken place,' and I was attacked by like a thousand gnats."