Billy Corgan and The Smashing Pumpkins perform and interact with intellect and swagger for a full house of fans in the XM Performance Theater. Hear a workshop style of their songs to a powerful Q&A session. The Smashing Pumpkins mesmerize in this edition of Artist Confidential.
The aforehyped program, recorded July 10 in Washington (full setlist from spfc.org) and surely edited down in the interim, has its premiere airing at 9pm Central on XM Ethel (ch. 47). Listen along (((free stream from AOL))) as we “live”-blog this occasion.
8:04pm: The XM Ethel DJ spins “That’s the Way” to warm up the listening audience. 56 minutes until mesmerization…
8:50pm: The DJ instructs listeners not to “pee [their] pants” but instead to use the “lavoratory” (ph; sic) during the 10 minutes until the show begins. Does everyone have to be gross these days?
8:57pm: DJ, who seems to prefer to say “Billy Corgan” rather than “Smashing Pumpkins”, chooses Nirvana’s “Pennyroyal Tea” as the last song before the program. Hey, if you have something to say, dude, just spit it.
9:01pm: Loooong packaged generic intro, then a Pumpkin-specific medley of studio tracks, several greatest hits and then several Zeitgeist tracks.
9:03pm: Zzzz…intro finally ends; your host, Lou Brutus, says “the only thing better in Chicago than Wrigley Field is the Smashing Pumpkins.” Crowd claps. Band launches into an acoustic “That’s the Way”.
9:08pm: “What kind of Smashing Pumpkins album are we going to make?” Billy said that he and Jimmy asked themselves in Scottsdale in late 2005. “The original feel of [”That’s the Way”] was something like…” Billy starts to play and asks Jimmy to join in with the “original beat”, and Jimmy does. “We love the idea of the song, but it reminds us too much of Mellon Collie.” Billy says they didn’t want to reject the idea, but to adapt it (as Flood might have suggested); coming up with a new rhythmic pattern on the guitar moved the song “from 1995 to 2005″.
9:12pm: “People have a rosy opinion of what we did, but it isn’t always the reality of what we did.”
9:13pm: Billy begins “For God and Country”…
9:17pm: …and the band finishes it. Re: “For God and Country”, Billy says it was a “last-second entry” for the recording sessions that was originally a “Civil War dirge”, like a “funerary, there-goes-our-country thing”. A cheap keyboard provided a disco beat that Jimmy and Billy incorporated into the final album version.
9:21pm: Billy on the thematic overtones of the record: “I feel I’m drowning in a bunch of [political] crap, and I don’t know what to do or say about it.”
9:22pm: Billy introduces “Neverlost”, which he says they created in their last moments together before breaking for Christmas vacation.
(no timestamp) A general comment: Billy sounds quite energized, even excited, while talking, and is quite funny. Sorry that isn’t coming across so much in what I’m getting down.
9:28pm: Jimmy, discussing Roy Thomas Baker, says the world formulates grandiose stories about people who have fallen out of the public eye; he and Billy found the stories about Roy to have been false, and further found in him a soulmate, someone who approaches art in the same way they do. “He wore us out with his energy and his willingness to go the extra mile.”
9:30pm: “Every performance on Zeitgeist is a live performance,” Jimmy says, with “no digital editing or click tracks at all.”
9:34pm: After an impassioned complaint about the state of the music business and its obsession with “short money”, an amused Billy exults in his ability to swear on satellite radio. “Fuck ‘em. Fuck ‘em with a song - ‘Backdoor Sally’ - ready? 1, 2…” “Bleeding the Orchid” ensues.
9:39pm: “Ironically, that song is about what we just talked about.”
9:40pm: Lou is (not the only one) curious to how “United States” is going to come across acoustically. “I personally have always been afraid of the shuffle,” Jimmy says. He and Billy kick into some shuffle-based “good-time boogie”. The beat for “United States” is, Billy says, a Pink Floyd-influenced modified shuffle beat.
9:45pm: The journey begins.
9:52pm: The journey ends rather anticlimactically.
9:53pm: Billy says to fans: “We’re committed to the band for good… The band is not going to go away as an emotional identity until we’re dead.” He cites Neil Young, whom he describes as an artist who is forever making music for “right now”, as a model for where the band wants to go - but he says it’s “uncharted territory” (as many of their peer bands are gone) and that fan support will be necessary for them to succeed.
9:56pm: “We thought we’d do one oldie.” Crowd claps, and “Today” starts.
10:00pm: “Thank you.” Roll credits with special thanks to caterer Red Hot and Blue. XM 47 resumes regular programming with Social Distortion’s “Bad Luck”, thus in my mind clinching passive-aggressive hater status for the nasty DJ.
I’m still attempting to process what I just saw last night, but in the absence of a podcast this week I thought I’d get a few thoughts down to clarify some of what we said in the 
This week we pondered the idea of the Pumpkins as a “collective”, speculated on whether the band will have another mainstream hit, and reviewed last year’s acoustic Berlin secret show. See the end of the show notes for a chance to take part in a future episode of the podcast.
Billy Corgan and the Fellowship of Broken Toys
Following up on the previous blog on sp.com regarding recording sessions, it was 
