Appearing on YouTube today is some very dark fan-shot video from a Q&A session with Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan prior to the group’s recent “White Crosses” concert in Boston. (Linking to fan-conducted and -filmed interviews isn’t our #1 choice for most ethical blogging behavior, but sometimes newsworthiness trumps.) If you’re wondering what’s up with the band’s attitude on this tour, here Corgan — speaking while seated next to drummer Jimmy Chamberlin — spells it out:

fan: …integrity as you like strive forward and you know, the need to be creative, how do you, what do draw upon to keep the faith in your own musical output? Your songwriting, your endeavors, how do you keep faith in it, you know, before you get an audience feedback or before you can stamp it out…

Billy Corgan: I would say at this point our faith in our audience has never been lower. We are literally…

fan: I mean your music, not your audience…

BC: No, you have to understand, we’re still making music for people to listen to.

fan: Right.

BC: When we were younger we very much looked to the audience to give us a sense of who we were and what we wanted to do, and then we kind of worked with it and against it. And I think now we’ve become extremely insular. We’re really not listening to anybody anymore. Because, it’s not like we look around and see a tremendous amount of good music and we feel left out of something. We feel like we’re sort of on our own little island, standing for the things that we grew up with: you know, good playing, good singing, good songs. And we feel like somehow that’s working against us in the general culture, which is kind of…to us it’s mind-boggling. That’s like saying, that’s like saying a Major League hitter is better, he’s better if he hits .200 than .300. But that’s the world we live in. It’s a .200-hitting world. You write one weak fucking song that everybody likes, you’re better than a band that’s an excellent band that has a legacy and a history.

fan: So at the end of the day what do you tell yourself to keep going, that you are making good music?

BC: That history shows that cultures have a hard time appreciating certain artists in certain times because they don’t fit the cultural perspective. And you can see it in painting, you can see it in film. We all go to the Best Buy and there’s a film, it’s like, it was totally overlooked and nobody thought it was good at the time and now it’s become like a classic. Well, we think of ourselves as a classic band, and it doesn’t matter if we keep getting overlooked — at some point somebody is going to turn around and realize we’ve just done more better than other people, and we’ll be, we’re willing to be measured on that. But we cannot ride with the culture of this time because this is absolutely the shittiest culture I’ve ever lived in.

[fans laugh, there is a shout of “Amen!” and another of “I agree.”]

BC: The amount of mediocrity is frightening. I lived through disco, I’m old enough to remember disco. [fans laugh] This is worse than disco. This is worse than disco, and that’s nobody’s fault. We’re all sort of in the same boat. So, when you ask a question like that, I mean, you’re looking at the inspiration. We just turn to each other. If he thinks it’s good, and I think it’s good, it really doesn’t matter what anyone thinks. And we’ve reached that point with each other, where we’re secure in our belief in what we do that if, I mean, you know, bad review, bad fan, bad…you know, whatever — it doesn’t matter anymore. I mean, it doesn’t feel good, but it doesn’t really change anything.

(Thanks to HU blogger Andrew for transcribing this!)

At the very end of last night’s first “Black Sunshine” hometown show, the Smashing Pumpkins singer said this:

This doesn’t speak to everyone, but many of you — we don’t know what the fuck you want from us… Last I checked we were an “alternative” band. “Alternative” means different than what everyone else is doing, including those reunion bands that go out and just play the old songs. So, for those of you we disappointed, we’re sorry; we hope you give us another chance. For those of you that love us, we will report to torture [ed. of course] you for twenty more years, at least. God bless.

(Video taken by HU reader Cara!)

Listen live to WLS here.

2:09pm CT: Hosts and callers are making so-hilarious jokes about a proposal for a gays-only high school in Chicago. (The Pumpkins have yet to appear or be mentioned.)

2:30pm: The hosts are now bantering about an upcoming Chicago performance to be given by…Richard Marx. Somehow this leads into the first mention that the Smashing Pumpkins will be joining them a little later in the show. (Probably around 3:30pm CT.)

3:13pm: So far, fans of “Soul Train” host Don Cornelius have been given more to chew on than we have been.

3:27pm: TV newsman Ron Magers is exiting, with the rockers about to claim their seats in the studio. If you’ve been waiting to tune in, do so now!

3:40pm: An unspecified “mistake” has been made, and as a result the band members are in the “green room” and are “refusing” to enter? The hosts are making light of whatever the situation is…

3:43pm: Roe Conn says, “I’m going to go talk to the Smashing Pumpkins and see if I can convince them…” and then trails off and returns to filling time with a discussion of some unrelated t-shirt deal and, then, the stock market.

3:47pm: “We’ll come right back with your Pumpkins after this.” Cue commercials.

3:52pm: “The Smashing Pumpkins are hiding. They stormed out of the green room…and are refusing to go on before [other guest] Ben Vereen. There was an argument that broke out between the Pumpkins and Ben Vereen. I don’t know what to do about this.” Haha… (Conn is saying this all in good humor, so it’s hard to know what parts or how much of it to take seriously.)

4:01pm: “Billy Corgan in the building! Jimmy Chamberlin also…” but first the news.

4:08pm: They at last kick off the interview with the classic clip of Corgan talking to Homer Simpson, and then the sounds of “Tarantula”. The hosts joke with Jimmy about his playing air-drums to the song.

4:10pm: Billy says his first concert was Asia at the Auditorium Theatre, at age 14, in the “crazy top tier” of seats.

4:13pm: Billy recounts a recent stunt in Tampa, where the band pretended to end the show before an “unwelcome” Billy Sr. came on stage to plug in and blues-rock out.

4:17pm: The hosts lurch from grilling Jimmy about women to asking Billy about his appearance on “Bozo: 40 Years of Fun!”. That’s some local flavor. Billy recounts a story about seeing his favorite Bozo (Bob Bell) on his 11th birthday. Apparently, during the Grand March exit, his tender pre-pubescent ears heard curse words out of the famous clown’s mouth. Jimmy cackles.

4:22pm: Roe Conn pimps the new DVD, asking if it’s available on the website (uh, yes) and promoting the shows this week in Chicago. Presumably, it’s time for the Pumpkins to head to soundcheck for their show tonight.

4:24pm: The clip of Homer Simpson plays: “I’llll miss you Pumpkins.” Show’s over, folks.

4:29pm: …though the hosts did come back after the commercial still talking about the band, spinning “Tribute to Johnny” (!) as transition music and with Conn saying that those who miss James and D’Arcy should “get over it”. Now I will close the streaming-audio player. Blog’s over, folks!

While other Chicago music writers (including friend and rival Greg Kot at the Chicago Tribune) have weighed in this morning with first-night reviews ranging from negative to worshipful, Jim DeRogatis has clearly been the most interested of the bunch in the return of the Smashing Pumpkins — and with a followup blog post this morning, he’s the most interesting as well.

The veteran analyst dives in where others have feared or failed to tread, putting out perhaps the most plausible explanation of this tour that anyone (fan or critic) has yet offered. His entire post is a must-read, but here is the center of it:

[M]y guess is that night one links up with night two (”White Crosses”) to form a two-part story arc tracing, I dunno, his band’s journey from hard-rocking, optimistic early days (it all began with “Everybody Clap Your Hands,” remember, and “Siva” came early on, too) through painful darkness and turbulent destruction (”Superchrist”/”United States”) to his beloved band being reduced to a mere automated facsimile of a superstar rock group (”Heavy Metal Machine”). As a result, the musicians turn bitter and angry and decide to punish their fans with the most extreme noise and tweeness they can deliver (”Set the Controls,” followed by the kazoos).

Then things move toward the white light again (”White Crosses”) and the artistes find their spiritual center and Pumpkins Mach II prevail at the end of night two. Or something like that.

Why, if almost everyone has hated this tortured routine on earlier tour stops, does Corgan persist with it? The man has never been anything less than 100-percent committed (and some say that he should BE committed) to his grand conceptual conceits, even when no one understands or likes them.

Chicago Sun-Times rock critic Jim DeRogatis has this evening reposted to his blog several of his past writings regarding the Smashing Pumpkins. This segment of an April 2000 exchange (just prior to two shows in Chicago) with frontman Billy Corgan seems particularly relevant to the current moment:

[DeRogatis]. Do you feel that you’ve matured?

[Corgan]. Oh, I don’t know. Just when I would think I wouldn’t write about personal stuff anymore, I would turn around and a write a whole album about it. As I’ve always said, if I could have chosen what I wanted to do, I wouldn’t have chosen these things.

[DeRogatis]. There’s that perverse streak. Do you enjoy confounding expectations?

[Corgan]. I enjoy the energy in that. I don’t find comfort energizing. Inside, there must be some sort of thing in me that needs to be contentious.

Okay, I just watched The Fillmore Residency, a.k.a. the main dish on If All Goes Wrong DVD #2. That was sweet.

Three of the 15 songs are performed by Billy Corgan and Lisa Harriton alone, those being “Peace+Love+Shit”, “Death from Above”, and “Winterlong”. Given my previously expressed fondness for that duo’s takes on “Death from Above” and “That’s the Way”, you might expect that I’d be all about these performances too…and boy, would you be right. I only watched it once, but I thought “Peace+Love” was the shit.

Better keep an eye on your man, Jimmy…he just might have another musical soulmate in the band these days.

Adam Graham of the Detroit News politely writes up the new Smashing Pumpkins documentary:

Seen mostly moping around hotel rooms in a long nightgown you’d expect your grandmother to wear to bed, Corgan spends much of the film writing and performing new songs, most of them unmemorable. But he’s trying, and the concerts are not hit parades or quick cash-ins, but rather creative experiments designed around exploring the dynamic between band and audience and the expectations of both.

Mostly, it’s Corgan’s interactions with die-hard fans that show the gap between what he’s expected to be and what he truly is: a man — albeit a famous one whom many people idolize — trying to find his way.

Martha’s Vineyard Times writer Ben Williams is more enthused:

It is the weight of [Corgan’s] character that drives the documentary forward. He seems to answer the movie’s title with a loud, “Keep going,” repeatedly regaining momentum as everything from tired audiences to disillusionment with San Francisco challenge what his band is or should be.

Despite the film’s tendency to provide only parts of songs, the music is presented wonderfully. One of the heights of the movie is the strobe-strewn guitar solo of “Gossamer,” which has impressive energy coming through the Capawock [Theatre]’s sound system.

As Commander Corgs might put it, Jester John Petric of the Other Paper didn’t get the joke — but he did appreciate the rock:

At least when idiot bands like Phish pull a Halloween stunt, it’s surrounded by a sense of fun—patchouli-drenched stink-bomb fun, but fun nevertheless. Bill the Butcher’s “acoustic” set was about as much fun as Ryan Adams looking in the mirror.

But when the electric Pumpkins finally came on, sans Halloween costumes, they did prove— once again—that they are one of the great rock bands. Especially with the drums manned by the powerful Jimmy Chambers [sic], whose precision timing and ability to make his skins speak in tandem with Corgan’s seriously dynamic guitar playing make the pair perhaps the most underrated team in music.

The bottom line:

[A]dd tons of bone-splintering, wicked guitar riffing, a crack band, a sold-out house, Halloween and Billy’s megalomaniacal personality, and it was a strangely memorable night. In the end, I admired him for being such a gigantic and talented asshole.

His commentary during last night’s concert in Toronto is featured among a variety of rock-and-roll reactions posted on the Brooklyn Vegan blog.

UPDATE: Here’s a higher-quality video than that posted…by the Vegan? on “The Vegan”?

The above video is a bit blurry and you can’t see Stephen Bradley or Gabrial McNair at all, but you sure can hear them and Gingger Shankar backing Billy Corgan and Josh Groban on the Siamese Dream chestnut.

Getty Images offers nothing but tightly cropped shots of Billy Corgan (including a few with “Disarm” lead singer Josh Groban) at the Bridge School Benefit on Sunday. Hey, celeb photogs and editors, there were eight other people playing music on stage…

UPDATED UPDATE: Flickr user Tree Hugger shows us how it’s done, getting a variety of great images, including the hornists Stephen and Gabrial, Lisa, Ginger, Jimmy, Billy’s shoes, Mr. Pooley (on flute!), Jeff, and the, uhm, other instrumentalist Gingger (on Double Violin!). (Sorry, Google failed to help me figure out what a double-neck five-stringed violin-like instrument is called!)

On the occasion of the revitalization of his band’s website, the head Pumpkin (picture above from G4TV, more here) holds forth on an array of topics. You’ll likely want to read the whole thing, but here are some particular points of note:

Last evening we were able to play for the first time as a 9 piece version of the band, which is very exciting. The more we let go of how the band is supposed to appear numbers-wise and more of what it is supposed to sound like heart-wise, the closer we get to a present kind of truth. …

The night before we played the new Guitar Hero release party, which was great fun. I swore I kept hearing someone from the crowd yelling over and over, ‘where are the Smashing Pumpkins?’. I think I imagined it but either way it made me chuckle to myself.

So two very different shows over 2 days, and we were able to play 4 new songs: Owata, A Song for a Son, As Rome Burns, and a 2012 version of Simon and Garfunkels ‘The Sounds of Silence’. We’ve rehearsed now for 3 weeks for the 20th Anniversary tour, so I trust we have a few more suprises in store. That is, if you dare come to watch us piss on our own grave. …

If anyone comes to this tour expecting a hand-holding, teary-eyed tribute to a dead band, forget it. That is long gone. Outside of 9 shows in 1999, that band hasn’t existed whole since 1996.

Let me take this pause then to say a few things about our former bandmates…

We absolutely, without reservation, honor James and D’arcy. There is no qualification to that statement. We honor them IN FULL. They were there, then. And together we did some incredible things. But let me go one step further. When Jimmy and I decided to move forward and begin again with SP we very openly addressed the question of James and D’arcy returning. We spoke honestly with each other about our feelings and personal reservations, and decided together that the door was open to them to return. Because it was the right thing to do. Honestly though it wasn’t suprising to us that they didn’t want to return, because that was consistent with their general position to date (and continues to be I might add), which is they see the band as something that they got away from for their own reasons. There were no conditions ever put on a return. They simply didn’t even want the conversation with us.

I can now say definitively that they aren’t ever coming back. Period. There is no maybe. If the door was once open to at least have the conversation and consider the possibility, it is now closed. For good. We have moved on. We love them, and we wish them well.

The Smashing Pumpkins are now whoever is standing on that stage, on any given day, with a willingness to play those songs. Not just any songs, those songs. Because its not just what we play, its how we play them. The music MUST come first. And that’s just the way it is.

Talking to Press Association Ltd. at the Spike awards, Billy Corgan reflected on a time when all went wrong:

It was interesting in a sense that we got a lot of things put on us that we didn’t ask for.

Like we never said reunion, we just said we’re gonna put the band back together and see who wants to do it.

Then it became ‘oh, these aren’t the original members’. Well, we never said it was going to be the original members.

Despite my efforts to avoid the word reunion, it has cropped up on HU from time to time. I think it is an inappropriate term not only because Corgan never used the word but primarily because no one reunited…Corgan and Chamberlin were never apart. Obviously, though, the press has used the word liberally — and even the band’s Wikipedia entry claims that “In April 2006, the band officially announced that it was reuniting”, the seeming inaccuracy of that statement and an effort to correct it not withstanding the one-man wikiocracy of user WesleyDodds:

Yes, it’s still a reunion, even if Corgan didn’t use the word

Smashing Pumpkins Prep New Album, 20th Anniversary Tour
Reunited band breaks out classic tunes for tour; concept disc to follow
DAVID BROWNE
Posted Oct 30, 2008 9:59 AM

For an article that was posted in the future, this one is low on shock value. There are a couple of fun quotes, including Billy Corgan referring to himself as “a guitar hero” (note lowercase!), and a hint that the Schroeder/Reyes Pooley/Harriton combo will be joined by “to-be-determined additional musicians” on the new tour. (Keep that accordion handy, Mr. Pooley.)

Anyone see something else in there we don’t already know?

Time Out Chicago editor Frank Sennett has posted an interview that he conducted with Smashing Pumpkins chief Billy Corgan prior to the band’s early August concert in nearby Hammond, Indiana. Sennett’s questions revolve around his toddlin’ town, and since Corgan is not running for President he feels free to be an elitist express himself:

[Frank Sennett]: Could you be a little more specific about how the values have changed?

Billy Corgan: Having grown up working-class, and around working class people, there was a kind of ‘Icarus’ thing, where it’s like, “Enjoy your time flying close to the sun because eventually you’re going to crash and burn and come home.” In any career there are times when you go up, and other times when you go down, and when we went down it was almost as though there was an inevitability attached to it— people were like, “Yeah, we knew you guys were going to come back down to earth.” Meanwhile, the band is continuing to grow and prosper around the world, but Chicago still seems attached to this idea that we never got back up, which is really strange. I don’t take it personally, I see it more as a working-class type of thing. I think that’s why so many people leave Chicago. They find they can’t get away from that. They almost have to go and create a new fantasy away from it, because in Chicago you’re constantly reminded— through commentary and things people say—that it is a working-class city. Working-class values are interesting in that sense of “work hard” equals struggle, equals you maybe will succeed, but if you succeed there is a time limit to that.

[FS]: They want to remind you that you’re no better than anybody else.

Thank goodness Billy has not taken those “reminders” too seriously… Moving on, Sennett inquired into the fate of material from Corgan’s all-but-forgotten post-Zwan-but-pre- TheFutureEmbrace period:

[FS]: A few years ago you played a solo acoustic show featuring your folk songs about Chicago. What kinds of things were you writing about, and is it still a project you are pursuing? What spurred you to start doing that?

[BC]: I felt very inspired because I had gone through a really serious depression after the break-up of a relationship. I was really in a bad place, and had pretty much moved out of the city. But at one point I had to come home and lick my wounds, and found that the city really embraced me on an emotional level. It wasn’t like the people on the street; I just felt embraced by the place. So this project was my way of honoring what I thought was great about the city. I started writing about stuff I had never though about writing about: the Chicago fire, the Leopold and Loeb case, the Cubs and Sox rivalry. I wrote about fourteen or fifteen Chicago-related songs and I did one performance at the Metro. I had planned on putting it out, but I found that the response to the songs and the direction I was going in was so underwhelming that I just got really disappointed and put it all away.

[FS]: Do you think you’ll revisit that at some point?

[BC]: The plan now is to let it sit for a while, and maybe pick it up and do a part two. To put maybe seven years or so between them, and then maybe make a documentary. I have all the footage from the first cycle. That’s the plan now, and it’s the best-case scenario I can think of.

There you have it, fans of “Black Irish” and “White Lights”: in the best-case scenario you will wait seven years (which at 8% interest is roughly half of forever) to purchase a fine recorded representation of those and others of the (so-called? was this a name Billy gave to them, or did the fans make this up?) ChicagoSongs. Thank goodness Billy changes his mind a lot…

HMM… Actually I read that too quickly, and I apologize. Corgan says he may put seven years “or so” between the recording of part one and the (future) recording of a possible part two. Given that the songs were recorded in 2004, that would put recording of a second set into 2011 (or so), with a release to follow thereafter. Maybe there is only 30% of forever to go!

A music lover scorned can be petty and heartless, especially when you’re one of the music world’s most prominent critics (Kot and DeRogatis, I’m looking at you).

But the Chicago music media is feeling less like an “ugly date” now that its prodigal son, Billy Corgan, and his mega-band are returning to the city by the lake for four shows in November.  Embracing the news, several local publications have picked up the story now that there’s no casino involved in Hammond, Indiana.  *gratuitous eye roll*

The latest Chicago Metromix article sarcastically opines “Smashing Pumpkins in Chicago?!” brought to you by none other than the aforementioned Greg Kot.  Thanks to my mother, Sally, for the tip.

Meanwhile, Billy Corgan graces the cover of the new issue of Time Out Chicago, which features an article entitled “Cultural Heroes” which lists Billy Corgan at the head of his class alongside other prominent figures in the scene oh yeah, and Steve Albini.  The article puts the moves on BC:

Billy Corgan, Musician

Even though the Smashing Pumpkins are bigger internationally than they are stateside these days, Corgan’s sticking with Chicago—he’s even written more than a dozen folk songs about such local subjects as the Great Chicago Fire and the Cubs-Sox rivalry. Corgan recounts wandering around Lincoln Park one emotionally tough day only to end up in front of Columbus Hospital where he was born. The moment “struck me as quintessentially Chicago,” he muses. The city “has this unassuming quality where you can find yourself back to where you started without really realizing it.”—Frank Sennett

The single “G.L.O.W.,” out this month, is the Smashing Pumpkins’ last release of ’08, but “a multiyear concept album” might be in the offing, Corgan says.

Under “The Builders” section, lifelong Smashing Pumpkins friend Joe Shanahan is also listed.

Thanks to HU reader Cara for the Time Out tip.