Billy Corgan made the great lost record. 3:28 pm // Saturday, June 23, 2012
Posted by jjb in amusing, analysis, billy corgan, chicagosongs, interview.trackback
During a Los Angeles meet-and-greet yesterday, this exchange (video) took place between KYSR-FM deejay Darren Rose and Smashing Pumpkins leader Billy Corgan:
Billy Corgan: If I told you my real opinions of every album, you’d probably laugh.
Darren Rose: Do you have a favorite?
Corgan: Not really, no. Honestly, I think the best album I’ve ever made I haven’t released. It’s sitting in a can at home. I did a solo acoustic record about my hometown of Chicago. And I played one show, and I thought the show was amazing, and then I went on like an idiot the next day and read what the fans were writing and they said ‘Can he just please pick up an electric guitar again? Screw this acoustic music, we don’t want to hear this shit, dadadada.’ And I said OK, and I put the album back in the can and it’s sitting there to this day. People who’ve heard it say it’s some of the most beautiful work I’ve ever done. It’s just sitting there.
The album in question, known as “ChicagoSongs” or “ChicagoKid” or both, dates to the 2002-2004 period and encompasses about fourteen or fifteen or seventy-two (yikes!) songs.
While Corgan seems to blame “the fans” for the album not having been released, another possible reason is that Corgan has to be his own best editor. If he’s putting out something, it’s a decision he’s made, and sometimes it doesn’t have anything to do with musical quality. It has to do with personal satisfaction. He’s earned the right to fucking suck.
Also, exuberance from Corgan about his yet-to-be released records (e.g., Zeitgeist, Teargarden by Kaleidyscope, Oceania), as well as negative comments by Corgan about released records that the public has not embraced (e.g., Zeitgeist, Teargarden by Kaleidyscope), are par for the course.
RESEARCH UPDATE: On October 19, 2004—exactly six months after the “one show” Corgan played—a Toronto radio DJ asked him (audio, at 3:55) to “Tell us about the [ChicagoSongs/ChicagoKid] DVD.” Corgan replied: “It’s in the can. It’s all acoustic. There’s been about thirty songs recorded. And we’re just starting to cut it together, and hopefully that’ll be out by the end of next year.”
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I want Chicagosongs NOW! XD
wp
That’s so dumb. I feel like all SP fans have been waiting for a real honest-to-God acoustic album. I was thinking Adore would have been it, but then it turned into something much better. I just don’t get it. His acoustic songs have always outshone his rock shit. Hell, even Zeitgeist The Song is lightyears better than anything else on that record, and he relegated it to a fucking bonus track. For God And Country was a beautiful acoustic jam before Baker get all stupid and crazy and made it sound like someone farting into a can.
I KNOW! I liked the Zwan album and was optimistic only because I thought there was to be a Djali Zwan follow up. THEN I was ok with TFE because I thought a second solo/acoustic album was coming out or at least Chicago Songs. Besides, who ON EARTH was bitching about Chicago Songs- the sociopaths on Shitphoria.net? The few clips that leaked of that Church show where he recorded the Chicago Songs were sublime.
My point is, I guess, that BC is at his best when he’s proactive in his creative endeavors, not reactive.
Agreed! I’m really looking forward to the Zwan reissue sometime before the END OF ALL, cause quite a few of the Djali Zwan songs were weep worthy. Spun Soundtrack is some serious goodness.
As always, to Billy, 1 criticism > 100 positive comments. It’s unfortunate for those of us who appreciate, on some level, all of his work. Not getting ChicagoSongs is like when there’s a bad kid in a kindergarten class that does something to distract the attention of the class and, as a result, no one is allowed to have recess that day. Or… something. BUT WORSE.
What is with people criticizing the pumpkins heavier music. The heavy side of SP is one of my favourite things about them. As far as the Chicago songs go I will gladly wait for them.
Billy’s made the best heavy songs ever. Normal follow up..
I am moving to Chicago and making him finish what he started….
we need it now :) xoxoxoxo
what a stupid thing to say … he says people who heard it love it, but he won’t put it out b/c people ripped on the songs … whatever dude, you are full of b.s.
^Nailed it^ Bill contradicts himself in the same sentence. Par for the course.
FWIW, Oceania debuts at #6 on the Billboard charts:
http://www.billboard.com/news/justin-bieber-s-believe-now-aiming-for-390-1007407952.story#/news/justin-bieber-s-believe-now-aiming-for-390-1007407952.story
He does have plans to put it out. In 2013?
There’s wiggle room for it to move up to 5.
@me he’s saying people that were at the show ripped on it. But those that actually heard the album loved it. Reading comprehension.
”Me” is full of shit. What a surprising sentence for me to say.
Who has actually even heard Chicago Songs? All I’ve even heard are snippets from the church recording, I think. I mean, who has heard enough of this material to knock it hard enough for him to decide that nobody wanted it? I just don’t understand this rationale whatsoever.
Fans kept ripping on the Teagarden shit and he kept rolling out that crap.
Brett, check out the April 19, 2004 Metro show:
http://archive.org/details/bc2004-04-19.flac16
Also, on the FutureEmbrace tour in 2005, Billy played some of the Chicagosongs in Sydney:
http://archive.org/details/bc2005-07-28
You can find some other things if you search YouTube diligently I think; Corgan played a bunch of the songs around town in 2004, including a series of dates at Dimitre Photography/The Temple leading up to the Metro date. But I think most of those are just clips.
example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itq1Y7x_NHQ
Anyone else wanna pitch in to help Brett? I’ve exposed myself to what I can of the Chicagosongs, but I was tuned out of BC-doings in that era, so I’m no expert.
Thank you so much, Susan!
Ok, I won’t live blog this shit, but listening to the Metro show, and World’s Fair is making we really wonder why this hasn’t been released. And envious of anyone who was actually at this show, cause this recording is really quiet. I have my speakers loud as shit, and I’m terrified of the upcoming first audience applause. Might be time for new speakers.
oh man you should totally liveblog or at least live tweet it!!
I think the archive went down… didn’t get to hear Black Irish. :(
@colquittbrett
yes you can. here ya go:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOAZuczaBHA
I have that whole show in good def. I think somewhere… LOL @ living in terror of the applause. That’s the worst part of those Djali recordings from The Intersection/Emerson…
Billy Corgan ought to spend less time Googling himself so that he can focus on what matters: wrestling promotion.
I think I also have the 2005 San Francisco Fillmore show in which he plays some of these songs, let me dig in my archive.
Only 50k versus Adore, Machina, and Zeitgeist 150k?
Holy hell, I had no idea he alienated that many fans with Teargarden…
@Just_Erick
Pretty sure that Fillmore show is not on LMA, you best be putting it up soon! XD
Your right Susan it totally is not. My memory was fuzzy and he did play an accoustic set of songs for “The Crimer” but it was mostly Future Embrace stuff. He does in fact play some unreleased songs though. I found my poster from the show that is signed by Billy plus the setlist but no usb yet. I shal post asap once found.
DyingHorseBlues, I’m pretty sure it’s due to lack of promotion, comparatively. Zeitgeist had a lot of hype around it. Oceania has comparatively little. If it sells a lot of records it will need to be by word of mouth largely.
On another note, If you insert Tom Tom between Pale Horse and The Chimera and omit Glissandra, the album becomes impossibly strong from start to finish…
@DyingHorseBlues+ Andy: And also the business kept on declining for 5 years since Zeitgeist. We can’t measure these sells of now by comparision to them in 2007 or even less the golden ninetees.
in 2007 it was still OK to buy cd’s. in 2012 it is not. i bought Oceania and people close to me were suprised that they still sell cd’s.
i appreciate hipsters united, but the whole snark war against Billy is getting a little old, guys. it’s ok to call the man out, but it seems like that’s the mission of this place now. lame.
I have a feeling sales will grow, or at the very least, the album will have serious legs. I really think the lack of an advance single might have hurt the first week sales.
@Daniel: Based on all the coverage of the last 2 weeks, your interpretation is that it’s the mission of HU to call out Billy Corgan? WTF?…
@Chris: If, once in two weeks, Corgan snarkily blames “the fans” for something, that’s just, you know, a statement about reality, and any good mission-free blog would either accept it silently or, perhaps, dispassionately repeat it. Anything else is war. Also, remember: Don’t be a robut.
I think not letting any of the press hear it before fans was genius. He put it out there and fans gave a very warm reception to it that it was foolish for any reviewer no matter how much they dislike Billy to give it a a really bad review
I think should sell bundles get rid of the CD format, and sell Vinyl with the mp3 downloads. The artwork is there, and you have the mp3 for the car and your iPod but vinyl is an experience when you put a record on you intend to really listen to that album not through laptop speakers like the last podcast…. Analog On 180 grams with a great needle IMO is the best way to listen to music
agree with @Daniel – jjb in particular really enjoys holding BC’s feet to the fire. i used to have a similar view until i realized that, if someone were recording conversations with me every week for 20 years and putting them on the internet, i’m sure plenty of hypocrisies and contradictions would leap out too. he’s only a human being who like to talk from the hip.
that said, i do appreciate the thoroughness and the thoughtfulness of this site and their attempts to catalog how SP fits into the larger indie/mainstream debate.
oh and I think that B0lly didn’t release ChicagoSongs because he intuited that he didn’t want his career path to wind down that quickly. There’s plenty of time later for the ‘paul-simon-lite acoustic songs in coffee shops for NPR listeners’ phase. he’s got some years as a rock monster left and thank god he’s using them. hopefully people are putting the pieces together that this is why he keeps using the SP name: as Smashing Pumpkins there’s a conversation happening in the mainstream. if he were making these albums as “Billy Corgan” there would be zilch press interest except for the occasional pitchforkian character assassination piece, and little radio interest. just a fact. what’s the difference between a new Pearl Jam album and a new Eddie Vedder album in the eyes of the casual listener or the workaday rock journo? (not an entirely fair comparison, but hopefully you get what I mean)
I was at the ChicagoSongs show at the Metro! What is this church recording everyone’s talking about? I’ve only seen Billy at church for poetry readings.
Does the Billboard take into account digital sales or only physical copies?
For those who don’t know, @werideatdusk and I already have had the debate he is trying to start again.
always handy with a link, jjb!
@DyingHorseBlues
This is from the billboard.com website
If you buy a whole album at one time (for example, using the “Buy Album” button on iTunes), it counts as one album sold. If a consumer buys one or multiple tracks from an album separately, those count as a “track purchase.”
his name is bookie
I really don’t find what the issue is with Billy contradicting himself is? Read the “debate” and I agree with werideatdusk sort of I suppose. If I think back at all of the things I personal have said in the past 10 years I have contradicted myself plenty of times, and sometimes I had former friends along the way who said “well that’s not what you said a month ago”….. Who cares what I said a month ago, this is what I am saying today, I as a person can’t change my mind how I feel about something?
Contradiction is human nature, and if you stand by the point that you as a person have never contradicted yourself than you either a liar or a Saint, and in that regards that’s why as fan I can continue to be Billy Corgan’s fan because he’s a human being.
@werideatdusk Yes, to some extent, memory is one of my strengths.
Look, you’re not stupid. Can we perhaps agree that there is a difference between an inconsistency or contradiction that has no import, and one that is pertinent to a dispute? Because, HU does not pay much attention at all to benign contradictions (on the part of Corgan, the press, or anyone). But when the basis of an attack (on Corgan, on another musician, on “the fans”, or on whomever else we care about) is a clear inconsistency, I think it is well within our scope to call that out.
Yes, I do agree, though I’m not sure this in particular is a case of anyone attacking anything. And I think we’re coming from a very similar place, actually. I’ve contributed to a lot of the band articles on wikipedia and have researched this man/band extensively. As have you.
What I found was, Billy Corgan is a hard man to put in a box. And he wants it that way. Seems to me that you’re someone who likes to boil things down, to categorize. And you make very good points, and you have my respect. But there’s something vaporous about Corgan and even SP that resists that kind of left-brain approach. It’s tempting to try to map out the behavior of famous people that are, in actuality, complete strangers. Your map will always mislead you because the territory is always shifting, always illusory, always treacherous. That’s part of Corgan’s MO – he wants to be a puzzle, a riddle, a cacophonic collision of total earnestness and total construction. Someone this mercurial cannot be held to conform to a citation-lined narrative. Because with a trick of a tail, he’s outta there with the may queen. further down along the range, off he goes!
@werideatdusk paragraph one: Corgan clearly complains about “the fans” here. (Cf. the new MusicRadar interview with him and Geddy Lee, where he speaks of somewhere he has to give “fans” credit.) To me, “the fans” is not a null set, so, uhm, I say something was attacked.
@ paragraph two: By (1) putting Corgan in a “hard man to put in a box” box and (2) putting me in a “someone who likes to boil things down, to categorize” box, you are categorizing him and me in a way I find inappropriate. I do not subscribe to the notion that he alone—The Visionary Mystic—gets to be “vaporous” and “mercurial” (your words) and “a public pain in the rear” (his words) while the rest of us—People On Twitter—must face up to critics on Internet comments threads and try to answer for whatever mean things we have said or done. I will remind you here that, by all accounts, Billy Corgan willingly spends many nights of his life talking to certain fans on Facebook. I’ll put him in a box, sure—that same one you or I are in, assholes all, puzzles all, struggling with day jobs and night hobbies, trying to transcend and/or work within the limitations of language and logic to make the stupid box a little nicer to live in.
@werideatdusk: That’s an interesting characterization of BC, but it begs the question: at what point do we just disregard everything he says? If the statements he makes in interviews are intentionally misleading and not based on even an internally-consistent reality (which is the point that seems to be made by the RESEARCH UPDATE portion of the post, that he claims now that what fans said days after the show caused him to shelve the project but 6 months later he claimed he was planning a DVD release. These are mutually exclusive scenarios), then why should we as fans bother paying attention?
The way I see it we (“the fans”) have 2 choices: don’t bother searching for truth in what Billy says (this includes his comments about past band members, which often vary wildly based presumably on his mood) or hold his feet to the fire when he contradicts himself about something we think is important or for which we are being blamed.
In this case I’m sure negative fan reaction had *something* to do with Billy canning the project, but to paint it as the only reason seems to be an exaggeration.
One thing strikes me anyway: you guys have a lot of spare time. Rock n’ roll please.
@jjb and @chris – if it was negative comments about billy every single day here, nobody would read your blog. but there is an over-all, gradual theme and it seems to me like some of you might have a bit of a grudge against him. just an honest observation. other people see it too. so don’t play dumb.
billy certainly deserves to be held to account, and that’s refreshing sometimes. but sometimes it feels a little bit like some of you really want to hold him accountable for every single fucking word he ever says, and i think that’s a bit silly. he’s human. he will contradict himself at times or change his mind. somewhere in the mess of all that is just a regular guy trying to get by. holding him accountable to every word, over and over again, and cataloging it, is not a standard anyone could really hold themselves to, so it’s a bit hypocritical as well. it just suggests that maybe there’s some hard feelings ever since he publicly disowned you, which is understandable…but it gets a little old when it starts to seem like some of you possibly have some kind of love/hate personal vendetta here against him.
don’t take any of this personally – internet snark is way over-rated. just the impressions of an outsider here. if i’m wrong or if i’m right, maybe it tells you something about how people perceive your blog.
I think Billy Corgan wants to be in a box so he can say that he is not there :)
@Daniel – Most of what I’ve written about Corgan that people perceive as “negative” comes out of wanting him to release more music in a more timely fashion, plus an added bit of edge from his repeatedly blaming “the fans,” with whom I identify, for that situation. Beyond those issues I think HU is more than fair to him. Why do you assume that the ‘positive’ 90% is cover for the “negative” 10%? Placing a touch of extra emphasis on the disagreements serves to give our ‘positive’ angles greater credibility, doesn’t it? I’m not going to claim that’s why we emphasize the disagreements, but I wouldn’t deny it either…
@jjb hey man, whatevs. i enjoy reading HU. it was just my impression. no hard feelings.
[...] That record aside, the other major output from Corgan’s interstitial solo period was…a batch of exclusively acoustic music. And we are supposed to believe that James Iha, D’Arcy Wretzky, and Jimmy Chamberlin’s [...]