Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/08/14/watch-the-smashing-pumpkins-pl.html
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“…troubling is watching Corgan pal around with Infowars’ Alex Jones, a man who called the Sandy Hook mass shooting a hoax and has refused to apologize for it.”
I think Taylor would disapprove.
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Is Corgan deliberately trying to look like Uncle Fester?
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i was just thinking both these things: (1), i guess we’ve forgiven Corgan and the Pumpkins for all that goodwill they burned through with all their bickering and drama back in the 90s and early aughts, and (2) man, Billy has got that Uncle Fester cosplay DOWN.
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That’s a nice looking guitar. Does anybody know what it is? I was thinking a Jazzmaster, but it doesn’t quite match.
Thunderbird?
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Watch the Smashing Pumpkins play
sorry but fuck no. at least I wont.
deleted twitter about chemtrails, the david icke forum loves him
http:www.twitter.com/billy
“Chemtrails on Memorial Day. How patriotic…”
12:30 AM Jun 1st via txt
“Chemtrails on Halloween? Spooky! Maybe instead of just barium + antibiotics they made a special mix to drop with spider webs + cat’s claw”
10:42 PM Oct 31st via txt
"New thing in LA today: triple chemtrails. I guess they just aren’t killing us fast enough…
https://forum.davidicke.com/showthread.php?t=148602
bit too much for my taste. fuck him.
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The best thing about this is it made me want to listen to Sweet Baby James again. Every time I hear James Taylor say “turnpike” my mental image is along these lines: http://www.american-historama.org/images/turnpike-1.jpg
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The Pumpkins can go the way of their buddy Alex Jones, I don’t give a f#ck, zero f#cks for a-holes.
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Yeah, that’s definitely a Thunderbird body. I bet it’s custom made, since Gibson only uses that body for basses.
Man …Charlie Brown did not age well.
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I absolutely loved smashing pumpkins in their day
Then I learned about what happened to Corgan and makes me so sad
Great artists often have troubled minds but he really chose some horrible paths
heck they’ve got a whole section on him
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I only got about halfway through so maybe it has a great finish - however I did not enjoy this rendition. I don’t pay any attention to this band but based on the comments above, Corgan comes across as a wacko. So, yeah, @David_Guilbeaul, I am with you - going to play the original now.
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It’s a Firebird. Technically the Thunderbird uses the same body but is designated as a bass.
(There is also the “non-reverse” Firebird that Fender sued over back in the 60’s.)
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I don’t think so. I’ve seen both, and never knew the difference.
I think the story is that when that body is on a guitar it’s a Gibson Firebird. When it’s a bass it’s a Gibson Thunderbird.
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Now we know what Col. Kurtz would have looked like if he returned from Vietnam and became a rock star.
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The absolute same for me. I was heartbroken when I read all that Alex Jones stuff (and pro-wrestling? I mean, WTF?) because they were absolutely the band of my youth. And I wonder how the other two put up with that because I sense that neither James Iha nor Jimmy Chamberlin share those convictions.
I do have a tiny bit of hope. He seems to have cooled off recently, maybe getting the original band back has grounded him a little? I mean he was always the mastermind but now that two of the original members have returned maybe the whole process doesn’t just solely revolve around him. I don’t know, maybe it’s rather that he’s realised that those kinds of opinions don’t fare well with his audience and he just doesn’t express them to impact ticket and record sales…
But as it is, no, I really don’t have any desire to listen to or see them right now…
Never mind his politics, I’m never forgiving him for the couple of hours of this We Watched Billy Corgan Play an Eight-Hour Freeform Synth Interpretation of "Siddhartha"
which I subjected myself to while live-snarking it on drownedinsound
it was truly awful. A bad librivox recording, a wall of modular synths costing more than a house or two, and corgan pottering about looking and sounding like he had never heard of a synthesiser before let alone used one, while people sat awkwardly in his cafe and got thrown out for having their phones switched on
ha found the thread, good times, I miss wasting hours at work on DiS There's A Fat Bald Bloke Fucking About With Some Mcahines Streaming Here: / Music Forum // Drowned In Sound
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I admit to trying to watch a bit of that myself when it happened, thinking “gosh, this sounds ambitious as hell, he must have something grand in mind,” but quickly realizing he seemed to have no idea how to use the equipment and was “interpreting Siddhartha” by pushing random buttons and plugging things in a lot. Awful awful awful.
I also remember the one time I saw the Pumpkins live, at the free Tibetan Freedom Concert in SF. They played one song (I think it was “Cherub Rock”?) and then the band left the stage to let Billy do an endless, terrible guitar solo of feedback and noise. Easily one of the worst things I’ve seen on a stage.
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Two random Billy Corgan stories
1 Midtown Kansas City, the day before Lollapoloza, 1994. Someone sees Billy at the local coffee house. Walks up to the table and say’s “Are you Billy Corgan?” Billy thinks he is meeting a fan and says yes, person immediately says “Is Ad Rock here?” This spreads like wildfire around midtown as Billy wanders around Westport, record shopping and so on. Everyone is going up to Billy asking "Are you Billy Corgan? only to reply “Cool, is George Clinton/Nick Cave/Q-Tip/Donita Sparks here?” I did it and asked about Yamantaka Eye because I was obsessed with The Boredoms. I wasn’t there at the end, but apparently after about 20-30 people pulling this Billy broke down crying. One of the Alt-Weeklys and a few upstart zines all reported on the Billy’s breakdown in Westport. (I have some regrets about being a shitty, obnoxious, KC punk in the early 90’s, but in retrospect, I don’t regret this or the time I threw my urine at Westboro Baptist Church protesters.)
2 Early/mid 2000’s. A friend of mine starts getting hired by a very hipster Chicago band to do artwork for them (not going to name names here.) He heads up to Chicago and ends up at a party with a bunch of popular Chicago bands. He said he randomly started talking to this one guy, maybe for about 10 minutes or so, just normal party banter. Gets done talking to the guy and he said he was immediately swarmed by a group of people at the party. They were all asking him “How did that go?”, “Were you getting along with him?”, “Did you like him?” He was like WTF, I was just talking to someone at a party. The reply was “That was Billy Corgan, he could really use a friend right now.”
