Billy Corgan and the double album he refuses to stop rebuilding

Billy Corgan

Photo: Arturo Pardavila III from Hoboken, NJ, USA / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	March 17, 1967 Elk Grove Village
Occupation	Guitarist
Awards	Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock Performance · MTV Video Music Award for Video of the Year

Billy Corgan has spent the past year doing what most rock songwriters would call a trap: rebuilding the same record again and again. Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, the sprawling double album he once pitched as “The Wall for Generation X”, has been his opera, with the orchestra and chorus of the Lyric Opera of Chicago behind him. It has crossed to concert stages in London, Antwerp, Paris and Madrid. Now it is the entire first set of every Smashing Pumpkins arena show in North America. The appetite for excess that once made the indie world distrust him has become exactly what audiences queue for, and the man once sold as rock’s great control freak is finally being paid for the habit.

Chicago’s western suburbs shaped him. William Patrick Corgan Jr., who arrived at Columbus Hospital in Lincoln Park on 17 March 1967, is the elder son of Martha Louise Maes and William Dale Corgan, a working guitarist who was rarely home and whom his son has described as abusive. After his parents divorced, he grew up largely in Glendale Heights with his father’s second wife, the woman he considers his mother. A friend’s Flying V pulled him toward the guitar, and he taught himself on a cheap Les Paul copy bought with his own savings. Black Sabbath gave him weight, the Cure gave him mood, and he left Glenbard North High School an honor student who turned down college for music.

After a dead-end stint in Florida with a band called The Marked, he took a job in a Chicago record store and met James Iha there. The pair made what Corgan calls “gloomy little goth-pop records” over a drum machine, added the bassist D’arcy Wretzky and then Jimmy Chamberlin, a jazz drummer whose force dragged the songs somewhere heavier. The Smashing Pumpkins played their first show as a quartet at the Cabaret Metro on 5 October 1988. Gish, made with Butch Vig for about $20,000, followed in 1991.

Siamese Dream is where the myth and the problem begin. Corgan played nearly every guitar and bass part on it himself, a rumor he later confirmed, during four months of sessions in Georgia. Released in 1993, it reached No. 10 on the Billboard 200 and sold more than four million copies in the United States, while Cherub Rock, Today and Disarm turned a Chicago club act into a radio fixture. The price was a reputation that never quite washed off.

In 1995 he took some 56 songs to the producers Flood and Alan Moulder. The result, 28 tracks running past two hours, debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 that October and became the best-selling double album of the decade. 1979 topped Billboard’s modern rock chart. The Méliès-inspired video for Tonight, Tonight won six MTV Video Music Awards, Video of the Year among them. Bullet with Butterfly Wings brought the band the Grammy for Best Hard Rock Performance in 1997, and a second in the same category followed for The End Is the Beginning Is the End.

Success did not hold the band together. In July 1996 the touring keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin died of a heroin overdose in a Manhattan hotel room after using with Chamberlin, who was fired. Corgan’s marriage to Chris Fabian was ending and his mother died that December, losses that shaped Adore, a darker, largely electronic album from 1998 that split the audience. Machina/The Machines of God followed in 2000, Wretzky quit during its making, the sequel Machina II was given away online, and the group played a farewell show at the Metro on 2 December 2000.

The case against Corgan has always been louder than the case against his records. Pavement mocked the band’s status in Range Life, Bob Mould dismissed them as “the grunge Monkees” and Steve Albini compared them to REO Speedwagon. Some of that was scene snobbery; some of it Corgan supplied himself. When Zwan, the group he formed with Chamberlin, collapsed mid-tour in 2003, the confessions he later posted online savaged his former bandmates; on his 2005 solo tour he walked off a stage in Australia because fans kept shouting for Pumpkins songs. The reunion that brought Iha and Chamberlin back in 2018 left Wretzky outside after a contract offer was withdrawn, a dispute both aired in public. Here is the contradiction at the center of the career: the songwriter who most wants his work heard as one grand, unified statement keeps letting the people around it become the story.

The years after the break-up were restless. His poetry collection Blinking with Fists reached The New York Times best-seller list; the solo album TheFutureEmbrace sold just 69,000 copies. In 2005 he bought full-page ads in the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times announcing that he wanted his band back. Zeitgeist debuted at No. 2 in 2007, and the output since has been relentless: Oceania, the solo album Ogilala, Cyr, the three-part Atum: A Rock Opera in Three Acts and, in 2024, Aghori Mhori Mei. Since 2017 he has also owned the National Wrestling Alliance, a sensible sideline for a writer who thinks in acts and cycles.

The long game is now paying out. The Lyric Opera of Chicago staged A Night of Mellon Collie and Infinite Sadness from 21 November 2025, with James Lowe conducting new orchestrations for the house orchestra and chorus; Corgan’s one condition, he told Fox 32, was that it should not turn into “opera goes rock”. The production reached London’s Royal Festival Hall on 1 and 2 September 2026 before the continental dates. In January the Pumpkins featured on YUNGBLUD’s heavier remake of the Cranberries’ Zombie, co-produced by Corgan, and a live version they sang together at Chicago’s Riviera Theatre came out on 8 October. On 31 July the band played Lollapalooza for the first time since 1994, with Olivia Rodrigo singing Thirty-Three over Corgan’s acoustic guitar.

Off stage, Corgan married Chloe Mendel on 16 September 2023 after a decade together, and the couple have three children. He runs Madame Zuzu’s, a tea house in Highland Park, and has spoken openly about depression and childhood abuse.

The Rats In A Cage Tour opened at the Schottenstein Center in Columbus on 30 September, with Iha, Chamberlin and the guitarist Kiki Wong, and runs 27 dates to the Kia Forum in Inglewood on 12 November, before the Darker Waves festival in Huntington Beach. “Staging a Mellon Collie-themed show is something we’ve discussed for over a decade, and finally the stars have aligned,” Corgan said when he announced it. Behind it waits a vault of more than 60 unreleased Zwan songs. Three decades after the fact, he is still asking audiences to sit through a two-hour record on its own terms, and the arenas are answering yes.