Fans that see Billy Corgan on his current tour with his new group, The Machines of God, will see the Smashing Pumpkins frontman commemorate a pair of his band’s watershed moments — the 30th anniversary of the 1995 album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness and the 25th anniversary of Machina/The Machines of God & Machina II/The Friends and Enemies of Modern Music — while also giving a nod to the Smashing Pumpkins’ last studio effort, last year’s Aghori Mhori Mei.
While these three releases span much of his group’s existence, the Chicago native notes the albums share a spiritual thread.
“I’ve been lucky and have had a lot of success with popular music and having songs on the radio,” Corgan said. “But as fans often point out, those songs are not necessarily emblematic of the spiritual heart of the band. I think this tour sort of gets to the personal drive or personal vision of the band. There are songs that are timely because there’s a certain thing in the air that summer and you can kind of go with the vibe.
“I think there is a particular kind of underbelly feel that the Pumpkins have that is a heavier, riffier thing that obviously came out of (Black) Sabbath. When you put that together and hear it, you realize that there is a much more personal vision at play than maybe the popular work would indicate.”
According to recent reports, some members of the Smashing Pumpkins didn’t want to do a tour centered on these three albums, so Corgan formed The Machines of God for the occasion.
As for what attendees can expect on his current tour, a three-week run that covers the eastern half of the United States — and stops Sunday at Irving Plaza — Corgan predicts it’ll be a loving mash-up of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, Machina and Aghori Mhori Mei.
“It’s basically like having the rights to three movies and then having somebody ask you to take the three movies and re-edit them into something that feels together,” he explained. “The tour is really an exploration of putting the emotional, heavier, gothier vein of the three records and putting it together into a show. I’m really excited.”
Beyond the current tour, Corgan is marking Machina and Mellon Collie in other ways. Both “Machina” albums have been extensively remixed and remastered into a unified, expansive 80-song box set. This set features a 48-track Machina plus an additional 32 bonus tracks of demos, outtakes and live performances. There will also be a 16-song vinyl reissue of the original Machina/Machines of God. In addition, the Smashing Pumpkins founding member will partner with Chicago’s Lyric Opera to world premiere A Night of Mellon Collie and Infinite Sadness, a seven-series performance taking place from Nov. 21-30.
While Corgan’s place as one of the foremost composer/guitarists to come out of the ‘90s alternative rock boom is firmly established and he remains busy with music, he’s moved into distinctively non-music ventures centering on tea and professional wrestling. Regarding the former, he is the owner and proprietor of ZuZu’s Tea House, a business he initially opened in the Highland Park suburb of Chicago in 2012. He closed it down in 2018 and reopened it in a bigger space in 2020, where he’s been selling Smashing Pumpkins music and merchandise alongside a selection of fine teas. The reason he gravitated towards tea? A visceral dislike of coffee.
“I was never a coffee drinker and never drank it in my life, which nobody believes, but it’s true,” he said. “I never really liked the smell. I grew up in a time of getting up for school to that smell of cigarettes and coffee that was emblematic of the 1970s. I hated that smell, so I think I associated coffee with that vibe. I was always just a tea drinker.
“When I decided to open what, in my mind, was going to be more of an art gallery, which is more the original idea of ZuZu’s, I knew I needed some kind of contrivance and not just pictures. I needed to have something in there to have people be more social. That’s when I struck upon the idea of having a teahouse.”
The pivot to professional wrestling came out of a passion that started with his forming a Chicago-based independent wrestling outfit called Resistance Pro. After a brief stint at being brought in eventually head up Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (TNA), Corgan moved on to purchase the name, rights, trademarks and championship belts of the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA), which at one time was the sole governing body for professional wrestling in the United States before World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) and its national expansion changed the professional wrestling landscape.
“There was a point where Dixie Carter from TNA called and offered me a job to work at what was at the time, the second-biggest company in America,” Corgan said. “I found myself working with a lot of top talent and producing television. Next thing you know, I’m in the middle of literally the heartbeat of the business navigating, let’s call it, the good and bad. The good is, you’re a famous person and can be helpful. The bad is that because you’re a famous person, nobody in wrestling trusts you because they just think you’re there to fool around.”
While Corgan has continued his work to bring the NWA back to its previous heights, music is still his first and foremost priority. The son of a guitarist who “…played the Holiday Inn five nights a week, five sets a night and hated it…,” Corgan the son grew up listening to his father’s soul & R&B 45s. As a high school student he saw his friend “…playing a black and white Michael Schenker Flying V and thinking that’s what I wanted to do and it gave me a clarity that I never had in my entire life.”
Corgan’s obsessive love of all things guitar and music found him gravitating towards six-string heroes like Tony Iommi (“…his cinematic way of playing guitar has forever inspired me and I’m forever in his debt”), Ritchie Blackmore (“…he created the modality of the guitar player as a stand-alone, savant-type thing.”) and Eddie Van Halen (“He’s like a prodigy that’s so frighteningly good that you almost don’t know what box to put him in.”) And while the 58-year-old guitar-playing singer-songwriter has carved out quite a creative niche for himself, both in and out of the Smashing Pumpkins, he’s always done it on his own terms. This outlook grew from a piece of advice he picked up from his father.
“My father caught me one night in a sub-basement he had in his house that he had in Chicago trying to learn a song,” Corgan recalled. “I was really frustrated because I’m really bad at learning other people’s songs. I just don’t have the talent for it. My father said I’d do far better in music if I wrote my own songs.
“It was like he put on this lightbulb in my head that said if you write your own songs, then the path for you is open. It was a simple choice. Like Jack Kerouac — there’s Route 66. The road is open to you and you can do whatever you want or you can go into this other thing. He gave me the permission to be a writer.”
Billy Corgan will be appearing on June 15 at Irving Plaza, 17 Irving Place, NYC. For more information, visit livenation.com or call 212-777-6817.
