From Zero To Here

1996 WAS Year Zero for the Smashing Pumpkins. True, the band had been racked by attrition since its inception: Billy Corgan's insistence on playing everything bar the drums on Siamese Dream, the tensions between former lovers James Iha (guitar) and D'Arcy Wretzky (bass), and drummer Jimmy Chamberlain's drug problems all took an untold toll on the quartet's collective psyche. Between them, the four clocked up more hours of therapy than Woody Allen.

But by mid-'96, as the Pumpkins were embarking on what should've been a triumphant tour to promote Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness, things began to fall apart. Corgan's four-year marriage folded, and the singer's mother was diagnosed as having terminal cancer. She died five months later. Then, during the band's Dublin show at The Point Theatre on Saturday May 11th, Bernadette O'Brien, a 16 year old fan from Cork, was seriously injured in the crush in front of the stage, and died in the Mater Hospital the next day. The band were devastated.

Two months later, while in New York to play two dates at Madison Square Garden, the group's on-tour keyboard player Jonathan Melvoin fatally overdosed on a combination of alcohol and an exceptionally pure form of heroin known as Red Rum. Jimmy Chamberlain, who was on the scene, awoke from his own drug-induced stupor to call paramedics, and was charged with illegal possession of a controlled substance (a syringe with traces of heroin on it was found in his hotel room).

Initially, the other Pumpkins elected to await their drummer's release and then resume their tour. But as they waited, it became apparent that drastic action was required. "Basically, Jimmy overdosed every time we went on tour," James Iha later remarked. They'd had enough. The way Billy Corgan saw it, the longer Chamberlain stayed within the band, the greater chance there was of the drummer killing himself. The band's management were instructed to sack him.

The tour resumed six weeks later in Las Vegas with Filter drummer Matt Walker and ex-Frogs keyboardist Denn Fleming on board. After the tour, the new line-up went straight into the studio to record demos, played some European festivals, contributed 'The End Is The Beginning Of The End' to the Batman And Robin soundtrack, and allowed themselves brief periods of recovery.

Although the original idea was for the next Pumpkins album to be stark and low-key, it didn't quite turn out that way: original producer Brad Wood was dismissed, and the band largely eschewed using a live drummer in favour of loops and drum machines, recreating their original late-'80s line-up. After months of failed experiments and blind alleys, with Corgan "floating in cyberspace", Flood was called in to help clean up the mess. The new album, to be entitled Adore, finally began to gel.

Given the circumstances that surrounded its gestation, one might expect Adore to be a wrecked amalgam of Dylan's Blood On the Tracks, REM's Automatic For The People, and Neil Young's Tonight's The Night, with a few kilos of Suicide, The Sisters Of Mercy and Ministry thrown in for bad measure.

However, nothing's quite that linear in the Pumpkins' universe. The new album does contain veiled references to Corgan's broken marriage and his mother's passing, but they're brief and oblique - a verse or two in 'Once Upon A Time'("Mother I hope you know/That I miss you so"), the sense of failure and loss in 'Crestfallen'("Who am I to need you when I'm down?") - hardly the confessional bloodletting many would've expected from the author of 'Today'. Still, if Adore is no funeral march, the press corps, much to Corgan's chagrin, are focusing heavily on the loss as well as the magic behind the new songs.

It's 2.30pm, May 30th, at the Merrion Hotel in Dublin. The Smashing Pumpkins are back in town to play for the first time since that tragic night at The Point. Minutes before I'm due to meet Billy Corgan, the band's press officer requests a word in my ear: would I please exercise some diplomacy in addressing some of the more sensitive subjects, particularly the death of Bernadette O'Brien? She then hands me a pre-interview contract.

This document informs me that, should I sign it, I forego all copyright to the interview, and if the Pumpkins' organisation decide to reprint all or any part of it, they are under no obligation to either pay me or put my name to it. I'm advised to put a line through anything I have a problem with. I'd as soon put a match to the whole thing, but I decide to sign it, be damned. There's a rock star waiting, a deadline looming, and precious little room to manoeuvre.

Corgan himself is on his feet when I enter the room. A glance at any of the group's recent videos or press shots might've led me to expect some dark overlord of consumptive angst, an eyelinered, hairless, bloodless, 6'3", leather-clad gorgon of goth, the Max Schreck of rock 'n' roll, no less.

But cliches beget cliches, and masks mask more masks. Trickery.

With many of his contemporaries and peers forsaking the orthodox rock blueprint for electronica, Billy Corgan appears to have taken a backward route to the future, retracing his steps from grunge back through metal, prog-rock, goth and electro pop, even throwing in the odd red herring like Karl Wallinger and Radiohead into the mix. Of course, certain doubting Tommys are bandying about unflattering comparisons to The Mission, but nevertheless, Adore is a frequently superb album.

Besides, Corgan's always been on a quest to rehabilitate the terminally unhip, whether raving over the likes of Queen and Boston in the midst of the grunge wars, or dragging Simon Le Bon out to sing 'Nightboat' at a London show a few weeks ago. At this stage, one would hardly be surprised if future band blueprints included weird couplings of Blue Oyster Cult and Classix Nouveau.

If Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness was an attempt to sum up the last incarnation of the band in all its sprawling, molten glory, Adore is an equally ambitious (and at 70 minutes, epic) work. And if the album's a quantum sideways leap in terms of sound and song, it's also an entirely practical one: even with drummers as skilled as Walker and Matt Cameron (ex-Soundgarden) in on the sessions, the band couldn't hope to replicate the atomic kineticism of the original Chamberlain-anchored line-up.

"I'd say the restructuring of the band probably played more into the production," Corgan begins. "The songwriting stuff I think was going to go that way no matter what happened. Production-wise, it got more kind of '80s because we started reverting back to the way we played then, which was the three of us and a drum machine. Just breaking the band egg. Taking Jimmy out of the picture kind of broke the circle and just seemed to open our minds to the idea that anything was possible."

In the couple of days the band spent deliberating over whether or not to sack Chamberlain, did they consider the effect it would have on the band?

"No," Corgan says emphatically. "I don't think we could ever really fully appreciate at the time that it was going to dissolve a core unit that had an almost psychic interaction."

Has he spoken to Jimmy since?

"No, we have no contact," he admits. "I mean . . . whatever, I'm not going to get into it, but the wounds from a situation like that run far beyond, 'Can we get a drum track down?' It's just the way that it worked out."

Given that he and Chamberlain were particularly close, does he still feel any guilt over that decision?

"Put it this way, I can't really answer your question without getting into the whole thing, and that's like turning up rocks," he shrugs. "There's plenty of blame to go around in everything that goes on in the world. Y'know, who's to blame for Pakistan blowin' off fuckin' bombs? Is it India's fault, is it the US's fault because they didn't give Pakistan enough fuckin' money? You could spend your whole day trying to scratch your head about shit like that."

Consider this: you're a hugely respected songwriter, producer, arranger and performer - the leader of one of the few rock bands of your ilk to mean as much to Mexican, Puerto Rican and Asian kids as white middle-class suburbanites. You've just released your magnum opus to warm reviews. It sells by the truckload. You embark on a tour to promote it, playing 18,000-seat venues, entering the Gold Card-carrying inner circle of the rock 'n' roll aristocracy. Time to celebrate, to make merry, to suck the marrow out of life. Except, before you can begin to decompress, all hell breaks loose. Death afflicts your private and public life, everything turns to crud. Ever feel like you've been cheated?

"Honestly, it all happened so fast I don't think we ever got to fully appreciate it," Corgan considers, getting up to pour himself more tea. "And when I say appreciate it, I mean appreciate the good and the bad. After all that we just decided to soldier on. I guess what I'm trying to say is we could play the 'What if?' game all day, but what happens happens. I could sit here and say if not for all the negative things that happened, I never would've made this beautiful album. If my mother was still alive, maybe I wouldn't have quit rock 'n' roll (I believe Corgan's referring to his abandoning of a guitar-heavy sound rather than his career here - PM).

"Who the fuck knows? I'm just saying that conjecture makes for good press, interesting quotes and stuff, but it doesn't really have relevance to my day to day life. I wake up, ask God to give me strength and just try to take it as it comes."

I ask Corgan if the work was any help in getting over the death of his mother?

"No," he decides. "Too much is made of that. This kind of, 'Work is catharsis' is a bunch of bullshit. The songs don't help at all. It's a romanticised idea, because you go in your own little garden and turn up the stones and you have to live with the worms. Everybody can put on the CD and take it off, but I have to live with it. Every time I get on stage I have to live these things again. It's not catharsis. It's exactly the opposite - you're embracing what you don't want to embrace.

"I mean, I'm just trying to be realistic. For anybody who wonders about what happened to the guy who made Gish or Siamese Dream, I'd be happy to play that music all day. But in terms of being an artist, an original, being groundbreaking, we just reached a nadir, and there was nowhere else to go with this. And now we've put ourselves in this comfortable water where we're living breathing and reacting, and it's much more invigorating artistically, but it makes for an uncomfortable person."

If the first three albums were the amped-up caterwaulings of a child who'd been shunted from mother to father to stepmother, Adore has more of a sense of grace under sufferance - gone is the almost inchoate rage of yore. Did the events of the last couple of years teach Corgan a lesson in stoicism?

"I think being 31 years old has a lot more to do with it than what happened between 1995 and 1997," he reflects. "Put it this way, a lot of shit happened between 1980 and 1984. Did it have anything to do with me being a fucking asshole? I'm just saying, stuff happens, life goes on. Everybody wants to always connect the dots - it's not like that. In my mind, everything runs concurrently: I'm five years old, I'm 15 years old, I'm 30 years old, all at the same time. In my flesh and bone person, I'm 31 years old, but my feelings and emotions run like a time machine. I feel the Pumpkins' first show as powerfully now as I did ten years ago. What's probably different in me is I've lost my sentimentality.

"If you go: 'And then because of this shocking and bruising couple of years, the band retreated to the safety and comfort of a recording studio and made this insular and kind of personal record', it reads like some TV movie, and it's not like that, it's exactly the opposite. People keep trying to tell me it's a personal record - it's a universal record! Retreat to the studio for an insular moment? We basically junked the things that made us multi-millionaires to go exactly in the opposite direction, to completely fly in the face of convention, to basically tell the world that the artform we revel in and profit from is basically dead.

"Y'know, I got divorced," Corgan continues, "but there's not a lot of divorce stuff in there. For me, everything's like a Yes and No answer. People go: 'Did the death of your mother play any part in the album?' Well, what do you think? Yes, it's in there. There's a song in there and it's called 'For Martha', not 'To Martha' or 'About Martha'. There's a reason for that.

"It just . . . I dunno. You know when you meet somebody and they talk to you for an hour and go: 'I have to tell you, your friend Larry over there told me you were kind of a jerk, but now that I'm talking to you, I don't know what he's talking about'?" That's what I feel like, I feel like I keep going into these situations and the press rolls in front of me, people read the Q article, and then I spend the rest of my life going, 'But that's not really how it is'. You have to keep untangling the wires. I'm just trying to give you my truth. I have no agenda, that's the only thing I can say in my defence. Just to get it across that it's not like this. People tried to say that when I was 26 years old all I was doing was writing albums about me and my poor little childhood, but meanwhile there were legions of kids who were crying because I was writing about their lives. It's not so simple."

The day after our encounter, the Smashing Pumpkins were set to play the Olympia, their first Dublin show since Bernadette O'Brien's death. I ask Corgan if the show will represent an exorcism of sorts?

"I'll put it to you this way," he replies. "The reason the band didn't even come to Ireland until 1995 was because for the first four years our old managers told us, 'Don't come here because you're gonna get blown up by a bomb.' Then the band decided that was a bunch of bullshit. So, I guess what I'm trying to say is, y'know, horrible, terrible tragedies happen, but turning your back on them, running away from them, it's not gonna make 'em go away, it's not gonna make them any less painful.

"We believe in this city, we believe in this country, we believe in our fans, and at some point we just have to look everything square in the eye, take a deep breath, and just move on. It's very hard to do, it will be very hard to do tomorrow, but . . . the easiest thing to do would just be to never come back."

Did the band consider quitting live performances in the immediate aftermath of Bernadette's death?

"I don't know if I can answer that," Corgan sighs. "There's no way to answer that. All I can tell you is the easiest thing for us to do would be never to come back, to pretend that this never happened, so we'd never have to face the question, I'd never have to sit here and explain anything to you, or go through this. It's very painful. Very painful. I mean, our hearts bleed for that family. There's really nothing else you can say about it. But we won't run, we're not afraid of people questioning, people wondering. At some point you have to be willing to take a chance that things are gonna be okay."

Although it's no solace to anybody, least of all the friends and family of Bernadette O'Brien, it was widely held that the Pumpkins did all within their powers to calm the crowd that night.

"Yeah," Corgan shrugs. "But that really doesn't provide any comfort for us. It still hurts us very, very deeply."

He looks genuinely distraught as he says this. A half-minute ticks by before he speaks again. Time for a raincheck.

Fast forward 32 hours. The Olympia is jammed. One can

only guess at the band's motives for playing this (by their standards) tiny theatre on a major tour, but, promotion aside, the payoff certainly isn't financial - the band are hauling around a stadium-sized show, and tonight's receipts should barely cover the production costs.

The No Moshing Or Crowd Surfing notices posted around the venue are an ominous reminder that there are demons to be banished tonight. Earlier in the weekend, Corgan admitted to Tom Dunne that the Point tragedy caused them to rethink their whole approach to live performances, and although the memory of it must be faced down, the singer is mindful that his band's very presence in the country this weekend must be the cause of some pain to Bernadette O'Brien's family. It's not too fanciful to suggest that tonight is an exercise in redemption, in burning off the nightmare of two years ago.

Although billed as an Unplugged set (a ploy to keep the lid on the pressure cooker and draw a veil of exclusivity around the proceedings?), tonight's show is in fact nothing of the sort. Augmented by keyboards, two percussionists and powerhouse drummer Kenny Arnoff, the bulk of the set is culled from Adore.

To Corgan's right, D'Arcy cuts a feline figure in see-through top, leather jeans, black eye-shadow and lipstick, cat's ears and stackheels. James Iha is a more studious silhouette, hunched over his pedal board, the delicate Japanese-American features framed by lank hair. There are occasional blasts from the past: 'Bullet With Butterfly Wings' is drum-heavy, debased and almost unrecognisable from its recorded incarnation. A stripped-down 'Tonight, Tonight' sparkles, although judging from the grimaces Corgan pulls afterward, he disagrees.

He'll play taskmaster again later on, flicking a plectrum at Wretzky for fluffing a note during a rough but rousing '1979'. But really, the overbearing feeling is one of warmth: the band seem to genuinely glow at the crowd's devotion, responding with a generous two-hour set. As they cruise home through an elongated 'For Martha', with Corgan preaching love and celebrating the human spirit, even the unbelievers are beaming.

Of course, Corgan had been back to these shores in an off-duty capacity since 1996. In a recent interview, Bono mentioned waking up on New Year's Day 1997 to find the chief Pumpkin doing the dishes.

"He's in the neighbourhood of truth," Corgan smiles at this. "As he's wont to do he's probably dramatising a little bit, but . . . close. He was celebrating all the New Years of all time at one time!"

For Corgan's generation, bands like U2 and REM provided the only real clues as to how to survive success without becoming clownish parodies of themselves.

"For me, it's like they offer me a way to conduct yourself with some honour and some grace," he reasons. "I never made any bones about it, I definitely look to those bands for a certain amount of personal inspiration. Those were the first bands that really proved to me that it didn't have to be about leather jackets and chains and put-your-hands-in-the-air. In my world in 1983 or 1984, that was a revolution because it was like, 'People can actually express the way I feel and it's okay'. It was a bizarre concept, because all rock 'n' roll I'd ever seen up to that point was posturing, I mean, even punk was posturing. Y'know, David Bowie

was about transforming yourself, T Rex, Alice Cooper, The Sweet, Zeppelin, you name it, everybody was transforming themselves into something bigger, brighter, better. And suddenly it was like these people (U2 and REM) weren't about transforming themselves, it was about transforming their insides, and that was very powerful to me. But now that the naivete is all off it, I don't know if anybody'll let anybody do anything."

What exactly does he mean?

"It's just so much negativity," he elaborates, quietly exasperated. "I mean, we're doing this interview today, but we've spent ten minutes of twenty talking about tragedy, death, drugs . . . no-one can live in a pure space (now), maybe no-one did, but my perception was that the air was a little clearer, a little less tabloid. (Now) everybody's a celebrity, everybody's got a tale to tell. The mystique is gone."

So, when Billy Corgan goes home, does he shut out the lights, paint the windows black and plug out all appliances?

"No, when I go home I go out and hang out, because that's what I need," he admits. "I need to be amongst people, who, after two minutes, the fact of who I am wears off and they go back to being themselves and I go back to being myself."

Does that perceived sense of negativity interfere with his life at that level?

"Oh, absolutely," he affirms. "I think the media has zero concept, none, of the negative atmosphere that it's creating on a personal level. It's hard to go into the whole psychological aspect of it, but people feel like, not only do they know you, but they're almost above you. It's hard to explain, it would take an hour for me to explain it to you. All I can tell you is that because there are no heroes, everybody's an asshole.

"Just think about it in totally general objective terms - how much respect do people have for the government, for people running for office? Not a lot. Not admiration, respect. Do people really believe that they're being told the truth? I'm telling you, it's a pervasive basic negativity. I mean, it's easy to sell a 15-year-old that I'm a hero, but it's a lot harder to sell it to a 24-year-old. And I'm not sitting here telling you I am one, I'm saying that every human has their grey area, but the grey area's become the focus. And some people do a better job of portraying that area correctly and some don't. Those who don't, like me, suffer for it, and those who do, people buy all that shit hook, line and sinker.

"My personal life, the band's personal life, is literally a 50/50 subject with our music. You meet a guy in a pub and he knows that you're a fuck-up, but you don't know that he's a fuck-up, so who wins in that particular situation? It creates a built-in tension that's just hard to explain, and I've watched it evolve over time."

If this sounds like the whining of an overpaid complaint rocker, then maybe that's what it is. But I have to admit, as Corgan vents his grievances, he does so with such conviction I find myself nodding sympathetically.

"Y'know, I got in a big argument with a magazine editor in America," he recalls. "I said, 'Your magazine's negative and you're ruining music. Fuck me, I'm too old to even care about whether or not I'm good or bad, but you're ruining the purity of the musical experience for young kids because everything sucks, everything's tragic, everything's faulty.' One of my managers calls it 'Internet talk'. When you pick up a music magazine and you read people are saying something's really fantastic, don't you look at it with a grain of salt? You think, 'What's the politic here, who's suckin' whose dick?' You and I know the back channel, you know what I'm saying? It just colours the world all wrong. I just feel bad for kids, because they can't experience that kind of base euphoria, everything is so quickly underlined."

So what's Corgan's antidote to all this negativity?

"I had this idea that I wanted to start a magazine," he confesses. "Of course I would never do it, 'cos I would get crucified - but I'd call the magazine The Things We Like. And the credo of the magazine would be: 'We don't put stuff in here unless we really like it, so don't pick up this magazine expecting to read any dirt, any bullshit, this is nothing but total support and interest in the things that we like.'

"I mean, (take) the Q magazine article, right? I sat with Phil Sutcliffe for 90 minutes, went very into depth about all sorts of things. I thought it was a fantastic interview. (But) the interview in the magazine is 20% of what it could've been. Page three of the interview, there's a picture of the dead guy (Jonathan Melvoin) being dragged out of the fuckin' hotel. And with us, no matter how blowing a record review, no matter how fantastic a concert, it's still going to be: 'They're the band that this happened to'."

Tempus has fugited and Corgan's schedule would weaken the most seasoned of press-blitz veterans. By way of a parting comment, I remark that if many rock 'n' roll bands use the medium as a way of extending their adolescence, then the Smashing Pumpkins' biggest contribution to the form is that, through songs like 'Disarm', they made regression therapy as valid as kicking out the jams.

"We still pumped out the rock," Corgan maintains, getting himself a drink of water. "What was behind the rock was a whole other thing."

More worms, perhaps?

"Yeah, right. More worms." n

* The Smashing Pumpkins' new album Adore is out now on Virgin Records.