Billy Corgan haș hopped on Zoom to chat about his coming tour with the his new band, the Machines of God, which will revisit Smashing Pumpkins songs from Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, Machina, and Aghori Mhori Mei at special small hall shows. He’s really eager to go over the details, but his eyes aren’t on the camera at first, and he’s slightly distracted. It turns out there’s a bat loose in his house, and his young kids are home.

“It’s quite an intense thing because we have a lot of love and respect for wildlife,” he says, shortly before one of his kids briefly plops down on his lap. “But at the end of the day, you’re dealing with a dangerous animal. [My kids are] freaked out and fascinated. But it’s all good. This is part and parcel of living in the faux country. It’s not quite the country, but close enough.”

Somehow or another, the loose bat ceases to be an issue a couple of minutes into our chat. But the clock is ticking before Corgan has a business meeting in 30 minutes. During that time, we touch on the Machines of God tour, the upcoming Smashing Pumpkins European run, the grueling process of assembling a Machina box set, his new Magnificent Others podcast, and his deep respect for Green Day.

I pushed for years and years for the band to invest in what I would call smaller tours that would highlight particular eras of music. Not to do the “Hey, we’re going to go out and play Siamese Dream tour,” which we still haven’t done, and maybe will do some day. But to sort of learn into an era in a very particular way so that something different might come out of it.

We weren’t in agreement about what the purpose of such a thing might be for. And we have this agreement, which has been really helpful over the pasts seven or eight years, that says if we’re not in alignment about something like that, nobody is going to pull rank and say it has to be done. That was very much the way the business worked back in the day, and solved a lot of problems.

So, I’m going out and doing these shows the way I want to do them, in the manner I want to do them, and in July I’ll be out with the band in Europe.

I’d seen Kiki on Instagram and was following her when I saw her name listed amongst the people who wanted to audition. I made this mental note of, “Oh, cool. I know her,” like how you think you know people from social media. And so she was…I guess you’d use the word “waitlisted” as somebody to come in and audition. She was amenable to that.

Jimmy [Chamberlain] and I had a Zoom call with her, and she was just a lovely person. She’s very much the person that she is today. She came, did the audition, and I think we whittled down 10,000 auditions to about 10 auditions.

Management. We had people from management. I think it took them three full days to whittle it down to the 600 or 700 range. And I whittled that list down. It took me a few days.

When James came back, Jeff had been in the band for 10 years or something. The first person I called was Jeff. I said, “Listen, I don’t want you to lose your gig over this. What do you think if we went to a three-guitar lineup and leaned into the band’s recorded narrative, which is all the guitar layering.” He said, “I think that’ll be great.” James loved Jeff, and we just kind of went from there.

When Jeff left a few years ago, we were all pretty certain inside that that was a good way of doing things. It’s hard to explain, but after so many years of a song being out, the general public wants to hear a song as they hear it or heard it 1,000 times on the radio. The best you can present that song as it is on record is actually to your benefit. Back in the day, we never thought about it like that. It was always about, “We’re going to play the song this way tonight.”

A ton. On the Pumpkins, there’s so much guitar that it’s ridiculous. Sometimes I meet guitar players in bands and all they want to do is pick my brain about what I did on something. When I tell them the statistics, they are just like, “Holy shit.”

Yeah. And James plays a lot of cool shit that can just float over the music. We call him the “Space Ranger” because of that, and it does feel more like the records.

Jake, I met through my friend Trev Lukather. Jenna, I’ve known for years as a friend and someone I respect as a recording artist. I lured her to the bass side of the force for the tour.

I’m just paying tribute to the records. I’m cherry-picking what I want.

Yes. Let’s just say it’s an idealized setlist of what I want to say from those three albums.

We’re definitely doing two songs from Aghori that have never been played live. There’s a bunch of stuff from Machina that’s never been played live.

There’s a few, but I can’t think of them from the top of my head. That’s the problem with playing these Greatest Hits setlists. You end up leaving off the cool seven-minute songs because there’s no fuckin’ time.

Yeah. We’re definitely doing some of the singles. The show would not flow well without them. I would say that I’m doing a more personalized version of the records based on what I want to say today. I’ve chosen those songs that are most resonant with what I want to say. And certainly “Bullet With Butterfly Wings” and “1979” and “Muzzle” are part of that vision. But because of the size of the venues, I don’t feel any pressure to play hits. If I’m playing them, I feel like it’s part of the show I want to make.

I’m in my own rehearsal. There’s a lot of lyrics. I picked a lot of songs and there’s a fuck-ton of lyrics. Last night, my son wanted to watch Doctor Who. I was like, “I gotta learn these lyrics.”

Oh no. I try to memorize everything.

Listen, it helps to cheat. It’s a lot less stress. But I feel like I’m not as connected to the songs because I haven’t committed to understanding what I’m saying and why I’m saying what I’m saying.

Sure. But I mean, when you’re singing a song that’s 30 years old, I think it’s important to get back into the mindset of, “What was I trying to say?” or “Why was this important for me to say this way?” Sometimes I’ll write funny words and I’ll go, “Why the fuck is that word in there?” So it helps me as a singer to think, “Okay, I was upset about this thing and I sang this thing,” and it puts me back in the mindset.

I always mess around.

I wanted to celebrate the anniversary of certainly our biggest album. And Machina, the box set is finally coming out and the reissue of the original vinyl. My label Teahouse is putting out the box set. And so I’ve been steeped in Machina this year trying to get this thing out. I was like, “That would be a cool tour. Honor the 30th anniversary of one, the 25th anniversary of another, and then throw in some new songs. That sounds like a rockin’ tour.”

I could tell I picked the right thing because once I announced the three albums, the fans were like, “Fuck yeah, fuck yeah, fuck yeah.” Those fans who know the depths of those albums, and what I would pick from those albums, and why I would be picking those albums…once they saw the visual imagery I put out to promote it, they went, “Okay, I want to see this show.” Hardcore Pumpkins fans, that’s the vibe they’re more into.

It puts more stress on me as a guitar player to cover more guitar parts and sing. Last night, I was working on “White Spyder,” which is a Machina song that was never played live. The version on Machina had a drum machine. Jimmy never played it. And so I’m like, “How the fuck am I going to play these crazy guitar parts at 160 BPM and sing this thing?” There’s like 80 lines of lyrics. I’m like, “What was I thinking?”

One cool thing when I went to put together the Machina box set is that we had Jimmy actually play on the song. And so we have the original version, but with Jimmy now. It’s cool since it sounds like a lost Pumpkins track.

That’s the plan, yeah.

Yes. Because, again, there’s this uneven agreement about how to approach this end of our musical opportunity. I’m the type of person who has no problem going to ground and building something up from the bottom. Just the fact that if I say, “I want to go out and play all the songs from Adore in some arty fashion,” doesn’t send 800 promoters screaming for their phones to write a check doesn’t mean anything to me.

If it’s at Madam Zuzu’s or some small concert stage somewhere in Nova Scotia, I don’t really care. I’m interested in saying what I’m interested in saying. I just know because I’m very much in touch with my fan community, particularly with my Substack, that there’s a lot more interest in this side of the musical equation that people would think.

The distance is so vast between the Borg of the Smashing Pumpkins playing the greatest hits and me doing a deep dive tour, albeit of this massive album, and one that’s certainly revered in hindsight, that it’s hard for people to do the math on that. For me, the math is very apparent. I think there’s a tremendous amount of energy here.

It’s no different than if you went to a film festival and before Tarantino plays his favorite Western, he gives a 20-minute talk, and then you watch some Western you’ve never seen. I think recontextualizing art in the modern world, particularly through one’s access of social media, is just going to throw open creativity in a way that people don’t understand yet.

[Laughs] You and me both.

The original agreement was before Universal owned the catalog. The agreement that I made somewhere along the way circa 2010 was that I’d be able to reunite Machina I and Machina II in a cohesive whole that would honor the record that was originally intended to be made, and was never finished. They agreed to that.

When Universal bought the EMI catalog, which included our works, they bought that agreement. Well, when it came time for me to do this, they were like, “Why do you want to do that?” I was like, “Well, it’s on a piece of paper, and your predecessors agreed to it.” It went through a lot of hand-wringing like, “Why do you want to do this?” to “Okay, I guess we have to do it,” which is never a good thing to hear from a record company.

The modern state of the music business is that every time you turn around, every six to 12 months, the person you were talking to is gone. And so one year, it would be someone who was favorable. The next year, it was someone who didn’t give a shit, and wouldn’t even return e-mails.

By the way, this is for a record that was a gold record. It wasn’t an insignificant record. And if you want to argue that the band’s heyday was the Nineties, well here’s the last album of the Nineties. But they didn’t really give a shit about it for many, many, many years.

It didn’t want to do it until everyone was in line to do it. Finally, I had that agreement. Now I’m proceeding. And it took me two years to put the damn thing together. There were missing tapes. The amount of forensic detective that took place to cover the 48 songs that make up the reconstituted Machina, not to mention all the extra tracks for a box set…And by the way, I’m touring. I got kids. It’s not my number one project. I do it here, here, and here.

And by the way, I’m paying for everything. Nobody is giving me a penny. Everything is out of pocket. I do all this, I get it all ready, and they go, “What the fuck is these 48 songs?” I go, “Well, that’s the record.” They go, “Machina I had 15 songs and Machina II had 16. Why are there 48?” I go, “Well, there’s a bunch of unreleased stuff, and there’s stuff I fixed.” They go, “Oh, we don’t know about that.” And now they don’t want to put out the box set.

Whoever was running the thing at the time didn’t agree. And so that was another approximately three years of wrangling. And so the end result is they’re putting out the original 2000 release with the original artwork, which is commonly known as Machina I. And ZuZu’s is putting out the box set, which is 80 songs. It’s the reconstituted Machina I and II together, plus all the additional materials, plus all the liner notes, and an explanation of the whole contrivance of the story. As painful as it’s been, I think everybody wins.

I think that when people hear…I can’t speak for the bonus material. That’s always a bit of a toss up, right? Does someone want to hear your fourth version of something? But when people hear the reconstituted album, which is now just called Machina, which is what it was originally meant to be, I think they’ll find it quite shocking.

I think it’s as powerful as anything we’ve ever done and some would argue it’s even more powerful.

Yeah. The record company at the time didn’t give a fuck about anything. I’ll tell you a quick, funny story. We’re coming up to the end of the band’s tenure in 2000 where we played our last show at the Metro, where I believe we played 38 or 43 songs or something over a four-hour farewell. I called our record company at the time because obviously I still had a relationship, even though we were out of the deal. And I said, “It makes good sense to me that we would record this concert, and you’d want this concert whether we released it now or ten years from now.”

They said, “How much do you think it’s going to cost to record the concert properly and film it?” I said, “About $60,000.” They went, “No. We don’t have that kind of money.” So the record company waved on the band’s final concert, which they would have owned, for $60,000.

As they’re telling me this, the paid either Janet Jackson or Mariah Carey, I forget which, $80 million to go away. Why they’re blowing crazy amounts of money to sign and subsequently get rid of artists who are now considered legacy artists, Janet and Mariah, while totally bungling our entire situation…that’s a book in itself.

While that’s going on, they’re telling me they don’t have $60,000. And so I end up paying for it, which is why the band owns the band’s final concert.

Fantastic. It was awesome. The crowds were great. Green Day was so gracious. We couldn’t have had a better summer. It was one of my favorite tours of all time. I obviously knew the Green Day guys since we did Lollapalooza together back in ’94. They used to laugh at me when I would play basketball against the monks, and snicker like the punks they are.

But they’ve obviously gone on to such tremendous success, and they were so gracious in being hosts, not only to us, but to Rancid and the Linda Lindas. The vibe on the tour was incredible. It was just the spirit of what it’s supposed to be when you put bands together. It was one of the best experiences we’ve ever had, and we’re forever grateful to them. They were such great ambassadors.

More of the same. We’re in this interesting place where we continue to gain momentum ever since James came back. And maybe I allowed it to refocus itself where probably it should have been focused for a decade. We started leaning into our strengths, and stopped messing around the edges, as I like to do. And it’s all kind of grown up and gotten very strong. There’s noting to complain about. The interest is strong. The shows are very strong. The band has arguably never played better.

I oftentimes found myself in this position with people less skilled than yourself, not enjoying the interview, but really wanting to enjoy the interview. Why wouldn’t I want to share my story to interest people in what I do? That’s the whole point in doing an interview. It’s not so much to talk. It’s to get people to want to listen. I found myself in this interesting place where I was recruited by people who work for Bill Maher to join his burgeoning podcast network.

I was told I could basically do whatever I want to do. I said, “As long as you let me have the latitude to interview the guests in a manner that I think is more respectful and befitting the position I think they have in my own mind, and certainly the position I think they should have in the culture, that’s what I want to do.” That’s exactly the show you see.

My main harp is that we’ve lived in the past to 10 to 20 years in American culture with a lot of people being celebrated for things that you can argue are a form of accomplishment, but not what you’d call a traditional accomplishment. We’ve all watched the VH1 One Hit Wonder show. But what they overlook in the One Hit Wonder show is there are a lot of people who wish they had had one hit.

There are also a lot of people who had one hit, and went on to become very influential. And yeah, you can talk about that one hit, but it really was their influence in the style of music they were playing or their own individualistic approach that makes them valuable.

I want to talk to people that I think are valuable in American culture that need to maybe be looked at in a different light, and when given the breadth and time of a sober conversation, I can present a case for that value that I think is contributory.

Carnie is someone I’ve always really liked, and that I respect. And maybe I’m sensitive when it comes to this, but we need to be careful at how we look at people who come from very famous musical families.

I love not only exploring the challenge, but also celebrating where they’ve triumphed against the challenge.

And there are cases where people haven’t triumphed, but their story can be a different story. I’m friendly with Mackenzie Phillips. As a kid, she was on a very successful show with Valerie Bertinelli, Wolfgang’s mother, One Day at a Time. Mackenzie is the daughter of John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, fell horribly into drugs, and destroyed a very promising career.

She turner her life around, got sober, and became very, very valuable and important in the rehabilitation/recovery community. Her story can be told in any number of ways. But if the ultimate summation of her life isn’t one of celebration and a victory, you’re missing the whole point.

Again, we live in a clickbait culture. And clickbait, by and large, thrives off negativity. I’m not saying not to do it. I’m saying there are antidotes to that type of culture, which require a slow unwinding of a story to say, “I think there’s a lot more value here than a 60-second meme can cover.”

I love Gene. I know Gene well enough to know that he’d let me push him around a little bit just to see what he would say. I think it illustrated a lot. I think on one level, you see the hard shell that’s been created over 50 years of being sort of denied. Look at how many years they were denied the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. It was like a laughing, moving joke that they kept keeping them out. You can’t tell that doesn’t sting for an artist of that magnitude.

Gene has had a huge influence as an artist, as a graphic mind, as an avatar, as a way to even look at how to run a business as a brand in rock & roll. Hugely, hugely influential figure, who has kind of reduced himself at times to this guy from the reality show. But the real person, I think, is far more complex, and far more wounded on many levels. But that doesn’t make him weak. That makes him strong in my eyes.

Everyone has asked this question, and I always say Paul McCartney. And the reason I say that is because not only is he the architect of the most successful rock band of all time, and I would say that he’s the greater architect, even above John [Lennon], because it was really Paul who had the aesthetic width to understand what the Beatles could be. And even though John had the talent to create the road that wasn’t in front of them, it was Paul who had the ability to frame it.

Paul was really the production genius that have kept the Beatles so relevant all this time, and obviously one of the greatest songwriters and singers of all time, and a hugely influential musician. But the reason I’d love to interview Paul McCartney is because I would to do the interview which I don’t think anybody has done.

I’m not going to tell you. [Laughs] But my point is can you take someone who is so wrapped up in their patois and get them to break out of that long enough to give you something different? The closest we saw of that was Rick Rubin did the thing with Paul where they were playing Beatles tracks and doing more of a musical deep dive. But if you really, really, really think about it, and this is what I would say, and I don’t think this is going to give away my shot, is how much do we really know about Paul McCartney the person?

I would love the opportunity to show the Paul McCartney that I think is in there, even if he doesn’t want to show it. That’s because he’s one of the greatest artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, and he’s alive, and we will spend the rest of our lives examining his work, whether he’s with us or not. And to not have these things documented, in my mind, is a crime.

It forces the inevitable thing in that it forces other people to reexamine the people that have come after and made significant contributions, including ourselves. We will finally be cast in a light that doesn’t involve the boomer shadow.

It’s true.
And speaking of Green Day, in a living and beautiful light, I had this feeling the other day, and maybe I’m very late to this party…I think it had something to do with the fact that they just got their star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. I’m watching them get their star and they certainly deserve it. I had this moment where I was reminiscing and I was like, “Wow, I’ve known these guys for over 30 years, and we just did this tour. Oh my God, they’re bigger than the Ramones.”

What I mean by that is that in the world I grew up in, the Ramones were number one. In a way, they always will be number one because they were first. But then I realized, “Oh my God, Green Day has actually done it. They are bigger than the Ramones. Their influence is greater, their reach is greater, and certainly their success is greater.”

And that’s all power to them. I’m late to that party at 58 years old, and I’ve known them and watched them and listened to them and been a competitor, right? But even I have to go, “Wow, they’ve done it.”

I think we’re going to go through a lot of interesting assessments in the next 10 to 20 years about the contribution of Courtney [Love] and the contribution of Gavin [Rossdale]. There will be a lot more contributions noted once the boomer shadow is off of us.

The world isn’t making new mega rock bands.
Have you noticed? [Laughs]

That means the ones we have become more precious, especially when the older ones fade away.
I have to jump off and attend a pitch meeting now. And here’s my existential question: Why are there not big rock bands anymore? Okay, bye bye. [Laughs]