The story of The Smashing Pumpkins

A kid from Chicago

William Patrick Corgan Junior was born in Chicago on the seventeenth of March 1967. His father, also called Billy, was a guitarist who spent much of his time on the road, and his parents split up when he was three. Billy was passed between relatives, then raised in the suburb of Glendale Heights by his father and a stepmother. When they separated, he stayed with his stepmother and became the protector of his younger half brother Jesse, who was born with serious disabilities. Corgan has said he suffered physical and emotional abuse as a child, and he has linked his lifelong depression and anxiety to those years. He was also a tall, awkward boy with a large birthmark on one arm, and he later said he always felt like an outsider.[1] [2] [3]

Billy decided to play guitar after seeing a Flying V at a friend's house. He handed his savings to his father, who bought him a cheap copy of a Les Paul, and he mostly taught himself. He loved Black Sabbath, Queen, Cheap Trick and Boston, then found the gloomier sounds of Bauhaus and the Cure. He graduated as an honor student but turned down college offers to chase music. In 1985 he moved to St. Petersburg, Florida, with a goth band called the Marked, named after the birthmarks of both Corgan and their drummer. It went nowhere. Back in Chicago he played guitar in a band called Deep Blue Dream, whose line up included the future Static X singer Wayne Static.[1] [2]

Working in a Chicago record store, Corgan met a guitarist named James Iha. James was born in Chicago on the twenty sixth of March 1968 to a Japanese American family and grew up in Elk Grove Village, a suburb he called boring and middle class. He had been studying graphic design at Loyola University, and he would drop out for the band. Corgan had already been telling people he was in a group called the Smashing Pumpkins, so the two made it real, writing moody songs in the style of the Cure and New Order over a drum machine. On the ninth of July 1988 they played their first show at a Polish bar called Chicago 21, with Corgan on bass, Iha on guitar and the machine keeping time.[1] [2] [3]

The bass player arrived through an argument. After a show by the Dan Reed Network, Corgan got into a heated debate with a young woman about whether the band was any good. Her name was D'arcy Wretzky. Born on the first of May 1968, she grew up in South Haven, Michigan, where she played violin and oboe and sang in choirs before teaching herself bass. When Corgan learned she played, he asked her to join, and he moved to guitar. The trio played the Avalon club, and then Joe Shanahan, who ran the famous Chicago venue the Metro, offered them a booking on one condition. They had to get rid of the drum machine and find a real drummer.[1] [2] [3] [4]

A friend recommended Jimmy Chamberlin, a jazz trained drummer from Joliet, Illinois, born on the tenth of June 1964. He had left home at fifteen and spent five years in a local show band called JP and the Cats before taking work as a carpenter. Chamberlin went to see the trio at the Avalon and later admitted they sounded awful, but he liked the songs and the drive in Billy's voice. Corgan was just as doubtful when he met a man in a pink T shirt with a mullet and yellow drums. Then Chamberlin learned the whole set at once, and everyone knew. On the fifth of October 1988, the four played together for the first time, at the Metro.[1] [2] [3]

Gish and the grind

Chamberlin's power pushed the band from gloomy pop toward something much heavier. In 1989 they appeared on a local compilation called Light Into Dark, and in 1990 they released their first single, I Am One, on a small Chicago label. It sold out, and a second single, Tristessa, came out on Sub Pop before the band signed with Caroline Records. From December 1990 to March 1991 they recorded their debut album at Smart Studios in Madison, Wisconsin, with a young producer named Butch Vig. The budget was twenty thousand dollars. Corgan re recorded most of the guitar and bass parts himself using his bandmates' instruments, which caused lasting resentment, and he later said the sessions left him with a nervous breakdown.[1] [2] [3]

The album came out on the twenty eighth of May 1991. It was called Gish, after the silent film star Lillian Gish. Corgan explained that his grandmother used to say one of the biggest things that ever happened in her life was Lillian Gish passing through town on a train. At first it barely registered, spending a single week on the Billboard chart at number 195. But it reached number one on the college radio chart and sold one hundred thousand copies within a year, far beyond what Caroline expected. Until the Offspring's Smash in 1994, Gish was said to be the best selling independent album ever released, and it eventually went platinum.[1] [2]

Life on the road was hard on all four of them. The band opened for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jane's Addiction and Guns N' Roses. James Iha and D'arcy Wretzky had been a couple since the early days, and they broke up during the Gish tour, just before the band played the Reading Festival in 1992. They still had to share a stage every night. Chamberlin sank into addiction to alcohol and narcotics. Corgan fell into a deep depression and was writing songs in the parking garage where he was living. After the Lull EP in October 1991, the band formally signed to Virgin Records, the major label that owned Caroline.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Then the ground shifted. Nirvana's Nevermind arrived four months after Gish and changed American rock overnight. Corgan felt the Pumpkins went from future stars to has beens in the eyes of the industry, and critics kept calling them the next Jane's Addiction, then the next Nirvana, then the next Pearl Jam. There were good moments. Their song Drown appeared on the soundtrack of Cameron Crowe's 1992 film Singles and became a modest radio hit. But according to Corgan, the label wanted to repackage Gish for the new grunge audience. He refused, and told them that if they wanted the right record, he would go and make it.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Siamese Dream

In late 1992 the band moved to Triclops Studios in Marietta, Georgia, near Atlanta, with Butch Vig producing again. One reason for going so far from home was to get Jimmy Chamberlin away from his drug contacts. It did not work. Vig later joked that within a day Jimmy knew every dealer in Atlanta. The drummer would vanish for days, and the others feared for his life. After one disappearance, Vig recalled, Corgan made him play the drum part for Cherub Rock until his hands bled. Chamberlin finally went into rehab, with Dave Navarro, then of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, as his sponsor. When he came back he played some of the most ferocious drumming of the decade.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Corgan was in a dark place of his own. He was blocked, overeating and cut off from his bandmates, and he later said he spent months thinking obsessively about killing himself. He had begun giving away his belongings and imagining his own funeral. One morning, he said, he stared out of a window and decided that if he was not going to jump, he had to change his life. That same morning he wrote Today, a bright, sunny sounding song about the best day of someone's life, written when he felt at his very worst. He began seeing a therapist, and his lyrics became far more open about his childhood and his fears.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The sessions were famously tense. Corgan played nearly all the guitar and bass parts himself, arguing that he could nail them in a few takes. Vig remembered D'arcy locking herself in the bathroom, James saying nothing, and Billy locking himself in the control room. The music press began calling Corgan a tyrant, and he admitted there was some truth in it. The layering was enormous. Corgan said Soma alone held up to forty guitar parts, and Vig had to draw maps to track them. Alan Moulder, chosen because he had worked on My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, took thirty six days to mix it. The album finished months late, and its costs ran past a quarter of a million dollars.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Siamese Dream was released in America on the twenty seventh of July 1993 and entered the Billboard chart at number ten. Cherub Rock, Corgan's swipe at the indie rock world that looked down on him, was the first single, but it was Today, with its ice cream truck video, that broke the band on MTV. Disarm and Rocket followed. The cover showed two little girls in fairy wings, and for years fans wondered if they were twins. They were actually California child models named Ali Laenger and Lysandra Roberts, who had never met before the shoot. The album went four times platinum in the United States and has sold more than six million copies around the world.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Success brought scorn from the underground. Pavement mocked the Pumpkins by name in their 1994 song Range Life. Bob Mould of Husker Du called them the grunge Monkees, and the Chicago producer Steve Albini wrote a scathing letter calling them ultimately insignificant. Meanwhile, a collection of leftovers called Pisces Iscariot reached number four in 1994, higher than Siamese Dream itself. That summer the Pumpkins headlined Lollapalooza, a slot Nirvana had been expected to fill before Kurt Cobain's death in April. Courtney Love, Cobain's widow and Corgan's former girlfriend, joined several dates to speak to the crowds, often using time that Corgan gave up for her.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The Infinite Sadness

After thirteen months on the road, Corgan went straight back to writing, producing around fifty six songs in 1995. He wanted a double album and described it as The Wall for Generation X. The band parted ways with Butch Vig and hired Flood and Alan Moulder. Flood had them record rough takes in a rehearsal room, set aside time each day for jamming, and use two studios at once so nobody sat idle for weeks. Iha and Wretzky played far more on this record, partly to answer the stories that Corgan had done everything on Siamese Dream. Late in the sessions, Flood said a half finished song was not good enough. Corgan wrote 1979 that night in about four hours, and Flood put it straight on the album.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness came out in America on the twenty fourth of October 1995. It held twenty eight songs across two discs, one called Dawn to Dusk and the other Twilight to Starlight. Tonight, Tonight featured a thirty piece string section from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Record company panic about a two CD set costing more than twenty dollars proved wrong. The album entered the Billboard chart at number one, with about two hundred and forty six thousand copies sold in its first week, the band's only number one album. It went on to be certified diamond, for more than ten million units in the United States, and became the best selling double album of the decade.[1] [2] [3]

This was the Pumpkins at the height of their fame. On Saturday Night Live on the eleventh of November 1995, Corgan unveiled the shaved head he has kept ever since, and his black shirt with the word Zero and his silver trousers became a look copied in shopping malls. Bullet with Butterfly Wings, 1979, Tonight, Tonight and Thirty Three all reached the American top forty. At the 1996 MTV Video Music Awards, the silent film style Tonight, Tonight video won six awards, including Video of the Year. The band earned seven Grammy nominations and won Best Hard Rock Performance for Bullet with Butterfly Wings. They even played themselves on The Simpsons, in the 1996 episode Homerpalooza.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The tour behind the album was shadowed by tragedy. In May 1996 the band played the Point Theatre in Dublin, a show with no seats on the floor. The band had spoken out against moshing for more than a year, and during the set people surged toward the stage and fell on each other. A seventeen year old fan named Bernadette O'Brien was crushed in the pile up and suffered a heart attack. D'arcy Wretzky told the crowd that a girl was dying backstage and asked if they cared. Bernadette died in hospital the next day. The band cancelled the following night's concert in Belfast out of respect, though they carried on playing standing room shows for the rest of the tour.[1] [2] [3]

Death at the Regency

Behind the scenes, Jimmy Chamberlin's drug use had returned during the long tour, and his father died while he was on the road. Corgan later told MTV that Chamberlin had already overdosed twice on that tour and the band had kept it private. Early in 1996 the Pumpkins had added a touring keyboard player, Jonathan Melvoin. He came from a musical family. His father Mike Melvoin played keyboards with the Wrecking Crew session musicians and had led the Recording Academy. His sister Wendy was in Prince's band the Revolution, and his other sister Susannah was in a Prince project called the Family, which Jonathan also joined. He had drummed on a Prince album and played with the punk band the Dickies.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the night of Thursday the eleventh of July 1996, before two sold out shows at Madison Square Garden, Chamberlin and Melvoin went back to the Regency Hotel on Park Avenue in Manhattan and injected heroin together. Both passed out. At about half past three in the morning Chamberlin woke and could not rouse his friend. He called the band's security manager, and they put Melvoin under a shower and phoned emergency services just after four. Paramedics pronounced Jonathan Melvoin dead in the early hours of the twelfth of July. He was thirty four. According to later accounts, the heroin was unusually pure and meant for snorting rather than injecting. Detectives believed he could not have been saved even if help had come sooner.[1] [2] [3]

Chamberlin was arrested and charged with misdemeanor heroin possession. Corgan, Iha and Wretzky were questioned by detectives and released. The band postponed its Madison Square Garden shows and the rest of that month's American dates. On the seventeenth of July they announced that Chamberlin had been fired, saying they had fought his addiction for nine years and that it had nearly destroyed everything they stood for. The Pumpkins were not invited to Melvoin's funeral. Several songs were written in his memory, among them Sarah McLachlan's Angel and Prince's The Love We Make. Chamberlin's firing was framed as a way to save his life, and Corgan later called the man his musical soul mate.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The band decided to finish the tour, hiring drummer Matt Walker of Filter and keyboardist Dennis Flemion of the Frogs. Corgan later called carrying on the worst decision the band ever made. The rest of 1996 kept taking things from him. His marriage to the artist Chris Fabian had ended, and in December she filed for divorce in Chicago, citing irreconcilable differences. That same month his mother, Martha, died of cancer. There was one bright spot. The Aeroplane Flies High, a box of singles and B sides, was pressed in a limited run of two hundred thousand copies, and it sold out so fast that Virgin had to make more.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Adore, Machina and goodbye

Mellon Collie had hinted at a turn toward electronics, and in 1997 the band released Eye on the soundtrack to David Lynch's Lost Highway and The End Is the Beginning Is the End for Batman and Robin, which won a Grammy. The next album went much further. Adore was made mostly with drum machines and guest drummers, including Matt Cameron of Soundgarden. Corgan spent weeks in Chicago, then moved the sessions to Sunset Sound in Los Angeles, where he rented a house hoping the band would live together. He later said Iha refused to stay there. Corgan called the result a record made by a band falling apart, and it included For Martha, a tribute to his mother.[1] [2]

Adore came out on the second of June 1998 and entered the Billboard chart at number two, behind Master P. Critics liked its hushed, gothic mood, but many fans did not, and it sold far fewer copies than the two albums before it. Corgan later joked that the title was a pun on A Door, a new way into the band, and he blamed himself for telling people it was a techno record. That summer the Pumpkins played a charity tour of seventeen dates, giving every dollar of ticket sales to local causes and paying the costs themselves. It raised more than two point eight million dollars. On Halloween they opened for Kiss at Dodger Stadium, dressed as the Beatles.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In October 1998 the four original members met and agreed on a plan. Chamberlin, now clean, would come back, and they would make one final album and tour before splitting for good. In April 1999 they played a short club tour called the Arising, the last time all four played together. Then, in September 1999, D'arcy Wretzky left the band in the middle of recording, saying she wanted to act. In January 2000 she was arrested for allegedly buying cocaine, and the charge was dropped after she completed a drug education program. Her replacement for the tours was Melissa Auf der Maur, who had just left Courtney Love's band Hole.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Machina, the Machines of God, came out on the twenty ninth of February 2000. It was a concept album about a rock star called Zero who hears the voice of God, renames himself Glass, and calls his band the Machines of God. Corgan said the idea was that the band would play cartoon versions of themselves. The album entered the chart at number three, then sales fell by sixty percent in its second week. Chamberlin compared it to watching your child flunk out of school after years of straight A grades. Corgan later said a concept record nobody understood, released as Korn and Limp Bizkit ruled the charts, was a career killer. On the twenty third of May 2000, he announced on the radio that the band would break up.[1] [2]

Virgin did not want a second Machina album, so the band released it themselves. Machina II came out in September 2000 on Corgan's own label, pressed on vinyl in just twenty five copies, which went to friends of the band with instructions to share the music free on the internet. On the second of December 2000 the Smashing Pumpkins said goodbye at the Metro, the Chicago club where it had all begun twelve years earlier. They played thirty five songs over four and a half hours, and fans were handed a recording of the band's very first Metro show. Matt Walker sat in on drums for 1979, while Chamberlin played acoustic guitar.[1] [2] [3]

Apart

After the split, Corgan toured with one of his heroes, New Order, in 2001 and sang on their comeback album Get Ready. He then formed a new band, Zwan, with Jimmy Chamberlin, his old friend Matt Sweeney, David Pajo of Slint, and the bassist Paz Lenchantin. Their only album, Mary Star of the Sea, came out in early 2003 to good reviews. By September 2003 Zwan was over, announced by Corgan on Chicago's WGN. He later described drugs, affairs and betrayals within the group, called his former bandmates dirty, filthy people, and swore he would never go near them again. James Iha and D'arcy Wretzky, he added, were good people, if misguided.[1] [2] [3]

In 2004 Corgan began posting a long online memoir called The Confessions of Billy Corgan, writing openly about his childhood, his failed marriage and his bands. In February 2004 he called Wretzky a mean spirited drug addict and blamed Iha for breaking up the Smashing Pumpkins. Iha answered the following year that he had not broken up the band, and that the only person who could have done that was Billy. Corgan also published a book of poems, Blinking with Fists, which reached the New York Times best seller list despite mixed reviews. He recorded around seventy two acoustic songs about Chicago history, and as of 2026 they remain unreleased.[1] [2]

The others built new lives. James Iha joined the supergroup A Perfect Circle in 2003, ran his record label Scratchie, played on records by friends like Fountains of Wayne, and co owned a New York studio. Later he formed Tinted Windows with Taylor Hanson, Adam Schlesinger and Cheap Trick's Bun E. Carlos. Jimmy Chamberlin married, had two children, formed the Jimmy Chamberlin Complex and later became a tech executive and investor. He has described himself as California sober since 2004. D'arcy Wretzky went almost completely silent. In 2008 she and Iha sued Virgin Records over ringtones of Pumpkins songs sold without their consent.[1] [2] [3]

On the twenty first of June 2005, the day his solo album TheFutureEmbrace came out, Corgan took out full page advertisements in the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun Times. He wrote that he had been keeping a secret for a year, that he planned to revive the Smashing Pumpkins, and that he wanted his band back, and his songs, and his dreams. The solo album sold only about sixty nine thousand copies, and on tour in Australia he stormed off stage when fans shouted for Pumpkins songs. Chamberlin quickly said yes. The two moved in together near Scottsdale, Arizona, to write, and on the twentieth of April 2006 the band's website confirmed the reunion.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The revival years

In April 2007 Iha said plainly that he was not part of it and had not spoken to Corgan in years. Melissa Auf der Maur also declined. So on the twenty second of May 2007, in Paris, a new line up played its first show, with Jeff Schroeder on guitar, Ginger Reyes on bass and Lisa Harriton on keyboards. The album Zeitgeist, recorded by Corgan and Chamberlin alone, came out that July on the same tape machine used for Mellon Collie, with no computers at all. It debuted at number two and went gold, but reviews were mixed and many fans missed the old line up. Corgan admitted people were puzzled by it.[1] [2] [3] [4]

A twentieth anniversary tour in late 2008 was marked by Corgan berating audiences from the stage. In March 2009 the band announced that Chamberlin had left. He called it a positive move and said Corgan had every right to keep the name. Corgan held an open call for a drummer and picked nineteen year old Mike Byrne of Portland from more than a thousand applicants. He then launched Teargarden by Kaleidyscope, a plan to release forty four songs one at a time for free, loosely based on the Tarot. Nicole Fiorentino joined on bass in 2010. The project produced EPs, stand alone songs and two albums before Corgan abandoned it in 2018.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The first of those albums, Oceania, arrived on the nineteenth of June 2012. Corgan called it the band's best effort since Mellon Collie, and it entered the chart at number four with generally good reviews. By 2014 Byrne and Fiorentino were gone, and Corgan and Schroeder made Monuments to an Elegy as a duo, with Tommy Lee of Motley Crue playing drums. It sold poorly, peaking at number thirty three in America. Corgan was furious at lukewarm reviews, insisting that nobody believed it was a three star record. A planned companion album, Day for Night, was shelved. In 2015 Jimmy Chamberlin returned as a touring drummer for a co headlining tour with Marilyn Manson.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Corgan's life had grown well beyond music. A lifelong wrestling fan, he co founded a Chicago promotion called Resistance Pro in 2011. In 2012 he opened a tea house, Madame Zuzu's, in Highland Park, Illinois. In 2015 he joined TNA Wrestling as a creative producer, became its president in 2016, and left months later in a dispute over money he had loaned the company. In 2017 he bought the National Wrestling Alliance, the historic brand founded in 1948, and became its owner and promoter. He also met the designer Chloe Mendel, his partner since 2013, and released the gentle solo album Ogilala with producer Rick Rubin in 2017.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

On the twenty sixth of March 2016, James Iha's forty eighth birthday, he walked on stage unannounced at a Pumpkins show at the Ace Hotel in Los Angeles and played Mayonaise, Soma and Today alongside Corgan and Chamberlin. It was his first appearance with the band in sixteen years. He joined them again the next night and at a Chicago concert in April. That August, Corgan said he was speaking to D'arcy Wretzky for the first time in sixteen or seventeen years, and called it awesome to have his friend back. According to the New York Times, it was Iha who sent the first tentative emails, and a few air clearing dinners followed.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Three of four, and onward

On the fifteenth of February 2018, the band confirmed that Iha and Chamberlin had officially rejoined. D'arcy Wretzky was not included, and a bitter public fight followed. She said she had been offered a contract that was then withdrawn, and shared text messages to back her up. The band said she had been invited many times and had always put it off. The summer's Shiny and Oh So Bright Tour, with Jack Bates, son of Peter Hook, on bass, sold more than three hundred and fifty thousand tickets. For the thirtieth anniversary show in New Jersey in August 2018, guests included Courtney Love, Chino Moreno and Peter Hook himself.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The first album from the reunited core, recorded with Rick Rubin, came out in November 2018 and reached number fifty four. Corgan later said he never really saw it as a full album. Cyr followed in November 2020, a synth pop record named after a fourth century child saint, and pronounced like seer. Its release came as the pandemic cancelled the band's touring plans. In December 2021, Corgan's father, William Corgan Senior, died at seventy four. The two had a complicated history, but Billy had long praised his father's guitar playing, and his father once played a guitar solo on a Pumpkins B side called The Last Song.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Corgan next finished a trilogy that began with Mellon Collie and Machina. Atum, a thirty three song rock opera, was released in three acts between November 2022 and May 2023, each accompanied by a podcast. It reached number one hundred and eleven in America, the first Pumpkins album since Gish to miss the top hundred, though it did well in Australia. The band toured with Jane's Addiction and staged their own festival, The World Is a Vampire, mixing rock with wrestling from Corgan's promotion. On the seventeenth of September 2023, at a Siamese Dream anniversary show at Madame Zuzu's, Corgan announced that he had married Chloe Mendel the day before. It was Jeff Schroeder's last show.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In October 2023 Schroeder announced he was leaving after sixteen years, on friendly terms. In January 2024 the band posted an open call for a new guitarist. More than ten thousand people applied, and eight staff worked full time to read every submission. In April they chose Kiki Wong, a guitarist with a heavy metal background and a big social media following, and Corgan said he had been a fan before she applied. That August the band released Aghori Mhori Mei, a guitar heavy record Corgan compared to the Siamese Dream and Mellon Collie era. They released no singles in advance, wanting it heard as a whole. That summer they played stadiums with Green Day.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The past kept returning in new forms. In 2025 a long delayed box set finally restored Machina to Corgan's original vision, eighty songs in all. In November 2025 the Lyric Opera of Chicago staged A Night of Mellon Collie and Infinite Sadness, an operatic version of the album with Corgan singing on some songs. In 2026 the band announced the Rats in a Cage Tour, an arena tour of North America built around the album's thirtieth anniversary, opening in Columbus, Ohio, at the end of September. As of 2026 the band is Corgan, Iha and Chamberlin, with Jack Bates and Kiki Wong on tour, and its worldwide sales passed thirty million albums long ago.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The people around The Smashing Pumpkins

Billy Corgan and James Iha. They met in a Chicago record store and started the band together in 1988, with Iha co writing Soma and Mayonaise. Corgan's habit of replacing Iha's guitar parts in the studio caused lasting hurt, and after the 2000 split they did not speak for about a decade, with Corgan publicly blaming Iha for the breakup. Iha reached out by email years later, and in 2018 he rejoined the band for good.[1] [2] [3]

Billy Corgan and D'arcy Wretzky. Their first meeting was an argument outside a club, and Corgan once called her the moral conscience of the band. After she left in 1999 he called her a mean spirited drug addict online. They reconnected warmly in 2016, but the 2018 reunion turned into a public feud, with Wretzky calling him insufferable and sharing their private messages.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Billy Corgan and Jimmy Chamberlin. Corgan has called Chamberlin his musical soul mate and, pound for pound, the best drummer in the world. The band fired him after the 1996 overdose, and in 2009 Chamberlin walked away himself. He kept coming back, for Machina, Zwan, the 2006 revival and again from 2015, and he is Corgan's longest serving partner in the band.[1] [2] [3]

James Iha and D'arcy Wretzky. The band's guitarist and bassist were a couple from around 1988 until they split during the Gish tour, just before the 1992 Reading Festival. Iha said the worst part was being stuck together on tour afterwards. They got over it, founded the label Scratchie Records together in 1995, and in 2008 jointly sued Virgin over ringtones. Iha has called her a best friend.[1] [2] [3]

Billy Corgan and Courtney Love. Corgan arranged for her band Hole to stay at his Chicago apartment so he could meet her, and they dated briefly in 1991 before she married Kurt Cobain. He later co wrote much of Hole's Celebrity Skin. In 2006 he lived in a wing of her Hollywood home, then they fell out bitterly over songwriting credits. They reconciled, and she sang at the band's thirtieth anniversary show.[1] [2] [3]

Billy Corgan and Butch Vig. Vig was a little known Wisconsin producer when he made Gish with Corgan in 1991, the same year he produced Nirvana's Nevermind. He loved that Corgan gave him the time to spend hours on a single guitar tone. Siamese Dream nearly broke them both, with Vig drawing maps of the guitar tracks. Corgan then chose other producers, saying they had become too close.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Billy Corgan and Flood. The English producer Flood shaped Mellon Collie with Alan Moulder, changing how the band worked and famously challenging Corgan to write 1979. He came back to rescue and mix Adore and co produced Machina. Corgan has praised him less for sound than for ideas, saying Flood could see an atmosphere in a song that the band could not.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Billy Corgan and Stephen Malkmus. Pavement's singer mocked the Pumpkins in the 1994 song Range Life. Corgan called it jealousy and compared indie rock to a high school clique. Malkmus said he liked most of their songs and only disliked their status. The grudge lasted, and in 2010 Corgan tweeted his scorn on finding the two bands booked together in Brazil.[1] [2]

Billy Corgan and William Corgan Senior. Corgan has described his father as a drug dealing, gun toting musician and has spoken of abuse in his childhood. His father admitted to Rolling Stone in 1994 that he did not know how to raise boys and had not realised how much his son was hurting. Billy still admired his guitar playing, and asked him to play a solo on a Pumpkins B side. His father died in 2021.[1] [2] [3]

Jimmy Chamberlin and Jonathan Melvoin. Melvoin joined the Mellon Collie tour as keyboardist in early 1996, his big break according to family friends. On the night of the eleventh of July 1996 he and Chamberlin used heroin together in a Manhattan hotel room. Melvoin died, and Chamberlin, who survived, was arrested and fired from the band within days.[1] [2] [3]

Billy Corgan and Melissa Auf der Maur. They met in Montreal in 1991, after her roommate threw a bottle at the stage and got into a fistfight with Corgan. They became pen pals, and Corgan told her she would be in his band one day. He first steered her to Hole in 1994, then, when she left Hole in 1999 in the same week D'arcy left the Pumpkins, he called and hired her.[1]

Rare facts about The Smashing Pumpkins

• The Smashing Pumpkins played their first gig as a duo with a drum machine, and Billy Corgan was on bass. The first show was on the ninth of July 1988 at a Polish bar in Chicago called Chicago 21. Corgan only moved to guitar once D'arcy Wretzky joined on bass.[1] [2]
• Corgan's first real band, the Marked, was named after birthmarks. Both Corgan and the drummer Ron Roesing had conspicuous birthmarks. The band moved to St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1985 but broke up after failing to find success there.[1] [2]
• Before the Pumpkins, Corgan played guitar alongside the future Static X frontman Wayne Static. From 1987 to 1988 Corgan was in a Chicago band called Deep Blue Dream with Wayne Static. He left to concentrate on the Smashing Pumpkins.[1]
• Gish was named after the silent film star Lillian Gish because of a story Corgan's grandmother told. His grandmother said one of the biggest events of her life was Lillian Gish riding through her small town on a train. Corgan later joked the album was nearly called Fish, but that sounded too much like the band Phish.[1]
• Gish was once said to be the best selling independent album of all time. Released on the Caroline label, it held that title until the Offspring's Smash in 1994. It was later reissued by Virgin and certified platinum in 1999.[1]
• The famous squeal in Mayonaise came from a cheap guitar that made noise whenever Corgan stopped playing. Corgan said the high whistle came from a sixty five dollar Kimberly guitar. Instead of fixing it, the band worked the feedback into the song.[1] [2]
• The Siamese Dream booklet was assembled by Corgan and his wife the day after their wedding. After disagreements with the label over artwork, Corgan stepped in at the last minute, pasting old family photographs with handwritten lyrics. It includes a picture of his mother Martha as a girl sitting on a fake moon at Riverview Park.[1] [2]
• The two girls on the Siamese Dream cover were not twins and had never met before the photo shoot. They were California child models Ali Laenger and Lysandra Roberts. Laenger later said they spent the day eating Lemonheads and rocket popsicles. They reunited in 2018 for a video announcing the reunion tour.[1] [2]
• The opening drum part of Cherub Rock was lifted from a Rush song. Corgan said the introduction was a direct lift from Rush's 1975 track By Tor and the Snow Dog. He also admitted the so called Pumpkin chord was borrowed from Jimi Hendrix.[1] [2]
• Corgan said Soma alone contained up to forty overdubbed guitar parts. Butch Vig said as many as one hundred guitar parts were squeezed into a single song on Siamese Dream. He had to draw maps of the tracks, and the one for Soma ran onto the back of the sheet.[1] [2]
• The woman on the Mellon Collie cover is a collage of two famous paintings and a whiskey ad. The illustrator John Craig took the face from a Jean Baptiste Greuze painting and the body from Raphael's Saint Catherine of Alexandria. The star she sits on came from a whiskey advertisement, and a cocktail glass stem is still faintly visible.[1] [2]
• The Tonight, Tonight video struggled for costumes because Titanic was being filmed at the same time. James Cameron's production had rented nearly every turn of the century costume in Los Angeles. The directors rented the leftovers and had designers remake them for the three day shoot.[1]
• The original footage for the 1979 video was lost when the tapes were left on top of a car. The driver pulled away with the tapes still on the roof, and the band had to fly back to reshoot the party scene. The video for Perfect later parodied the accident.[1]
• Corgan's famous Zero shirt was originally made by a skateboard company. The long sleeved black shirt came from Zero Skateboards, which stopped making it around the time Corgan started wearing it. In 2011 he auctioned one of his originals for Japanese earthquake relief.[1]
• The Pastichio Medley on the Zero EP stitches together seventy three song fragments in about twenty three minutes. Most of the snippets were unreleased ideas from the Mellon Collie sessions. Some grew into later songs, and several were released in full on the 2012 reissue.[1]
• The drum machine track on Thirty Three is the one from Corgan's original demo. Corgan could not recreate the part, so the demo track stayed on the finished single. He joked that he had planned songs called Sixty Six and Ninety Nine but never finished them.[1]
• The B side The Last Song features a guitar solo by Corgan's father. Corgan said he burst with pride hearing his father's playing on it. The song was performed live only once, at the band's farewell show at the Metro in December 2000.[1] [2]
• The Pumpkins covered Depeche Mode's Never Let Me Down Again because D'arcy Wretzky asked them to. Wretzky was a longtime Depeche Mode fan. The cover was recorded at the BBC, possibly in one take, and appeared as a B side to Rocket and on the film Not Another Teen Movie.[1]
• On The Simpsons, Corgan impressed the writers with his impressions of Homer and Marge. The staff of the 1996 episode Homerpalooza were struck by his voices, though they decided not to use them. Pearl Jam had been asked to appear and declined.[1]
• The band's 1998 charity tour gave away every dollar of ticket sales. The seventeen date tour raised about two point eight million dollars for local causes, and the band covered the costs themselves. The Chicago show alone raised five hundred thousand dollars for the Make A Wish Foundation.[1] [2]
• Only twenty five physical copies of Machina II were ever made. The hand numbered vinyl sets went mostly to friends of the band, with instructions to share the music free online. Every publicly circulating digital copy was ripped from those records.[1]
• Before joining the band, Melissa Auf der Maur watched her roommate start a fight with Corgan at a Pumpkins show. At a Montreal gig in July 1991 the roommate heckled and threw a bottle onstage, leading to a scuffle with Corgan. She and Corgan became pen pals, and he later hired her.[1]
• Zeitgeist was recorded on the same tape machine used for Mellon Collie, without any computers. Much of it was cut in the home studio of Kerry Brown, D'arcy Wretzky's ex husband. As of 2026 the album is not available on streaming services.[1]
• Two men were arrested for stealing and leaking the Zeitgeist booklet photos in 2007. Police said thirty nine photographs and three guitar picks were stolen, and a few images appeared on a fan forum. The two twenty one year olds were charged with felony burglary.[1]
• Starla was named after a woman called Darla, whose name Corgan misheard. The eleven minute song began as a demo and became a B side before appearing on Pisces Iscariot. Corgan wrote its middle section on the back of an envelope.[1]
• A guitar stolen from Corgan just after Gish was made came back to him nearly thirty years later. His 1974 Stratocaster was stolen shortly after the album was finished. He was reunited with it in early 2019.[1]
• D'arcy Wretzky once spent six days in jail because her horses kept getting loose. In 2011 she missed court dates over a ticket for failing to control horses that wandered onto roads near her Michigan farm. She was arrested again the day after her release, on a drunk driving charge.[1] [2]
• Jimmy Chamberlin raced cars professionally in the late 1990s. He competed in the IMSA series. He is also a keen birdwatcher and bird photographer, and later became chief executive of the Chicago digital media company LiveOne.[1]
• Longtime Pumpkins guitarist Jeff Schroeder was also working on a PhD in comparative literature. In 2014 he was finishing his doctorate at UCLA, specialising in Asian American and Francophone literature and critical theory.[1]
• Before joining the Pumpkins, Kiki Wong drummed for Taylor Swift at the MTV Video Music Awards. Wong did session work in 2014, including drums for Swift at the VMAs and lead guitar for Bret Michaels in a commercial. She studied biological science and once worked with neurological patients at UCLA Medical Center.[1]
• Kiki Wong's audition pieces were Bullet with Butterfly Wings, Cherub Rock, Jellybelly and Today. She was one of nine finalists invited to audition in Los Angeles in March 2024, out of more than ten thousand applicants. She said she studied every live video of those songs for three weeks.[1] [2]
• The album Cyr is named after a fourth century child saint and pronounced like seer. Corgan also admitted that witches had criticised him for mispronouncing the festival of Samhain in the song Wyttch.[1]
• Mayonaise charted in 2023, thirty years after release, thanks to a Netflix series. It played over the final scene of the last episode of Beef, sending it to number five on a Billboard lyrics chart. It had won a Rolling Stone readers poll of the best Pumpkins songs in 2012.[1]
• The band's 2024 search for a new guitarist needed eight full time staff just to read the applications. After the band's January 2024 open call drew more than ten thousand submissions, eight people worked full time to review every one.[1]
• Corgan inducted Pink Floyd into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996. He also played acoustic guitar with the band on Wish You Were Here during the ceremony.[1]
• D'arcy Wretzky once took revenge on a journalist with her lipstick. Unhappy with an article saying she cared more about makeup than the band's recording, she tracked down the reporter and slashed a Zorro style mark across his face with lipstick, according to Rolling Stone.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.