The Smashing Pumpkins Were Great. Billy Corgan Is Not as Great as Billy Corgan Thinks He Is.

The Smashing Pumpkins made some genuinely great records. Siamese Dream is a legitimate classic, layered, melodic, heavy in all the right ways, with hooks that hold up thirty years later. Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness is bloated and overlong and also kind of magnificent, a double album that had no right to work and mostly did. Today, 1979, Tonight Tonight, Bullet With Butterfly Wings. These are real songs. Nobody is taking that away.

What is worth examining is the gap between what the Smashing Pumpkins actually achieved and what Billy Corgan believes they achieved. That gap is substantial. And the size of it tells you something interesting about how ego and genuine talent can coexist in the same person without the one validating the other.

What He Actually Built

The Smashing Pumpkins formed in Chicago in 1988 with a lineup that would remain volatile throughout their existence. Corgan on guitar and vocals, James Iha on guitar, D'arcy Wretzky on bass, Jimmy Chamberlin on drums. Their first album Gish came out in 1991 and was a credible underground record. Siamese Dream in 1993 was the real arrival, a dense, layered guitar record that owed debts to My Bloody Valentine and heavy metal simultaneously and made something new out of the combination.

Here is the thing about Siamese Dream that gets discussed less than it should: Corgan played most of the bass and guitar parts himself. He replaced Iha and Wretzky's contributions in the studio because he did not believe they could execute his vision. His explanation at the time was that they had "failed" him. The album was brilliant. The method was telling.

Mellon Collie in 1995 was Corgan's explicit attempt to make The Wall for Generation X, his words, offered without apparent irony. It is the highest-selling double album of the 1990s. It is also 28 songs and 121 minutes long, which is about 40 minutes longer than it needed to be. The best songs on it are exceptional. The worst songs on it are filler that exists because nobody in Corgan's orbit was willing to tell him the album was too long. When you have publicly compared yourself to the Biblical Job and called your album The Wall for Generation X, people stop pushing back.

The Decline Nobody Wants to Name

After Mellon Collie, the original lineup fell apart. Drummer Jimmy Chamberlin was fired after the death of touring keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin from a heroin overdose. The band continued without him. Adore came out in 1998, a melancholy, electronic-influenced record that had some interesting moments and sold a fraction of what Mellon Collie had. Machina followed in 2000. The band broke up that same year.

The reunion in 2007 brought back the Smashing Pumpkins name but not the original lineup. Wretzky declined to return. Iha was not initially invited. What came back was Corgan with hired musicians, releasing records under a band name that had earned its reputation through a specific combination of people. The post-reunion catalog has produced nothing that belongs in the same conversation as Siamese Dream. The Smashing Pumpkins' last genuinely essential period ended around 1996.

That is a creative run of about five years. It produced three albums of varying quality and a handful of songs that will last. It is a real achievement. It is not the achievement of one of the greatest rock artists of all time, which is the claim Corgan has been making, with increasing intensity, for the past two decades.

The Corgan Problem

Billy Corgan is one of the most quotable figures in rock not because he is wise but because he has no internal filter between thought and statement. He told the press that Mellon Collie would be "The Wall for Generation X" before it was finished. He has described himself as someone who took bandmates who could barely play their instruments and built something beyond the sum of its parts. He compared himself to Job after a Lollapalooza set. He has feuded publicly with D'arcy Wretzky, James Iha, his Zwan bandmates, and various journalists. He published a book of poetry.

None of this makes the early Pumpkins records worse. Siamese Dream is not diminished by its creator's subsequent behavior. But the claims Corgan makes on his own behalf, that he is among the greatest songwriters in rock history, that the Smashing Pumpkins are chronically underappreciated, that the world has failed to give him his due, these deserve scrutiny rather than deference.

The honest read is that Corgan peaked early and hard, made records that mattered, and has spent the years since struggling to accept that the peak was behind him. He is not alone in this. Plenty of artists have trouble with the distance between what they were and what they are. What distinguishes Corgan is the volume at which he insists on arguing the point.

What the Band Actually Was

The Smashing Pumpkins at their best were something genuinely specific: a band that took the shoegaze density of My Bloody Valentine, the melodic ambition of classic rock, and the energy of alt-rock and fused them into something that felt simultaneously huge and personal. Corgan's nasal, distinctive voice was not technically accomplished but it was immediately recognizable, which matters more. Chamberlin's drumming was exceptional, probably the most underacknowledged element of the band's best records, and the most obvious explanation for why the post-Chamberlin Pumpkins never sounded quite right.

The guitars, those walls of layered distortion on Siamese Dream, were a genuine contribution to the vocabulary of rock production. Even if Corgan played most of them himself, the sound he was reaching for was original and he found it. That counts.

What the Smashing Pumpkins were not was transcendent. They did not change rock music the way Nirvana changed it, and this comparison must sting Corgan, who has been publicly dismissive of Nirvana while watching Cobain's legacy dwarf his own in critical esteem. They did not build a catalog that deepens across decades the way Neil Young's or Tom Waits's does. They made a run of records that were very good to great, and then they did not.

The Honest Legacy

The Smashing Pumpkins belong in the conversation about the best bands of the 1990s. Siamese Dream belongs in the conversation about the best guitar records of that decade. These are real achievements and they are enough.

They are not enough for Billy Corgan, who has spent the past 25 years trying to expand them into something larger through the force of his own insistence. The insistence has not worked. The records stand on their own, which is both the problem and the point. Great work does not require its creator to campaign for it. The campaigning is what you do when you are not sure the work is enough, or when you know, somewhere, that the best of it is behind you.

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