(Well, 5 million copies of a double album, but that’s arguably more impressive, given that back then the CD version cost more than $20.) And then it all went to shit, just as Corgan’s flamboyantly dour lyrics had long foretold. The RIAA eventually certified it Diamond, meaning 10 million copies sold. The Pumpkins followed it up in 1995 with the double-disc Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, a gigantic flex from the title on down, indulging Corgan’s every whim, from prog wizardry to gentle balladry to emo acrimony. (God bless the crunchy neon-melodrama anthem “Today,” and its iconic “let’s paint an ice-cream truck” video.) Very few ’90s rock records - Nirvana’s Nevermind, in fact, might be the only one - were bigger, or better, or more melodramatically beloved. Smashing Pumpkins - with a core lineup of Corgan, second guitarist James Iha, bassist D’arcy Wretzky, and drummer Jimmy Chamberlin - hailed from Chicago and blew up with their second album, 1993’s Siamese Dream, a colossus of snarling guitar-god ambition and bleating sad-goth vulnerability. Taking things badly has always been his thing.įor much of the ’90s, operatic rock-star pissiness was a fantastically lucrative field.
On June 2, 1998, the band had put out their fourth album, the murky and hobbled and vaguely electronic Adore. “You have this feeling of desertion: Maybe they don’t love you anymore.” The piece’s headline was “Billy Corgan Blasts the Critics,” but by they, of course, he meant his fans. “There’s definitely the moment where you go, ‘What happened?’” the Smashing Pumpkins frontman and alt-rock supervillain told Rolling Stone in late 1998.
But the greater tragedy is that the world was destined to fail Billy Corgan.
Billy Corgan was destined to fail, eventually.