Billy Corgan and the Nelson Brothers: A Conversation on Music and Life |The Magnificent Others

Billy Corgan welcomes Matthew and Gunnar Nelson — twin sons of teen idol Ricky Nelson and grandsons of TV icons Ozzie and Harriet for a conversation about rock stardom, grief, and the ruthless side of the music business. The brothers trace their journey from losing their father at 18 and confronting millions in family debt to topping the charts with "(Can't Live Without Your) Love and Affection." They recall the punishing tour schedule that pushed Gunnar into a panic attack, the rise of Nirvana and grunge that upended MTV overnight, and a Geffen executive's vow to bury their record. Billy shares his own major-label battles as they debate the real cost of bending your music to please the label. That fight for creative freedom echoes back to their father's story from Bob Dylan's encouragement to write his own songs, to the boos that inspired "Garden Party." It's the story of a four-generation musical legacy, and the brothers fighting to protect it. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:09Speaker 01

  I just, I love music. I get to play it with my brother, which is awesome.

• 1:12Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13Speaker 01

  I haven't killed him yet, which is even better. We've always been in the business of connection. And I think music has this way of doing that. We got in the studio, we realized that it was really gonna be about songs, the power of songs.

• 1:27Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27Speaker 01

  It's all about the song.

• 1:29Billy Corgan?

  Some songs rise above the moment.

• 1:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32Billy Corgan?

  That's one of those songs that just like, to me, that's your dad's song.

• 1:36Speaker 01

  If you try to shift creatively to please the suits, even if you win, you lose. We just don't have quit. I think that's what we write in the book. We just don't quit. We just move forward, learn from it. The show must go on. You know, you've got this machine around you and everyone's depending on you and no one stops to think, hey man, how you doing? Are you doing okay? And he said, well, I just wanted to let you know that I'm gonna do everything in my power to kill your record. I'm gonna make sure that it never gets heard and there's gonna be no support. You're gonna get no money. There's gonna be no videos, no nothing. And just, just so you're not surprised.

• 2:11Billy Corgan?

  Gentlemen, welcome. Nice to see you both.

• 2:14Speaker 01

  You too.

• 2:14Billy Corgan?

  So let's start here because this is always the most exciting part. New music, you got a new record you're preparing. Of course, I always say, I never know where people are gonna see the interview. So at the time, the record has not come out, but you're about to release singles and all that stuff. So if you wanna talk about that.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  Well, right now, we're in the mixing phase. We're working with a mutual friend, Chris Lord Alge, right now, doing the actual mixing. And Matthew and I are based out of Franklin, Tennessee, so we have a studio out there. And

• 2:38Billy Corgan?

  But when I think LA, I think of you, you know what I mean?

• 2:41Speaker 01

  Born and raised.

• 2:42Billy Corgan?

  How could you leave?

• 2:43Speaker 01

  The sun kissed Malibu, Richmond. Yeah, we, we actually went to high school at Palisades High. It's been in the news lately, too. It's kind of there. Is it still there? No, mostly gone.

• 2:52Billy Corgan?

  All gone.

• 2:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, but the Nelson

• 2:53Billy Corgan?

  Have you driven through it over there?

• 2:55Speaker 01

  I can't bring myself to do it. He did. I tried and they turned me away. It was kind of fresh and what a shame. We had just come back from actually doing a benefit concert for Lahaina, from Maui, and it felt eerily similar. Eerily similar. And kind of the Palisades Village had a little bit of that vibe, which was rare in California, so we miss it a lot.

• 3:15Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, we were here actually. For some reason, we were just staying in town, my family and I. So it was weird to be kind of not a tourist, but like you're not living here, but you're in the anxiety of it. Just the anxiety of that time was really high.

• 3:29Speaker 01

  So you were here during the fire?

• 3:31Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, we just happened to be staying in town for work or something and the kids were freaked out. And one night, we had a fire break out across kind of this valley from where we were staying and there are helicopters coming. My kids are freaking out.

• 3:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:43Billy Corgan?

  I got little kids, you know?

• 3:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. But Nelson, we actually were originally from New Jersey. Ozzy and Harry had a big band back in the day and

• 3:52Billy Corgan?

  Yes.

• 3:53Speaker 01

  And based out of

• 3:54Billy Corgan?

  I'm old enough to remember you.

• 3:57Speaker 01

  They moved out here for the television show.

• 3:59Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  Thinking that TV was gonna be a fad and they were gonna be able to get back on tour with the band.

• 4:05Billy Corgan?

  Yes.

• 4:05Speaker 01

  It kind of took off.

• 4:06Billy Corgan?

  And here we are now in the future with fast channels and

• 4:09Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 4:09Billy Corgan?

  The Ozzy and Harry Show will live in perpetuity.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  Well, so we just restored it.

• 4:13Billy Corgan?

  I saw that.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  Our grandfather Ozzy filmed on 35mm film, so it was really wonderful. Yeah, he was a great guy. He wrote, produced, edited, directed, starred in all 4 and 35 episodes of the show. It's probably where we inherited our insomnia and our drive.

• 4:29Billy Corgan?

  Your, your beautiful work ethic, yeah.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  He did a great job. And of course, our, our dad singing on the show didn't hurt either. Going through all that stuff and figuring out, and our dad was our best friend, great guy. But hearing those stories and finding all the documents of things like ABC sending a letter saying, hey, congratulations on Ricky's success as a singer. We just want you to know, though, if he leaves the show to go sing full-time, the show's canceled. And that was, and the show ran for another seven years.

• 4:58Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  No pressure on a teenage kid.

• 5:00Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, wow.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:02Billy Corgan?

  So, um, talk a little bit about the music you're doing.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  Oh, great, great. It's a melodic rock record. It's for anybody who liked our first record, After the Rain.

• 5:11Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  It's kind of a modern continuation, similar theme, but it's, it's all about the songs for us.

• 5:17Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 5:18Speaker 01

  So we kind of waited a bunch of years till we had 10 bangers and, that we feel anyways, and put them down and

• 5:24Billy Corgan?

  I feel, I mean, you tell me, you live it, but it seems like time has been kind to what you guys originally were after, which was this kind of melodic rock. It seems to have aged very well.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  Well, we were different from a lot of the bands that came out before. I mean, Matthew kind of pointed out that Geffen, back in the day, kind of marketed us as a heavy metal boy band, which wasn't our choosing, but

• 5:47Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, I'm trying to remember. I mean, I certainly remember when you guys suddenly were on MTV every five seconds. It was like, there you were.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  We looked like hot Swedish chicks, you know?

• 5:55Billy Corgan?

  I wasn't thinking that. I was more focused on the, on the songs.

• 5:59Speaker 01

  Right. Well, the songs also, we weren't blues-based, mostly. We were

• 6:03Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, you guys weren't heavy on the pentatonics.

• 6:05Speaker 01

  Right, not, not really. We weren't. And it was more of like a heavy version of the Hollies that we were going for meets the Everlys.

• 6:11Billy Corgan?

  Interesting.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  And so it seemed to work that way and everybody was kind of doing the black and white thing in the videos and we went full color. I guess the idea was that people were going to get a snippet of time in which to make a, find an attraction to what we were doing or just pay attention, really. There were no guarantees. And so that's kind of where the look came from, too. We'd done some writing with some people in Europe where they really emphasized that that was super important, is the image and getting that together.

• 6:41Billy Corgan?

  Oh, okay.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  And we had the, I don't know, ironic, I think, looking back on it, situation of everybody thinking that it was music was just a hobby for us. So we kind of picked up and wanted, oh, here's some rich kids that wanna do something.

• 6:54Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 6:55Speaker 01

  Our upbringing really wasn't Ozzy and Harry. It was the opposite of that. And music for us was our way out of our, kind of our prison. And we had each other and we started doing it young and it just kind of developed. We started playing clubs really young, like we're like 12, 13.

• 7:08Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  Before we rolled, like Madame Wong's was a place that we used to play. And that was pretty much eight to 10 years before all that hairband stuff that came out that we were kind of lumped in with.

• 7:18Billy Corgan?

  Oh, I see. So from your perspective, when this all kind of starts to kick in, this is what we do. Like, you're not riding some way, you're just

• 7:26Speaker 01

  This is, this is an extension of where we are. And I think one thing that was a real kicker for us was losing our dad the way that we did and just kind of being thrust into, hey, figure it out, guys.

• 7:36Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. That really, it caused us to either sink or swim and made a decision that was really like, I remember we were dealing with a lot of grief and pain and putting it into stuff. And it was one person at the right time that said, hey, you know, you guys don't need to do this, right? You don't have to do this. You know anything you wanna do. The world's wide open.

• 7:52Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  And when we looked at each other and went, no, but we wanna do this. It, everything kind of like went from there. It's like we're on a mission.

• 7:59Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, it strikes me. I mean, I've been friends with

• 8:04Billy Corgan?

  other children of celebrity patronage or parentage. And when you have loss in the family, it's not just the private part. There's always this kind of personal thing that comes in where you have people constantly coming up and giving you their reflections. You almost become this kind of constant wake line.

• 8:22Speaker 01

  A bit, a bit. We've had that a lot and we've actually embraced it. We think that it's, it's actually, it's kind of lovely most of the time. The people especially that have a meeting with our dad or our grandparents or things. And now on our, on our mom's side, Mark Harmon is our uncle. And so it's kind of, people have been seeing us for a long time that way and they feel like they're kin to us. They feel like they're related to us a little bit.

• 8:48Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, there is that in America. I think it's partially because we don't have a rural family. So celebrity almost becomes a version of royalty.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  I think you're right, but I think, yeah.

• 8:59Billy Corgan?

  Like I used to tell, I was friends with Lisa Marie Presley. I used to say, you know, it's your rock royalty. It's like, there's, there's no escaping it. You're Elvis's daughter. There's no escaping it.

• 9:07Speaker 01

  That was true with her. And I remember the last time we saw her was with James Burton, our dad's guitar player. I went to go see a show that she was playing and we waited for the very, it was at the Opry and we waited for the very last people. We spent about an hour with her.

• 9:20Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 9:21Speaker 01

  And it was kind of neat to be able to talk to her about things as, you know, Elvis was our dad's pal and kind of almost treated our dad like a little brother. They played like these famous football games together.

• 9:30Billy Corgan?

  I heard the thought, yeah.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  So it was, it was neat in the sense that, yeah, of course, we had something we could relate to that way. And there's all, there are also the same, there's the same situation with people that are related to other people that, that spin out in the curves. And we always say, we could have wound up that way just as easily as the other.

• 9:48Billy Corgan?

  Sure.

• 9:51Billy Corgan?

  9/29/1990. Remember that date?

• 9:54Speaker 01

  Yep. Well, that September 29th, it was actually, I think it was the 20th, was our 22nd birthday and

• 10:01Billy Corgan?

  Yes, I have that here too. You skipped ahead on me, but

• 10:03Speaker 01

  Sorry.

• 10:05Billy Corgan?

  I said, "Not bad for your 23rd birthday present."

• 10:08Speaker 01

  Right. Not so bad at all. I think that's when we got the phone call to Love and Affection. It got number one.

• 10:13Billy Corgan?

  That's right.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  Which was an amazing day.

• 10:15Billy Corgan?

  Interesting call to get, right?

• 10:16Speaker 01

  It was. And you know what was, we wrote about this in the book, or at least I didn't, in my chapter on this. I, we'd been working towards it our whole lives, doing that. We started playing when we were six. So you always think, "Hey, you're gonna prove all those naysayers wrong."

• 10:31Billy Corgan?

  When you say six, what does that look like when you're six?

• 10:34Speaker 01

  Pots and pans in the kitchen, making a lot of racket. I was a drummer first.

• 10:37Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 10:38Speaker 01

  And I, I loved it. And my first memory was seeing my dad at Knott's Berry Farm, off the side of the stage. And I kind of made this connection. "Wow, it's pop and he's happy and, but the drums." And I just thought it was great. So the title of that chapter is, "I just want to hit something."

• 10:52Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  And Gunner was actually a savant drummer. He just had this thing where, and we grew up as a rhythm section. That's kind of the heartbeat of what we do, even though it's really now more write songs, acoustic guitar.

• 11:03Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 11:04Speaker 01

  You know, so you're not hiding. And he was a great drummer to the point of where when we started playing in clubs, all the, all the grownups were coming to see him play the drums. Kind of like, "Look at this freak show kid that's playing the drums." And it really worked out well. And it was when we turned 18 and our dad passed away suddenly. And we had already booked Saturday Night Live as a musical guest. Funny story there too. But on the way home, Gunner just turned to me and he said, and I thought he'd lost his marbles. I really, because it was a lot for us. We found out our dad was dead. I found out on the car radio, Gunner was watching television.

• 11:39Billy Corgan?

  That's the most horrific thought.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  And we were supposed to be on the plane with him. So it was just too much. I have to call it like a football game even all this time later. I miss him every day. But on the way home, Gunner just turned to me and he said, "You know, I gotta, I gotta come up with you. I gotta come up front with you. I just played my last gig as a drummer." And so what are you talking about? He goes, "Are you happy?" I said, "No, I'm miserable." I said, "Me too." And we decided we had to get ourselves together. But he said, "I promise you, I'm gonna learn how to play guitar," which he didn't know how to play at all. And he was a lefty. We're mirror twins. So I was born, I'm right-handed, he's left-handed. And he convinced me, because I figured there was no way I was gonna talk him out of this, that he was going to learn how to play guitar. For one year, he's gonna have a guitar in his hand every day, all day long.

• 12:23Speaker 01

  And like all those people we grew up with saying, "I've been playing guitar for 10 years." He said, "I'm gonna, I'm gonna make my hands bleed. I'm gonna learn from people." We were friends with Dweezil Zappa, who was a, you know, a savant, great guitar player. And Dweezil kind of became his first guitar teacher. Wrote out a chart, where Dweezil's mind works. That was how the fretboard was.

• 12:41Billy Corgan?

  It's the Zappa mind.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  It's unbelievable. And Gunner, to his credit, never, never stopped playing guitar for a year. And we kind of got our heads together and

• 12:49Billy Corgan?

  Was the thinking though, that you, if we're gonna make it like, am I jumping ahead?

• 12:55Speaker 01

  I just, I just had this vision of kind of like a modern Everly Brothers thing.

• 12:59Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 12:59Speaker 01

  Being the, the two guys up there doing that.

• 13:01Billy Corgan?

  Certainly works.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. It did. But the weirdest thing too, was that I had been the lead singer most of the time. And we got in the studio and we, we realized that it was really gonna be about songs, the power of songs. It's all about the song. And we decided to, even though we'd played a lot of clubs, start fresh, meet some people, learn the craft, really start over again. If he was starting over again on guitar and coming up fun.

• 13:24Billy Corgan?

  Funny. I had a similar experience.

• 13:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it was really

• 13:27Billy Corgan?

  Where you just go, "If I'm really gonna do this, I gotta go this way."

• 13:30Speaker 01

  It was that simple.

• 13:31Billy Corgan?

  Everything that's happened has been fine, but now I gotta

• 13:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:34Billy Corgan?

  I totally get what you're saying now.

• 13:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and it really worked for us. We really started getting into what it was like to not just write, everybody can write songs. You gotta write good songs.

• 13:44Billy Corgan?

  What was it about your father's passing though, that sort of shifted that for you?

• 13:47Speaker 01

  Well, we hit the, we had to hit bottom. You know, we did. We spent a year after our dad died, being those guys we never wanted to be. Being those Hollywood kids that you read about in the tabloids and stuff. And we got to the end of that year, broke in every way you can be broke.

• 14:00Billy Corgan?

  Did I hear right? I think, I saw somewhere, he was, your dad was $4 million in debt when he passed away?

• 14:05Speaker 01

  He was. Yeah, he owed a lot of money.

• 14:08Billy Corgan?

  That's a lot of money.

• 14:09Speaker 01

  Well, here was a problem as well. Bankruptcy for him was never on the table because he just thought that it was dishonorable. And we inherited a bit of that as well. But there's also another situation. If you declare bankruptcy, everything goes in the pot. That's every song, all the publishing, the Ozzy and Harriet Show, all of it. Name it. Like this rights? Everything. Everything goes, so our situation was a little different that way.

• 14:32Billy Corgan?

  Yeah. Wow.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  You know, I know a lot of people that use it almost as a financial strategy. "I'm just gonna, you know, walk away from it."

• 14:38Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  We really couldn't. Or we could. Actually, you have a choice.

• 14:41Billy Corgan?

  Well, thank God you didn't.

• 14:42Speaker 01

  I agree. And all these years later, and that was another thing, we're kind of finding our feet as people, as artists, but also as, you know, we never felt like we were entitled to anything. But we, we felt like we had a duty. It was like an honor thing. We, which we accepted because we loved our dad. We loved our grandparents. They were great. They were really funny and really good people. I never saw our dad have one of those celebrity moments, ever. And he was arguably, with Elvis, the most famous person in the world. And he never acted like it. He was impossibly good-looking, because he really was a handsome guy.

• 15:16Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 15:16Speaker 01

  But it was almost, he was shy about that. I mean, we saw women fall apart when he was around. And I'm talking not people that knew who he was. He just had that Elvis charisma thing, you know? But he was also, what we identify with too. He was, he was a teen idol when there wasn't such a thing. They coined the term for him. But he was the real deal. I mean, they would record on a Friday and it was on the air on Monday. There was just

• 15:39Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, I think it's hard for the modern world to understand that level of fame. Because we assume, because of the reach of the internet, we assume that fame these days is different because people can show these massive numbers. But I think what people get, get lost in that is the compression. Like, when your father walked through life as a, as a 20-year-old man, the entire country knew who he was.

• 15:58Speaker 01

  Oh, sure.

• 15:59Billy Corgan?

  Not just people who were into that type of music. The entire country knew who he was.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  In his situation, it's like the country grew up with The Adventures of Ozzy and Harriet and watched him grow up in a very real way from the time he was six. And there were 435 episodes, a lot of them. And it was part of the lexicon, still is. And coming out of World War II, I mean, at that time, there were basically three, three national channels and a local for everybody. Television was brand new. So you didn't have a million channels like you mentioned. And when they tuned into Ozzy and Harriet, the whole country did.

• 16:31Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  And so it was just a different time. But, you know, he always surrounded himself with the best musicians. Matt mentioned James Burton. We love Elvis II, that Elvis connection.

• 16:42Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  And Elvis tried to steal James from, from our dad for years. And our grandfather Ozzy, nobody knew that he was a lawyer. He had a law degree from Rutgers. So he knew what he was doing when he was negotiating contracts. And the family wound up owning the show because he paid a little extra money. And he had complete control of it. And as a musician, you know what that's like. It's when, ironically, there's a great clip of him, I think it was like on Mike Douglas or something, where he, he was asked about what it was like running this show. And he said, "Well, having autonomy, I think, is really crucial because I just don't believe in art by committee. I don't think it works." And now people, you see the song credits for any number of pop songs.

• 17:23Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  Is, how about one or two people, not 500?

• 17:27Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  So times are changing, understanding.

• 17:30Billy Corgan?

  I covered Wrecking Ball by Miley Cyrus once. And I think there were 12 writers on the song.

• 17:34Speaker 01

  Well, there you go. Yeah. Crazy. Art by committee. Yeah.

• 17:39Billy Corgan?

  I'm always fascinated because I think that you understand this vibe because I get it too. You know, people want to talk about a peak moment in your life. And then they sort of, it's like after that, you sort of fade into some sort of shadow in their mind. You know, they remember that time. They remember that song. They remember that album. So I'm always fascinated by what was your experience? Because being number one, huge, you know, had a big MTV moment. You guys were certainly everywhere there for more than a hot minute. Not so much how, how it feel, because we all know it's very intoxicating. But it, it's more the idea of like, did you think, "Okay, now that we're here, we can do this," or "This opens up this other lane?" Or like, what was your inner perception of?

• 18:23Speaker 01

  Really cool. Interesting. It was, it was overwhelming. It really was. On a, on a Friday, we went to the Valley over here. We're filming this in Los Angeles. And we went to the Sherman Oaks Galleria, when that was a big deal. It was kind of our childhood mall. And we got some supplies to go to New York to do some MTV VJing. We were sitting in for Daisy Fuentes when she went on vacation for the week. And we hadn't released our record yet or anything like that. They said, "Don't bring guitars with you." We brought guitars. Right. So we, we showed up there and, you know, we were cutting on each other and playing in and out of commercial breaks and doing the whole thing. And, and by the end of the week of announcing all the videos, they had a show, was it called Dial MTV? Like a countdown, 10, Top 10 Countdown.

• 19:03Speaker 01

  Right. At the end of the week, we got to announce, they surprised us with it. Love and Affection was the number one most requested video. So we thought, "Hey, man, that's really cool." We get on the plane, we go home. And the, the, two days later, we had a radio event at the Licorice Pizza, the Sherman Oaks Galleria. And we were met by the police when we got there. Their eyes were this big and they said, "We don't know if we can do this. What are you talking about?" And they opened up the elevators when we got out. We're in the back, so we didn't see what was going on. Yeah. And we never experienced anything like that.

• 19:33Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 19:33Speaker 01

  It sounded like a jet engine. It was insane. And, I mean, thousands of kids had showed up at, at that. Mostly female and three layers of parents and kids.

• 19:45Speaker 01

  They closed it. They closed it down when they realized there was no way they were gonna get to meet us there. So you can't really, even though we had a famous dad, we saw how people reacted to him at certain times. And we thought we were ready, but nobody can be ready for that. You know, where, you know, one day you're playing for the sound guy or you're in the studio. Yeah, you know, and I had mentioned And the only difference really was TV, which was, I found fascinating.

• 20:08Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 20:08Speaker 01

  We were the same guys, making the same music, having the same dream and all that stuff. And the only thing that was out of place was some TV work.

• 20:15Billy Corgan?

  Yeah. But did you, did it change the way you saw what you were gonna do musically or?

• 20:19Speaker 01

  I think we were on that path that time. We were just Being not, we were just being professionals, just being Nelsons, putting your head down and getting the job done. And I think, I think when that spotlight's focused on you in those moments, because our dad always said a, a career, just like life, is a series of comebacks. You, there were so many people that wanted our energy, they wanted our time, they, and we didn't really have any time to ourselves anymore. That's something I didn't really embrace, I had no perspective. All of a sudden, we're in it and you're living in a world where you have to visit four different radio stations in the same day in three different states to promote your record and everybody wants you to do the favors for their daughters at the bar mitzvah, at the privates, because he's a radio guy and, but that was two and a half years of that.

• 21:03Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  And at the, at the end of that, it was kind of like a matter of survival. It was tough for the two of us because our image was so strong, when we were on the road, we couldn't even spend days off together in public at all. We had to split up and do that and he was, he's my best friend. That was hard.

• 21:19Billy Corgan?

  Oh, I see.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  And I, I had a more difficult time on, on the road or with fame or success than Matt did. You know, actually putting everything together, I always felt that I was the driver and I was tough and, and all that, but we got about halfway through that tour. It was 13 months, six shows a week in arenas. And, and my voice- And we're a singing band. Yeah, my, my voice, no tapes or anything, my voice started giving me trouble. And if you have one cold or one bad day, then you're playing catch up, as you know, and people don't understand what that kind of pressure is.

• 21:53Billy Corgan?

  The anxiety is, the anxiety is the thing that gets me.

• 21:55Speaker 01

  It's the audience, your bandmates, the, the crew, they're all relying on this, right? And you wake up on a show day and if you have one of those, one of those days of, of total arogenitis, it's, it messes with your mind. So I started writing things down on a pad during the day just to preserve my voice. I started having to do every interview, because that was one thing is, he's got spare parts. So then I took that on as well. It's weird how we-

• 22:19Billy Corgan?

  I see.

• 22:20Speaker 01

  But I gotta say, I snapped. I, I lost my mind about halfway through. There was a moment where Matt had to grab me, the, the intro music was going on. He was running out of the arena. The, we were like, that was the, the, the show was starting and he starts running, total panic attack, lost my mind.

• 22:34Billy Corgan?

  Do you remember it?

• 22:35Speaker 01

  I, I barely do, I, I do. We got to write about it, Matt grabbed me and pulled me in and, and I wasn't even really in my mind at all. And he said, what were you born for? And that just kind of got me back to the moment, got through the show and then started getting help for it.

• 22:51Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, wow.

• 22:52Speaker 01

  It also didn't help, help you, you know, you, you got some medication given to you that you didn't know was- Oh yeah, a vocal doctor had put me on something, they don't even make anymore, it's illegal, it's basically speed. It was to clear up my, my throat and not have reflux or whatever.

• 23:06Billy Corgan?

  Was it drying you out?

• 23:07Speaker 01

  It was drying me out, but it was also spinning them out up here. And so I got no sleep. I had total insomnia for weeks at a time. That's a family trait anyways, though. But it was- We're convinced we're, we're vampires, Ozzy never slept. But the, the show must go on, you know, you've got this machine around you and everyone's depending on you and no one stops to think, hey man, how you doing? Are you doing okay?

• 23:29Billy Corgan?

  I literally think back to some of the greatest years of success I had and I can't remember anybody ever asking me how I was doing.

• 23:36Speaker 01

  There it is. Cause also, nobody wants to stop the gravy train, let's be honest.

• 23:40Billy Corgan?

  Well, there's that and I think people also do this weird thing where they think like, well, that must be great. And it is.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  It is.

• 23:46Billy Corgan?

  But of course, there's a cost to anything. I mean, we understand when we drive a car that you burn gasoline, well, it's the same thing with human resources. At some point, you can only run that hot for that long.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  I found my limit.

• 23:57Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 23:57Speaker 01

  I did, and it was the hard way. Fortunately, I had my twin.

• 24:00Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  Which was great, the show did go on and we got done with that first tour and that's when Matt fell apart. Yeah, I, I kept it together until it was, the tour was over.

• 24:08Billy Corgan?

  Who was born first?

• 24:09Speaker 01

  Uh, Matt was born first.

• 24:10Billy Corgan?

  I'd say it would make more sense if, you know.

• 24:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 24:13Billy Corgan?

  If he was born second.

• 24:14Speaker 01

  I almost lived with Elvis, you know? Elvis was a twin, as you know.

• 24:17Billy Corgan?

  I do know.

• 24:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I was almost Jesse. That's true. And we came home, it was very interesting, we worked very hard. We noticed that we were getting booked into certain places three times and even my brother and I were like, what's going on here? It almost sent, we found-

• 24:32Billy Corgan?

  They should make it money off you.

• 24:33Speaker 01

  They were just, they were trying to milk it for as long as it was going to happen. And here we were being told and telling each other, this is just the setup. The next thing, that's where it's really gonna come together. Everybody telling us, hey, you gotta invest in yourself.

• 24:45Billy Corgan?

  I'm trying not to curse, because I know, I know this vibe so well.

• 24:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:48Billy Corgan?

  I know this vibe so.

• 24:49Speaker 01

  And that, yeah.

• 24:50Billy Corgan?

  It's always the, the carrot, you know what I mean?

• 24:53Speaker 01

  Oh, sure.

• 24:53Billy Corgan?

  Oh, you gotta do this because this thing and then this thing. And then when you wake up one day and it's like, what happened to all that stuff that we were doing? Oh, well, you know?

• 25:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 25:01Billy Corgan?

  That's all gone now, sorry.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  Where's my tour manager? Oh, he's working for Barney now. It's like, it was like one of those things. And that's literally true.

• 25:09Billy Corgan?

  I know, that's why I'm laughing. That's why I'm laughing.

• 25:12Speaker 01

  We were also on DGC, David Decker Company, so we were, we were complete zeros waiting for a window to release our first album for about a year and a half. Because they had some huge artists that our, and our guy was working with. I mean, at the time, Whitesnake and Cher.

• 25:29Billy Corgan?

  We're getting into John Colautner in a minute.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  John, oh yeah. Well, he was great, but, but the thing was, we also got off the road to kids that were from Seattle, that were completed, the label had changed because Nirvana broke on our label.

• 25:42Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 25:43Speaker 01

  But we were on tour-

• 25:43Billy Corgan?

  That's right, while you, while you guys were on tour, that's when that whole thing came to happen.

• 25:46Speaker 01

  Yes, you're in the tour bubble, every arena looks the same. And then you get out of that vacuum and all of a sudden, the world has changed and no one told us.

• 25:55Billy Corgan?

  That makes sense, yeah.

• 25:57Speaker 01

  So it was a-

• 25:57Billy Corgan?

  And it really had changed.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  It, it really did. It, it really, it really did. And everybody that we knew at the label when we left was replaced by newer, younger-

• 26:06Billy Corgan?

  I mean, yes, they had, they had different color hair and they had nose piercings and-

• 26:10Speaker 01

  Well, I, you know, I look back on it now and I think we write about it in the book, there were some very interesting moments with, with people that we met that, I guess, the public wouldn't think that we would either meet or hang with. We had one show, I guess it was in upstate New York in Albany, and Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore came to the show. And they were super nice to us. It was, it was kind of odd that way. And I don't know, it was a great show and some fan in the audience had brought hundreds of signs. I had done an interview, it was almost like I was having to defend what we were doing at the time. And it wasn't like the, the label had really promoted us as songwriters or producers or whatever, it was just those were the guys on the shiny cover.

• 26:55Speaker 01

  And, and the, the sign that they brought said, fear no art. And the whole audience, they didn't know that, that Sonic Youth was in the audience, but they held up this sign. It was just kind of a surreal moment I'll never forget. And the other was going to see Henry Rollins do spoken word at the Roxy when we had a tour break and I was a big fan for years of Black Flag and his books, I read his books. And we write about it in the book, it was a fascinating thing where he started talking crap about our band onstage, not knowing I was there.

• 27:23Billy Corgan?

  Very meta.

• 27:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:25Billy Corgan?

  Very meta.

• 27:26Speaker 01

  And our dad's tour manager, Gary Hurst, is, he, I think he was Circle Jerks manager for a long time, but he was also Dad's mixer and introduced us to, to Rollins' music and stuff in the late seventies, early eighties. And he was terrified to come and see me after the show. And he said, do I need to get you out? I said, man, I wanna meet him. It's like, why? After that? And the, the interaction that happened afterwards was basically me saying, I think, believe it or not, we have more in common than you think.

• 27:54Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 27:55Speaker 01

  And he said, what the hell are you talking about? I said, well, I know your books, I know what you have to say and I also know that on the outside, if you probably walk in and down the street, people see you coming and probably walk onto the other sidewalk, cause you're a fairly intimidating guy. You know, your neck tattoos and the prison chic. He doesn't have a neck. That's right. Right. And I said, and Gunner and I, you just see me on the cover of a teen magazine, I've never done a teen interview for one of those magazines ever, but that's what you see. So it's all about what you see and now what's in there, and it's like, oh, interesting. And then we wound up collaborating on something, it was brilliant, he came in and did some spoken word on something, we're gonna probably release this year, we can get the rights and stuff, but we talked to him and again, when we were putting the book together.

• 28:40Speaker 01

  And he's a lovely guy, we just became friendly to, to completely different-

• 28:45Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 28:45Speaker 01

  Things that just work, I think music's that way. I think you can, you can really bind people together globally, like we've been to China before and played to a hundred thousand people that couldn't speak a word of English, but they just got into it and loved it.

• 28:57Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  Or just in that case where it's, it's an artist that you really admire for years, that on the surface is kind of shocked and not very pleased that you, you, you love their work and then you find that you have more in common than you thought.

• 29:14Billy Corgan?

  I just think that, um, it's, it's, it's silly to think about because at the time, late eighties, early nineties and, you know, you're, you're having this peak moment in 1990. And, you know, Nevermind comes out a year later and that's always considered the watershed moment of the shifting of the guard-

• 29:32Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 29:32Billy Corgan?

  From whatever it was before, usually, you know, it killed hair metal is the, is the one liner, but, you know, we were sold on, let's cut like, because I was sort of laughing because when you guys were number one, I think we were in the studio with Butch Vig, um, doing our first record.

• 29:48Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 29:49Billy Corgan?

  So if you can imagine the sequence of events, while you guys are doing that and we see on MTV every five seconds, we're in the studio in Madison, Wisconsin doing our first album, Gish, and then Butch leaves and goes, does Nevermind right after that.

• 30:00Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 30:00Billy Corgan?

  And, um, so I'm sort of on the other side of that-

• 30:04Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 30:05Billy Corgan?

  -street, right?

• 30:05Speaker 01

  Well, we warmed them up for a little bit.

• 30:08Billy Corgan?

  But the point I'm trying to make is, is we were sold from a counterculture point of view that, that that was the enemy, whatever that was, was the enemy.

• 30:16Speaker 01

  Sure, of course.

• 30:17Billy Corgan?

  And, and I think what time has done now has made people realize that actually, nobody's really the enemy.

• 30:24Speaker 01

  No, I, Gunner was saying too, when we reflected on it, it was amazing how, uh, planned it kind of seemed to a certain degree. One day, it was confidence rock and the next day, it was, it was alt and hip hop, period.

• 30:41Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 30:41Speaker 01

  On the 800 Pound Gorilla, which was MTV, when they actually played music videos.

• 30:47Speaker 01

  I had a, I had a storage locker in North Hollywood next to Frank Black, actually, we talked about it a little bit. Very nice to me and the same thing you were saying is like every we're all kind of in this weird cosmic brotherhood if we play music and write songs. So looking back on it, you're absolutely right. And I will say, I think Gunner and I realistically were unfairly lumped into something because even those guys, those hairband guys wouldn't let us in their club. When we went to go and tour, nobody wanted to tour with us. And so we had to start headlining theaters. Yeah. I still love doing that. That's fun. You can see the audience and it's different way of playing. But I think a lot of that stuff from our era, we were like the bookends for something. But again, we were different. We weren't, we were the anti-Guns N' Roses, really.

• 31:32Speaker 01

  I mean, we grew up seeing all those guys on Melrose Boulevard, you know, with the blue black hair and it wasn't a new thing. It had been happening for a long time as far as that whole Sure. That that that rock thing, the biker rock thing and that whole aesthetic. And we just knew that it wasn't authentic to us. And I mean, we really grew up around our dad's Stone Canyon Band, those the scene that was happening up in rural Canyon. Yeah. So we grew up around Linda Ronstadt and the Crosby, Stills and Nash guys and Jackson Brown and Joni Mitchell and and Dylan over at the house all the time. And and our dad was during the second phase of his career with Stone Canyon Band and playing acoustic and singing three-part harmony all the time. But it was reinvention when nobody thought he was going to do anything. They thought he was washed up and done. It's an incredible story.

• 32:17Speaker 01

  It is. It's a fantastic story. And for us, I think that was what it was. It was you. You mentioned something that made me think, was there ever a moment when we thought about doing something else? And as as tough as it was, because honestly, we became kind of the poster children for for an era that was now not only done, but it was under attack. Yeah. We write about it in the book, you know, showing up and, you know, one of the the new A and R guys who had a lot of weight at the time, I was going in with the what was supposed to be our second album under my arm. And he's like, what? You guys are still here? I mean, that's how it was. It wasn't subtle. It was Wow. You're the enemy and I'm going to take great pleasure in burning you down. But we we learned from it and we also had that kind of, I don't know, we just don't have quit.

• 32:58Speaker 01

  I think that's what we write in the book. We just don't quit. We just move forward, learn from it, try to do something great. That's what I mean to time. Sorry to cut you off, but at time, I think time is kind to what you've done. You know what I mean? And I don't mean just what you did, like what you're doing. I think I think people are starting to understand that, you know,

• 33:17Speaker 01

  that whatever you want to call it, melodic pop metal, just great music, great songs, whether it's Bon Jovi or you guys, or just a lot of great artists. And even I'll listen to the hair metal channel on on Sirius, you know, there's a lot of great songs. And I think what happened was that generation felt this need, at least the grunge world, which we got lumped in, we didn't like that either. But you know, it was so it was it was so convulsive and against things. And what would unfortunately turn out to be true was a lot of the things that we were against, we weren't as against them as we pretended to be. And a lot of things we thought we were against, we actually secretly liked. I never And I think time over time, that's all kind of softened.

• 33:57Speaker 01

  It's funny, well, it's when you said that and you said, because to me, what you've done is far more interesting and

• 34:07Speaker 01

  different in its own way, really unique than a lot of, you're right, than a lot of grunge stuff, which I like a lot of that stuff. Yeah, me too. I never, I never saw it as the enemy Gunner did a little bit, but I never Well, I'm the one with the attitude. That's okay. It's my job. I I thought that that was a fascinating statement because it almost did seem that was we were all told to feel a certain way. And what I was saying was when when grunge happened, the gap had flannel that week everywhere. And it just Well, in Geffen's case, I think it was really more of a financial decision than anything. Hmm. You know, is I in the book, I talk about the interesting parallel between, say, the death of disco and the rise of grunge all those years later.

• 34:48Speaker 01

  Where financially speaking, just business-wise in the industry, back in the day, you know, it got to the point where Donna Summer was was spending $2 million to make a record. I see. In those days, dollars. And the six or seven people who who determine what goes on in that industry got together and said, we can't afford this anymore. It doesn't pencil out. But there's a movement going on over there in England called punk. And, you know, we can really, the economy can scale down. We can get more control of everything. Part of the rap rap with you. I mean, I remember Jimmy Iovine telling me personally, he said, it's so much cheaper for me to make rap records. Yes, yes. A band, five, six people, all the bullshit, the producer. Mm hmm.

• 35:33Speaker 01

  He's like, I pay two guys to go into studio. I got the track in a week. Yeah. I got on the radio two weeks later. If it doesn't work, we just make another one because I haven't spent that much money. So I So there was, there is an economic driver to those turnovers. So you are, you are hitting at something that I know is accurate. And Matthew and I were, man, we were a soft target. We were like, you know, the the Malibu Beach Twins and all that stuff. And we were human pinatas there for a while. But we really didn't think that was through. I mean, we got home from the from the tour. Yeah. And we knew something was different. We were walking to that building on Sunset and stuff and a and a carload of guys goes driving by and we wave and they say something not nice at all out the window. What's going on? What's going on? Don't worry, they were saying not nice stuff to me with the black hair.

• 36:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. But honestly, we've never, we've never not been grateful. And I think that's really been our superpower. And we we wrote about that a little bit in the sense that we got to see this great career that our father had. He had to reinvent himself because he did the Stone Canyon Band when people considered him completely yesterday's news and over and kind of like the the quintessential teen idol. And then he blindsided them with something. He started writing and he started putting together a kind of music that that he wanted, he wanted to put the attitude of rock and roll with the songwriting and storytelling of country. Yeah. And did something new, but he was able to come from inspiration and not desperation. He'd made enough money from Ozzy and Harriet to to do that.

• 37:02Speaker 01

  He traded James Burton at the time for Tom Brumley on pedal steel, who was the equivalent. He was an original buckaroo, amazing guy. Oh, I didn't know. Yeah. And it was the first time that that you put a Marshall half stack on the same stage as a guy on pedal steel. I see. And it worked great.

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• 38:02Speaker 03

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• 38:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it's interesting in your family story, you know, these three generations between your grandparents, your father and yourselves. It's like, it's, it's, there is a sort of kind of interesting kink there that all three generations have had to figure out a different way to do it. Mm hmm. That's that's entirely true. I remember we were making our second album, Harriet. Is this the second album that they rejected or the second album that they This was the second album they rejected, actually. And it was taking a little bit of time. And we were visiting This is an imaginater for historical It was an imaginater. Yeah. Gunner, to this day, still can't listen to that album because it was I know it's cathartic to make it, but it's like listening to the tapes back from a bad therapy session. It's, yeah.

• 38:52Speaker 01

  I was wondering about that. So I'm glad you're bringing it up. It's a musical expression, but it's also an exorcism. And and it was also supposed to be a a concept album. And that's what we had Henry come in and do some spoken word on. Okay. But it was about, I guess, the internet before the internet happened. It was about this pervasive media presence where there was no privacy and and Would you, would you feel you were being too reactive or? I, well, I I just think that it's always been kind of our job, not just to put on a brave face, but the our family's really been about kind of like hope and inspiring people and solidity and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, it kind of is. And so it was off brand at the time. It's just not who I was. Say to me, I, because I wasn't aware of the story of the record. So I was listening to it before I talked to you.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  And my reaction was, I wish you'd gone further. Well, Geffen didn't. Yeah, I know. Well, no, but I'm saying just strictly from artist to artist, it's like, if you're going to go there, really go there. Yeah, right. We have since then. I just think that, and thank you for saying that for for us. There was one of those proverbial meetings at the label. Sorry, I have to laugh because I know it's coming. Yeah. And and when I'm saying what you heard, it lasted for them less than a minute. And the entire room stood up and walked out. And Gunner and I were sitting there. I mean, we thought, here we are with the white You just played them a minute of music and they walked out? They walked out as it was playing. We were so proud of the record and and we just Oh, my God. That's a nightmare.

• 40:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, it kind of. And we could hear arguing in the hallway. Our manager at the time was talking to Eddie Rosenblatt and and and he walked in, Eddie, Eddie only came in and said, boys, you know, I love you guys. I think you're great. But this won't work for us because nobody's going to think this is you. And I realized, oh, my gosh, we're trapped in this. Yeah. There's we, to a certain degree, you either end your Your financial career one way and have musical expression. What had happened was we went back in the studio, made something that was, it was good. It was good with, you know, with table scraps to kind of finish it off.

• 41:02Speaker 01

  But we also knew that we could have come in with the white album and it wouldn't matter because we symbolized something that had moved on.

• 41:08Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 41:09Speaker 01

  But it inspired us though.

• 41:10Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, but stop, stop here.

• 41:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:12Billy Corgan?

  Cause I, I, I think these moments like this in our lives are the, like, they really test the metal of us as people and artists and.

• 41:21Speaker 01

  Agreed.

• 41:22Billy Corgan?

  Even as men, right? And, um, looking back, now that you've had more years and time, do you at least appreciate why they had such a convulsive reaction?

• 41:34Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 41:34Billy Corgan?

  I mean, I don't, I don't, I did, the, the bedside manner is horrible. They should at least listen and then told you you were out of your mind.

• 41:40Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 41:41Billy Corgan?

  But not even listen.

• 41:42Speaker 01

  Well, they were expecting and hoping for love and affection, part two. They just wanted to keep that.

• 41:47Billy Corgan?

  But that's also their own lack of creativity. That's, that's the funny part about it all.

• 41:51Speaker 01

  Right. They were selling widgets at the time and even saying that the times had shifted, as you mentioned.

• 41:58Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 41:58Speaker 01

  Everything was different and.

• 42:00Billy Corgan?

  What in your, because, because I do think this is worth trying to get into.

• 42:06Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 42:09Billy Corgan?

  But even if you had come with, you know, the same thing again, albeit four years later, three years later, whatever it was, it was at least three years.

• 42:16Speaker 01

  It was, it was five. They, they kept us on ice for a long time.

• 42:19Billy Corgan?

  But when you first, when you bring in Imaginator, it's about three years, three and a half years. But so, okay, so, but even if you had dropped that, let's say you made just that part two, like exactly same harmony, same vibe, same A.

• 42:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:32Billy Corgan?

  Right?

• 42:32Speaker 01

  It would have been.

• 42:33Billy Corgan?

  Winning smiles.

• 42:33Speaker 01

  Auto flusher, correct. It wouldn't have.

• 42:35Billy Corgan?

  It wouldn't have worked.

• 42:36Speaker 01

  No, not at all.

• 42:36Billy Corgan?

  So, so, so what I, what I'm sort of offended by is like, well, if, if, if, if everybody sort of accepts that wouldn't have worked, well, what the did they think you should do?

• 42:46Speaker 01

  They, they wanted us, they're wishing us off into the cornfield. We'd had too much success for them to allow us to go to a different label and, and risk our having another success at a different label. So they did the one thing they could do, which is try to get us to quit. That's it. They tried to get us to quit because if we quit.

• 43:04Billy Corgan?

  They don't have to pay you.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  They don't have to pay us. It's like that Robbie Benson movie, you know?

• 43:08Billy Corgan?

  Oh, yeah. Uh, uh, Breaking Away?

• 43:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, uh, trying to.

• 43:11Billy Corgan?

  Earn all the right moves.

• 43:12Speaker 01

  I was at a breakaway. But it was, uh, one thing we had a college scholarship and they had to pay the college scholarship if he stayed on the team.

• 43:19Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 43:19Speaker 01

  Quit. All bets are off. So that's really what happened. So I'll be, but they sent us to eight countries overseas and, and all this stuff. We went to Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, all this stuff. And, and, and basically.

• 43:32Billy Corgan?

  We had a great time there.

• 43:32Speaker 01

  We did, but they, they gave us a schedule that was truly inhuman to do, hoping that we were just gonna one day wake up and go, hey, this is not worth it to us.

• 43:42Billy Corgan?

  That's what I love about the music business.

• 43:44Speaker 01

  It's, it's so much fun.

• 43:45Billy Corgan?

  Can we, can we just hit pause for a second? Cause I'm, I'm, I'm sort of, I don't know if I'm finding, finding the right adjective. I'm both fascinated by John Colautner and sort of, uh, I have a sort of a kind of an allergic reaction to him at the same time. Because, uh, and I don't know John Colautner at all. I feel like maybe I met him one time for five seconds, but I don't know him. So, uh, if he hears this or people who love him hear this, it's not a personal attack. Because to, to personalize these types of things, let's call it the record company guy is to, is to understand that if it's not John Colautner, it's going to be somebody else.

• 44:19Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 44:19Billy Corgan?

  There's always going to be a John Colautner there. And, uh, John Colautner, obviously very skilled and his greatest credit that he gets is bringing Aerosmith basically back from the dead.

• 44:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:29Billy Corgan?

  And creating, you know, this, remember these two, that skit on Saturday Night Live with Adam, I think Adam Sandler would do it where they would sing all five Aerosmith ballads in a row. And they would just make up other ones. I'm crying, I'm dying. And it would just be the same song over and over again. So as an Aerosmith fan, I sort of blame John Colautner for, you know, the Aerosmith that I didn't love. Over time I grew to love it. But at the time as an old school Aerosmith fan, Toys in the Attic, you know, what happened to that band?

• 44:53Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 44:54Billy Corgan?

  So, so I guess what I'm trying to say is I want to talk about John Colautner and you can be as personal or not as personal as you want. You've had said nice things about him even in this interview, but I'm, I, for the, for whatever reason, I didn't get that guy in my musical life. I seem to avoid that guy or they, or they avoided me.

• 45:12Speaker 01

  It was, it would have been easier on your, on your psyche. So I'm, I'm glad that, that.

• 45:16Billy Corgan?

  Well, I think what I, in, in getting to know some of those guys through the years, what they basically told me is we knew to avoid you because you, you were, you, you had a reputation.

• 45:26Speaker 01

  Take it as a compliment.

• 45:27Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, I do. No, for real. Actually I do because they, they, they, they would basically say to me, we know how you are and we, you wouldn't have listened to anything we said anyway. But.

• 45:35Speaker 01

  Wonderful.

• 45:36Billy Corgan?

  But you could certainly make an argument along the way that I could have used a John Colautner when I kind of got lost somewhere along the way for somebody to sit down and say, here's the reality of things.

• 45:46Speaker 01

  Hindsight's always 2020, isn't it?

• 45:48Billy Corgan?

  Sure. So I'm saying is, so whether it's John Colautner or the mythical record guy, that guy had helped you and mentored you to a huge record.

• 45:57Speaker 01

  Indeed. Well, we also, as Matthew mentioned as well, we, we owe John a lot. John, for, for the viewers or listeners out there, John is the guy in the dude looks like a lady video that turns around in the wedding dress with the beard. He was a real guy and a legend. He, he signed, uh, I believe ACDC to Atco back in the day. He's just a story.

• 46:18Billy Corgan?

  He's one of the top record guys of all time.

• 46:20Speaker 01

  For real.

• 46:20Billy Corgan?

  He's, he's absolute legend.

• 46:21Speaker 01

  He, he was his.

• 46:22Billy Corgan?

  But, but I, but having seen him be interviewed, I always had this kind of like, that guy's like vampire, a vampire to me. Because, because the way my brain works, you know, my arty brain is like.

• 46:33Speaker 01

  I've got to be very careful here. John and I had, uh, John, me and John, we had a very interesting relationship that was different from the way Matthew related to John.

• 46:42Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 46:43Speaker 01

  I'm going to preface by saying that none of this is personal, but it's also very real to me too. John is a very, very strong willed person.

• 46:52Billy Corgan?

  I got that, yeah.

• 46:54Speaker 01

  And, uh, we, again, we owe him our start. He's the one that signed us to the label. We, we targeted John because we knew it was going to take us a certain amount of time to develop our sound, whatever that meant.

• 47:04Billy Corgan?

  Slow this down for me because again, I didn't have this guy in my life.

• 47:07Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 47:07Billy Corgan?

  And I'm, I'm saying it for all the John Colautners in the music business. I just didn't get that guy.

• 47:12Speaker 01

  Okay, great.

• 47:13Billy Corgan?

  So even before the first record and then all that success, what's that guy telling you?

• 47:19Speaker 01

  Uh, to go back in the studio and keep writing. He had us.

• 47:22Billy Corgan?

  But did he have specifics?

• 47:23Speaker 01

  No, that was the thing. Great. The best thing, we bring in a song and, and I'll give you a verbatim quote. Something's wrong with the chorus. Well, what's wrong with the chorus? I don't know. You're the musician, you figure it out. That's what it was. So when you were saying that, I was going, hmm, interesting what Billy thinks that it was like to be guided.

• 47:40Billy Corgan?

  That's why I want to know.

• 47:41Speaker 01

  No, yeah. No, what he did was he kicked us in the ass enough to make us want to be better. And it was maddening. I'm going to be honest with you. A lot of times Gunner's probably going to say something different, but you know, we got to a point where John wore suits. He wore normally white, like a John Lennon white type of a thing. But he was, he had a tell. And you had to make an appointment with John. We did because we weren't Aerosmith. We were just two guys he signed to a development deal and kept us on ice for a few years. Honestly, we got a pittance to go into the valley and do eight track demos, but that was good. It made us work harder. We wanted to get that attention from, from him at the label. But he wore these suits and if he wore white, he was generally in a pretty decent mood.

• 48:24Speaker 01

  If he put on a black suit or a dark blue suit, anything other than white, he was terrifying.

• 48:30Billy Corgan?

  He was eviscerating.

• 48:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, so what we did was we, we, we, we know what we're doing. We made friends with his secretary.

• 48:37Billy Corgan?

  What's, what colors he wears?

• 48:40Speaker 01

  We would call and even if we had, and if he was wearing it, we would reschedule. And we realized it actually really helped us survive.

• 48:47Billy Corgan?

  We had to play the game though, too. When we're making those demos, we would have like basically, uh, uh, one meeting every month and we'd come in and we'd have three songs to play for him. We were trying, trying to get signed.

• 48:56Speaker 01

  And I'm sorry, it was the worst sounding system that he had in that room. And he kept talking about how expensive it was and how it was great, maybe for his ears, but it was, it was tearing my head off every time I listened to something.

• 49:06Billy Corgan?

  So super duper crunchy. Anyways, I digress.

• 49:09Speaker 01

  Sorry.

• 49:09Billy Corgan?

  We, uh, we, we would go in there at the end of the month and we would play him three new songs that we'd written and demoed. And without fail, he'd can two and he'd approve one. And, or if he approved any. And Matthew and I really liked the songs we were working on. We, we, you know, ego aside, we didn't want to do filler and stuff. And he could never quantify what was wrong with the songs.

• 49:32Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 49:32Billy Corgan?

  Which was maddening after a while. So we kind of started to figure him out. And after about, oh, eight months of that routine, we would come in recycling songs that he had rejected before in previous meetings until we got the album we wanted.

• 49:47Billy Corgan?

  And I, I don't think he ever.

• 49:48Speaker 01

  Well, cause he, he liked a few songs a lot that he had heard eight months earlier. And so that worked a couple of times, but it was just a very interesting guy to work with in that sense. Cause on one, on one side, he really did, well, Gunner and I were down to about 17 bucks in a joint bank account. We had, uh, we write about in the book, the last place in the world we wanted to go to find a place to, to live, because we were living in a friend's, was our, our mother's house. We didn't get along with her very well. And we had to go back hat in hand and say, look, we're broke. Can we just stay here while we're working on our stuff? So we had no money and we wrote this tune and we knew that it was money. We knew that we had something that was like, it's, it sounds like us, it's fresh, it's good. And it was the song love and affection.

• 50:33Speaker 01

  And we, uh, we called Chris at John Colautner's office and said, we've got something. And frankly, Gunner, we had no, we had nothing to lose. We were, we were at the bottom, bottom, not signed yet. By the way, still on development for a year and a half. And we didn't think it was gonna happen. We were kinda pissed. We said, you know, he's been kind of stroking us for a couple of years now and and he's too busy with other stuff, including Aerosmith. We're never gonna get a shot. And so we called the the girl, the label, and she said, yeah, he's in and he's he's in his, he's in a dark suit. And we said, you know, we're going in, we're gonna go play this thing for him. We brought our guitars and and we walked into his office. And he said, you need an appointment to be here. What are you doing? And Gunner and I think said, just shut up.

• 51:17Speaker 01

  And we got something for you. And we played Love and Affection acoustic for him. And he closed his eyes and he listened to this thing and he didn't make a move, nothing. And we thought it's this is it. It's either we're out of here forever or whatever. And he opened his eyes and he said, I've been waiting for you guys to have the balls to do that for two years. And he picked up his phone and the proverbial, the Nelson deals and go make it happen. That's what happened with Love and Affection. And then we recorded it three times for our album and just couldn't nail it. And it was this close to never making the album. And we had to completely re-record that that song. And we just wouldn't give up on it. And I, we didn't really even plan on that being the first single. We thought something else was gonna be. And somebody said, I really like that Love and Affection song, put that out.

• 51:59Speaker 01

  And I think it was because it was the 12 string on it and the like that very California thing that was different. Uh, it was the two hot Swedish chicks in the video. Yeah, but it it just kinda all came together and it worked. And I think that's that was the thing. If I look back on Kollodner, uh, I have everything to say in thanking him for, in his own way, he really gave us an opportunity to make us be the best that we could be. And it was probably the frustration and the mental torment. That is his style. He's contentious. And and if you were talking, talking to Tyler about it, the same thing. It was always this. We were re-recording albums, whole albums is his thing. So, and and he was

• 52:42Speaker 01

  on that tear, especially about the Imaginator record, about going back to the studio and recording things all over again. But I can honestly say it, it, it was a very uncomfortable process. Yeah. But I think it bore fruit.

• 52:57Billy Corgan?

  So when, when you handed this record that they just reject, Whole Cloth, where's he at at that point?

• 53:04Speaker 01

  He's, he's feathering his nest at Sony. He's about to hit the eject button. And

• 53:09Billy Corgan?

  So he's checked out.

• 53:11Speaker 01

  Totally. And we're thinking, okay, well, if it's not working here anymore, he's, he, he's going to take us with Aerosmith to Sony. And then we read in the press that he'd left for Sony with Aerosmith. And we didn't get a phone call from him. So he just kinda And the album that he sent us back in to make after talking to Rosenblatt from that meeting was, okay. We got a, we got a meeting with John. He says, I don't want a single distorted guitar on the, the album you're making. You cannot turn up, you know, and I'm like, I'm kind of into noise rock a little bit now, you know, and and he's like, no, you gotta turn it down. It's just gotta be everything that's distorted gotta be clean.

• 53:52Speaker 01

  And, you know, it's gotta have some punch and stuff. It's really hard to do that in certain respects when you wanna use certain tools. Especially when you're writing major keys and Right, yeah. The album actually was, it was, it's a decent album. It was, it was okay.

• 54:04Billy Corgan?

  Sounds good.

• 54:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, the, what became the second album. Um, it was very much like we had Timothy B Schmidt from the Eagles and Don Felder on before the Eagles reformed and Elliot Easton from the Cars played with us, you know, some of our heroes.

• 54:17Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 54:17Speaker 01

  But it wasn't really, looking back on it now, I kinda wished we would have gone a little bit more in the Imaginator thing because looking back on it though, you're right, there was no way of knowing if where music was heading with, with grunge music or anything from, from, you know, art rock, all that, if it was gonna last either. You just didn't know. You never know. So you have to be authentic. I mean, I think the way, the only way to win, uh, and I'm gonna be honest and say a lot of stuff that in the hairband era needed to die. If you look at it now and you some of it was great and some of it was just awful. And, and I didn't have that perspective either. But I think what, what Gunner and I had was something a little bit unique and different because we were kinda taking what we learned

• 55:01Speaker 01

  from playing power pop and, uh, rockabilly and punk clubs earlier. And what we did, I know it was dressed up in a pretty package and that worked too. But I think what we had being brothers and kind of completing each other's sentences musically really worked for us throughout our entire career. And yes, we've gone to different directions, but I will say, looking back on it, that whole shift that was we just happened to be the guys that were the bookend of that era.

• 55:28Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 55:29Speaker 01

  And, and we were actually kind of, I think unfairly by those cats that wouldn't let us in their club before lumped into, oh, and then there was Nelson that ruined everything for us. And so, you know, we're okay with that. It's all right. I think it's a it's a family thing too. I think it kinda makes you dangerous when you get to the point after that whole thing happened where you got nothing to lose, like our dad was during the Stone Canyon Band era. We, we experienced that as well. And what we realized is that we do something that's really unique and, and you, if you're trying to, what I learned with the whole Geffen experience, if you try to shift creatively to please the suits, even if you win, you lose.

• 56:10Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, my impression is, is the minute they feel you're weak in the thing, they just don't rate you as having an upside. And even when you achieve an upside, they think somehow they have more to do with it than you. So it's like you win while you're losing or something.

• 56:25Speaker 01

  I get it.

• 56:26Billy Corgan?

  Which is why I fought them so ferociously.

• 56:29Speaker 01

  Well, I, I, I wish we had a chance with that, but, um, it's cool now, all these years later. What's really nice, and I, I think you're on it, we just got back from Milan. We played something called the Frontiers Fest over there. It was great. 20,000 kids. It was killer. Well, they're not kids anymore. But, um, it was, they marketed us differently over in Europe. And so the, the, it was a really great response, this new record that we're making. Uh, we basically got no attachment to it commercially or financially or, or anything. We're just trying to make the best music that we can make. And it's, it feels liberating to do that. And I can honestly say it's turning out to be, I think, the best Nelson record. I know everybody's in love with their most recent project.

• 57:09Billy Corgan?

  The stuff I heard, I really liked. That was very strong.

• 57:11Speaker 01

  Cool, thank you. And it, we're having fun doing it without anybody over your shoulder going, oh, well, you can't play that or sing that.

• 57:19Billy Corgan?

  It's not a defense of your, of your situation, but I can say that the music business that you came into and the music business that I came to relatively at the same time, that was a very difficult business to navigate. And what anybody, say, under the age of 40, maybe wouldn't understand is if you weren't in the major label system, you didn't really have many options.

• 57:40Speaker 01

  You didn't.

• 57:41Billy Corgan?

  You could go, you could go release a record with a subpop or something. But in your situation, being a pop act, if you're not pop and you're not on the charts, no one's gonna touch you. I mean, you're basically, you know, radioactive kryptonite, whatever, bad analogy, but

• 57:55Speaker 01

  True.

• 57:55Billy Corgan?

  You know, I mean,

• 57:56Speaker 01

  Well, there's no way, there was no way to sell it. There was no internet.

• 57:58Billy Corgan?

  At least, you know, like in an alternative rock thing, if it doesn't work with the major label, you can always go back and out and kind of do some indie label.

• 58:04Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 58:04Billy Corgan?

  But in the pop realm, if you, if the, if it doesn't work with the label, I mean, you're

• 58:08Speaker 01

  You are kryptonite at that point. They won't touch you. Well, you, you just mentioned this. What happened was with Imaginator, it, it caused us and the whole Geffen thing blowing up the way that it did. I had a fateful conversation with a buddy that was opening for us on the tour. It was Chips Enough, Enough's Enough.

• 58:23Billy Corgan?

  I know Chip.

• 58:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, uh, he said,

• 58:26Billy Corgan?

  He was in a very similar situation.

• 58:28Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And he said, you know what I'm doing? He said, I just started my own label. Why don't you guys do that? And nobody had really done that. And I thought about, well, how'd you do it? We talked about the mechanics of it. And I said, you know what? You're right. Because at this point, I don't think we're gonna sell another record for the rest of our lives. Why not just put out what we wanna put out and at least have control of it? So we started a little imprint called Stone Canyon Records. Gunner had a whole stack of business cards from all over the world, people that we'd worked with. And we just started making phone calls saying, hey, you wanna work with us on this thing? And that's how we continued making music. We don't, we don't do label deals anymore. We license. We own it. We license it to them and we have a reversion. We've learned. Kinda gone a little bit more Ozzy Nelson than, than, uh,

• 59:12Speaker 01

  old Nelson that way. And it's been super cool and liberating. We've done different kinds of music. We've got a lot of stuff in the can that's you know, different than even what you've, you've heard. But we're so happy because as Gunner said, we're playing music now. We're having a great time with it. And I think it's better. Because of it.

• 59:29Billy Corgan?

  Yes, I guess.

• 59:32Billy Corgan?

  To reinforce what you're saying, I mean, I've released all of our music for like, I think the last seven or eight years, same thing. And the reason and what spawned that.

• 59:43Billy Corgan?

  Was we had, we had an album about eight or nine years ago and the manager we had at the time said, do you mind if I shop this?

• 59:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 59:51Billy Corgan?

  And I thought, ah, I don't, I don't, I don't know if I want to go through that. Cause invariably you're going to run into one of those guys. You know, he's going to tell me, you know, hey, it doesn't sound like, you know, one of your old albums, whatever. Cause it was a very electronic kind of record.

• 1:00:04Speaker 01

  Oh, cool.

• 1:00:04Billy Corgan?

  But it had a pop thing to it. And one of the labels, and I won't say who, because I don't want to pick a fight with anybody, actually was interested. And I was surprised. I thought, okay, you know, and we've sold a lot of records and this is before the streaming numbers really started kicking in in the last few years. So there was that moment of like, oh, maybe we can get back in this game.

• 1:00:24Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:00:24Billy Corgan?

  Big label, historic label. And the deal came down to.

• 1:00:31Billy Corgan?

  They would only sign us if we were willing to. Make it so that every time somebody bought a ticket to our concerts, the people had to buy the record.

• 1:00:40Speaker 01

  Oh, wow. Wow.

• 1:00:41Billy Corgan?

  And if I didn't accept that, then they didn't want to do the deal. They liked the record. Right?

• 1:00:47Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:00:47Billy Corgan?

  We weren't asking for a zillion dollars, you know, it wasn't 1995, right? And it literally came down to unless you force 250,000 of your fans to buy this record. When they buy a ticket. We don't, we don't want you.

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  Sounds pretty sinister.

• 1:01:02Billy Corgan?

  Well, and then you reminded, this is why I'm out of this thing. So then we, we turned it back around and we just said, okay, we're just going to. Release our own stuff. And so I'm reinforcing what you're saying, autonomy for the modern musical artist is, I think is everything.

• 1:01:15Speaker 01

  It's everything.

• 1:01:16Billy Corgan?

  If you can find a partner that you want to work with, that's different. But this old idea of this guy in an office in his white suit, telling you what to do. And if he doesn't like you that day, you're kind of like cast down to the seventh ring of hell.

• 1:01:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:01:27Billy Corgan?

  Melodic hell.

• 1:01:28Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:01:29Billy Corgan?

  Not catchy enough, you know?

• 1:01:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:32Speaker 01

  I've never heard a, a story quite like yours.

• 1:01:35Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:35Speaker 01

  Then that's, yeah, wow.

• 1:01:37Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:38Billy Corgan?

  So, you know, one thing I, I, it's a little bit of.

• 1:01:43Billy Corgan?

  It's a little bit of a speech, but one thing I keep. Reminding people in the music business, because I still do have a lot of contacts in the, in the business is. You're, you're, you're actually in the wrong business now. The old business is gone.

• 1:01:56Billy Corgan?

  My, my personal lawyer is a big guy in the catalog sales world. He does a lot, like he just did like the billion dollar weekend deal and. So he's in that world and I recently even went to a conference where all the major publishers and the. People buy catalogs were all there. And they're about a good five to seven years behind what the business is actually going to be and, and. The, the key word I keep saying is this is going, it's going to be partnership models. You know what I mean? You guys have something, you've built something and you own it. So if anybody wants to get in business with you, really has to find a way where you want to work together. This idea of like, well, you're only valuable this way. And if you want to, like, if you guys woke up tomorrow and decide you want to do your industrial goth record. There's no reason you shouldn't.

• 1:02:39Speaker 01

  Great idea.

• 1:02:41Billy Corgan?

  But there's no reason you shouldn't be able to. That's the, that's, that's the world that we live in. And honestly. I think young people in particular really respond to that, just as a general message. They don't, they're not so much interested in where you're coming from. It's like kind of where you're going. And why you're going there.

• 1:02:57Speaker 01

  And that's liberating for us as well. I, I agree. We've navigated that a lot.

• 1:03:00Billy Corgan?

  So I'm empathetic because I know, I know exactly the circumstance that you were in, even though my circumstance was different, I saw it. I, I, I certainly heard them talk about other people.

• 1:03:09Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:03:09Billy Corgan?

  I heard them talk about other people on the label, like they were. Cans of tuna fish or something, you know, you're like, how do you talk about people like that?

• 1:03:17Speaker 01

  Cause that's the way they, they look at us.

• 1:03:19Billy Corgan?

  That's amazing.

• 1:03:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is. That was funny. Actually, when we finished, what was. Our second album, I remember delivering it to, there was a new head of the label.

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  And I'm going to use his name, Robert Smith, not, not from The Cure.

• 1:03:32Billy Corgan?

  It'd be funny if it was Robert.

• 1:03:33Speaker 01

  I know, it'd be great.

• 1:03:35Billy Corgan?

  I'm not feeling it.

• 1:03:37Speaker 01

  No, this was different. I was walking in the hallway to go meet with somebody there and he stopped me and he said, what you got there? I said, it's the new album. And he said, well, I just want to let you know that I'm going to do everything in my power. To kill your record. I'm going to make sure that it never gets heard. And there's going to be no support. You're going to get no money. There's going to be no videos, no nothing. I just, just so you're not surprised. And I thought he was punking me. I said. You're joking, right? And this is after five years of torture. And he said, no, I'm, I'm, I think I'm doing the right thing by telling you that.

• 1:04:09Billy Corgan?

  He thought he was doing you a favor.

• 1:04:10Speaker 01

  He did. And, and I said. You know, we're human beings, right? We have.

• 1:04:15Billy Corgan?

  But he's not a human being.

• 1:04:17Speaker 01

  So that kind of stuff really happened, genuinely happened.

• 1:04:20Billy Corgan?

  I mean, think about it. I mean, we know this is true. We've met those people, right?

• 1:04:25Speaker 01

  Just a.

• 1:04:25Billy Corgan?

  But, but to the average person who's just interested in the music business or musical life or your, your music. They, they, they think, how is this possible that people talk to each other this way?

• 1:04:37Speaker 01

  They're robots. I don't even know what to say. I mean, it is that way. And for us, it's Hollywood.

• 1:04:42Billy Corgan?

  Well, I, this is a slight digression, but I think when, when Silicon Valley kicked in early 2000s, you had this massive brain drain out of the labels.

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:04:51Billy Corgan?

  So the people that end up being stuck there. You know, weren't very attractive either. Obviously this is, this is even before that, but. You know, it was, it was already kind of teetering mid 90s anyway.

• 1:05:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was.

• 1:05:02Billy Corgan?

  Sorry, I'm getting very.

• 1:05:04Speaker 01

  But it's really true. Yeah. A lot of the talent did migrate to Silicon Valley and the people that were left. I don't know. The one thing I've, I've thought about is each generation of our family has had to navigate. What was current at their time.

• 1:05:18Billy Corgan?

  Exactly.

• 1:05:19Speaker 01

  So if you go all the way back, it was, you know, circus performers, then vaudevillians, and then a radio show, radio was the big thing.

• 1:05:27Billy Corgan?

  Yes.

• 1:05:27Speaker 01

  And then television was invented and all that stuff. But, but our family has been in the middle of all of that, all of those technological shifts and have had to. Figure out how to do it. I mean, our dad arguably was the first guy to really use the power, the power of television to market music. Really the first MTV to mainstream American living rooms. If you wanted to see Ricky Nelson, you tuned in Ozzy and Harriet.

• 1:05:47Billy Corgan?

  But what's amazing to me as a, as a fan of, of your father, and I have a lot of, I collect vintage vinyl and I love the sound of his old record.

• 1:05:54Speaker 01

  Aren't they great?

• 1:05:55Billy Corgan?

  What a great.

• 1:05:55Speaker 01

  Especially the mono records.

• 1:05:57Billy Corgan?

  Sounds so good.

• 1:05:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:59Billy Corgan?

  And I'm a fan of your, of your, of your dad's voice, you know? There's a certain kind of. Not, I'm telling you anything. There's, there's an earnestness in your father's voice. It's very rare. I don't know if he was that way as a person, but.

• 1:06:13Speaker 01

  He was. And, and also music for him, he was. That was his salvation because he was living in a soundstage and as cool as that was.

• 1:06:21Billy Corgan?

  Ah, yeah.

• 1:06:21Speaker 01

  That music and, and for better or worse, our grandfather wrote all the shows. So he would always write things in that were what the kids were doing in their life. And I think our pop really, at first, he really just wanted to keep that for himself.

• 1:06:35Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:35Speaker 01

  And I, that, I think that's what you hear. I, I know what you're, you're talking about. And, and he recorded right there in, in. I think it was Sunset Sound. Well, Bill Putnam was his recording engineer and Bill.

• 1:06:46Billy Corgan?

  I have a Bill Putnam board.

• 1:06:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. I'm jealous. Yeah, I'm jealous too.

• 1:06:51Billy Corgan?

  Eight, eight, eight to three.

• 1:06:53Speaker 01

  That's all you need.

• 1:06:54Billy Corgan?

  Eight channels in the left, right or center.

• 1:06:56Speaker 01

  And one of the ones that he put together himself and, and. He was doing great work with, I guess.

• 1:07:03Billy Corgan?

  One of those records sounds so good. See, it's Bill Putnam.

• 1:07:05Speaker 01

  It's Bill Putnam. But it's also clean signal and no bullshit, you know, back then. Guy standing around a mic, throwing down live, there were no unlimited track things, you know? And real talent, you know, he was, he had a great band. He had Richie Frost on drums and Gene Kirkland on bass and James Burden just. Just kind of paving the way. I've talked to James a lot too. We, we've been blessed to do some gigs with him. He's still playing amazing. And he's the OG and we sit there talking about the records and stuff. And a lot of people want to talk to James about his work with Elvis. Which was incredible. And we were doing an interview together for the press. He had a guitar festival in, in Shreveport, oh, I don't know, 10 years ago. And he was, he was talking about.

• 1:07:50Speaker 01

  His work with Elvis and they asked me a question about. About his work with Elvis. And of course I said, it's amazing. I said, but you know. James, I think that the work you did with our father was even more important. And the guy in the press explained, and I said, well. There was really no roadmap per se, when our dad was making music. These are a bunch of dead kids in the studio, making records. In kind of isolation, there was no such thing as a producer at the time. They were making music. From the hip that they themselves want to go down and buy. And that whole west coast thing was very different from what Sam was doing in Memphis. And the do walkers were doing in, in New York.

• 1:08:26Billy Corgan?

  New York, New York rock and roll was a lot different.

• 1:08:29Speaker 01

  Very different. And it was kind of regional, right? And so that was what was so cool about it is because he was working on that television show, five days a week. And going through all that, no one was bothering them. And that west coast thing was very different with Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent and all that. But I loved that music. And I said, James, it was so brave because. You weren't following anything that had been done before. You guys were just pioneers. Playing what you loved.

• 1:08:57Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:58Speaker 01

  And there was some freedom to that. And I think that's what you can hear in those early Ricky Nelson records. Was just this reckless abandon. They weren't thinking it. They were more feeling it. And the recordings sound totally honest. I mean, believe what you say on a mono jukebox to this day is like the best sound. Ever. It sounds massive. And, you know, I would aspire towards that. The irony is the two of us do stuff that's for the most part, pretty layered.

• 1:09:23Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:23Speaker 01

  And, and composed and structured. But I'm back to, okay, so our dad's music, both phases of his career. Were different from what we did, just like Oz and Harriet, when they had their big band, very different.

• 1:09:34Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:35Speaker 01

  But it was relevant to their time and also they were doing what they wanted to do.

• 1:09:39Billy Corgan?

  What do you think that is in the family lineage that's sort of? You know, is, is behind, not behind it. It's like, you, you know, every family has a story.

• 1:09:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:49Billy Corgan?

  Is it, is it sort of sluggish determination or?

• 1:09:52Speaker 01

  I think just doing the most you can with what you're handed at the time. I think that's what it is. I think, you know, for Oz. He was just one of these guys that didn't want to wait around for people to do things for him. He just, he was one of those guys that. Long before the show.

• 1:10:11Billy Corgan?

  He would, when he would coach high school football in the afternoon, he was going to Rutgers. He would do his homework on the train on the way into to New York to do his gigs and they made people differently back then. And I I just think that he was one of these guys that had a vision and and followed it. Same thing with our dad. I you you you see it done and then you follow it for us. That moment with, hey, I want to come up front and and perform with you. We've all kind of had that in common, I I would think.

• 1:10:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:40Billy Corgan?

  But maybe we're just, we we got the shared insanity where we we we we won't be denied because, uh, you know, people tell us no, and we just kind of find a window somewhere to go through.

• 1:10:51Speaker 01

  You know, I will say, looking back on this too, for all three generations.

• 1:10:56Speaker 01

  We've had some success, but there are easier ways of making money that don't put you out that way as far as, you know, bury you naked and like, hey, love me, please. I think after talking to our grandmother, you know, this granddama was singing at the Cotton Club when she was a kid and stuff. A bigger star, she was making movies with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. And then going and doing gigs on the weekend with with Ozzy. She said, you know, everybody thinks that we're a television family. But she said, we're not, we're a music family.

• 1:11:23Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:23Speaker 01

  Music is the through line for this family. And I think it really comes, it's really simple. We love music. We do, we just, we just love it. And so we're willing to get the the shit kicked out of us.

• 1:11:36Billy Corgan?

  So somebody, somebody sent me this, uh, I don't know, it's like a pitch deck. I don't know, it's like, it's about you guys running sort of the family estate. Is that?

• 1:11:44Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:11:45Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, yeah, we, well, we do the uh, the family IP. Yeah, so it's, so so not only are you sort of reconciling it as, you know, your own life story, but it's like you're actually sort of, you're you're the, you're the custodians and stewards of your, of your family's legacy.

• 1:11:59Speaker 01

  Trying to protect it and promote it at the same time.

• 1:12:01Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, I think that's cool.

• 1:12:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I think there's some, some honor in that.

• 1:12:04Billy Corgan?

  I think it's worth it, because it's just good. Well, I'm, I'm preparing my children to one day take over my estate, so.

• 1:12:11Speaker 01

  I have an eleven year old little boy. And everybody says, uh, you know, you guys have had three generations with number ones in it, and how about the fourth? And I was like, no, he can do whatever he wants to do, but I named him Ozzy. So it's like, and he's playing already, so.

• 1:12:24Billy Corgan?

  O Z Z I E?

• 1:12:25Speaker 01

  Uh, yes, that's right.

• 1:12:27Billy Corgan?

  Um, I, but I saw on that deck, uh, and it was, it was interesting to me. Uh, you, you either referred to yourself or whoever put it together, you referred to you as futurists.

• 1:12:36Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, I had to look that up when I saw that too. I just, I saw that for the first time this morning. And, uh, yeah.

• 1:12:42Billy Corgan?

  I was like, can you explain? I mean, I think I know what it means.

• 1:12:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think he can, because he didn't write. We didn't write the deck, but uh, but I I suppose what it is is kind of, uh, you know, everything old is new again and and stuff. There's some, you always have to move forward, you always have to do, uh, and be who you are in the moment. But we also think coming from the family that we do, that the history is important. You know, that it's bigger than, it's bigger than us. As far as what.

• 1:13:07Billy Corgan?

  To me, sorry, but to me, that's, if you don't look at your story, your combined story, in the light of the family story, you're, you're missing the whole point.

• 1:13:16Speaker 01

  Correct, and we feel the same way too.

• 1:13:18Billy Corgan?

  Right.

• 1:13:18Speaker 01

  We really do, and we live it, you know, we really do. We get people to this day coming up and.

• 1:13:23Billy Corgan?

  Like, you know, you know, the nepo baby stuff and all that, it's like, the, the people, they don't understand that stuff.

• 1:13:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:28Billy Corgan?

  It's an easy thing, but but it's so not even close to what the truth is.

• 1:13:33Speaker 01

  Right, indeed, and and it's, it's important to people too, because three days ago, we were at a buddy's house in Turlock, California, which is up in the Central Valley. Uh, playing a, a concert in a living room for his mom, who's, um, beautiful and has a lot of memories that are starting to fade and that type of thing. And we just, we just sang those songs for her. Um, we leaned on our dad's music. And to watch people transform and feel that connection in a way that is as pure as it gets. You know, no stages, no cameras, no whatever, but just here, I'm gonna, I'm gonna help you reconnect with your life. It is so beautiful to be able to do that for people sometimes.

• 1:14:16Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:17Speaker 01

  And, um, until we said, nobody would ever know about that type of thing. But we talk about that kind of thing every once in a while, getting to do something like that is, is honestly the treasure for me, it is.

• 1:14:27Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:27Speaker 01

  You know, all the rest of it is kind of crap, you know?

• 1:14:30Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:30Speaker 01

  It's a necessary thing, yeah, you gotta make money, you gotta go out there and gotta pick the right team and all that kind of stuff. But when it comes down to it, man, I just, I love music. I get to play it with my brother, which is awesome.

• 1:14:42Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:43Speaker 01

  I I haven't killed him yet, which is even better.

• 1:14:47Speaker 01

  We haven't gone off as half Nelson and done our solo records like this album.

• 1:14:51Billy Corgan?

  Like, hey, that's a good idea. That's actually a funny idea, just putting it out there as a marketing. Um, I'm sure you saw where Bob Dylan recently did Garden Party.

• 1:15:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was cool.

• 1:15:01Billy Corgan?

  Pretty cool.

• 1:15:02Speaker 01

  I think that was the only song he sang that night.

• 1:15:04Billy Corgan?

  Really?

• 1:15:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, that show, yeah.

• 1:15:05Billy Corgan?

  He has those nights when he just kind of wants to play and sometimes, you never know with Bob, right? Okay, right.

• 1:15:11Speaker 01

  But yeah, we, and you can imagine, our phones blew up with everybody all over the place, and his, hey, look what happened last night. Uh, that, that was a cool thing, because he, he did in, influence our dad a lot.

• 1:15:22Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, I don't think that Garden Party would exist without Bob Dylan, to be honest. He was at our, our house a lot, according to what we heard. And they had a moment together where Bob and our dad, our dad had basically gone into forced semi-retirement at that time. The world had changed, the Beatles had, had invaded America.

• 1:15:39Speaker 01

  Right, okay, so.

• 1:15:40Billy Corgan?

  Everything had shifted. And the singer songwriter thing was happening at the time. And our dad was taking some time off to have a family, which worked out for the two of us, that was cool. And, and apparently they had a conversation one day and, and Bob just said, look, you know, I, I understand that the kids consider you completely over your husband. He said, well, you know, thanks, Bob, and he said, no, no. What I'm saying is, um, yeah, it's all about writing now, it's all about.

• 1:16:04Speaker 01

  He said, why don't you screw him up, why don't you write some songs? Can you write? He said, I don't know, I haven't tried, and that was enough to get him to do it. And in sixty seven, he, he started releasing songs that he wrote for the first time, you know, which was a, a real moment for him. And full circle, you know, the Garden Party song, great, he, well, the song for those people that don't know, he was asked to play at the garden, Madison Square Garden for an oldie show. He got booed off the stage for walking on stage with long hair and looking like, you know, a cowboy hippie. They couldn't believe that that black and white television clean cut Ricky Nelson, Rosie and Harriet, it was the same dude. And, uh, he wrote a song about the experience, or basically wrote itself, and he was the, uh, the translator, because he said it came to him in a dream.

• 1:16:48Speaker 01

  And the lyrics are all on one piece of paper, we have them on the wall at home. And, and it was, I think, a great, I look back on it now, he really had reached that point, you call them those moments that you have. And for him, having, as he said, instant non-acceptance for the first time, really, at that level. I mean, it was twenty two thousand people booing him. And there are all these stories.

• 1:17:08Billy Corgan?

  Madison Square Garden too, it's not just some, it's not, you know, I don't want to say, I was gonna say some places about those people.

• 1:17:14Speaker 01

  It wasn't Adam Wong.

• 1:17:15Billy Corgan?

  I know, I got it, I know what you're saying.

• 1:17:16Speaker 01

  But, right, but, uh, yeah, so it was a big deal for him. And, uh, there were a lot of people saying, oh, the, the police were fighting with some people in the crowd or whatever. And I just say, look, I know what my dad told me. And he said, he was there, they were booing, all of them.

• 1:17:31Billy Corgan?

  You know when you're getting booed.

• 1:17:32Speaker 01

  You know when you're getting booed, you know when you're getting booed.

• 1:17:34Billy Corgan?

  It's a certain, it's a certain sound.

• 1:17:37Speaker 01

  It was New York, so even the nice people started joining in. And so when he wrote that song, it was really a kind of a middle finger in a velvet glove. And it was something, because it came from him, it worked, you can't please everyone, so you gotta please yourself, you know? What we're talking about in this whole thing.

• 1:17:50Billy Corgan?

  Well, two things on that, one, I, I, I, I'm a Dylan fan and I, I, I thought it was such a beautiful tribute to your father. That's how I, that's how I took it.

• 1:17:58Speaker 01

  It was, it was.

• 1:17:59Billy Corgan?

  It was Bob saying, we still love Ricky.

• 1:18:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:03Billy Corgan?

  That, to me, like, we're talking about, like, the world we actually live in, not this world.

• 1:18:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:18:07Billy Corgan?

  The world of family and songs.

• 1:18:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:10Billy Corgan?

  And keep going.

• 1:18:11Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:18:12Billy Corgan?

  To have Bob do that for your dad, I was like, that's cool.

• 1:18:15Speaker 01

  It was, it hit me like that too.

• 1:18:17Billy Corgan?

  Great, I'm, I'm glad that, because obviously that's the thing that matters, what I think is important. But I'm glad you got that, because that's the way I took it. I thought, wow, what a beautiful.

• 1:18:26Speaker 01

  It, as you said, that's the real stuff. And it, and I, I love that, I love that about music and I love that about people, even, even to wake up and have my phone have nine hundred messages saying, you know, hey, I gotta send you this, did you see this?

• 1:18:42Billy Corgan?

  But the other thing I thought to ask you about Garden Party, it's, it's a, it's one of my, uh, I love that, it's, how can I put it? Some songs rise above the moment.

• 1:18:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:54Billy Corgan?

  That's one of those songs that just like, to me, that's your dad's song.

• 1:18:58Speaker 01

  Agreed, agreed.

• 1:18:59Billy Corgan?

  I mean, there's other great songs, but that song is like, that's the one where you go like, there's that Ricky in there too. And I feel like as a songwriter, maybe, maybe, I'm sure there were others, but it was the first time where he kind of stepped across the threshold and said, hey, I've been here the whole time. There's a real, there's a real guy in here with real feelings.

• 1:19:17Speaker 01

  I, I think he had, at that point, nothing to lose, he felt. And when he talked to us about it, he really described it this way. Said, I didn't re- I was present for it, but I don't feel like I really wrote it. Because I, I just wrote down what was coming. If you look at the lyric sheet on that, which is, I always say if my house caught on fire, I'd grab my D18 Martin and those lyrics and that everybody, everything else can fend for itself. But he's scratching in the margins and turning the page and you've got the coffee cup stain on it. He didn't want to break concentration, but he said that it came to him like he was listening to a stereo. Done lyrics, melody, everything, truly a gift.

• 1:19:55Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:55Speaker 01

  Because he had gotten to that point where, I mean, I can't even imagine what it would have felt like to spend his entire life having to, to be that person that people expected him to be. Even his own parents, again, you know, if you start playing music full time, we're canceling the show. No pressure, your parents are out of work.

• 1:20:13Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:14Speaker 01

  And finally gets to this point where no one cared about him anymore. And he had that moment where the phone stopped ringing. He was back in his music studio here in LA. I mean, what do you say to a guy who just got booed off the stage by 20,000 people at the Garden? And, and it was just like in the middle of the night, that song came to him.

• 1:20:33Billy Corgan?

  What strikes me about what you're saying too is his response wasn't violent. It wasn't bitter. It was, hey.

• 1:20:42Speaker 01

  It was, it was almost kind of a

• 1:20:44Billy Corgan?

  Sweet.

• 1:20:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. It was an understanding of who he was.

• 1:20:46Billy Corgan?

  Yes. That's why, I think that's why it touches me.

• 1:20:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. I, and you know, one thing we never really talk about too is, is he started all over with the Stone Canyon Band. I think why it's even more important, the way that I look at it.

• 1:20:59Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:59Speaker 01

  He went from being this huge star to playing colleges for kids who had no idea who he was. He, he took his band out and played tiny little clubs for 10 people, 12 people. And he did that for like two years before this happened at the Garden. So he, I think he had that kind of strength that you get when you know you're doing something that means something to you.

• 1:21:19Billy Corgan?

  And yeah.

• 1:21:20Speaker 01

  And, and learning through it and being an artist and, and then to get booed off. It was almost kind of a, well, this is my moment. I have to say something here.

• 1:21:28Billy Corgan?

  Yes.

• 1:21:29Speaker 01

  And that's where that song came from. It was, I'm an artist, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a person, I'm an artist, I'm a father, I'm, I'm a man. And this is what I have to say. And if you like it, awesome, come along for the ride. And if you don't, happy trails.

• 1:21:45Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, I get asked a lot why, um, people are curious why I wanted to do this type of format of a show. And my sort of common answer that I've been giving in interviews is, is I'm very interested in reshaping the narrative of celebrity in America. And, and I certainly have my own personal bent on it, but I would make the same, I would make the same pitch to both of you. Which is that the old system of how we evaluated people's value in American culture is really not only broken, it's actually very inaccurate.

• 1:22:14Speaker 01

  Agreed.

• 1:22:14Billy Corgan?

  You know what I mean?

• 1:22:15Speaker 01

  Agreed.

• 1:22:16Billy Corgan?

  I just heard some, two new songs from you guys, sound great. You look great.

• 1:22:20Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:22:20Billy Corgan?

  Your minds aren't broken, despite whatever went on in the, in the nineties. The point is, is, is, is, is American culture should celebrate not only your journey, your family's journey, and really want to see good things happen. And that is a much more, that in atmosphere is more likely to yield great music than the other thing of

• 1:22:43Billy Corgan?

  deprivation and fear and lack.

• 1:22:46Speaker 01

  I totally agree. I totally agree. I, our, our grandmother had this great expression, which we've always kept in mind. Which is, we've always been in the business of, of connection. And I think music has this way of doing that of throughout the generations, throughout the eras, uh, throughout the styles. It's all about frequency. And when you have those rare moments where, uh, as Matthew was mentioning in that living room the other day, or, or, you know, playing a song for a kid who's struggling through a health issue or, or something to us, that's the most important thing. It's not, I'm not trying to be trite about it, but it was the thing I missed the most about not being a celebrity there after that, that whole shift.

• 1:23:30Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:32Speaker 01

  That was the thing I felt was tragic. It wasn't, you know, it wasn't the, the money or the fame or the power or whatever going away. It was the ability to, to make a difference. And I think, and nowadays the times are, are really, really tough for a lot of, a lot of reasons. But I think that, that music and what it can do and the feelings that it can, can give you, the, the feelings of hope, the feelings of abundance, the opposite of lack and fear and, and all of that.

• 1:23:58Billy Corgan?

  Yes.

• 1:23:58Speaker 01

  I, I think it is more inspiring. I think better art can come from that, I really do. And I think the one through line is that we talked about the Garden Party experience. When you get to the point where you feel as a man, you've got nothing to lose. Uh, if you're, i- it can make you a very dangerous person to the gatekeeper, so to speak.

• 1:24:18Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:18Speaker 01

  Who have been shying away from that in our dad's, uh, moment. No one cared anymore at that point. And so he was able to be honest and able to say, hey, this is who I am despite your perceptions. And I suppose with the two of us, that's what we wanted to do with the, the book we just wrote, the music that we're making. Is for everybody, you know, sometimes what you see is, is not just it. You know, there's a lot behind the story and a lot behind the person. We all go through our struggles. Uh, everybody's busy kind of trying to navigate their own lives. We get it, but we've got this rare, uh, privilege as a family to be those people occasionally that can be there for others that we might not ever meet.

• 1:25:02Speaker 01

  And, and the through line really has been the music throughout all of those years. And, uh, man, I just feel grateful to be here.

• 1:25:09Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, I guess, I guess as a way I would try to close the loop and I appreciate you talking to me today is, is that, you know, oftentimes people point to your grandparents as sort of setting up the, the archetypal American family model. You know? True or not, doesn't matter, right? Because it's showbiz.

• 1:25:28Billy Corgan?

  Before I'd ever seen an Ozzy and Harriet show, I remember my father saying something about like, we're not the Nelsons or something.

• 1:25:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:25:36Billy Corgan?

  You know what I mean? Like, like it was being used as a pejorative. Like, like they, they may live like that over there, but we don't live like that over here.

• 1:25:44Speaker 01

  Hey, it was a soundstage.

• 1:25:45Billy Corgan?

  Yes, yes, beautiful. But, um, I guess what I would try to say to that is,

• 1:25:55Billy Corgan?

  the one thing I, I, I, I take from your music that, that strikes me is, is this unabashed positivity. And, and it's, it's almost hard for me to say, cause it doesn't sound right coming out of my mouth. It's, um, does that resonate at all with you?

• 1:26:09Speaker 01

  It does, it does. It was, it was, um, in being real, I, I think that's really the only thing that's kept the two of us sane. And not Hollywood statistics is we found that, that that positivity you talk about, which is not considered cool, uh, but it is kind of who we are. Sometimes our positivity has been the only thing we've had.

• 1:26:33Billy Corgan?

  But you know, having done a lot of negative music and have been around a lot of negative people and been involved in a lot of negative scenes, you know, you also see the casualty rate in that.

• 1:26:42Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:26:43Billy Corgan?

  In that world.

• 1:26:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's high, it's high.

• 1:26:45Billy Corgan?

  Most of my contemporaries, and I guess by extension, your contemporaries, they're dead.

• 1:26:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:26:50Billy Corgan?

  And, and

• 1:26:51Speaker 01

  That is true.

• 1:26:51Billy Corgan?

  And people tend to romanticize a lot of these things. And I can understand that I romanticized Jim Morrison and like everybody else. But then you realize the cost to the family. And by the way, a lot of those artists, when they, when they leave the, when they leave the stage at 27, 29, 32, there goes all the music that they didn't make.

• 1:27:09Speaker 01

  Right. Our dad was 45, you know, when he passed away.

• 1:27:13Billy Corgan?

  I mean, that's to this world, that's a young

• 1:27:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, young guy.

• 1:27:15Billy Corgan?

  Young guy.

• 1:27:16Speaker 01

  And, uh, he did a lot of great things in that time.

• 1:27:18Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, well, I didn't know he was that young.

• 1:27:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, um, again, he was on his way to a show and Gunner and I, we wrote about it. We've had a lot of close calls ourselves. I mean, we look at it like, we don't really have a right to be vertical right now. A lot of things, so we better do something with that.

• 1:27:32Billy Corgan?

  Well, if we know anything, it's that you can't stop Nelson.

• 1:27:35Speaker 01

  That's true. That's true. And that's kind of annoying, but true.

• 1:27:39Billy Corgan?

  Yeah. Okay, so last thing is it, is it, cause, cause I, I struggle with the nomenclature here. So Nelson's not really a band.

• 1:27:46Speaker 01

  No, it's, it's not. It's been the two of us. It's always been the two of us. We, we tried to promote it as a band when we launched our first album. And we were frustrated to find that, that nobody wanted to put the band on the covers of things or what have you. And we really fought for it to the point of where we were borderline difficult. Cause we really felt when you, when you tour with people and they're your family, you, you want to promote that. It's that, that communion, that brotherhood. And they just didn't want it. So they really focused on, and then Gunner and I just kind of said, well, let's, why fight it?

• 1:28:21Billy Corgan?

  I blame Colonel Parker.

• 1:28:23Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:28:23Billy Corgan?

  He's the guy.

• 1:28:24Speaker 01

  Um, he was, he was.

• 1:28:25Billy Corgan?

  It was, it was the year after our father died. Our dad's manager worked with Colonel Parker growing up and, uh, we were in Palm Springs and he saw the two of us spinning out in the curves and was concerned. He said, I, there's someone I want you to meet. And we showed up at this guy's house and it was the Colonel's house in Palm Springs, which was pretty awesome. I didn't know this story. Oh, yeah. It was surreal because really his whole house was painted blue, like everything, all the furniture, the walls, everything was blue.

• 1:28:53Speaker 01

  He was a little eccentric.

• 1:28:55Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, a little bit. And, uh, he was getting up there in years, so his assistant brought him out and he sat us down. And this is long before the record deal or Geffen or any of that stuff. And he said, so, uh, what are you boys working on? And we said, well, we just got back from New York. We did SNL, we were the only band in history to be unsigned and do that. And now we're just trying to find our band. And he immediately said, you don't need a band. Just you two guys, two acoustic guitars, that's it.

• 1:29:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:21Billy Corgan?

  He did. And we thought, what is this old guy? No, he's so out of the blue. He knows, he knows a few things.

• 1:29:27Speaker 01

  I guess he does. And we, looking back on it, uh, really truly, every break that we've had in our life, every, the bit, from the biggest shows we've ever played to getting our deal to, um, you know, obviously being guilty until proven innocent. Even, even to that living room a couple of days ago, it was two brothers and two acoustic guitars.

• 1:29:46Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:46Speaker 01

  And the old man was right.

• 1:29:47Billy Corgan?

  He was, he was right.

• 1:29:48Speaker 01

  The entire time.

• 1:29:50Billy Corgan?

  But in, in Elvis's case, he took 50%, so you're lucky he didn't take

• 1:29:54Speaker 01

  I would have taken the 50% that he left Elvis, absolutely, any day.

• 1:29:58Billy Corgan?

  Thank you guys.

• 1:29:59Speaker 01

  Thank you so much.

• 1:29:59Billy Corgan?

  Pleasure.

• 1:30:00Speaker 01

  Really.

• 1:30:00Billy Corgan?

  Thank you.