Wendy Dio | The Magnificent Others with Billy Corgan

In this powerful and emotional conversation, Wendy Dio joins Billy Corgan to share the brilliance of her late husband, Ronnie James Dio, from their first meeting at the Rainbow to the creation of Blackmore’s Rainbow, following Ozzy in Black Sabbath, and his breakthrough with his own band, Dio. Wendy reveals how Ronnie stayed true to his vision, refusing to chase hits, and how his humility, brilliance, and devotion to fans made him a legend. She and Billy discuss the origins of the devil horns, the making of “Holy Diver” and “Rainbow in the Dark,” and the enduring legacy Wendy continues through the Ronnie James Dio Stand Up and Shout Cancer Fund. Subscribe to the Magnificent Others YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@BillyCorganTMO?sub_confirmation=1 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices 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.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

  It's a hard life. It's a hard life. And there's ups and downs. We, I mean, we had...

• 0:35Billy Corgan?

  You don't strike me as a shy personality.

• 0:39Speaker 01

  No, absolutely not. We would knock heads like this. In fact, people would walk out the room and say, "Oh, God."

• 0:45Billy Corgan?

  You met him sort of really at the precipice, I suppose.

• 0:47Speaker 01

  Right. And, yeah, he kept following me around. I'm like, "He's short for me."

• 0:51Billy Corgan?

  The word you hear with musicians often is eccentric, but they tend to be different types of...

• 0:55Speaker 01

  He was very eccentric, really.

• 0:56Billy Corgan?

  OK, right, right.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  But there were a lot of fun times. Like, we would have all kinds of things going on, especially seances.

• 1:03Billy Corgan?

  My view of him, from an outside point of view, he was a true professional.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  He was a very much professional, totally, totally. But didn't work at home.

• 1:13Billy Corgan?

  OK.

• 1:16Billy Corgan?

  Wendy D'io, thank you so much for being here. I'm so excited to talk to you about your late husband, Ronnie. Such an incredible musical icon. So, let's start with two stories. You get one story, I get one story.

• 1:28Speaker 01

  OK.

• 1:30Billy Corgan?

  I'm sure you've told it many times, but take me back to the night that you met Ronnie. You're working at The Rainbow as a waitress.

• 1:35Speaker 01

  I was, indeed. I was over here. I'd come over. I didn't have a green card yet. And I needed to work. So I was working at The Rainbow, also doing some movies at the time. And so I knew Richie Blackmore, and I knew his wife at the time, Babsy, from England.

• 1:56Billy Corgan?

  Oh, so you knew Richie from back?

• 1:58Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:58Billy Corgan?

  Oh, OK.

• 1:59Speaker 01

  I knew them very well, actually. And they invited me to... They were in town, and they invited me to go to a party with them afterwards up at the Hollywood Hills. And so I said, "OK." And they had recorded the first Richie Blackmore Rainbow album, but they had not toured yet.

• 2:15Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16Speaker 01

  So we went up there, and Ronnie was following me around. I was like... A bit short.

• 2:22Billy Corgan?

  And he wasn't, nothing disrespectful, but he wasn't a young guy at that point. I mean, he wasn't in his twenties. I mean, he's about thirty at that point.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  Thirty, yeah, yeah. I was like.

• 2:30Billy Corgan?

  So he'd lived, he'd lived some life and.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, he'd been an elf and, uh, but Rainbow was really his, was coming out, as I say, of, of, of being actually in a big band.

• 2:42Billy Corgan?

  Sure, but I'm saying you met him at a, at a unique time where it's.

• 2:45Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, right. He wasn't a big star then. No, he wasn't a big star.

• 2:48Billy Corgan?

  You met him sort of really at the precipice of starting.

• 2:50Speaker 01

  Right. And, um, yeah, and he kept following me around. He was short for me. And, uh, anyway, we talked and everything and then everybody was going to Denny's for breakfast because party of this was like, I guess the sun was just coming up and we were talking and stuff. And he said, do you want to go for a ride to Malibu? I said, okay, sounds good. So we went and we talked and talked and talked and he was very interesting. A really interesting person, very, very smart. And we started chatting and stuff and then we started dating for about two weeks.

• 3:20Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  And then he went on the road.

• 3:22Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 3:22Speaker 01

  And then he called me and he said, why don't you quit your job and come and join me? I said, no, I can't quit my job, but I come for a couple of weeks.

• 3:30Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 3:30Speaker 01

  And I went for the rest of my life.

• 3:31Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, that's so beautiful. Okay, so my story.

• 3:35Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 3:35Billy Corgan?

  Uh, I went to see Sabbath in, uh, two thousand and seven. Heaven and Hell, obviously, was the name of the tour at the time. And I went back to see Tony, my, my hero and my friend and, uh, talked to Tony for ten, fifteen minutes as you do. And then, okay, everybody's leaving. I'm gonna go home. I'm on my way out and I'd never met your husband and he's passing me. And he looks at me, goes, hey, where are you going? I said, well, I'm just going home. He said, can you hang out? Do you have to go home right now? I said, no. He goes, let's, let's go talk. And he just took me in a room, just me and him, for forty-five minutes. He had a glass of wine and we just talked.

• 4:13Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:14Billy Corgan?

  And he was just amazing, as you know. I mean, uh, but he was so, uh, warm, generous.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:22Billy Corgan?

  Uh, supportive, which is interesting. Most big musicians aren't really supportive.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  He was very supportive.

• 4:27Billy Corgan?

  He.

• 4:29Billy Corgan?

  Told me, ask me whatever you want. We talked about Rainbow a lot. Cause I love Rainbow. And um, I still to this day really hold that meeting. Cause it's so rare.

• 4:40Speaker 01

  He was a very rare person. He always made anyone he was talking to feel like that they were the most important person at that time to him, and they were. He honestly, genuinely loved people.

• 4:53Billy Corgan?

  And I'm not saying this in any self-granted, he was generally interested in what I was doing, what I was thinking, how I was thinking of music, where I was going.

• 5:02Speaker 01

  Well, because he was always interested in the next generation of music.

• 5:05Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, very much.

• 5:06Speaker 01

  Very, very much so.

• 5:06Billy Corgan?

  And even when I did the last Ozzy show recently, I was talking to Lizzie Hale.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  Oh, Lizzie, yeah.

• 5:11Billy Corgan?

  Hale Storm, uh, about her experiences with your husband. And she said, he was so amazing to us. He would take time and get in our camper van and wanna know what we were doing and what we were, and she, so here we are, these multiple generations.

• 5:27Speaker 01

  Right, exactly.

• 5:28Billy Corgan?

  Where your husband gave us like a form of blessing, if that's a nice way to put it.

• 5:31Speaker 01

  Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, Lizzie, he gave Lizzie, she asked him one time for a piece of advice and he said, always take time with your fans because, you know, you may not be remember it, but they will remember it for the rest of their life. Yeah.

• 5:44Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, absolutely. So, um, when you first heard Rainbow, um, I assume you heard it basically before it came out? What was your first impression as somebody who was a Purple fan and who knew Richie?

• 5:57Speaker 01

  I was a big Purple fan, big Purple fan.

• 5:58Billy Corgan?

  Great band, I mean.

• 6:00Speaker 01

  And I, yeah, I loved it. I loved it. I thought it was great.

• 6:02Billy Corgan?

  Did you kinda get what they were after right away?

• 6:04Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, absolutely. It was more, it was more of a, of a blues way of going and, and rock, blues rock. And Ronnie wrote, actually wrote a song for me, about me, called Rainbow Eyes.

• 6:16Billy Corgan?

  Oh, beautiful.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  Cause he said, my eyes changed from blue to green to hazel.

• 6:19Billy Corgan?

  I love that. So, uh, now you're on tour with Rainbow.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 6:25Billy Corgan?

  Richie obviously had something to prove, right?

• 6:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:27Billy Corgan?

  Because he'd left Purple and kind of, I mean, all that stuff's well documented. We don't need to talk about it. But I mean, it wasn't, it wasn't exactly the best of terms. You know, he kinda felt like those guys were stealing his band away.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And old Richie was a very intricate person. He, he's obviously a brilliant musician. But very difficult person.

• 6:49Billy Corgan?

  When you say, because because I'm I'm we I like to say we don't do gossip here.

• 6:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 6:54Billy Corgan?

  But but I think it's fair to ask someone who knows him as a person because I've never met Richie. You know, you hear these stories about Richie being difficult, but is it the difficulty of someone who's strong headed? Is it somebody because he's a visionary and he's got it his way? Or is it just somebody who's just difficult because they're just difficult?

• 7:11Speaker 01

  No, it's just his way. And I think because of him being such a musical genius that that's what made it like that. I mean, he was so nice to my parents. My parents loved him. He was an absolute gentleman to them. Me, I knew him before, so he and I would lock heads sometimes. Someone would go, don't talk to him like that. I don't care, you know, I'm me.

• 7:34Billy Corgan?

  So, but what was your impression? Because, you know, I I love Rainbow as a band. And I think they're honestly, in many ways, an underappreciated band.

• 7:44Speaker 01

  Very underappreciated. And I think that, you know, when people talk about Rainbow now, of course, they had the hits after Ronnie left. But Ronnie didn't want to be commercial. That's one thing he did not want to do. He didn't write love songs.

• 7:56Billy Corgan?

  When you so can you explain that? Because I think maybe most people, if they're not in the music business, they wouldn't understand what they mean. It was it was Ronnie was more about finding the music that the fans wanted and and or his vision of rock or can you break that down a little bit?

• 8:10Speaker 01

  Doesn't write love songs. He never wrote love songs. And he didn't want any. He was more into the music than making a commercial hit.

• 8:20Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 8:20Speaker 01

  And he felt that they were just trying to make a commercial hit, which of course a record company always does.

• 8:25Billy Corgan?

  Sure.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  And that's why he wanted to stay true to the way he felt the music should be.

• 8:30Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:31Billy Corgan?

  Because, you know, for the music historians in the crowd, my impression, and you tell me because you were there.

• 8:40Billy Corgan?

  Richie kinda sees Elf and basically.

• 8:44Speaker 01

  It took Elf.

• 8:45Billy Corgan?

  Thank you. I was trying to say the nice version of it.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  Everyone except the guitar player.

• 8:50Billy Corgan?

  The first Rainbow record sounds a lot like Elf.

• 8:52Speaker 01

  It was Elf. It was all of Elf except Richie.

• 8:57Billy Corgan?

  I think in a clever way, and I do think Richie's a musical genius, so I'm with you on that. I think he saw something in Elf that he thought, okay, if I take that and I kinda.

• 9:07Speaker 01

  No, he wanted Ronnie. And the only way he could get Ronnie. The only way he could get Ronnie was to take the band because Ronnie's been with him forever. And it was very sad to see one by one by one go.

• 9:20Billy Corgan?

  And how did Ronnie take all that?

• 9:23Speaker 01

  He was very hurt by it, especially with Jimmy Bain firing. That was the real crucial thing of almost the end.

• 9:32Billy Corgan?

  Cause him and Jimmy were pretty tight.

• 9:33Speaker 01

  Very, very tight, very, very tight. And Jimmy Bob Bain, Ronnie called him Jimmy Bob Bain. He was just a character, you know? He was such a character.

• 9:41Billy Corgan?

  Yeah. So, okay, now you're on tour with this, it's hard to call it a fledgling rock band, but like I said, Ronnie's got something to prove. I mean, he's now bursting onto the bigger, I mean, you're playing with Richie Blackmore. You're not just playing with some guy in a band. So there's a lot of pressure on Ronnie. In many fans' minds, he's following Ian Gill, even though he's not, or Coverdale too, on top of that. And then, and then of course Richie's very much got something to prove that he can stand on his own without Purple.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 10:09Billy Corgan?

  So what was your impression of the vibe of that time?

• 10:13Speaker 01

  Well, I can think of the time was this big rainbow that they carried around, a huge thing that never worked. Every night it broke down, every night it broke down. No, but that was, it was a very exciting time. We were young and it was an exciting time and you know, first time where played to big audiences for Ronnie. It was, it was, it was, it was a bittersweet time.

• 10:36Billy Corgan?

  Can you explain that a little bit?

• 10:37Speaker 01

  Bittersweet? Well, sometimes Richie was in a good mood and sometimes he was in a bad mood. Sometimes if he was in a bad mood, you could not say hello to him or good morning to him until he felt like you're speaking to you.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  You had a lot of very odd things that went on, but as I said, he was a musical genius. So that comes along with with.

• 10:55Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, um, I mean, there's certainly a lot of evidence to suggest, and I have my experiences with musicians, being one myself, and my father was a musician too, is they believe sometimes that that what makes musicians such great musicians is the brain doesn't sort of communicate. Some people might call it bipolarity, but the the brain functioning is different. So they'll have a heightened sense of music, but maybe not a heightened sense of something else.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:21Billy Corgan?

  It does not just say something bad, it's just a different.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  No, no, no, yeah.

• 11:23Billy Corgan?

  Because then, you know, the word you hear with the musicians off is an eccentric, but they tend to be different types of.

• 11:28Speaker 01

  It was very eccentric, really.

• 11:29Billy Corgan?

  Okay, right, right.

• 11:30Speaker 01

  But there were a lot of fun times, like we would, we would have all kinds of things going on, especially seances when they.

• 11:36Billy Corgan?

  Seances?

• 11:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:37Billy Corgan?

  Okay, you have to tell me about that.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  Which he was into seances, when we recorded at Chateau Monma, oh, Chateau, what was it?

• 11:43Billy Corgan?

  Was it the one in France that everyone recorded at?

• 11:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was in a place called, we called it Horaceville, but it was Horville, I think, and near Pontoise, which we call Pentyhose. And we had a lot of seances there and it was, it was a lot of fun, until it turned to be quite scary.

• 12:03Speaker 01

  We did this one seance, which I always thought somebody was pushing the thing, you know, whatever, and they said.

• 12:09Billy Corgan?

  You're talking about Ouija board stuff, yeah?

• 12:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, they said, who is this? This is, this is Ball, the devil.

• 12:17Billy Corgan?

  Really?

• 12:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I say, oh, well, give us a sign. And so, um, suddenly thunder struck out and was like, whoa, we were all kind of scared and everything. So that was one time and we all ran to bed. And then another time we have a seance and I forget who it was, was one of these spirits that come in and they said, ha, ha, ha, ha, don't worry, all your tapes wiped off. And it was the next day taped, all wiped off, completely wiped off. In fact, on that album, it says, no thanks to Ball on it. And another time, um, we did a seance and the glass broke and it was a round table and it went round the table by itself and smashed the floor. That was really scary and that's when I left.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  And as I was leaving, somebody pushed me down the stairs and there was no one behind me at all, but I got a hand shoved me down the stairs. Another time Cozy got locked in his room, he felt the lock go and all the books came off the shelf. It was quite scary there.

• 13:16Billy Corgan?

  See?

• 13:17Speaker 01

  And I've never done a séance since.

• 13:19Billy Corgan?

  I'm with you.

• 13:20Speaker 01

  Since I got pushed down the stairs.

• 13:22Billy Corgan?

  Um.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  But those are fun things they did.

• 13:24Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 13:25Speaker 01

  And we used to do like Richie used to get a can of Coke and put it on a string and it was like a three story place and go on the top scale and bang and it would dangle on someone's window. So there was tapping on the window. So you never knew if it was real or if it was.

• 13:39Billy Corgan?

  Oh, I see. So last thing on this, and I want to talk about you.

• 13:46Billy Corgan?

  Did Ronnie in that, in that early period with Rainbow, because it was like about seventy five to seventy eight, if my memory is correct, but did, because again, he wasn't. And when I say young man, I mean, most people, when they're, when they're really hitting that other level in music, they tend to be in their twenties or early twenties.

• 14:02Speaker 01

  No, it was in his studies.

• 14:03Billy Corgan?

  Right. Did he have a sense that there was still this greater destiny ahead? Did he feel that or was he very focused on just?

• 14:10Speaker 01

  He was very focused on what he was doing at the same time. Like he never wrote songs on the road.

• 14:14Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  He was always, this is touring.

• 14:17Billy Corgan?

  Right.

• 14:17Speaker 01

  Off the road, this is writing.

• 14:18Billy Corgan?

  Right.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:19Billy Corgan?

  Right. Um. So let's talk about you. So you were born nineteen forty five. Is that correct?

• 14:26Speaker 01

  Maybe.

• 14:27Billy Corgan?

  Okay, somewhere around there. But the reason I ask is so many people that were born in, in Britain, you know, either during the war years or post war, they grew up in this kind of very difficult time in England with, you know, there were still bomb craters. I mean, Sharon Osbourne sat in that very chair you're sitting in. We were talking about people playing in bomb craters and stuff like that.

• 14:52Speaker 01

  I played with those.

• 14:52Billy Corgan?

  What's your memory of post war Britain?

• 14:54Speaker 01

  I remember mostly that because

• 14:59Speaker 01

  the food was still on ration for eight years after the war. And I remembered my mother giving me chocolate, which I'd never had before. And I spit it out because I did not like the taste of it because I'd never had it before.

• 15:10Billy Corgan?

  Right.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  You know, I'd never, I'd never had a Coca-Cola.

• 15:13Billy Corgan?

  And where were your family at sort of in the socioeconomic scale? Because there's not, you know, to be fair to you, and I'm interviewing you. We obviously want to talk a lot about Ronnie, but there's not a lot of information about your life, you know?

• 15:26Speaker 01

  I grew up in probably a middle class family. We lived in Epping in Essex.

• 15:31Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 15:31Speaker 01

  Countryside, lived next door to a farm. We used to play with the kids on the farm with the animals and everything and. Became a vegetarian because of that. Um, I'm not anymore, but I became vegetarian at that time.

• 15:44Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  Because, you know, I played with the animals. My mom said, every Sunday we'd have a roast dinner. And um, I said one day, what's that? She said, oh, that's, you know, it's beef. It's like the cows. I said, with the big brown eyes? No, I don't eat that. So I didn't eat any meat except chicken because I hated the chicken. So he used to peck me. So, you know, remember those that, you know, I left home. Um, I worked for Decca Records for a while. Um.

• 16:11Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, tell me about that because uh, what years did you work for Decca Records?

• 16:16Speaker 01

  It must have been like, um, sixty, sixty eight, something like that.

• 16:21Billy Corgan?

  See, I, I did my research.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 16:24Billy Corgan?

  The biggest artists in Decca Records in nineteen sixty eight were The Stones.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 16:30Billy Corgan?

  Engelbert Humperdinck.

• 16:31Speaker 01

  Mm hmm, mm hmm.

• 16:32Billy Corgan?

  The Moody Blues and Tom Jones.

• 16:34Speaker 01

  Yep. And I'll tell you a funny story about that because um, my girlfriend, I must have been, I must have been about probably eighteen or something. Um, seventeen or eighteen and she uh, got an interview for a job through the paper. And it was meeting at a hotel and she said, I don't want to go hotel, come with me. So I did. And it was an interview for the Tom Jones Show that was um, they were for America. Uh, recording it for America.

• 17:03Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 17:04Speaker 01

  So um, and it was an assistant job which she got, but she didn't drive. So they said, well, will you come? So I said, yes. So they, they recorded Elstree Studios, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Uh, they rehearsed Thursday, Friday, and then they would record with a live audience on Saturday and Sunday.

• 17:20Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  And Engelbert was there, I met him. Goldie Hawn and all the, all the laughing people were on it. Moody Blues, I took them all to the pub. That was my job to drive them to the pub. It was, and Liberace.

• 17:31Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  It was a very interesting, uh, so, you know, uh, and my girlfriend at the time, how I got into music really was. My girlfriend at the time is going out with a, a chap from Romford in Essex, uh. In a band called The Paramounts.

• 17:46Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  Okay. Who later became the mood of the Pocahontas. It was Robin, Robin Trow, she was.

• 17:52Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, okay, wow.

• 17:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I used to go to all the shows with them.

• 17:56Billy Corgan?

  Did you, did you, um, cause I always love to talk, cause it's such an incredible period of time for music.

• 18:01Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 18:02Billy Corgan?

  Did you, did you like the music of the time? Were you attracted to the music of the time?

• 18:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, um, I love the Animals. That was one of my favorite bands, uh, the deep, when Deep Popo came out, I love that band Zeppelin, of course, was like, well. Beatles, of course. I mean, I saw the Beatles, uh, when they were third on the bill with Chris Montez and Tommy Rowe in my hometown. Yeah.

• 18:24Billy Corgan?

  Wow. So I've been about sixty six, probably.

• 18:26Speaker 01

  Something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 18:28Billy Corgan?

  It's dizzy.

• 18:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:29Billy Corgan?

  Remember Tommy Rowe?

• 18:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was, uh, it was very interesting.

• 18:32Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 18:33Speaker 01

  It was an interesting time. He's got the speakers, of course. See everybody down there. We go to.

• 18:38Billy Corgan?

  The reason I ask, I mean, not just because you got to see some of these great artists and, and, and be around them a bit, but also, you know, you end up working in music, you know, so.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:46Billy Corgan?

  You know.

• 18:47Speaker 01

  In fact, David Bowie brought a desk, uh, an acetate, it was an acetate at that time. And he was turned down. And I had that acetate for many, many years and then somebody stole it.

• 18:58Billy Corgan?

  Really?

• 18:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:59Billy Corgan?

  Hmm. I mean, I think, I think there's some, I could be wrong, but I think David had eleven or twelve failed singles before he had, he had space out of it.

• 19:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 19:08Billy Corgan?

  Was basically considered a kind of a.

• 19:10Speaker 01

  He was an amazing musician. I mean, he was like a chameleon. He was always something different every time.

• 19:15Billy Corgan?

  Did you, did you see something in David early? You know, did you, did you see that star quality?

• 19:19Speaker 01

  No, because he was like, his acetate sounded like something like Anthony Newley at that time.

• 19:24Billy Corgan?

  Well, he loved Anthony Newley.

• 19:26Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. Yeah.

• 19:26Billy Corgan?

  That.

• 19:29Billy Corgan?

  Very exaggerated.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 19:30Billy Corgan?

  But kind of funny. David was one of those people, he, he borrowed enough things that when he finally put it together in the right formula, ala Ziggy Stardust, it was like.

• 19:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 19:39Billy Corgan?

  It took off, yeah.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  He was amazing.

• 19:41Billy Corgan?

  Um.

• 19:43Billy Corgan?

  So how, how does, how does you, no, sorry. How do you end up going to America at some point? Cause again, there's so, there's no information on you out there that I can find.

• 19:52Speaker 01

  I married an idiot.

• 19:55Billy Corgan?

  Was he a musician?

• 19:56Speaker 01

  No, he was a ski instructor and I was, I was in Zermatt skiing and I stupidly.

• 20:02Billy Corgan?

  Was it the way he skied or?

• 20:03Speaker 01

  No, it was, I don't know. He was good looking. Uh, he said, come over here. I came to California.

• 20:12Speaker 01

  I had a, a visa. I ended up marrying him and realized after I married him that all he wanted to do was ski. He did not want to work. He didn't want to do anything and I just couldn't deal with it. And I didn't want to go home and say, oh, I failed. So I stayed.

• 20:26Billy Corgan?

  Okay. This is, this is Southern California. You sort of drift here and.

• 20:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I started doing some movies and things.

• 20:32Billy Corgan?

  Tell me about that.

• 20:34Speaker 01

  I did a film called Death Race 2000.

• 20:37Billy Corgan?

  I love that movie.

• 20:37Speaker 01

  Okay. So there's a scene in it where I was a masseuse. I had little white shorts, a little white t-shirt.

• 20:43Billy Corgan?

  Now I have to go back and see you in this movie.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  And, uh, so I, when the race came in.

• 20:48Billy Corgan?

  Was Keith Carradine?

• 20:49Speaker 01

  Yes. No, it was David Carradine. David Carradine.

• 20:53Billy Corgan?

  I got my Carradine.

• 20:53Speaker 01

  And so, uh, I, my thing was masseuse when they came in from ride, right? So this one guy who was a masseuse, he was said to me, I'm not, not doing these B movies for, I've, I've written a script and it's going to be huge. And you know who that was?

• 21:10Billy Corgan?

  Uh, let's see. Let's take a guess. Sylvester Stallone.

• 21:13Speaker 01

  Correct. Correct.

• 21:14Billy Corgan?

  Wow.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  Yep. Yep. And he was, he became a huge star.

• 21:18Billy Corgan?

  Hello.

• 21:21Billy Corgan?

  All right. Now I gotta go watch you in this movie. I love that movie. I think it's such a fun movie.

• 21:24Speaker 01

  It's, yeah, it's, uh, it's, um, definitely a.

• 21:27Billy Corgan?

  People still make that joke, you know, if you're gonna run over somebody on the street, 3,000 points.

• 21:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do too. I say, oh, I'll get six points for that one.

• 21:37Billy Corgan?

  So let's go back to Rainbow for a sec. So obviously we talked about you meet Ronnie. Now you're on tour with Rainbow.

• 21:45Billy Corgan?

  It's such an easy thing now to say that Ronnie was a pioneer of hard rock and heavy metal. But at the time, hard rock wasn't necessarily, and many people thought it was on the wane.

• 21:56Speaker 01

  Yep. Yep.

• 21:58Billy Corgan?

  So did he feel, did he have a sense that he was developing something new?

• 22:03Speaker 01

  No, he just always stuck to his guns. He did what he wanted to do musically. Nobody could tell Ronnie what to do. He knew what he wanted to do.

• 22:10Billy Corgan?

  So is that part of why him and Richie?

• 22:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, that, yeah, because, yeah, exactly. Yeah. It was musical differences. And, yeah.

• 22:19Billy Corgan?

  It's kind of funny because they're both brilliant, so you can't say one was right and one was wrong.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no. Richie wanted to be more commercial and Ronnie didn't. He wanted to stick to his guns. He always stuck to his guns. And I think that's why his fans, I mean, he's been dead like fifteen years now, right? And there's still two and a half, two and a half million people on his Facebook. We have, we've kept, keep it alive, but because he was true to himself, he was always true to himself.

• 22:47Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, I went back and listened to some of his early recordings. I have to.

• 22:52Billy Corgan?

  An angel is missing.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 22:55Billy Corgan?

  Cause you know, at some point, because I, because I was coming of age in those times and there was Ronnie, I didn't understand there was sort of age difference or anything. I didn't know that. I just assumed Ronnie was the same age of everybody else.

• 23:07Speaker 01

  Right, right. Which a lot of people did because he was very young.

• 23:09Billy Corgan?

  He was very youthful. Even, I mean, I saw him perform when he was seventy one years old and you wouldn't say that as a seventy one year old man.

• 23:15Speaker 01

  But his brain was, you know, he was always up to the minute of what was going on in the world. And as I said, musicians. He knew who the new musicians were. He knew who he liked and who he didn't like. Yeah. And he always said, you know, somebody asked him once, what's your favorite kind of music? And he said, you know what? There's no bad music because that person created it.

• 23:35Billy Corgan?

  Oh, that's beautiful. I wish I thought like he did. But there's this evolution where it's like early Ronnie kind of doo-wop, New York stuff, very kind of typical for the time.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 23:47Billy Corgan?

  And then there's a little bit of evolution, like there's, I heard like a version of Love Potion Number Nine. Starts to rock a little bit more.

• 23:53Speaker 01

  Well, I heard the Beatles.

• 23:54Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 23:55Speaker 01

  That's what changed his life was the Beatles.

• 23:57Billy Corgan?

  It's amazing how many people saw the Beatles and thought.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  Absolutely, absolutely.

• 24:01Billy Corgan?

  But it's funny because even when you listen to those early recordings,

• 24:06Billy Corgan?

  there's Ronnie. Like it's not like you think like he sounds like somebody else, you know, his, his, his diction is very, you know, it's very interesting. He's got perfect diction as a singer.

• 24:16Speaker 01

  I used to read a book a day.

• 24:17Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 24:18Speaker 01

  He was very, and do crosswords all the time.

• 24:20Billy Corgan?

  What was, what was in terms of what he was interested in reading about, what was his focus?

• 24:25Speaker 01

  Science fiction.

• 24:25Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 24:26Speaker 01

  And autobiographies.

• 24:27Billy Corgan?

  Okay. Is there a? Is there a reason that he was fascinated with those things? Just like to learn or?

• 24:33Speaker 01

  I don't know. I don't know.

• 24:36Billy Corgan?

  You were married to, right?

• 24:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know what he like. I mean, I know what he like. I know, you know, and writing music. He was a huge sports fan, huge sports fan. Oh, he knew everything about any, any, any team you would ask him about.

• 24:49Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 24:49Speaker 01

  He would write songs watching football or watching baseball or something.

• 24:53Billy Corgan?

  Mm hmm. So tell me about your, your falling in love and life together. Because, you know, and you know, the life of a, a wife in rock and roll is especially back then. There were a lot of expectations and, and, and, you know, you had a very successful partnership.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  And when you dumped to manage him on top of it, when you decided that I was going to manage him.

• 25:16Billy Corgan?

  Well, we're not there yet.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 25:18Billy Corgan?

  Hold on, because, no, because I'm, and I don't mean to stop you. I'm saying is, um, you know, it's one thing to fall in love. It's another thing to be with a famous musician. It's, it's another thing to navigate the insecurities.

• 25:29Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely, absolutely. It's, it's a hard life. It's a hard life and there's ups and downs. We, we, I mean, we had.

• 25:37Billy Corgan?

  You don't, you don't strike me as a, as a shy personality.

• 25:40Speaker 01

  No, absolutely. No, we would not get like this. In fact, people would walk out the room and say, oh, good, you know, they're at it. I, I was the only person I think in the world who could tell Ronnie, shut up. You know, because sometimes he would get arrogant and it wasn't called for. Particular time when, um, he had flown. This was with his own band. He had, or do you want to take that?

• 26:09Billy Corgan?

  No, it's fine.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 26:11Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, it's fine.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  He had flown with his assistant to wherever it was we were going. I don't remember where it was, but it was a long way. It was about. Ten hours on a bus and they had sent the bus, but it was a stand up bus.

• 26:26Billy Corgan?

  Ah.

• 26:27Speaker 01

  And we were meeting him. Oh, I know. It was a stand up bus and we were banned and the crew and I were on the bus. We meet him at the airport, wherever it was. It probably was four hours, but it seemed like eleven hours. We got there. And he was having a drink in the bar and I said, come on, we gotta go. Well, I haven't finished my drink yet. I said, we have to go now and he didn't. And so he got on the bus and I was really angry with him. I'm really angry with him. And I said, you know, you need to apologize. Every single person, this is a day off for everybody. You failed everybody up, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I said, it's all about you, isn't it? It's all about you. So.

• 27:02Billy Corgan?

  Well, yeah, it is.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  So he did apologize to everyone and then he bought me a pillow that said, it's all about me.

• 27:10Speaker 01

  Because he could, that's how he was. You could fight with him. And then the next minute he would be, and then he was mean to the crew sometimes and the band. He would yell at people if they were not on the spot like that, you know?

• 27:21Billy Corgan?

  Well, my view of him from an outside point of view, he was a true professional.

• 27:26Speaker 01

  He was a very much professional, totally, totally. It didn't work at home.

• 27:33Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 27:36Billy Corgan?

  So.

• 27:39Billy Corgan?

  You know, in my estimation, and I, I'm, I love my rock music. I mean, there's no better band on the planet in nineteen seventy eight than Rainbow. I mean, they are at their peak. Cozy Powell, one of the greatest drummers of all time. Your husband arguably the greatest rock singer of all time, Richie Blackmore, a true savant at the peak of his powers.

• 27:59Billy Corgan?

  Incredible lineup. I mean.

• 28:00Speaker 01

  And Jimmy.

• 28:01Billy Corgan?

  And Jimmy, right. I was getting there. And so, so.

• 28:07Billy Corgan?

  Usually when you're at that moment, you know, and you, like you said, there's this tension, Ricky. So when you say Richie wanted the band to be more commercial, is it? We need to be played on the radio because of dot, dot, dot. Or is there a logic to that?

• 28:19Speaker 01

  I think the record company was in his ear and in the manager's ear all the time.

• 28:24Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 28:25Speaker 01

  And pushing money to, to write a love song, which funny said no.

• 28:30Billy Corgan?

  Funny. Um.

• 28:35Billy Corgan?

  In the business side of the Rainbow, it was obviously Richie's thing. It was billed as Richie's thing. Richie later joked and said it should have been called Richie Blackmore and Ronnie James Steele's Rainbow. But, but was Ronnie, I assume, but you tell me, Ronnie wasn't a full participant in the business, right? It's basically Richie's.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was, was fifty fifty on the publishing.

• 28:57Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  Okay, which we got scooted off later on. And on record royalties, Ronnie was on a scale. So he, I think he got like thirty five percent first of all, and then it went up to where he would be equal.

• 29:12Billy Corgan?

  Okay. So, so at least by nineteen seventy eight, he's a fully vested member of the band. The band's very successful.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  But never got any money.

• 29:20Billy Corgan?

  Because?

• 29:21Speaker 01

  Well, because management, we had a big house in Connecticut. They made us move to Connecticut. We moved to Connecticut.

• 29:26Billy Corgan?

  Is that because Richie was living there?

• 29:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:29Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  We had a big house there, five acres. So we had no neighbors, very lonely time for me. Car, big car leased, everything was leased and we got a hundred and fifty dollars a week.

• 29:44Billy Corgan?

  Oh, it was one of those, so when it all got added up, they told you you had no money?

• 29:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, we had no money. And I fought for Ronnie's publishing for years and years and years. And finally got one Rainbow Rising back, with the rest of it, nope.

• 29:57Billy Corgan?

  Really?

• 29:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. And when Ronnie and Richie parted company, as, I don't know, because Richie says that Ronnie left and Ronnie says he got fired, so I don't know what happened. But anyway, I know we were left in Connecticut with, my grandmother died and left me fifty thousand. We had that money, it was all we had. And we drove across country from Connecticut back, because I said, we gotta go back to California, you know, where he wanted to start a band. And we had two dogs and a cat and us. And we drove back to California and Ronnie was working. He was, um... It was trying to get band together with Skunk Baxter.

• 30:39Billy Corgan?

  Really?

• 30:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, um, with.

• 30:40Billy Corgan?

  There's, there's the band that never was.

• 30:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, and uh, and then there was uh, old, old elf people and stuff and he was doing all that stuff. And then, um, I was friends with Sharon before, so Sharon and we were friends. And so Sharon was come up to the, uh, we used to go up to the Sabbath place all the time and that. And then, uh, Tony and Ronnie got together in the Rainbow and, uh, I guess they had decided that Ozzy wasn't able to perform anymore. It was their 10th anniversary, I remember that. And, um, gonna be their 10th anniversary. And, um, Ronnie came back and said, you know, um, um, we can get a band together with Tony. Oh, sounds good, you know?

• 31:24Speaker 01

  And then all of a sudden it was, well, it, it, it's gonna be, geezer's in and Bill's in. I said, Black Sabbath, he said, I don't know if I like their music. I said, we have eight hundred dollars in the bank, you love their music. And then he did love their music.

• 31:39Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, but is, is it true that Sharon recommended, uh, uh, Ronnie for, for the job?

• 31:45Speaker 01

  I don't know, but I think.

• 31:46Billy Corgan?

  That's what she said.

• 31:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so.

• 31:48Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, we, we used to go up to the Rainbow all the time.

• 31:51Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, that's what I'm saying, that's a beautiful thing that people don't always understand about that world. This is a lot more closeness goes on.

• 31:58Speaker 01

  Absolutely, absolutely. Um, yeah, I was, uh, Don was managing the band at the time. He was not happy about it at all. Uh, he, he wanted Ronnie to, um, write and record and for Ozzy to go on tour. And Ronnie said, no, that's not what I do. So he left and then Don wrote a, a, a note and said, I'm done with you all. And so they said, oh, we're out of the management. So that's what happened there.

• 32:31Billy Corgan?

  What I love about those, there's obviously the first couple albums, the Heaven and Hell and Mob Rules. What I love about those records was it showed that Sabbath had this other musical side.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  Oh, Tommy's brilliant. Brilliant. And Giza. I mean, brilliant, brilliant.

• 32:50Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, well, Bill did the record and then.

• 32:52Speaker 01

  Bill did the record, yeah. We went down to Miami. Yeah, we went down to Miami. They recorded Heaven and Hell in Miami.

• 32:58Billy Corgan?

  Was it a criteria?

• 32:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, and we stayed at the Bee Gees' house too there. And that was, that was, that was, that was a fun, that was a fun time. I'll tell you a funny story about that, which is actually in Ronnie's book that he tells. So when Ronnie was playing in Elf or Elves or one of those bands, he was, they'd play like cover tunes and they'd play for hours on end in different little clubs and things. And he was playing in this club in St. George, I think it's called, up in, up in up, upstate New York. And this guy there was said, oh, Dio, he said, are you related to Johnny Dio, the big mafia guy? Ronnie said, yeah, that's

• 33:40Speaker 01

  my uncle, right? So he said, oh, I'm gonna bring him down here. So Ronnie was like, just gonna kill himself because he was so scared of it.

• 33:50Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 33:50Speaker 01

  He said he was there. And then one night, all these suits came in and he was terrified. He said, you know, they're gonna find out that's not really my uncle, whatever. Anyway.

• 33:59Billy Corgan?

  Oh, it was kind of a joke that went wrong.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, we said it wasn't true. So anyway, they left and Ronnie forgot about it. Years and years went by, whatever. Ronnie, we were down in Miami, we called in Heaven and Hell. And it's the first time we had any money or anything, you know, Ronnie was the equal sharing partner. And so we went to this place called The Ford. It's a big fancy restaurant in Miami.

• 34:23Billy Corgan?

  I've been there.

• 34:23Speaker 01

  You've been there.

• 34:23Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, yeah. The steaks, I think, is their specialty.

• 34:27Speaker 01

  So anyway, I had called and made the reservation. And we got there and this maître d' took us to a private room. It was a beautiful room and everything.

• 34:35Billy Corgan?

  I know where this is going.

• 34:37Speaker 01

  Having food and they're bringing champagne and everything. I said, how are we gonna pay for all this? So, because we just don't have any money. Anyway, then Ronnie said, could I have the bill? And he said, it's. Thank you. It's from your uncle, Tony.

• 34:52Billy Corgan?

  Ah.

• 34:53Speaker 01

  So he must have been following Ronnie's career.

• 34:56Billy Corgan?

  Ah.

• 34:57Speaker 01

  Oh, this is good to say that.

• 34:58Billy Corgan?

  Wow, that's beautiful.

• 35:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a funny story. Anyway, that that was that. We had a fun time down there. That was a lot of fun. And then they went on the road and everything was good. And then Bill was having a real bad problem with his family. Um, he was total alcoholic at the time and it was just awful. And then one day he just left. He wasn't there. We woke up in the morning, was gone.

• 35:20Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 35:21Speaker 01

  So, um.

• 35:22Billy Corgan?

  But here comes Vinnie apathy.

• 35:24Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 35:24Billy Corgan?

  And I know that Ronnie and Vinnie.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 35:27Billy Corgan?

  Got on like a house fire.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  Well, they're both from New Yorkers.

• 35:30Billy Corgan?

  But you see the strength there, even in the relationships. That's what I love to talk about.

• 35:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 35:34Billy Corgan?

  You know, as fans, we can think this person, but what people don't understand is like.

• 35:38Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 35:38Billy Corgan?

  Vinnie's relationship with Ronnie.

• 35:40Speaker 01

  Right. Well, they were both Americans, too.

• 35:42Billy Corgan?

  But this, but also it's the key to so much great music.

• 35:44Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely. And Vinnie is an amazing drummer, amazing drummer.

• 35:48Billy Corgan?

  I love, I love Vinnie's drum.

• 35:49Speaker 01

  So well, and and poor Vinnie. I mean, he was just like.

• 35:53Billy Corgan?

  Well, in many ways, they, without trying to be commercial, they kind of became more commercial. Vinnie was a more of a eighties style drummer.

• 36:00Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 36:00Billy Corgan?

  Where Bill was obviously Bill Ward. He kind of created the genre of heavy drumming.

• 36:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:05Billy Corgan?

  Um, sorry, they're like, they're apparently dragging a body off at the moment over there. Um. Camp wise, uh, and you tell me, I'm guessing as a, as a, as a somewhat outside observer, but you know, the Sabbath vibe, meaning Geezer and Tony is a little bit of a lighter vibe than the, than the Blackmore vibe on a day to day level. Is that, is that accurate?

• 36:29Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, Ronnie.

• 36:31Billy Corgan?

  A little bit more jokey and silly.

• 36:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, the beginning, it was really good. Everybody was, well, they were all doing drugs at the time. Ronnie only smoked pot. He didn't do anything else. But, um, and that's one of the reasons why it fell apart the first time. Um, but, um, and Vinnie didn't do anything except smoke pot. I don't know if he smoked pot, actually. Anyway, that was, uh, no, they did, they did. But they always joked they loved each other's company. They would, they were.

• 36:59Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, it's a lighter, it's a lighter.

• 37:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, Tony stuffed Vinnie's briefcase with ham sandwiches one day. I mean, they did silly things all the time. Tony was terrified of snakes and Ronnie found a, uh, found a rubber snake and tied it to his, uh, inside as he opened his car. I mean, they did silly things, silly things, but they were, they were, well, they were all great musicians. And I think that's, they had respect for each other.

• 37:22Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, well, so much great music.

• 37:24Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 37:25Billy Corgan?

  Just so much great music. So, uh, am I right in assuming your fortunes are improving?

• 37:30Speaker 01

  Oh, God, yes, absolutely, absolutely. Yeah.

• 37:32Billy Corgan?

  And those were big records.

• 37:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, we bought our first house and yeah.

• 37:36Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 37:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:37Billy Corgan?

  So happy times.

• 37:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:39Billy Corgan?

  So, uh,

• 37:42Billy Corgan?

  that for me as a fan from the outside, that's where you really started to hear Ronnie's name a lot.

• 37:47Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 37:47Billy Corgan?

  You know what I mean? Because now he's in two successful.

• 37:49Speaker 01

  It was hard for him first of all, because, you know, kids would give him the finger on, on.

• 37:54Billy Corgan?

  Cause he's not Ozzy.

• 37:55Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, he's not Ozzy. But then after that, it just, you know, and Ronnie, of course, he, uh, his grandma used to always, um, do the, this when he was taking, he, when he was five years old, he'd go, uh, walk to the steel mill where his grandpa worked with his grandma and she would do this all the time, the Malloy. And so actually, you know, Ozzy always did the peace sign and Ronnie was like, I can't do that. And one day he just did it. And it was, yeah, that was that.

• 38:20Billy Corgan?

  The rest is, I remember somewhere along the way Ronnie got into a whole public thing about the devil horns and people were mad at him because he said he invented it. And there was like a whole.

• 38:29Speaker 01

  No, he didn't say it.

• 38:30Billy Corgan?

  I know, but I'm saying it's typical.

• 38:32Speaker 01

  He said he made it, he made it, he made it popular. That's what he said.

• 38:38Billy Corgan?

  I don't know what's going on next year.

• 38:39Speaker 01

  I got, when that all went down, cause somebody called me from, I think the BBC or somewhere and said, Gene Simmons is going to trademark the Malloy. And I said.

• 38:49Billy Corgan?

  Gene sat in this very chair and told me that he'd trademarked the dollar sign.

• 38:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, he, yeah, that's what Ronnie always said. And he would, he would trademark that. But so anyway, they called me and I said, no, I said, it doesn't belong to anybody. Ronnie just made it popular.

• 39:03Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  It's an old, goes back centuries ago, whatever. And they said, well, what do you think about, uh, Gene Simmons, uh, trademark? I said, I think it's disgusting. Headline, Wendy Dio caused Gene Simmons disgusting. I was like, oh God, I did not say that.

• 39:21Billy Corgan?

  Now, to make you laugh, hopefully, in the 90s, because we loved heavy metal, and of course, we loved Ronnie, The Pumpkins started doing the devil horns onstage and in pictures, and we got for it.

• 39:35Speaker 01

  You did?

• 39:36Billy Corgan?

  Oh, yeah. Because it's heavy metal.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  No, it doesn't. It belongs to anybody.

• 39:40Billy Corgan?

  I know, but you understand, we did it because we loved.

• 39:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, right, right.

• 39:44Billy Corgan?

  The genre, and we loved Ronnie, and it was our way of showing respect.

• 39:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 39:47Billy Corgan?

  But to alternative music, this was, well, tell me, I've lived it for 30 something years.

• 39:52Speaker 01

  But there's stupid people.

• 39:53Billy Corgan?

  But so there's pictures all through the 90s of The Pumpkins, and now everybody in alternative music, and I'm not taking any credit, it goes back to Ronnie and everybody. But the point is, is we started doing it to piss people off, because once they got mad, then of course, we did it everywhere. And to this day, I'm still doing it.

• 40:08Speaker 01

  Of course, of course, Ronnie would do things to piss people off all the time. He loved to do that.

• 40:13Billy Corgan?

  So, all right. At some point, your loving husband turns to you and says, okay, now you're gonna manage.

• 40:20Speaker 01

  Oh, God.

• 40:22Billy Corgan?

  Tell me about that conversation.

• 40:24Speaker 01

  Okay, so that started, actually, when he thought that Richie's manager, which actually was Payne, who was actually Elf's manager.

• 40:39Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 40:40Speaker 01

  And so Richie, when Ronnie went into Rainbow, Richie said, I don't like our manager. What's your manager? He said, oh, it's great. So Ronnie thought that he was gonna continue managing him, but he said, no, he's got Richie now, I don't need you. So.

• 40:53Billy Corgan?

  Don't you love the music business?

• 40:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Ronnie said, you're gonna have to do it, right? So, but then, luckily, I didn't have to do it, because we went, he got into Black Sabbath.

• 41:05Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 41:05Speaker 01

  And Black Sabbath had Sandy Pearlman.

• 41:08Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 41:08Speaker 01

  Was the manager, and Steve Shank. Do you know those guys?

• 41:12Billy Corgan?

  I know their names, I don't know them.

• 41:14Speaker 01

  So, anyway, they managed, they managed the first, the first slot of Sabbath, they managed.

• 41:19Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 41:20Speaker 01

  And then Ronnie left, and that's when he formed his own band, and that's when I had to start the management.

• 41:27Billy Corgan?

  So you, before Dio was formed, or as Dio was formed, or after? Where do you start managing this?

• 41:32Speaker 01

  When, before Dio was formed, before the band Dio was formed.

• 41:35Billy Corgan?

  What was Ronnie's logic for asking you to manage?

• 41:38Speaker 01

  Because I'd rather get screwed by you than screwed by your manager.

• 41:43Billy Corgan?

  How much did you take Wendy?

• 41:45Speaker 01

  About twenty percent. I did indeed, yeah, absolutely.

• 41:49Billy Corgan?

  God bless you.

• 41:49Speaker 01

  Because I did business management as well.

• 41:51Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 41:51Speaker 01

  And what happened was when we started with Holly Diver, we mortgaged a house to start because Ronnie said we've got to go out. It's got to be as big as it was Sabbath.

• 42:02Billy Corgan?

  So. Smart though.

• 42:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:04Billy Corgan?

  Great call.

• 42:05Speaker 01

  But, you know, we, we, I did, I hired the trucks. I hired the people. I did all that. I learned about production. I learned that production managers take a cutback. So, you know, with the band, with the places I use and everything. And so I went back to where Ronnie had used in Rainbow, which were all actually British people. It was like at the Time Light and Sound Design. It was Tesco.

• 42:31Billy Corgan?

  Was it people if you felt you could trust?

• 42:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm glad to use them to the day. I mean, Ronnie took them into Sabbath with them. I mean, they were great people. Anyway, so I was like, oh, God, I don't know about managing. Well, maybe I should start with some little bands and see how I can do.

• 42:48Billy Corgan?

  Sure.

• 42:48Speaker 01

  So we had Roughcut, Alcatraz.

• 42:50Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 42:51Speaker 01

  Cooney, a bunch of different bands.

• 42:54Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 42:55Speaker 01

  So I put those together. In fact, I was the one who found J K Lee. I was the one who took J K Lee to the interview with, to get the job with Ozzy.

• 43:03Billy Corgan?

  Didn't know that.

• 43:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:05Billy Corgan?

  Fantastic.

• 43:06Speaker 01

  They didn't want anything to do with me after that because don't mess it up for me. Because they offered him a little bit of money. I said, get you more. No, no, don't, no. So I backed out of that. But yeah, I had Roughcut, quite good success with them. They could have been Guns N' Roses, but they got too big for their boots. Thought they could manage themselves and started wearing stupid things. This is a red in festival, right? And they decided to wear red, white and blue satin. I said, you're going to get stuff thrown at you. Of course they did.

• 43:33Billy Corgan?

  But.

• 43:36Billy Corgan?

  Things have changed, obviously, in the last thirty, forty years, but, you know, you faced it, Sharon faced it.

• 43:44Speaker 01

  We were the only two women managers.

• 43:46Billy Corgan?

  You know where I'm going with that.

• 43:47Speaker 01

  Really bad time because all the men managers come up, say, you don't know what you're doing. They would just really berate us all the time and everything. And Sharon just told them all, F off. I listened nicely and said, oh, thank you very much and did it my own way. So we did it our own ways, but we both did it what we wanted to do.

• 44:05Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 44:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:07Billy Corgan?

  So.

• 44:07Speaker 01

  We opened the door for a lot of women managers. Women managers are very, very good because they're, they're listen to details, silly things that Ben's come up with. He got more T-shirts than I did or something and they listen to it. They don't just shove it away.

• 44:20Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, well, now, I mean.

• 44:22Speaker 01

  Oh, there's a lot of women managers, good managers.

• 44:25Billy Corgan?

  God bless because, you know, because I know it couldn't have been easy. I mean, I wasn't there, but I.

• 44:29Speaker 01

  Wasn't easy, wasn't easy.

• 44:31Billy Corgan?

  You know, I understand the business. You know, the business and we know how the business can be.

• 44:35Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 44:36Billy Corgan?

  When it's cruel, it's really cruel.

• 44:37Speaker 01

  It was very cruel. It's still cruel sometimes. I get people going, oh, cash cow, because I still keep Ronnie's memory and music alive, you know, but I'm, but I'm the cash cow. You know, that they're.

• 44:49Billy Corgan?

  I want to talk about that, but let's just stay focused here because it's such a beautiful moment. Because I, I wrote it down because I wanted to make sure. I think Ronnie was thirty seven years old when the first deal record came out. I mean, that's a very late number. To finally be like, it's all about him.

• 45:08Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 45:09Billy Corgan?

  It's so obvious in reverse because we could sit here and say, well, look at what he did to Sabbath. Look what he did. I mean, and the elf music is, is very.

• 45:15Speaker 01

  We had no idea what was going to happen with that. He wrote Holy Diver, actually, he wrote Holy Diver and Don't Talk to Strangers, actually for Sabbath. Because Ronnie, a lot of people think that Ronnie's just a lyricist. No, he plays trumpet, plays piano, plays guitar, bass.

• 45:32Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, we took, when I met him at the time, we talked a lot of him.

• 45:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, he, he, he wrote music. He wrote a lot of, I mean, a lot of those songs are written totally by him.

• 45:40Billy Corgan?

  In fact, I interviewed Rudy Sarzo and we talked about Ronnie a bit and he said Ronnie was a really good musician.

• 45:46Speaker 01

  He's a doll, that's a doll. Rudy Sarzo, one of the most special people.

• 45:50Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 45:50Speaker 01

  He's a sweetheart.

• 45:51Billy Corgan?

  Yeah. So.

• 45:55Billy Corgan?

  It's your husband, it's your life together. As you said, you're mortgaging, you're like, you're not, you're not living like rock stars.

• 46:01Speaker 01

  No, no, I wasn't finding socks anymore.

• 46:05Billy Corgan?

  Right. So here you are. And then boom, MTV. I just, it felt, I mean, you tell me, you were from the inside. From the outside, it looked like Roddy just exploded.

• 46:15Speaker 01

  That's so. They spent the record label didn't really do much for us on Holy Diver.

• 46:19Billy Corgan?

  Classic, right?

• 46:21Speaker 01

  But they did spend some money on making a record, making a video for Holy Diver.

• 46:27Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 46:28Speaker 01

  So they spent like all day for this Holy Diver video. And then had a bit of time left. So they said, well, why don't you do Rainbow in the Dark? So he goes up on the roof of the place we were at.

• 46:38Billy Corgan?

  That explains why the video is so kind of basic.

• 46:39Speaker 01

  And it was huge. The Rainbow in the Dark, they didn't care about Holy Diver. And Ronnie said, I love that video. It makes me look tall.

• 46:50Speaker 01

  And Sebastian Bach was telling me, he told me, he says, you know, I love those white boots. I had to get those white boots after seeing Rainbow in the Dark.

• 46:58Billy Corgan?

  It's Ronnie's fault, yeah. So, so it must have been, I mean, again, you tell me, but it must have just been a really beautiful moment because all the hard work, all the shows, all of it.

• 47:10Speaker 01

  All the stuff. The first show we did was, well, we went, they went out with Aerosmith first of all. We did, I think, 10 shows with Aerosmith. But Aerosmith at that time were falling off the stage and doing all kinds of stuff. And, and we had a Holy Diver, Rainbow in the Dark, something that was in the charts. And I know they were, they were this one show and they went over time. And the crew guy was gonna, Aerosmith's crew guy was gonna pull the plug. And Steven Seagal said, no, the audience has obviously come to see them. He was such a, such a gentleman. Anyway, then this, this guy came to me from William Morris. And he said, Kevin is his name was, and he said, you know, I could get you some good

• 47:55Speaker 01

  shows. I said, well, you know, Morris, they don't have anything at Rock. He said, well, that's the thing. We could, and actually they opened the Rock Department because of Ronnie.

• 48:04Billy Corgan?

  Wow.

• 48:04Speaker 01

  And I said, you get me some shows for $10,000 apiece and I'll go with you. And of course. It is Santa Monica Civic, it's sold out in like ten minutes. So we did two shows. We did a six o'clock show and a nine o'clock show. And then they did a, um, they did a in-store and the kids broke the window. There were so many kids. It was like, uh, unbelievable. I remember the first time. Ronnie playing, we played Antioch and somewhere, I thought cows are gonna come. It was out in the middle of nowhere.

• 48:31Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 48:31Speaker 01

  And there were so many people there and I got, I still got shivers seeing him on stage there and thinking, you know what? He did it. We did it.

• 48:41Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, we.

• 48:42Speaker 01

  We did it. Yeah. Yeah. Because Ronnie, that was, I think, why we were successful because I never interviewed Ronnie's music at all and he never interviewed my business.

• 48:50Billy Corgan?

  That's beautiful.

• 48:51Speaker 01

  He would.

• 48:51Billy Corgan?

  Can you?

• 48:52Speaker 01

  He would complain about things, but he would always.

• 48:54Billy Corgan?

  So he was willing to say, look, you.

• 48:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

• 48:58Billy Corgan?

  It's cause I, you know, you assume husband, wife, he's micromanaging a lot of stuff.

• 49:02Speaker 01

  No, no, no.

• 49:03Billy Corgan?

  Fantastic.

• 49:04Speaker 01

  He hated doing interviews. He'd always do them and he'd be fine, but he hated doing them. And it was like a hot potato, like the, the tour manager would say, oh, oh, you know, this is important. You better talk to him. So I talked to him and we have this big fight on the phone about him doing this interview. And one day I said, Ronnie, look, I've got ten minutes. I'm busy. You always end up doing it. Why do you make me go through this? He said, I have to suffer. You have to suffer.

• 49:31Billy Corgan?

  So your life basically changes overnight after all these years of hard work.

• 49:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And we bought the other house. I got the house. I bought that house in Encina, which I still live in, in nineteen eighty-five. And, um, that was, uh, Ronnie goes, I don't need to live in a big house. I said, well, I do. So we got, we got the house, which everyone calls the castle.

• 49:57Billy Corgan?

  I've heard about the castle. I've not been to the castle. I'm not asking for an invitation, but I've heard about the castle.

• 50:01Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. Then we went, at that time.

• 50:03Billy Corgan?

  Cause you know, cause you know, everybody talks, right? So when you're a kid in the music business, you meet somebody, go. Ronnie, he lives in a castle.

• 50:10Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 50:11Billy Corgan?

  So in your mind, there's dragons and.

• 50:13Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, that's what he had. He had. We went to England at the time. We bought back two semis full of stuff. Cathedral windows, antique fireplaces, flooring. I mean, you name it. It's there. It's.

• 50:27Billy Corgan?

  Right.

• 50:27Speaker 01

  It's there. The bar, we bought, the bar is very famous. We bought the bar from a pub in Epping. An actual bar, pub bar, and we had that installed in the house. Yeah. So it's, everybody loves the bar.

• 50:39Billy Corgan?

  So when. I don't know how to define the way to say it's like. There's personal vindication and there's public. And in the music business, public vindication becomes the thing by which you look back and say, you were wrong, you were wrong.

• 50:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 50:56Billy Corgan?

  Was Ronnie.

• 50:59Billy Corgan?

  Did he feel, okay, finally, like, I have trouble with the question because I'm not trying to put a bitterness on him or something like that. But, you know, did he finally feel like, okay, I wasn't crazy?

• 51:11Billy Corgan?

  Everything.

• 51:11Speaker 01

  He's a very humble person, you know, he didn't want. I used to make him, oh, he had all his stage clothes made and everything else and that. But otherwise, he'd wear sweats. He'd go to Walmart. He loved to go to Walmart. Just go there or Ace Hardware or one of these hardware stores. And, you know, I mean, he just, he was a very, he never. Sometimes he could be arrogant, yes, especially in the beginning, very arrogant in the news. Because people would. They would say about his age and his height.

• 51:40Billy Corgan?

  Hmm.

• 51:40Speaker 01

  And he would say, what different, what, what does it matter? Well, how tall I am, how old I am.

• 51:45Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 51:46Speaker 01

  You know, but they always would get that. And then he'd get really arrogant with people.

• 51:50Billy Corgan?

  But my sense of it is, is. He had complete confidence in his voice.

• 51:55Speaker 01

  Absolutely, absolutely, yes.

• 51:57Billy Corgan?

  Like an almost, because I don't have that.

• 52:00Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 52:00Billy Corgan?

  So I admire that in him because I see that in him as a fellow performer.

• 52:04Speaker 01

  But he is, you're going to imagine, he came from a working class family up in upstate New York. Uh, loved sports even as a kid. And I wanted to run out and play baseball when his father at five years old said, oh, listen to the radio, pick an instrument, oh, that one was a trumpet. So I took him down to the store.

• 52:23Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 52:24Speaker 01

  Got him a trumpet and that poor kid had to practice every single day for hours on end. To the point where he decided he was gonna get.

• 52:33Billy Corgan?

  Was it because somebody wanted him to be a musician?

• 52:36Speaker 01

  No, I don't know why he did it. Why his father did it? I have no idea.

• 52:39Billy Corgan?

  Oh, okay.

• 52:39Speaker 01

  Father was very, was very, his mother was a saint. His father was very old Italian.

• 52:47Billy Corgan?

  Like old school Italian, yeah.

• 52:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, and he was very mean to the mother. I mean, always like, she had to do everything. And I one time bought her a really nice coat. And he sent it back and he said, don't be wasting my son's money on frivolous things. My money, but let's say he, he was, anyway, he made him practice and practice. And Ronnie at the time said he, he just wanted to go out and play. So we figured if he just did it right, then he, he would go out and play. And it got to the point where the, um, the, the truder, he knew more than he did. So he went on to do that. And then he actually played. I mean, he played with like Bobby Darin and he played with all these people in the big bands at that time.

• 53:29Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, well, that was normal back then is a Bobby Darin would tour and they would just pick up local bands.

• 53:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 53:35Billy Corgan?

  So they just recruit, hey, you come play.

• 53:37Speaker 01

  Exactly. And he was fifteen, I think, at the time or something.

• 53:39Billy Corgan?

  Even Bob Dylan played some of those types of things, yeah.

• 53:41Speaker 01

  But, um, and he always, so that was pushed in him to be successful. You have to be the best you can all the time. And he.

• 53:50Billy Corgan?

  But, sorry, but he had that inner drive. That's just.

• 53:53Speaker 01

  He had the inner drive, but he also had that vocal where he sing from the stomach because of the trumpet playing.

• 54:00Billy Corgan?

  Very much from here, yeah.

• 54:01Speaker 01

  From the trumpet playing, all those years and years of that.

• 54:04Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 54:04Speaker 01

  That made him, and he knew he could sing. He didn't know he could sing when he had the first band, the singer quit. And he had to sing and so, oh, okay.

• 54:14Billy Corgan?

  So, uh, I don't want to dwell on the sad part, but you know, I mean, I saw him not that long before he passed. He was, I was literally turning the person next to me going, how old is Ronnie? And I think he was seventy one at the time and saying, how is he singing like?

• 54:31Speaker 01

  No, he wasn't seventy one because he died when he was sixty seven.

• 54:33Billy Corgan?

  Okay, my bad, but, but I'm saying is,

• 54:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, he was older.

• 54:35Billy Corgan?

  Most men in their sixties don't sing like your husband. And by the way, he's not singing the, you know, he's not singing, uh, Volare.

• 54:43Speaker 01

  No.

• 54:44Billy Corgan?

  He's singing, he's singing Mob Rules and We Rock and Rainbow in the Dark. These are

• 54:49Speaker 01

  They are nice.

• 54:51Billy Corgan?

  Operatic, like power.

• 54:53Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 54:53Billy Corgan?

  So you're looking at each other like, how is this humanly possible? So, uh,

• 55:01Billy Corgan?

  did he start to feel like, you know, were there signs or did just one day he just didn't feel right like?

• 55:07Speaker 01

  No, about five years before he passed away, he was complaining of indigestion. I took him to a very famous Beverly Hills doctor who gave him heart tests and all kinds of stuff and just said, oh, don't worry. It's just a gasp, just gasp. Had I known what I know now, I would have made sure he had.

• 55:31Billy Corgan?

  So there was that, that was that first sign that Dina had caught.

• 55:34Speaker 01

  And he always had indigestion. He was eat Tums all the time and indigestion, indigestion. But you see with things like stomach cancer, gastric cancers and pancreatic cancer, there's not really any signs until it's too late. That's why I've got the cancer thing that I promote now with early detection.

• 55:54Billy Corgan?

  You want to talk about that a bit?

• 55:55Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 55:56Billy Corgan?

  Please.

• 55:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. Uh, we started that, uh, when Ronnie passed. I'll tell you about when Ronnie passed away. Okay. So we found out that he was not feeling good. He finished a tour with Sabbath. That was, that was my happiest memory that I have now is that he went back with Sabbath and did that Heaven and Hell tour.

• 56:17Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 56:17Speaker 01

  The last thing because

• 56:18Billy Corgan?

  And it was great.

• 56:19Speaker 01

  And everybody loved each other. Everybody was back to loving each other, having fun, really enjoying themselves. Everybody pushing each other to the limit for, because they were all such good musicians and they did, created Bible Black, all those songs are really good songs and did a great time. And it had a really fun time and was going to go out and do another album.

• 56:39Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 56:39Speaker 01

  Okay. So. They they they they stopped them because um uh Vinnie had had something wrong with his hand or something, he had to do something, I don't know, whatever. They took a break. And Ronnie wasn't feeling good at all. And that last story wasn't feeling good at all. And so we were, I took him to my just local doctor, actually. He did a blood test and he called me back and he said, Wendy, um, it's not good news. I I think we need to do an ultrasound and a colonoscopy. We did all that. And Ronnie didn't know and I, he said he's got stage four cancer. Wow. And I said, don't tell him, don't tell him what. So I spent the whole weekend um trying to find out the best

• 57:22Speaker 01

  oncologist I could find at what hospital. And they said at the MD Anderson, but I couldn't get into MD Anderson. I was trying everything and then somebody said, go to the Mayo Clinic. So we flew to Minneapolis, went to the Mayo Clinic. And the guy, horrible doctor, he said, Tess, he said, no, you're gonna die. So, you know, just go back and and put your life together. You've probably got six months. Wow. So we went, stayed in the hotel. We cried all night long. I remember that. And then I got a text that um from from MD Anderson that we could get in there, the, you know, T J Martell,

• 58:04Speaker 01

  Tony Martell, who we'd done some, we'd done some stuff for him before and make, given him money and stuff. He was like, he's, we've got, so we flew from Minneapolis to to Houston for, to see this doctor. Um, this doctor Johnny, and he said, look, I don't, I'll do the best. There's some trials out there that we can try. I can't promise you anything, but nobody can tell you except God when you're gonna die. He said that doctor should be struck. Anyway, um, he started doing the the um, the treatment. We used to go every two weeks, we'd go fly to Houston for six hours, he would do chemo.

• 58:44Speaker 01

  And you know, there was a kid there, nineteen, that was was was there. And Ronnie spent more time caring about him than caring about himself. It was, it was really.

• 58:58Speaker 01

  And we used to skip down the halls going, we're gonna kill the dragon. We called it killing the dragon. And we never, ever, either one of thought that Ronnie was gonna die. Because he did very well. He did very well. Three weeks before he passed away, he was getting an award from um whatever award it was, a golden something. Um, and then, but I just feel sometimes the

• 59:25Speaker 01

  the

• 59:28Speaker 01

  they don't wanna find a cure because they make too much money with things. Because I know for a fact that at one point Ronnie lost the eyesight of his eye because it had messed his eyes up there. And his hand was like this. And I took him to an optician, um, a specialist. And he said, well, you know, there's nothing we can do about it. He said, um, but there's another specialist. Let me see in a couple of weeks. I said, okay. So we went to uh Houston again. And they tried a new drug called Avastin. And I forget the name of that. We got off the plane and I said, I think I can see better in my eye. My hands stopped shaking. And we went to the opticians and he said, I can't believe, I can't understand this.

• 1:00:09Speaker 01

  Your sight's back. I cannot understand this. And then the next time we went there, the Avastin was taken off the market.

• 1:00:16Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:18Speaker 01

  But, you know, anyway, um, we, he, we did that last show, the last award thing and uh, three weeks later, he passed away. He wa- he wasn't feeling that good. We, he was feeling really in a lot of pain. Went to the hospital and um Gloria and Terry were with me and uh he passed away.

• 1:00:44Billy Corgan?

  Hmm, sorry.

• 1:00:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, but then, okay, so then everybody was saying and wanted to give money for cancer. And Iron Maiden sent me ten thousand dollars and said, where do you want it to go? And I said, well, you know, I'm A lot of big organizations, they have so much administration costs. I would really like it to go right where it should go.

• 1:01:08Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:09Speaker 01

  And so we formed the Ronnie James Dio Stand Up and Shout Cancer Fund. And fourteen of his good friends that are on the board, actually one of the directors, Claire Brothers, from PRG, from Upstaging.

• 1:01:23Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:25Speaker 01

  Adam Parsons, Rick Sales, Andy Gord, they're all on the board. And we've raised almost three million dollars.

• 1:01:31Billy Corgan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:01:31Speaker 01

  For research and we support TJ Martel. We support a lot of other cancer things and it goes into, we were actually been supporting Dr Wong from UCLA with a cancer test from a swab.

• 1:01:46Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:47Speaker 01

  So that instead of, because men a lot of times don't get checked out because they don't want to finger up the butt. This would be a swab in the mouth and it could, early detection of if you've got

• 1:01:59Speaker 01

  stomach cancer or pancreatic cancers, those are the two killers. And they just named one of the labs at UCLA after Ronnie.

• 1:02:06Billy Corgan?

  Oh.

• 1:02:08Billy Corgan?

  Last thing, thank you for sharing all that. It's hard. I lost a lot of people with cancer too.

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  It's, it's, it's.

• 1:02:14Billy Corgan?

  It's the hardest.

• 1:02:15Speaker 01

  It's the hardest thing. It's just, you know, and it doesn't seem like he's been gone for fifteen years at all. And I try.

• 1:02:22Billy Corgan?

  When you said fifteen years, a few minutes ago, I was kind of like, it doesn't seem like he's gone that long.

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  It doesn't seem like that, no. I don't know. I just try to keep his music and his memory alive as much as I can.

• 1:02:32Billy Corgan?

  Well, you've done a great job. So let's talk about that because you brought up that people were critical of you. And, and to me, that's so the stupidest thing I can imagine. First of all, and again, you stopped me because I'm going to say what I want to say and you tell me if I'm wrong. First of all, it seems to me you're his wife and manager. Your number one responsibility is to keep his music alive.

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:03:02Billy Corgan?

  Okay, number two.

• 1:03:05Billy Corgan?

  Why wouldn't your family and the ones he loved be the beneficiaries of his gift? Which was a God given gift?

• 1:03:12Speaker 01

  Absolutely, absolutely.

• 1:03:14Billy Corgan?

  So, and put it this way, if I'm a fan and I buy these things that come out, I want the money going to you or your family.

• 1:03:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:03:23Billy Corgan?

  And his family.

• 1:03:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:03:24Billy Corgan?

  What is so hard for that, for people to understand about that?

• 1:03:27Speaker 01

  Well, who knows?

• 1:03:28Billy Corgan?

  And as we sat here, for every dollar Ronnie made in this business, there's all the times where you guys didn't make money and didn't get paid and got ripped off.

• 1:03:36Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I remember, you know, when we, when we drove all those miles from Connecticut to LA and, you know, we rented a house because I had that money from my grandma. We had like about 12, it's a two bedroom house. We had about 12 people sleep in there, living there. Because we were trying to struggle and get something happening.

• 1:03:53Billy Corgan?

  There was this article that came out after Michael Jackson died. The New York Times wrote it and they were, the basis of the article is they were shocked at how little money Michael Jackson made.

• 1:04:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:04:04Billy Corgan?

  And that's the thing that most people understand and we're not crying poor, but we're saying is it's not what people think it is.

• 1:04:09Speaker 01

  Oh, no, of course not, of course not. Yeah. I mean, we bought the castle in 1985, you know?

• 1:04:16Billy Corgan?

  Sorry, when you say we bought a castle.

• 1:04:18Speaker 01

  It's not really a castle, but it's, it's with Sonne Hill. We live next door to Vin Diesel.

• 1:04:25Billy Corgan?

  Oh, very good.

• 1:04:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so I don't know where he is lately. He's, he's not there. But yeah, so it's, it's, we made it the way it is. It's very medieval inside and everything is very medieval.

• 1:04:39Billy Corgan?

  So, last thing, because I'm just curious and, and of course, we wish Ronnie was still here to, to help us market the music and do all those fantastic things. Just talk a little bit about what it's like to, because first you have the emotional navigation of you have to constantly be in the energy of. Old times, reushing a concert, there's his voice. It's gotta be hard certain days, I imagine, I don't know. Or do you feel close because you're always together?

• 1:05:08Speaker 01

  I feel close because in my office, I have an office in Canoga Park. And it's pictures of him and things all, because we have in our house. Ronnie refused to have any gold records whatsoever, nothing, because he's a very humble person. So they're all in my office, everything's in my office. So I walk in the office and Ronnie everywhere, everywhere is Ronnie, yeah, exactly, yeah.

• 1:05:30Billy Corgan?

  So, but past the emotional part, just talk about the business of the posthumous business of, you know, how to manage a legacy, like.

• 1:05:39Speaker 01

  Right, well, you know, we've, we found things in the vault. Actually, I did find recently some things that have not come out. So, because Ronnie would, Ronnie would go to the stand in the studio. And he put a song down and he put it down with his playing guitar, playing the bass, drum machine, whatever, and then he would go into a proper studio with the musicians. So there are a lot of those things with songs that didn't make it.

• 1:06:09Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 1:06:10Speaker 01

  With his vocal on. So we've, we've talked about taking the band, his band.

• 1:06:16Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:16Speaker 01

  And, and but keeping his vocal and then recording.

• 1:06:20Billy Corgan?

  That'd be cool.

• 1:06:20Speaker 01

  So those are the things, you know, that we were talking about and doing things. There's a couple of songs, actually, funnily enough, he would never write a love song. But he did write two love songs for me, which are recorded, have never been out. And I'm tempted to put them out, but then I'm like, would he kill me for this because they're love songs?

• 1:06:38Billy Corgan?

  Well, it's obvious that he loved you and you loved him, and I think that's.

• 1:06:42Speaker 01

  We were soulmates, I think, you know, obviously we had ups and downs all the time. I left a few times and came back, but you know, those things happen.

• 1:06:51Billy Corgan?

  No, it's beautiful because I'm in business with my wife as well and.

• 1:06:57Billy Corgan?

  It just strikes me that

• 1:07:00Billy Corgan?

  the family of music is the best way to say it. And here we are talking about Sharon and Ozzy and Tony. We're in this kind of bigger family. And unfortunately, the music business has a terrible history of ripping people like us off.

• 1:07:12Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely, absolutely.

• 1:07:14Billy Corgan?

  So it makes total sense that he turned to the one person he trusted the most in you.

• 1:07:18Speaker 01

  Exactly. That's what I said. He'd rather screw me than get screwed. That's what I used to always say.

• 1:07:24Billy Corgan?

  Well, thank you so much, Wendy. It's so nice talking to you.

• 1:07:26Speaker 01

  Thank you. It's been absolutely very, very interesting.

• 1:07:28Billy Corgan?

  Thank you.

• 1:07:29Speaker 01

  Very interesting. Thank you.