Pod Insights The Magnificent Others with Billy Corgan Todd Rundgren | The Magnificent Others with Billy Corgan About this episode Billy Corgan welcomes Todd Rundgren for a masterclass in songwriting, record production, artistic autonomy, and a lifetime spent chasing creative curiosity. From working with Albert Grossman, Bob Dylan, and The Band, to producing hits for Grand Funk Railroad and pioneering the DIY recording approach decades before “bedroom pop” existed, Rundgren shares stories that only he can tell.
Todd reflects on making Something/Anything?, the radical creative leap of A Wizard, A True Star, learning to sing by studying Stevie Wonder, and why great producers serve the artist—not the label. Billy and Todd also explore musical intuition, vocal arranging, artistic risk-taking, and the freedom that comes from creating without worrying about commercial expectations.
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Transcript 16,239 words · 4 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:09 Speaker 01 To me, you know, in the strictest sense, you know, a song has a story to it.
1:16 Billy Corgan? You're such a distinctive artist in your own right, and you have really unique production style, but always in service to the artist.
1:24 Speaker 01 For me, it was music was all that mattered. I was just music, music all the time.
1:29 Billy Corgan? The myth, the legend, you see.
1:31 Speaker 01 When I started making my own music, I never had to worry about whether it would sell or not.
1:36 Billy Corgan? That record was the first time I personally registered, like, wow, this guy did all this on his own.
1:42 Speaker 01 I loved being a part of it, and it never left me.
1:47 Billy Corgan? But do you have a foundational songwriting ethos?
1:50 Speaker 01 Throw it all against the wall, you know, and see what sticks.
1:55 Billy Corgan? Todd Rundgren, thank you for being here today. Um, I want to start with Albert Grossman. I thought that was a good place to dive in.
2:04 Speaker 01 Whoa.
2:05 Billy Corgan? If you don't mind.
2:06 Speaker 01 No, you can start there. Sure.
2:08 Billy Corgan? You seem to have a good relationship with him overall. Is that, is that a fair thing?
2:12 Speaker 01 Well, it was, um, Albert was a very strange kind of guy. Um,
2:19 Speaker 01 he could be really great sometimes, really great for you. And then, uh, I think, I don't know whether most people are familiar with his, his, you know, odyssey with Bob Dylan. But he managed Bob Dylan for a while and then Bob left the Grossman Organization, whatever. And then for years and years and years after Albert would take Bob to court to try and win back more publishing money. And that was kind of the way he was. Um, he was a, he could be
2:59 Speaker 01 a great supporter of you, but if he thought your relationship with him was over, then the gloves came off.
3:06 Billy Corgan? Ah, I see.
3:07 Speaker 01 And, um, I recall that I was at the end of my contractual obligation to Bearsville Records. And the last record that I delivered under that contract was called Acapella.
3:23 Speaker 01 And, um,
3:24 Billy Corgan? Is that where you, it was only just your voice, right?
3:26 Speaker 01 Yeah, everything was all the sound.
3:28 Billy Corgan? I got that record when it came out.
3:29 Speaker 01 Vocal sound.
3:30 Billy Corgan? Full disclosure, yeah.
3:32 Speaker 01 And I delivered the record, you know, and I was prepared to move on, find another record deal or something like that. And Albert refused to release it.
3:41 Speaker 01 And he gave me this excuse that Warner Brothers didn't like the record because Warner was the distributor. And, uh, and this went on for months and months and months, you know, I said, what's going on with this? Finally, I recall the moment I was, um, driving up the, uh, New Jersey thruway. The Palisades, I think it was, and I was so frustrated, I pulled over to a phone booth. And I called Mo Austin. And I said, what's the problem with the record? You know, why wouldn't you use the record? And he said, you got a record? I've not heard this record, you know?
4:18 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
4:19 Speaker 01 And so it was just one of Albert's ruses, something like that, in order to get more out of me.
4:25 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
4:25 Speaker 01 Even though it was time for me to leave because my publishing was tied to the record contract.
4:30 Billy Corgan? I see.
4:31 Speaker 01 And so what he did was, he essentially got me over a barrel and said, all right, I will free you. And you can sign with Warner Brothers. I'll negotiate a three album deal with Warner Brothers and I'll get the publishing for the three album deal with Warner Brothers. So, yeah, he was, he could be great. He, um, for instance, when I put out this album called The Wizard of True Star, which was this crazy thing that I, you know, from a career standpoint, shouldn't have done. But, uh, he was just incredibly supportive. It was a weird record and he's, he's sometimes like weird things, you know? He sometimes liked to, uh, to tweak people.
5:14 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
5:15 Speaker 01 And I think he saw that record as just, in some ways, uh, musically legitimate, but also it was just a big tweak at everybody, you know?
5:26 Billy Corgan? Yeah, so you, you kind of enter his world as an engineer. They brought you to Bearsville.
5:31 Speaker 01 Yeah, it was an interesting transition for me because my first band, The Nas, uh, that only lasts about 18 months and it was like this whirlwind of, um, of showbiz, kind of bullshit and stuff like that. Uh, in other words, we got, first of all,
5:56 Speaker 01 We were just a local band in Philadelphia and I put together like what was a local supergroup because I stole people from all the other popular bands in downtown Philly.
6:07 Speaker 01 And the guys who owned the local record store wanted to manage us and they gave us a house to live in, something like that. One day, The Who comes to play in town. And we hear that they're staying at the Holiday Inn downtown. We figured maybe we could meet somebody because The Who was like one of our models, you know. I used to do that stuff all the time, you know, so.
6:33 Speaker 01 So we went to the Holiday Inn downtown and there was Roger Daltrey in the, in the bar. And nobody was talking to him at all. Nobody knew who The Who was yet.
6:43 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
6:44 Speaker 01 They were actually opening for the mamas and papas.
6:46 Billy Corgan? Wow. Now there's a bill.
6:49 Speaker 01 Yeah. And so we're talking to, um, we're talking to Roger Daltrey and we made a point of always dressing like we were in a band. You know, we wanted people to know we were in a band.
7:01 Billy Corgan? If you're going to call yourself the Nas.
7:02 Speaker 01 Yeah, it was something. I think it took a while to come up with the name too, but in any case, a guy approaches us and says, are you guys in a band? And we say, of course we're in a band, you know. And, you know, he liked the way we looked. And he said, well, can I hear you, hear you play? And the next day he auditioned the band, you know, in the lost space where we rehearsed over the record store.
7:29 Speaker 01 And he said, okay, I want to take, he liked the look and he liked what the little material we had. We hadn't written enough for a whole album yet.
7:37 Speaker 01 But he said, okay, I want to manage you guys. And his name was John Curlin and he had been a publicist up until then and never managed anyone. But he was well-connected. He knew everybody in the business.
7:51 Speaker 01 And so he whisks us away from Philadelphia. Uh, we think we're going to New York City. But he said, well, it's too expensive in New York City. Let's start looking in Long Island. And we started in Brooklyn, eventually wound up in Great Neck. By the time we got a, a, a house to stay in.
8:10 Speaker 01 And, um.
8:14 Speaker 01 It was just, as I say, it was this whirlwind experience. First, we started doing auditions for all the labels. You know, and in those days, most labels had their own studios. So you go and they say, you got a half an hour. Lay down everything you can in a half an hour. And then they send the tapes upstairs to be reviewed and then maybe somebody will sign you. So we did the rounds to all of those things. And while we're doing it, we're not yet signed yet. Uh, John Curland has all these great publicist connections. And he knows Gloria Staver as the editor of 16 Magazine. So we wind up being on like 16 Magazine and Tiger Beat Magazine before we've ever released a record.
8:59 Speaker 01 You know, we're suddenly teen idols with all these stupid questionnaires, you know? What do you like in girls and what's your favorite food? You know, and you know, the sort of same thing they did with the Beatles when they came out. And everywhere we went, we would go in a limousine. We would go to like events just to be seen, you know? And we'd come out of limousine and everyone would say, who are those guys? You know? So we were living the life of, of like rock stars and we hadn't even had a record out yet. Finally, we did get signed and made a record and they released the record. But our manager's philosophy was, well, I don't want you to go out and tour that much because I want the price to come up.
9:41 Speaker 01 You know, I, I want to raise the, uh, you know, the, the bar in terms of how much money we can ask for. And so the band just kind of foundered at that point. We didn't do what other bands had to do. We'd just go out on the road and, and fail every once in a while and get better and, and refine your performance and things like that. We never did that.
10:05 Speaker 01 We went on to our second record. We went to England to record our second record and got one song done and then our manager had neglected to do some paperwork because in those days they had an exchange program and a American band that went to England, an English band had to come to America. And for some reason, they hadn't matched us up with anyone. So we did one song in a studio and then the resistance union said, you can't do anything else now. You can't record in the studio. You can't play any live gigs. We did one showcase, I think, at Ronnie Scott's and the general reaction was too loud.
10:45 Speaker 01 And then, and then we went back to LA and recorded the second album. And in the midst of that, the band just fell apart. And before the record was eventually released, me and the bass player had both quit the band.
11:00 Billy Corgan? Right.
11:01 Speaker 01 And this is about 18 months into the life of the band.
11:04 Billy Corgan? Very auspicious start.
11:05 Speaker 01 Yeah. And then I'm on the street at that point. I have a place to stay because I'm signed to Screen Gems as a songwriter.
11:18 Billy Corgan? Wow.
11:19 Speaker 01 Which was part of the deal, you know, when you get signed.
11:22 Billy Corgan? Wow, that's interesting.
11:23 Speaker 01 They signed the band and they signed me as a songwriter because I didn't have a publishing deal before that. And so I was staying in an apartment that they kept for songwriters. I had a place to stay, but I spent almost all my days down in the West Village with clothiers that I had met when we were in the NAS. Because we only, I only dress in English clothes, or clothes made by English people at that point, you know, I didn't like American fashion. And I would, in years after that, I would go to England for like two weeks and stay with clothiers. And they would take me around to all the warehouses
12:04 Speaker 01 and then I would come back home with like six pairs of Crush Velvet pants, three suits, you know, patchwork platform boots and everything, you know, and wear that for a year and then go back and shop again. So, so I'm living, I'm in the village most of the time and I take a gig doing lights for a disco. I'm not, I don't even know if I have a guitar at this point, you know, it's a. And I don't know exactly what I'm gonna do in terms of music. And then, uh, the partner of John Kirland's partner, name was Michael Friedman, had gone to work for Albert Grossman.
12:46 Speaker 01 And he looked me up, you know, he said, well, I watched you, um, you were doing the NAS stuff because,
12:53 Speaker 01 we hired a producer for the first record and then when the producer started producing, we realized that it, he didn't do anything we needed. Uh, he was like an old style American producer, he's just watching the budget. Just making sure you don't spend too much money. That was what American producers did. We all thought, we thought everybody was George Martin.
13:13 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
13:13 Speaker 01 You know, he would help us really get our together. Now this guy just read the trades, you know, and said, well, that was a sour note there or something. Any case, you know, I wound up remixing the first album and then producing the second album. From beginning to mixes and so he had watched me and he said, he came to me, he said, you know, Albert's looking for somebody to sort of modernize his, uh, Lisa recording part of it, modernize the stable of artists because most of his artists had been signed during the folk era and now it's like the late sixties.
13:53 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
13:54 Speaker 01 And they're, and their records are not being played on the radio and things like that. So, started pairing me up with all these people like Ian and Sylvia and James Cotton and people like that. And so I got a lot of experience real quick. But the thing that, you know, really kind of busted it all wide open was, uh, they had me first go to Toronto to engineer the Jesse Wintester record, which was produced by Robbie Robertson.
14:28 Billy Corgan? Okay.
14:28 Speaker 01 And a lot of the guys from the band participated in making the record. And I was so efficient at it that they decided they wanted me to, um, be the engineer on stage fright. Um, they never, uh, they don't have producers. They kind of co-produce everything, you know, everybody's got an opinion.
14:50 Speaker 01 So suddenly here I am, working with the biggest band in the world.
14:57 Speaker 01 On their long awaited third album, whatever, you know, and.
15:02 Billy Corgan? They were pretty hot coming off the first.
15:04 Speaker 01 Yeah, and this is the beginning of a whole production career for me that eventually
15:12 Speaker 01 became my living.
15:16 Speaker 01 And it was just after I had secured that, that I asked for a budget to do a vanity project. And that's when I did my first solo record.
15:26 Billy Corgan? So that's how you got signed to Bearsville, yeah?
15:28 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, that's, um, that's how I got signed as an artist, I guess, as a recording artist.
15:35 Billy Corgan? Yeah, that's what I meant.
15:35 Speaker 01 Yeah, I was originally just there as a producer engineer. And then when I asked to do the vanity project, of course, it was going to come out on Bearsville. And lo and behold, we had accidentally had a something of a hit record on it. There I was back. I suddenly had to be an artist again.
15:55 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
15:56 Speaker 01 And I had kind of given a lot of that up.
16:00 Speaker 01 Uh, I couldn't sing 20 minutes without blowing my voice out because I had never been a frontman.
16:06 Billy Corgan? Hmm.
16:06 Speaker 01 You know, I was always a guitar player. I do occasional background vocals, things like that. So it was horrible, you know, if I was doing what I should have done when I was like much younger.
16:17 Billy Corgan? Oh, I see.
16:18 Speaker 01 Because most people, if they decide to be a singer, they start when they're really young.
16:21 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
16:23 Speaker 01 And I suddenly took this on in my twenties to try and learn how to be a real singer. And it took quite a while and it was quite uncomfortable. I didn't enjoy performing very much. I enjoyed the guitar playing, but you know, the singing and,
16:41 Speaker 01 and you know, I didn't have the stamina to get through a 30 minute show. It was really weird.
16:46 Billy Corgan? I didn't know that.
16:47 Speaker 01 Yeah, but eventually over time, you know.
16:50 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
16:51 Speaker 01 At least I had good, um, I had good influences. I knew what a good singer was. And I used to listen to, for instance, Stevie Wonder all the time. Especially that album, Sign, Seal, Deliver, incredible record. Every song is great. His performances are unbelievable. But the thing about it, the way they produced it, so much compression on his voice, you can hear everything he's doing with his breath. And I suddenly realized and had the realization, you know, that you don't sing with your throat. You sing with your diaphragm. Because you could hear him pump, pumping the air, you know? Before he would sing, you could hear this little huh.
17:35 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
17:35 Speaker 01 Sort of thing, you know, of him like tightening up his diaphragm. And after I realized that, I would, I would go out into the car and I'd drive around and scream at the top of my lungs. For like, you know, hours on end, just as loud as I could, as I could get, you know, over and over and over again. And eventually that, you know, by dribs and drabs, expanded my, um, my stamina, my ability to sing better. And yeah, just learning that basic lesson really kind of changed everything.
18:08 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
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18:39 Billy Corgan? I, there's one, uh, interesting thing that connects us. I, I did not know this until today. I saw that the, uh, your early stuff was engineered by James Lowe from the Electric Prunes.
18:50 Speaker 01 Exactly, Jim Lowe.
18:51 Billy Corgan? I knew, I knew Jim and I probably recorded the last two songs Jim ever sang.
18:56 Speaker 01 Wow.
18:57 Billy Corgan? I wrote, I wrote two songs for the Electric Prunes because I was friends with the bass player.
19:01 Speaker 01 I think Jim is still out there.
19:04 Billy Corgan? No, he's passed away.
19:04 Speaker 01 He did?
19:05 Billy Corgan? Unfortunately, yeah, he passed away, I think, last year.
19:07 Speaker 01 Oh, gosh, well, I know, nobody told me.
19:11 Billy Corgan? But I, I thought, wow, that's, I didn't even know he was an engineer. He never talked about having any engineer background, anything like that.
19:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, no, he was a, he engineered, uh, the second Nas album. The first album was engineered by a guy named Chris Anderson. No, not Chris Anderson. He's the later guy.
19:29 Speaker 01 I'm trying to remember, but he was, uh, he was in a British band called The Undertakers.
19:34 Billy Corgan? I don't know that band.
19:36 Speaker 01 And they dressed like Undertakers. It was funny, but then he moved to America, became an engineer, I think, uh,
19:44 Speaker 01 If you want to know his name, he eventually became the the producer of Note for War.
19:53 Billy Corgan? Okay.
19:54 Speaker 01 Eric Burden's group.
19:55 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
19:55 Speaker 01 You know, but after Eric Burden left, I don't know if he did the Eric Burden phase.
19:58 Billy Corgan? Oh, okay.
19:59 Speaker 01 He was the producer of most of their records.
20:02 Billy Corgan? So, you know, when I prepare for an interview like this, you know, you know, like I just interviewed Peter Asher, who in a similar situation had success as an artist, but also had big. But your, your story is so intertwined where it's like, you know, it's not like you were an artist and then you became a producer. Your producer became an artist. You were kind of like, they almost kind of went together. I know it's not that perfect, but, but I mean, did you, how did you balance in your mind, the idea of like, okay, I'm a professional producer. This is, this is a gig and then over here I have my own personal pursuits.
20:40 Speaker 01 Well, I work for the artist when I'm a producer.
20:45 Billy Corgan? Can I give you, can I give you a compliment? Do you mind a compliment? No, I, what I think is interesting is you're such a distinctive artist in your own right. And you have really unique production style, but always in service to the artist. Like I, I rarely feel that you're being heavy handed with the artist.
21:04 Speaker 01 That was kind of, as I say, it's kind of my point, you know, growing up with the Beatles.
21:12 Speaker 01 I, I took it as, you know, I just made the assumption that musical evolution was part of what you did.
21:19 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
21:19 Speaker 01 You know, the Beatles started out, the first records like half covers and stuff like that. You know, they hadn't even really started evolving as songwriters. But, you know, by the time they got to, you know, the Rubber Soul, then Revolver and, and, um, and Sergeant Pepper, they were inventing genres that other artists would make a career out of, you know, like Eleanor Rigby suddenly becomes the left bank. You know, things like that. So it's, um, I just thought that's what you do. You know, you constantly absorb new influences and try and synthesize them into new things. So, a- and also I, I didn't grow up as like a rock and roll fan
22:04 Speaker 01 because my dad didn't like that kind of music in the house. My dad liked, um,
22:11 Speaker 01 Kind of like contemporary classics, anything from like, um, Ravel and Debussy onward.
22:19 Billy Corgan? Okay.
22:20 Speaker 01 And show tunes and stuff like that, you know, musicals. So that's what got played in the house. And I got exposed to just, I may be a more, a greater range of, of music, of kinds of music. Because of that, because of that's what my dad wanted to listen to.
22:37 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
22:38 Speaker 01 Uh, but all, all around the neighborhood, you know, was the other stuff, you know, early rock and roll and things like that.
22:44 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
22:44 Speaker 01 I didn't get into Elvis. Elvis was like the, the greasers who beat me up in school, you know, so I didn't identify with, with that particular kind of music. I did though, you know, when, the first time I heard Walk Don't Run by The Ventures, I knew guitar. I knew that's what I want to do. Uh, so I pestered my parents until I eventually got a guitar and that became my instrument until much, much later when I was able to afford a piano. Um, but when it came to production, I had the same sort of philosophy, you know, which is it doesn't, first of all, kind of figure out the style that they're working in.
23:27 Speaker 01 The first, you know, like one of the first things I did, as I said, was Ian and Sylvia, which is essentially kind of a country act. And they sent me to Nashville, the Charlie Talent Studio, which is like out in, out in some suburb somewhere was, you know, I hardly saw anything of Nashville and that was a long time ago too. That was before Nashville was the hip place that is now.
23:49 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
23:50 Speaker 01 But, um,
23:53 Speaker 01 I'm, you know, here I am in the studio. I'm just, you know, I'm barely over 20 years old and there's, um,
24:02 Speaker 01 Session players who played with Elvis like that, you know, and some of the Amos Garrett, just like musicians who I'd never heard of, but are just like amazing in their capacity, in their performance capacity. And so I kind of like, in some ways, I have to surrender to it. I don't know that much about country music, you know, and these guys certainly do. So I just kind of have to surrender to it and bring in what I know how to do to sort of modernize it.
24:36 Billy Corgan? Right.
24:36 Speaker 01 So in some ways, it might be the sound, might be like, update the sound so it sounds a little bit more radio friendly or whatever, a little bit more contemporary. Sometimes help with the material, but again, it was always like, what does the artist need? Because I work for the artist. I've never made a record with the assurance that it was going to be a hit or anything like that. And so often, you know, I I would be cast as an album producer, you know, not necessarily singles producer.
25:18 Speaker 01 There are people who specialize in making, following along with what the meme is, you know, and making records that sound like they belong on the radio.
25:28 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
25:29 Speaker 01 And that was not my thing. I always thought in like larger terms, how does the, and that was the old days when people used to listen to albums.
25:36 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
25:37 Speaker 01 What is the impression you have of these people? Once you've gone through all of their music? That seemed to be the more important thing than just like go for the hit. Just, you know, try and think like a DJ instead of a record producer.
25:54 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
25:55 Speaker 01 So I, I never did that. And also because I had an eclectic interest in music, I was very interested in the music that, that people were making and what could I take out of it?
26:06 Billy Corgan? I see.
26:07 Speaker 01 For, you know, eventually for whatever it is that I was doing. Or for future reference, if I had to do another similar project. So I was always looked at as something for me to learn from as well.
26:19 Billy Corgan? Yeah, because I've always liked you as a producer. I was always attracted to your productions. You know, I would, you know, as you do, you pick up a record and say, who produced this record? And I'd see your name again and again on a lot of records that I like.
26:30 Speaker 01 Yeah, it used to be that way.
26:31 Billy Corgan? Yeah, but I mean, I, until today and knowing I was going to talk to, I never put together the idea. Like I, you know, in my mind, I have a favorable idea of you as an artist and a favorable idea as you as a producer. But until today, I never put together the pieces like that you didn't really have a heavy hand in the people that you produced.
26:48 Speaker 01 Well, tried not to. There were, there were some exceptions and I really had to discipline myself over it. Sometimes if, there was a period and I kind of like at a certain point, I said, I won't be involved in this anymore. But there was a period where you could, you know, if someone had something of a track or you say, okay, we'll schedule it. We'll schedule the recordings and we'll go in there. And even if you don't have the whole album's worth of material, we'll start the project and maybe the rest of it'll come. During the project. And I discovered sometimes that doesn't happen. And that's terrible when that doesn't happen. Because then everybody's sitting in the studio staring at each other. And when that happens, the things that have nothing to do with music start to happen.
27:33 Billy Corgan? Oh, yeah.
27:34 Speaker 01 You know, all of the issues that the band had before they got in the studio. That's what they're thinking about now. So my philosophy, essentially from the standpoint of, you know, how the work is supposed to go is. Write all the stuff outside the studio and we'll review it all and make sure that we got enough of it. Because we don't want to hit that point where everybody's like just looking at each other in the studio. If it gets to that point, I say session over, everybody leave, you know? The studio is for making music in.
28:06 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
28:07 Speaker 01 And the priorities, you know, eventually became singularly.
28:13 Speaker 01 The songs, nobody wants to listen to a great performance of a crappy song. Or an extravagant arrangement of a crappy song. You know, you want to, first of all, have confidence in the material. Second of all, you want the band to be able to play it with some kind of commitment and enthusiasm. And that's another problem with just writing in the studio because you still haven't really figured out.
28:41 Billy Corgan? I see.
28:41 Speaker 01 How, how to best deliver the idea.
28:45 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
28:45 Speaker 01 And that's the thing you usually do figure out when you're in front of an audience.
28:48 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
28:49 Speaker 01 And do it over and over a couple of times.
28:51 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
28:51 Speaker 01 And then the last thing that the audience cares about, the band may be terrifically concerned, but the last thing the audience cares about is the actual sound of the record.
29:01 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
29:02 Speaker 01 Because the first time they hear it, they think that's exactly what it's supposed to sound like. Nobody listens to record and said, gee, I would have preferred a little less echo on the, a little less reverb on the voice perhaps, you know? No, they just, I mean, why would Louie Louie be such a classic record?
29:19 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
29:19 Speaker 01 Nobody even knows the words to that song.
29:21 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
29:21 Speaker 01 Because it was so muddily recorded.
29:24 Billy Corgan? Would you, because sometimes people ask me and I don't have a good answer. So I'm going to ask you a question, maybe you don't have a good answer, but it's like, people will say to me sometimes like, how do you know something's good or bad or attractive? And it's like, I don't know, it's just a felt sense. Like I, in my mind, it's an intuitive sense. Do you have a, do you have a word that you like? You know what I'm saying? When you, you've sat your own songs and other people.
29:46 Speaker 01 It's some, in some ways, you know, a producer's head is not that far from an artist's head, you know? Because if you're making your own record, you're producing the record and you have a certain criteria and that you apply. And it may not be much different than what you would apply if you were producing somebody else.
30:08 Speaker 01 But I'm fully committed to, you know, to whatever the band's vision is. As I say, you know, and I have to reiterate it, I don't work for the label. I work for the band, even though the label may have some priorities that they convey to me. And I will try and work them into the, to the process, you know?
30:27 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
30:29 Speaker 01 You, you work for the act, you know, you, you don't. Because the act is only being lent money by the label, which they will later recover, you know, from your fans.
30:39 Billy Corgan? We're all, we're all aware of that.
30:41 Speaker 01 Yeah.
30:41 Billy Corgan? Um, I wanted to ask you. Maybe it's too dreamy way to put it, but it seems to me that you've always had a lot of vocal stacking, a lot of cool chorus stuff that you do and all, including with other projects that you did that weren't your, your own music. Was that Philly's influence on you at all? Was there any sort of osmosis there with Gamble and Huff and all that?
31:07 Speaker 01 Well, when I was in, when I was in school, any point in school, you know, it was just a horrible experience for me, you know?
31:19 Billy Corgan? Because?
31:21 Speaker 01 Because I had, I don't call it a learning disability. I just learned different than other people do, you know? And there's, there's this expectation that every five-year-old is capable of learning what a five-year-old can learn.
31:42 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
31:42 Speaker 01 You know, everybody progresses at the same pace. That's why, you know, when you're a certain age or in a certain grade, everyone, you know, you just get slotted in and sometimes it just doesn't work that way for somebody, you know? Your learning could be behind or ahead of everybody else in the class, or you're really good at one thing, you know? And you'll never be any good at this other thing, you know? But they insist that you be good at that as well, like math.
32:12 Speaker 01 And so I was just, you know, I hated school. I just hated the idea that I was forced to do that. But there were few instances where I felt like, okay, this I can do. Art class was one of them. By the time I got to my senior year, senior year, I had dropped out of so many other classes that I was doing eight periods of art a week, you know, for which I don't get any credit. But, but it was just, they were happy not to have me in their classroom. And I'd be in somebody else's class in the art room doing some big mural on the wall. And so.
32:54 Speaker 01 In junior high school, one of the classes, and I don't think it was required, but I, you know, but I took it, was chorus. And we had a great choral teacher and they would, twice a year, do big choral presentations, Christmas and Easter. And we do Handel's Messiah and all those, you know, and jazzy versions of Mr. Sandman, Mr. Santa for Christmas. And he was very kindly and he was kind to me and, and he taught me so much about the basics of singing. That even though I didn't think of myself, you know, as a singer, I knew
33:33 Speaker 01 more already than a lot of singers did about how to phrase, how to pronounce. It's like, a lot of people don't know how to pronounce and, and you can make it into a style, I suppose. It's like the way Sinatra can sing and, he can sing, you know, like that. But you're not supposed to sing, you're supposed to sing a vowel and then end with an N, you know?
34:03 Billy Corgan? Oh, I see. See, I don't know any of this stuff.
34:06 Speaker 01 Yeah, but that was the thing. It's hoping, you know, you find the essential vowel that's in a word, you know?
34:12 Billy Corgan? Okay.
34:13 Speaker 01 And then, you know, that's where the singing happens.
34:15 Billy Corgan? And now I'm learning, you gotta tell me all this stuff.
34:18 Speaker 01 And, uh, anyway, I just love that experience. I love being in his class. I love the concerts that they did. And I learned a lot because I was, because it was choral music, you know, and there's sopranos and altos and tenors and baritones and basses and stuff, and they're all singing a different part. And sometimes they're all singing.
34:45 Speaker 01 Completely different lines, you know, that all weave together and that fascinated me and I loved being a part of it and it never left me.
34:54 Billy Corgan? Oh, that's cool because you might appreciate, uh, we recently did an operatic interpretation in one of my records. So it was 60-piece choir, 40-piece, a 60-piece orchestra, 40-piece choir.
35:05 Speaker 01 Yeah.
35:06 Billy Corgan? And then four soloists. So, and then I sing with it too, so.
35:11 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's gotta be a thrill.
35:12 Billy Corgan? There's nothing like hearing the human voice stacked.
35:16 Speaker 01 Well, it is, you know, kind of like the original instrument.
35:23 Speaker 01 Discounting percussion like that. Many instruments are designed to imitate the voice.
35:29 Billy Corgan? Do you?
35:30 Speaker 01 To, you know, to somehow imitate what you could already do naturally, you know?
35:35 Billy Corgan? Because, because you've done such varied music, uh, it might be an unfair question to put it this way, but do you have a, do you have a foundational songwriting ethos? Is it, is it, is it just, some people are tell a story, some people just, whatever comes out of me, I try to honor that. Is there a?
35:51 Speaker 01 Well, it, I think early on, um,
35:57 Speaker 01 it's, uh, a lot of it is your, uh, is your influences, you know, the musical influences you've had through your life. You can't help but, you know, re-express those somehow. And early on, um, and I don't know that I recall exactly how my songwriting evolved to this point, but there was my first record and I wanted it to be really eclectic. So I, you know, I wanted to work with all the people that I had done records with, you know, so I got like Levon and Rick from the band to play on a song, you know, other bands that I had seen that I wanted to, um, uh, perform with musicians and things like
36:40 Speaker 01 that. So it was a, a very varietal experience and very incoherent in a way, but that was kind of like the purpose because my life had become.
36:55 Speaker 01 Maybe the most enviable life an artist could have because I had the production and I was making incredible money producing other people's records, which meant when I started making my own music, I never had to worry about whether it would sell or not.
37:13 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
37:13 Speaker 01 I was completely rid of that burden, which bears on almost every other artist. When they go into the studio, you know, they think, yeah, I like this, but will it sell? Like that, will the label, you know, allow me to make another record after this?
37:28 Billy Corgan? Yes.
37:29 Speaker 01 You know, if I, if this doesn't, uh, if this doesn't sell, so my entire career as a solo artist has
37:37 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
37:38 Speaker 01 been based on that sort of assumption.
37:40 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
37:40 Speaker 01 The problem is that now, you know, record production has changed. The whole record industry has sort of changed. You know, if you look at a record nowadays, it's got like three producers and five songwriters.
37:54 Speaker 01 Uh, it isn't the same thing where someone entrusts their, you know, their, their musical,
38:01 Speaker 01 entrust their oeuvre to someone else.
38:03 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
38:04 Speaker 01 You know, to help them do it, you know? They want a surety nowadays, you know? And so throw it all against the wall, you know, see what sticks.
38:15 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
38:15 Speaker 01 And eventually something sticks, you know? But, um, yeah, in those days, the producer was, you know, considered something of a gatekeeper. And it was a big responsibility.
38:27 Billy Corgan? Yeah. Um, you know, there's this term now that gets thrown around bedroom pop. And, and, uh, have you heard this term before?
38:38 Speaker 01 You mean music made on your laptop?
38:40 Billy Corgan? Yeah, I think the idea is, is that you can, you can, you can make credible pop music sort of on your own in your own little kind of world. And, you know, if you, if you trace it back, I mean, something, anything is kind of in a way like the precursor to that.
38:57 Speaker 01 Uh, in, in some ways, but I imagine, you know, a lot of people because.
39:04 Speaker 01 Well, I'm not exactly sure why, but I was not the first to do this.
39:11 Speaker 01 I think Paul McCartney's first solo album.
39:13 Billy Corgan? That's true. That's true.
39:15 Speaker 01 He played most of all of the instruments on it.
39:18 Billy Corgan? Can I, can I, sorry to interrupt you, but what the reason it strikes me because like, because um, I can get to my fandom in a second, but
39:27 Billy Corgan? that record was the first time I personally registered like, wow, this guy did all this on his own. It like struck me as a story, if that makes any sense.
39:37 Speaker 01 Yeah.
39:37 Billy Corgan? The fact that Paul McCartney had done it didn't mean anything to me. It's like, well, that's Paul McCartney. And maybe because it was the musical variance.
39:45 Speaker 01 Yeah.
39:46 Billy Corgan? And the width of the emotional.
39:49 Speaker 01 There, yeah, there's that. I mean, Paul, Paul's record, as I recall, you know, fairly simple arrangements, you know?
39:56 Billy Corgan? Well, it sounds like a record that he did at home. Somehow your record sounds more fanciful, and I don't mean in a weird way, like it, it's got more, you know, stars are being thrown into corners and, and sometimes they, they kind of, like, I think you, I saw somewhere you were talking about, like, there's even mistakes on the record, like you kind of left certain things in.
40:14 Speaker 01 Yeah.
40:15 Billy Corgan? There's a charm, not, it's not purposeful. It's just like, it has a charm because it's, it is what it is. It's an organic expression of one person.
40:22 Speaker 01 Yeah. And I, I think probably the difference is also that Paul's
40:30 Speaker 01 Linda's over his shoulder.
40:34 Speaker 01 I'm thinking, you know.
40:35 Billy Corgan? He had that, he had that Eastman Kodak money too, don't forget.
40:38 Speaker 01 Yeah, that, that was a help. Yeah. But, you know, she probably was, you know, you know, a presence during the entire making of the record. Me, I was like alone, completely alone. There was the sessions that I would do during the daytime at ID Sounds with Jim Lowe. And then I would go home.
41:01 Speaker 01 At a certain point, I realized, you know, there's some things that are maybe a little bit more experimental and I'd like to be just deal with it myself because I don't know exactly what I'm doing. And so I got an eight-track machine delivered to the house that I had rented. And um, and started doing that kind of like some of the otter things like Breathless. And I went to the mirror, you know, weird Gothic things that you would only do if you were just alone, you know?
41:32 Billy Corgan? It does sound like an alone record.
41:33 Speaker 01 Yeah. So, um, yeah, it was a part of that was, um,
41:43 Speaker 01 you know, I, I had achieved some sort of a formula in songwriting, which annoyed me ultimately.
41:51 Billy Corgan? Can you, can you break the formula down?
41:53 Speaker 01 No, it was just, it was kind of like I listened to so much other, so many other, other records and things like that, that, you know, I took certain forms that just like accepted, this is the way you write, you know?
42:05 Billy Corgan? Oh, I see.
42:06 Speaker 01 Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, maybe a third verse, chorus, chorus, chorus, you know, something like that. And you always write about getting your heart broken, you know, like that. You always write about a relationship that went wrong. And so I was writing, uh, something, anything was supposed to be, wasn't supposed to be a double album. When I, I hadn't gone with the intention of making a double album, but it just started happening. One factor was partly is that I had a friend who, um, who I grew up with. He was like my best friend from like forever. And I was in LA working on the record and
42:47 Speaker 01 he happened to, uh, uh, he was, he went to med school and he was becoming a psychiatrist. And he was finishing up his education in San Diego. So he came up to visit me one time and he had access to all these, you know, psychotropic drugs and things like that. And he said, there's this thing called Ritalin.
43:09 Billy Corgan? Ah.
43:10 Speaker 01 Would you like to try some Ritalin?
43:12 Billy Corgan? Hence the double album, yeah.
43:13 Speaker 01 And hence the double album because then I was just like, I would go down to the studio and record all day. I'd come home, I'd record all night.
43:21 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
43:21 Speaker 01 Studio all day, record at home all night. Um. And so it just started all coming out, but then after I was done the record, I realized it's it's not supposed to be that easy. I wrote, I saw the light in 20 minutes flat. You know, and it's not supposed to be like that. I mean, if you deconstruct the song, you see, oh, yeah, you could write it in 20 minutes.
43:43 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
43:44 Speaker 01 You know, it's not that complicated, Moon, June, Spoon, you know?
43:47 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
43:48 Speaker 01 And, uh. So by the time I got to my next record, you know, I said, my purpose, what is my purpose in in in doing this, you know, everybody's making music, you know, why should I demand anybody's attention? And that's when I realized that I have to do the things that other people won't do or can't do because of their circumstances. I have that freedom because I'm producing other people's records, you know? Why would I not use the freedom? You know, to just do whatever it is I feel like. And that's when Wizard of True Star happened. And that's completely essentially changed everything.
44:31 Speaker 01 I lost half my audience immediately. Everyone is expecting me to follow something, anything up with another.
44:38 Billy Corgan? Sure.
44:38 Speaker 01 So, you know, batch of of similar songs. And I had just completely discarded all formula at that particular point. Uh, I said, I said to myself, okay. If I've got this idea and I'm happy with this. Why am I forcing myself to make it longer? By just like adding more parts to it? I like this idea. I'll just use that idea. I'll just use that part of it.
45:10 Billy Corgan? I see.
45:12 Speaker 01 And then also I said, well, why does a song have to be three minutes long?
45:17 Speaker 01 Why don't I write a song that's like, you know, like a story that lasts seven, eight minutes or something like that, you know, with uh, and the sound is like the soundtrack to a movie. It's got sound effects in it and things like that, like arrows flying around or things like that. So it was uh extremely liberating because I thought for the first time I'm doing something that only I can do.
45:45 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
45:45 Speaker 01 And that's my, now I have a real space in the musical world.
45:53 Speaker 01 And it's been to some degree or another that ever since. And the compensating moves that I make from record to record have more to do with maybe, gee, I haven't played enough guitar in the last couple of records. I'm gonna write a guitar record, you know, or
46:10 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
46:11 Speaker 01 I haven't written enough kind of like, you know, three, four minutes songs in a while. Maybe I'll just do that. I'll, I'll try and move in that direction for a record. So it's become kind of expected, at least in my audience, that the next record is never going to be anything like the last record.
46:33 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
46:33 Speaker 01 And that's the point.
46:36 Billy Corgan? Yeah. Um, did you get something, you did a lot of work alone, um, but talking to you today, I don't get the sense that something you like set out to do, it just kind of worked out that way. Is that fair or?
46:51 Speaker 01 Well, my first records, I always had a rhythm section. It wasn't till something, anything that I tried playing the drums myself, but by then I had enough uh access to a drum kit that I had some confidence. And a lot of the reason why I do it is not because I could play it better than somebody else, but sometimes it's hard to convey the, you know, the subtleties of an idea to another musician. And if it isn't something too complicated, that you do it yourself, well, why not do it yourself? And um also because of the way that my songwriting evolved,
47:31 Speaker 01 I would tend to write all the music first and then do the words last. And so
47:39 Speaker 01 People are expecting to hear some lyrics to guide them through the song.
47:43 Billy Corgan? I see.
47:44 Speaker 01 While they're laying down the track and if there's no vocals, you know, they've got to remember it or, you know, or read a chart or something like that. So it would become more of a challenge for the other musicians sometimes to imagine what I was gonna do.
47:59 Billy Corgan? Have you, I always find that strange when, because I'll play people stuff that's instrumental. And I'm like, oh, this is a bang and track. This is good. And they're like, I don't, where's the vocal? Like they, they can't, if they only hear a melody or they don't hear a vocal, they cannot hear a song.
48:15 Speaker 01 I think that's, you know, it's somewhat legitimate.
48:18 Billy Corgan? Yeah, no, there's truth to it. But in my mind, it's like I hear the orchestra going the whole time.
48:22 Speaker 01 Well, you know, I grew up with, you know, as I say, my dad played a lot of orchestral music, instrumental music. My very first musical experiences were we had this little 45 RPM record player, very familiar one at the time, RCA made it and it was only for 45s.
48:41 Billy Corgan? Oh, it's the one, the one that loads with the big spindle and you just, yeah.
48:44 Speaker 01 Big spindle in the middle.
48:45 Billy Corgan? Those are hard to get. I've tried, I've tried to find them. They're hard to find.
48:49 Speaker 01 I don't have mine anymore, but.
48:52 Billy Corgan? Was tube, it was tube too, that thing?
48:54 Speaker 01 Yeah.
48:56 Billy Corgan? But that's part of the sound is the tube, right?
48:58 Speaker 01 Yeah, of course. It was before trans, pre-transistors. I'm old enough to remember when the transistor radio was, you know, all the rage.
49:06 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
49:06 Speaker 01 So, um, so they came with us, or my parents acquired, um, probably about a dozen of the 45s of Boston Pops Orchestra. And it was all kind of like classics, like skaters waltz and chicken reel and that sort of thing. But I would just spend hours. I'd put the stack of records on and I'd just sit there and listen to the, you know, all these things and flip them over, put it on the other side, you know, just for hours and hours. And so it'd get just seeped in there. All that orchestral music is in there and.
49:46 Speaker 01 Yeah, when I, you asked earlier, you know, like, when do you know?
49:51 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
49:51 Speaker 01 You know, when, when it's, when it's right? And part of it is, since I focus on the instrumental and push the,
50:03 Speaker 01 the lyrics and the vocal into my subconscious,
50:08 Speaker 01 and focus on the details of the, of the so-called orchestration. When I'm happy with that, that's when I know to call on my subconscious and finish the song.
50:19 Billy Corgan? Ah, okay.
50:21 Speaker 01 Cause I've gotten into this thing where I write less and less in the physical world and more and more up here. And, and consign the creativity to my subconscious, cause it'll do something honest. And, you know, it'll come up with something honest.
50:39 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
50:39 Speaker 01 And without guile.
50:43 Billy Corgan? I like that.
50:43 Speaker 01 And, and it's turned out that, you know, the way most of my records come out,
50:51 Speaker 01 I've got the instrumental completely, almost completely done. You know, maybe a little bit of detailing left to do. And then I, you know, okay, it's time for the vocal. I probably have a title for the song, an idea about what it's about. But then almost like automatic writing, you know, like,
51:09 Speaker 01 20 minutes later, it's all done, it's all written. Within an hour, it's written and sung.
51:14 Billy Corgan? Wow.
51:15 Speaker 01 And so like, I will spend days and days, sometimes crafting the instrumental part, but that, but the vocals in the end just go, just come right out.
51:24 Billy Corgan? You, you, so you, it's, it's, is it about trusting that that faculty in you sort of knows better than?
51:30 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah, definitely.
51:30 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
51:31 Speaker 01 You know, I have to make the assumption that my subconscious is gonna step up.
51:35 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
51:35 Speaker 01 And deliver.
51:37 Billy Corgan? So, if you'll indulge me, I have a particular fascination with Grand Funk Railroad.
51:42 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
51:47 Billy Corgan? So nerd question of the day. I heard you talk in an interview about the making of We're an American Band and how they were trying to get critical success with the critics and they wanted a hit record and that whole thing. So the nerd question of the day is that solo in particular still is something I've never been able to sort of truly understand. And the way I would express it to you in artistic terms is there's a physicality to that solo.
52:15 Speaker 01 And we're an American band?
52:17 Billy Corgan? Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it sounds literally like the guitar sort of exploding and I don't know if there's phasing going on. What's, is there a trick to that sound?
52:26 Speaker 01 Uh, I'm not exactly sure. I always thought that Mark Farner preferred a kind of a strange sound on his guitar was not.
52:36 Billy Corgan? Well, he purposely liked his guitar.
52:38 Speaker 01 Yeah.
52:39 Billy Corgan? He talks about it somewhere.
52:40 Speaker 01 This sound that they made in a way, you know, it's like most of the time if you're, if you're gonna do a solo.
52:46 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
52:48 Speaker 01 Um, you do, you do it either on the bridge pickup or the next pickup, right?
52:53 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
52:54 Speaker 01 You very rarely do it with the, you know, with the switch in the middle position, both pickups. It makes a sound that's useful for some things, but it's kind of a weird sound for solo.
53:05 Billy Corgan? For lead, yeah.
53:07 Speaker 01 And that's kind of what he insisted on doing, always doing it with that kind of like that, the two, both pickups going at once. And that gives it a, um,
53:19 Speaker 01 I find it hard to describe and it isn't the same, of course, for every instrument.
53:23 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
53:24 Speaker 01 Every instrument has its own, um, its own sounds. And yeah, he could.
53:35 Billy Corgan? But even the way it's, even the way it's mixed, it's very loud.
53:38 Speaker 01 Yeah.
53:38 Billy Corgan? You know, which was unusual for the time for it to be that loud.
53:42 Speaker 01 Well, it's funny. It's, uh, a lot of the recordings that I would do, I would do in my, in, in one of my own studios or a studio I was familiar with, like most, all of my records and Utopia record and stuff up to a certain point were done in, in Secret Sound, which is a studio we built in New York City. And it was, you know, it was a real.
54:06 Speaker 01 I mean, it was great because it was our toy. Nobody ever got charged a dollar for studio time. You just had to bring your own engineer in.
54:19 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
54:20 Speaker 01 And all of these, you know, acts, big and small, were just coming into our studio to, you know, to work out their ideas and sometimes they become real records and, and things like that, but it was very unusual to have that kind of facility in, in those days.
54:37 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
54:37 Speaker 01 Just to have a studio you could go into and mess around in, you know. Uh, you, and you didn't have to pay for any studio time. You just had to bring an engineer. And, uh,
54:50 Speaker 01 that philosophy kind of gave us,
54:57 Speaker 01 as I say, you know, it gave you a, a certain freedom to, to do a, a project that may not go anywhere, or things like that, but also you're very familiar with the possibilities within that room.
55:09 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
55:10 Speaker 01 And so we went to, they wanted to record it at Criterion Studios, which I had never been in before.
55:16 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
55:16 Speaker 01 And so in a certain way, I'm kind of feeling, feeling my way through it.
55:23 Speaker 01 Uh, I'm, you know, I don't know whether the sound is actually, whether I'm creating the sound I think I am, you know, when I'm mixing it.
55:30 Billy Corgan? Sure.
55:31 Speaker 01 But as it turned out, you know, it probably was the right decision to do that. But for reasons that, um, go beyond the actual recording process.
55:42 Billy Corgan? Hmm.
55:43 Speaker 01 Um, you've probably heard the story about how we recorded We're an American Band. We did the track the first day in the studio. We went in, got sounds, did the track to We're an American Band. The next day we came in fairly early, finished it off, did the vocals and mixed it. And went that afternoon into the mastering room in Criterion and cut the single.
56:08 Billy Corgan? It was out like a week later or something?
56:09 Speaker 01 And it was, and it was released a week later. And the thing is, they had scheduled that release. They sent us into the studio, you know, without a note recorded and already had scheduled the release of a single. And so, so much had gone, could have possibly gone wrong, you know, in the whole process. But somehow it just all fell together.
56:31 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
56:31 Speaker 01 You know, the single, they cut the single, they released it and it was in those days where orders, retail orders could be counted as actual sales, you know, advance orders.
56:42 Billy Corgan? Ah, that's right.
56:43 Speaker 01 Yeah. And so a week later, they've got the DJ copies at the, at the stations and it's in the top 40. And we're still in the studio recording the rest of the album.
56:52 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
56:53 Speaker 01 Uh, so that was, that was a remarkable thing that will never happen to me again.
56:58 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
56:58 Speaker 01 I know. But, uh, if, if you could possibly get everything to synchronize and line up like that, that's, that would be just like, for me, the most ideal. Okay. We already know when the record's coming out.
57:13 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
57:13 Speaker 01 Now go record it.
57:15 Billy Corgan? So one more step into Grand Funk and, and it's, it's more ultimately about you, but, um, I'm obsessed with this album you did with them shining on, which is kind of the follow-up to that album. It is, to me, one of the most unique sounding records I've ever heard in the rock canon. I can't quite explain it other than to give you an emotional reaction, which is, it's hyper masculine and it's, and it feels like you leaned into that with like, uh, it's just, it's got this robust sound, but it's not, I, I don't even know whether you were in chambered reverbs, but it's like, that whole album just sounds so loud.
57:55 Speaker 01 Uh, well, we, in the interim between, we're an American band and, um, and shining on, they built their own studio in Michigan.
58:05 Billy Corgan? Ah, okay.
58:06 Speaker 01 So it was a different studio. And I think, you know, I had so, I had an opportunity to go in there and tune it because they had never done any projects with it before.
58:16 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
58:17 Speaker 01 They'd only just finished it. So I had an opportunity to tune it to the way that I
58:23 Speaker 01 Wanted to hear it. And that's probably the difference between the Criterion.
58:28 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
58:28 Speaker 01 Versions, because Criterion, everything sounds kind of very clean.
58:31 Billy Corgan? Yes.
58:32 Speaker 01 You know, very clean recordings at Criterion. And when we got there, they always listen a big, you know, in a big metal building.
58:41 Billy Corgan? It sounds like it.
58:42 Speaker 01 Yeah.
58:43 Billy Corgan? Like even the vocal for Shining On, I mean, it's a kind of a shouty vocal.
58:47 Speaker 01 Yeah.
58:48 Billy Corgan? But even like, everything is just.
58:51 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, we were able to do, you know, kind of like, as I say, we didn't have to adhere to the, to the standard way they would set up things like tones and stuff like that. So we could like run everything much hotter.
59:05 Billy Corgan? It sounds like it.
59:06 Speaker 01 You know, we could just like, in the red.
59:09 Billy Corgan? Yeah, it's.
59:10 Speaker 01 Uh, and, and, uh, and that kind of, that saturates the electronics and adds this kind of compression, which makes everything sound louder.
59:18 Billy Corgan? Yeah. If anybody's never heard that record, I highly recommend it. Um, I mean, it's trying to follow your life story from a musical point of view. You know, it's like, literally like you're recording with the big band, then you're doing an album. In some cases, you were releasing two albums in one year.
59:38 Speaker 01 It seems. There were years where I would like, produce three records, release a solo record and a utopia record in one year.
59:47 Billy Corgan? It's exhausting just to look at. Yeah, I mean, were you, were you, were you, did you? I mean, I don't want to ask like something like, were you tired? It was more like, were you just running on the high of just like, wow, I'm just constantly engaged? Is that what kind of kept your motor going?
1:00:04 Speaker 01 Well, it was all, that was my life. It was all music all the time. Uh, I had no kids. And, you know, and I.
1:00:14 Speaker 01 Do you know the difference? Because as soon as I started having kids, it was, everything was different.
1:00:18 Billy Corgan? Yeah, there, there, there goes that time.
1:00:20 Speaker 01 Yeah, there goes that thing, you know, but I had no other obsession. I didn't have the kind of obsessions that a lot of people, once they get money, you know, will start to get a fast car, you know, or a boat or some other thing, open a restaurant. That's, that sort of stuff, which suddenly sucks away their attention into another pastime or something like that. For me, it was music was all that mattered. I was just music, music all the time.
1:00:48 Billy Corgan? Yeah, no, it shows in this school because it's, I can't think of anybody else that has your story.
1:00:57 Speaker 01 I guess, you know, but, you know, everyone has a unique story in a certain way, but.
1:01:02 Billy Corgan? But yours is all about music. That's, I'm, that's.
1:01:04 Speaker 01 Yeah, in a certain sense, because of that, you know, because of that level of commitment, I didn't have the kind of
1:01:12 Speaker 01 unpleasant downfall that happens to, to a lot of people, you know. You commit to a certain kind of music and then nobody wants to listen to that kind of music anymore. And then suddenly you're lost. You don't know where to go.
1:01:27 Billy Corgan? Well, then they're calling somebody like you to help them figure it out.
1:01:30 Speaker 01 Yeah, you get into the, you know, typical indulgences that happen to people if they have any kind of monetary success. You know, everybody around me is less like, you know, they're snorting up all of their income, you know. Like that, and I'd say.
1:01:46 Billy Corgan? Well, it was, it was the seventies.
1:01:48 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, that particular drug doesn't do anything for me, you know, so I'm not going to be spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on, you know, that sort of thing, or dealing with the emergency room visits that attend it, so.
1:02:03 Speaker 01 In that sense, you know, it was my.
1:02:07 Speaker 01 You know, you just have some natural predilections when you're growing up. I was never, it's kind of funny. I was never into the things that my peers were into growing up, like getting drunk, you know, or having a car or that sort of thing. I was always the one who was taking my drunk friends home to sober them up so they could go see their mom.
1:02:30 Speaker 01 I didn't have a drug of any kind until I was in my twenties. And I think the first drug I ever had was probably marijuana. And it was because my good friend, the doctor, you know, my best friend,
1:02:48 Speaker 01 he he got me into it. If he did, I would do it. And
1:02:55 Speaker 01 I can't say the same thing for when he gave me DMT. I knew I was never gonna do that again.
1:03:01 Billy Corgan? Did you see the elves that everyone talks about?
1:03:04 Speaker 01 The what?
1:03:04 Billy Corgan? People talk about seeing elves when they do DMT.
1:03:06 Speaker 01 I didn't see elves on my DMT. To me, it was like being smothered in Navajo blankets.
1:03:13 Billy Corgan? Okay.
1:03:13 Speaker 01 You know?
1:03:14 Billy Corgan? I've never done DMT, so it's
1:03:16 Speaker 01 extremely geometric sort of thing, you know? That's a thing that happens often with psychedelics, you know, you start having geometric hallucinations. Like you're looking, everything is through a kaleidoscope.
1:03:31 Speaker 01 Yeah, it was that. And then I would just, you know, no, I don't want to do this again. And that was the first psychedelic experience I had had. But it wasn't my last.
1:03:41 Billy Corgan? Namaste. So
1:03:44 Billy Corgan? I toss this up as kind of a softball. So somewhere in there, this nascent prog thing starts kind of emerging, like Mahavishnu more, I don't know.
1:03:54 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah, yeah.
1:03:54 Billy Corgan? But but there's a there's an addendum to that, which is like.
1:04:00 Billy Corgan? My father loved you. My father was a musician and my father was one of those musicians where if he hated it, he was gonna tell you. So if he loved it, but if he loved it, he was gonna tell you too.
1:04:11 Speaker 01 Oh, cool.
1:04:11 Billy Corgan? So I was listening to you from a young age because my father liked your music.
1:04:16 Billy Corgan? So I remember listening, even though I would have been, you know, eight, 10, whenever. Utopia became kind of more of a, I know in the beginning it wasn't necessarily as. Popularity seemed to grow. I don't know. Maybe that's just my memory of it.
1:04:29 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:04:30 Billy Corgan? But, but.
1:04:32 Billy Corgan? I remember being 10 and not like thinking like, I don't understand Utopia. Like I got you as a solo artist. But Utopia was just like, it went right over my head. So I went back in preparing to talk to you and I went back and kind of, and I understood Utopia a little bit more now as an adult. But there seems to be all of a sudden this like, best way I could put it is like, there's a lot more prog going on. There's pushing in a new territory, which is good. I don't want to say it's Zappa-esque, but it's like, it's like, okay, there's all this other music that I can get into.
1:05:02 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:05:03 Billy Corgan? And then, and then, and then you're playing with these incredible musicians. Can you at least kind of sort of walk me through that a little bit? Because it still strikes me as curious, but, but I, but I think it must have made sense to you or you wouldn't have done it.
1:05:16 Speaker 01 Well, it was, yeah, it was evolutionary. It wasn't like I suddenly got the idea. To do this, but there were a couple of factors in it. One, the original Utopia was made up of principally musicians who helped me make A Wizard a True Star.
1:05:36 Speaker 01 And who are also doing their own projects as well in at Secret Sound. So this was like, kind of the Secret Sound house band in a way.
1:05:46 Speaker 01 And.
1:05:49 Speaker 01 I can remember the first time we all played on stage. It might've been. I'm not sure if it was a birthday celebration for me.
1:06:01 Speaker 01 You probably remember, I'm not sure if you remember, did you grow up on the East Coast?
1:06:05 Billy Corgan? No, I'm in Chicago.
1:06:06 Speaker 01 Oh, in Chicago. Well, then you probably wouldn't remember the Woolman Rink in Central Park in New York. But that was a, a summertime music venue. They would convert the skating rink, they put a stage at one end and they convert the skating rink into seats. And all summer long, you would see all kinds of acts. I saw the Who there. I saw, they had some kind of like trim along the front of the stage. And I saw Pete Townes take his guitar and chop it all off a piece at a time. With his guitar, you know. Uh, it was a great setting, you know, you saw a lot of great acts there and we would play there with some regularity.
1:06:46 Speaker 01 And it was also the location where we did Sons of 1984, the East Coast part.
1:06:51 Billy Corgan? Okay.
1:06:52 Speaker 01 Yeah, on the, on the Todd album, there's a song called Sons of 1984. And essentially it's two live audiences, one in New York and one in San Francisco. And I have signed them vocal parts to sing. So, so there's verses and then we get to a chorus and I say, okay, New York, you sing the first chorus. And they all sing the first chorus. And then I say, okay, San Francisco, you sing the second chorus. And they're all over on the, on the left side, you know? We did that in Golden Gate Park in, uh, in San Francisco. And then by the end of the song, you say, everybody together now. So like San Francisco and New York, they're all singing together. And that was in the, uh, the New York part was in the Woolman Rink. And I think the very first gig that we did together.
1:07:37 Speaker 01 And I don't even know that we were calling it Utopia, but it might've been like a birthday party, birthday celebration for me. And was all, most all of the guys who would have, who eventually wound up in Utopia onstage. As well as the Brecker Brothers, as well as Rick Derringer, I think, you know, a couple of other people. And so after we did that gig, we thought, okay, maybe there's a thing here, you know? And so we started writing stuff in in Secret Sound. We just, everybody had great musical ideas. And we were all influenced by prog rock at that point, you know? Return to Forever, Weather Report.
1:08:19 Speaker 01 Of course, Mothvish Orchestra. See, there were two. There were actually two branches, two, two kind of genres of prog rock. One was the English one, and that was influenced by classical music.
1:08:32 Billy Corgan? Okay.
1:08:33 Speaker 01 You got groups like Yes, you know, and Gentle Giant and people like that. And their influences, these people all learned classical music, really like Rick Wakeman, you know?
1:08:42 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
1:08:42 Speaker 01 Things like that. Americans were all jazz. These were jazz guys incorporating now electronic instruments, you know, synthesizers and things like that.
1:08:52 Billy Corgan? Yeah, because because even like McLaughlin had come out of playing with Miles Davis.
1:08:56 Speaker 01 Yeah, things like that. So it was like, we kind of went a little bit more with the American style prog rock, with jazz based, jazz and funk and things like that. So all the guys in the band had great ideas. And we would somehow thread them together into these musical, little musical journeys, and then I would write a couple of verses.
1:09:19 Billy Corgan? Yeah, somehow there's a song in there.
1:09:20 Speaker 01 Just to tie it together.
1:09:22 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
1:09:23 Speaker 01 And it was, it was fun, you know, in those days, we would play like four hours. Because we had three keyboard players and me in the band, and everyone would get a solo on every song. And the audience was so high, they just didn't care.
1:09:38 Billy Corgan? Really?
1:09:39 Speaker 01 It's like, yeah, play forever. It was, you know, every band was the Grateful Dead in those days.
1:09:46 Billy Corgan? Um, the, I just say this for, for fun. There's the Ra album, seventy seven, you had the twenty two foot tall pyramid on stage. And then there was the, the infamous singing in the glass guitar.
1:10:04 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:10:04 Billy Corgan? Where each one of you represented one of the four elements.
1:10:07 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:10:07 Billy Corgan? And there's like sort of a battle going on between earth, fire, air and water.
1:10:13 Speaker 01 That was one of the more popular tours we did.
1:10:20 Billy Corgan? But you know what's strange is it's it's kind of coming back now.
1:10:23 Speaker 01 That sort of thing?
1:10:24 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
1:10:26 Speaker 01 That would be great. I've always said, you know, that there's, you know, the music is cyclic, you know.
1:10:31 Billy Corgan? Well, it's 50, we're going on 50 years.
1:10:33 Speaker 01 Yeah, I know. That would be a long phase though, because, you know, we've had these. Usually, you know, the public at large gets sick of of a certain genre.
1:10:43 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
1:10:44 Speaker 01 It would usually be a maybe a five year increment.
1:10:47 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
1:10:47 Speaker 01 Something like that, you know, in the way that, um, as I say, we had, um, 60s pop that got replaced by prog rock, which eventually got replaced by disco, which eventually got replaced by punk, which eventually got replaced by new wave, which eventually got replaced by grunge. But then it all got replaced by Taylor Swift and it's been that way ever since.
1:11:11 Billy Corgan? Well, that's a whole other conversation.
1:11:13 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's a completely different conversation.
1:11:15 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
1:11:15 Speaker 01 But essentially, the what happened was in the
1:11:21 Speaker 01 in the 90s, boys stopped spending money on music. It used to be, you know, whatever your disposable income is, you might spend at least some part of it on music. But that's when video games came out.
1:11:34 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
1:11:34 Speaker 01 And boys started spending all their money on video games and that left this gigantic audience of young women. Where are they going to spend their money?
1:11:42 Billy Corgan? Interesting. I never heard it put like that way. It makes sense.
1:11:45 Speaker 01 And that was when, you know, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, you know, and, you know, who's the biggest artist in the world? Taylor Swift. But it's been that way now for nearly 30 years.
1:11:55 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
1:11:56 Speaker 01 And so we're missing, something's missing now.
1:11:59 Billy Corgan? Well, I I I've been pleasantly surprised to see prog is coming back with young bands.
1:12:06 Speaker 01 Good.
1:12:07 Billy Corgan? So.
1:12:08 Speaker 01 Cause guys need music too.
1:12:10 Billy Corgan? Um, you've, you've often asked about the Meatloaf pad out of hell. Forty three million records sold, I think was the number I saw. Um, we were talking about it before you came in today.
1:12:26 Billy Corgan? And, and the person who, uh, books this show, he's an East Coast guy.
1:12:32 Speaker 01 Mm hmm.
1:12:32 Billy Corgan? So he resonates a lot more deeply to that record because of its sort of, you know, I know with Springsteen, whatever the connection is there.
1:12:41 Speaker 01 The Springsteenian connection.
1:12:42 Billy Corgan? Yeah. Chicago, even though it was a big record in Chicago, not so much because I don't think we had that same stew of influences in Chicago, which is interesting because it, to me, it's an East Coast record to this day.
1:12:55 Speaker 01 Well, it's funny, in the end, uh, Meatloaf's biggest audiences were outside the US.
1:13:01 Billy Corgan? Wow. Asia?
1:13:03 Speaker 01 No, Australia and England. The, the record stayed on the charts in England for 30 years straight.
1:13:11 Speaker 01 Never left the English charts.
1:13:15 Speaker 01 And, and it's kind of weird, you know, he engendered this weird devotion. You can, you can sort of understand it because
1:13:26 Speaker 01 in the US, we got over the 50s. In England, they never got over the 50s. There were still stores in even today where you can go buy a little guy and dress like a teddy boy. You know, that sort of thing, you know? That thing never left, you know?
1:13:41 Billy Corgan? Okay.
1:13:41 Speaker 01 It would just keep recurring, you know?
1:13:43 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
1:13:43 Speaker 01 We come back and people wearing what looked like zoot suits almost.
1:13:46 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
1:13:47 Speaker 01 And so you can sort of understand that, you know, that it never went away there. Always huge in Germany for some reason, and uber huge in Australia. So he would always find a place to tour, but rarely in the US because people in the US didn't seem to have that same kind of devotion.
1:14:07 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
1:14:07 Speaker 01 And he was notorious for like quitting the show early.
1:14:11 Billy Corgan? Really?
1:14:12 Speaker 01 Yeah. Cause, uh,
1:14:15 Speaker 01 uh, you know, it's kind of sad, but we did the first record and Steiman would write.
1:14:24 Speaker 01 From Meatloaf's highest note down. What's the highest note you can hit Meatloaf? All right. I will write the song from there down because eventually we're going to get to that note, to the highest note you can hit. And you may have to hold it for a long time, too, you know? So that was the way Steiman wrote. We did the first record and it took them a long time to, you know, to break that record.
1:14:46 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
1:14:46 Speaker 01 First of all, when the record was done, there was no label to release it.
1:14:49 Billy Corgan? Nobody wa- are you?
1:14:50 Speaker 01 Nobody wanted it. They shopped it around for six months.
1:14:52 Billy Corgan? Even, even to Grossman, right?
1:14:54 Speaker 01 Oh, well, Grossman had the first crack at it.
1:14:56 Billy Corgan? And he passed.
1:14:57 Speaker 01 Yeah, they passed. Then Warner Brothers passed, you know, and everybody passed. So they found Cleveland International, a little subsidiary of Epic Records.
1:15:05 Billy Corgan? Forty, forty-three million records.
1:15:07 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's unbelievable. And that, and it was a guy named Steve Popovich and he only had one other artist, Ian Hunter. So, you know, when we released the first single, we released the first single, nothing happened. Released the second single, nothing happened. So, but he didn't give up, you know? He didn't have anything else to do, so he released the third single. I think three things happened that eventually broke Meatloaf. One was his relentlessness, you know, that he could just kept releasing songs, even though most people would have given up after the second single. Second thing was that they retoured, that they toured relentlessly, you know, and it was a spectacle, you know? If you saw it, you so, you remembered it, you know?
1:15:52 Speaker 01 But the third, and maybe the most important thing, is MTV came on the air. And they had a video for Paradise for the Dashboard Light, a long video, seven minutes.
1:16:03 Billy Corgan? Yeah, right.
1:16:04 Speaker 01 And, you know, MTV had just come on the air and there weren't that many videos.
1:16:07 Billy Corgan? And they needed content, yeah.
1:16:08 Speaker 01 So they were playing it every hour. Every hour they played Paradise by the Dashboard Light. They were just like DJs, you know? They want to find the longest song to play so they can go up to the roof and get high.
1:16:18 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
1:16:19 Speaker 01 So like they would just love playing Paradise by the Dashboard Light and that's when it's really started to happen.
1:16:25 Billy Corgan? Um, your bona fides in, in, in being early into tech, I don't need to list them. It's easily lookupable, but you know, you're, somebody's always embraced tech. So how are you feeling about AIs coming onslaught?
1:16:41 Speaker 01 Don't scare me. Um, I use it a lot, you know, but I use it.
1:16:51 Speaker 01 I use it as a search engine, for instance. It's a better search engine if you've got a very particular thing you're looking for. You know, um, because it doesn't go to one source. It goes to as many sources as it can find, you know, come up with an answer for that. I'm not a great graphic artist. If I need a piece of graphics, I have no compunction against asking AI to create it for me. But that's principally what I do. I have it make things for me. But I have yet to find any of the, you know, kind of attempts at writing music to be very convincing. And, and the problem is,
1:17:33 Speaker 01 AI is essentially two things. It is, uh, it's what they call a language model.
1:17:39 Billy Corgan? So it's only learning backwards?
1:17:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's the stuff that it knows.
1:17:43 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
1:17:44 Speaker 01 This, you know, stuff that it can know, you know? And then there's the, essentially the prompting, the interpreting of what you want it to tell you.
1:17:54 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
1:17:55 Speaker 01 So there's these two components and, and there are different philosophies about how they are built and constructed. But it's perfectly possible, and you probably will at some point in the future, even if you don't know it, have your own personal AI. You know?
1:18:11 Billy Corgan? That's a given.
1:18:12 Speaker 01 Yeah, you'll, you'll have an agent and its learning model will be the stuff that's mostly about you and that you need to know. So it won't need to know the entire world, you know, to give you an answer. You know, you'll go to a different AI for that. But when it comes to creativity,
1:18:30 Speaker 01 you know, that's the problem there because, for instance, if you took an AI now, you know, I have a lot of AIs that say, oh, it can write music for you. But it's only going to write what's already been written.
1:18:44 Billy Corgan? It's not gonna write, it's not gonna write that out.
1:18:46 Speaker 01 It's likely to come back with a Taylor Swift song because it's only gonna, it, it looks at the stuff that everybody else is looking at.
1:18:53 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
1:18:54 Speaker 01 You know, and since most people are, you know, probably looking at Taylor Swift or some, you know, some other more popular artists, whatever that artist is doing, that's what AI thinks music is.
1:19:04 Billy Corgan? Right.
1:19:05 Speaker 01 And so you're not going to get anything particularly original out of it.
1:19:10 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
1:19:10 Speaker 01 You know, AI as a very good, or many AIs, as they say, they're all different. You're dealing with, it is not a thing, you know, it is not.
1:19:19 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
1:19:20 Speaker 01 It's not Skynet. There is no such thing, you know? It's not the Terminator. We're not going there. You know, there are all different kinds of them. They're all in all different devices. Some of them have very specific things they need to do, to know, like, like the shape of your face, just so you can log into your phone, that sort of thing.
1:19:41 Speaker 01 But, uh,
1:19:44 Speaker 01 yeah, I don't feel threatened in the least by it in that particular sense. And no matter how convincingly it makes itself seem human.
1:19:54 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
1:19:55 Speaker 01 It is not. It'll say, sorry, you're right, that was the wrong answer. It's not sorry.
1:20:04 Speaker 01 It just says sorry because it knows you want to hear that, you know, but it doesn't have emotion, you know? And there may be some, you know, there may be some scientific research going on in the pointless effort to give machines emotion, you know, but what is the point of that? We have no control over ours.
1:20:30 Billy Corgan? Well said. Um, couple more things. Thank you for indulging me.
1:20:35 Billy Corgan? You've done so much, it's like hard to pick things. So I picked one that resonated with me, which was, which was your production of Love My Way with the psychedelic furs.
1:20:45 Speaker 01 Ah, yeah, I'm, I actually, uh,
1:20:52 Speaker 01 Did a version of that myself, which I just uh.
1:20:55 Billy Corgan? Really? Oh.
1:20:57 Speaker 01 I did a, I did an album of covers for an aside project. It wasn't a regular label project. Someone was trying to do a TV show. That would be one of these, you know. Great success, great heartbreak.
1:21:13 Speaker 01 You get a bunch of people. I recorded an album. I left a bunch of spaces for others to add to it. And then we had people audition for it in a studio.
1:21:21 Billy Corgan? Okay.
1:21:22 Speaker 01 A bunch of people, they, you know, they came in and this was all supposed to turn into a TV show where in the end, you know, you get people to stand up and then I critique them, you know.
1:21:32 Billy Corgan? Okay, one of those.
1:21:33 Speaker 01 You know, harshly, and then I bestowed, you know, um, laurels on a winner of some kind. And I, you know, I said, I'm not doing that. I'm not doing that. But in any case, that show never made the air for some reason. But I did get an album out of it and a re-recording of Love My Way was, was on that. So.
1:21:55 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
1:21:56 Speaker 01 That's uh, still on my mind, you know, in a way, that song and, and the form of it. And that was one of those very fortunate things where you catch a band at the right time.
1:22:10 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
1:22:11 Speaker 01 Even though, you know, they're, they're very unsettled. They had a little bit of success, but the band is going through internal changes, you know? And so when they got uh, to um, upstate New York where my studio was at the time. They had already uh, left uh, I think a keyboard player and a sax player. Behind.
1:22:36 Speaker 01 And so it was only a four-piece when they got there. Um.
1:22:41 Speaker 01 And indeed, the drummer quit or said he was going to be leaving the band during the production. So, really was the core of the band. It was John Ashton, um, and the Butler Brothers. So I had a lot to work with because they were very unsettled, you know, on the,
1:22:57 Billy Corgan? Ah.
1:22:58 Speaker 01 You know, I could make some suggestions to them that they would be open to because they hadn't really locked into where they were gonna go yet. And that's when I suggested that we get Flo and Eddie to do all the background.
1:23:13 Billy Corgan? Sure.
1:23:13 Speaker 01 On, on the song because none of the, nobody in the band was gonna sing background.
1:23:21 Speaker 01 But the thing I liked about Flo and Eddie, and it was from their work with T-Rex, where they would do these really high airy falsetto vocals, it was almost like an instrument.
1:23:34 Billy Corgan? Yeah, like almost like a keypad.
1:23:36 Speaker 01 Yeah, it was almost like, you know, very high and almost you could almost understand what the words are, you know, but it was almost like, you know, like a synthesizer, a keyboard over, over top of it, you know, and so we had Flo and Eddie come into the studio, flew them in from the west coast, and they laid the vocals down on a bunch of, on a bunch of the material, but that was the one that was kind of where they made the most difference, you know, that high airy thing.
1:24:05 Billy Corgan? I can hear it in my head, yeah.
1:24:07 Speaker 01 You know, that opened it up in a way that background vocals are supposed to, but like I say, they had no background vocals, so I don't know what they did live.
1:24:17 Billy Corgan? Yeah, no, because I, I bring it up because that's a very important song to the alternative crowd, you know what I mean?
1:24:23 Speaker 01 Yeah, and they were, they had so much potential, I'm not sure what happened, why they didn't, you know, why they didn't go further or have more hit records after that. I didn't, I didn't work with them again, but I remain friends with them.
1:24:39 Billy Corgan? Yeah, yeah, they're cool. I, I think, I think they're just one of those bands, it's, the eighties was like that for, like, let's call it the, the, the early alternative bands, there, there wasn't really a system, like you, you had a crossover if you wanted success. So it was college radio, or it was MTV, and there's this major gap.
1:25:01 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:25:02 Billy Corgan? So some bands, like after U2 got really big, and kind of set the template for what became kind of modern alternative, and in many ways built up the college radio market and stuff like that, there really wasn't a lot of space for a band that couldn't consistently deliver top 40 material.
1:25:20 Speaker 01 Hmm, that's possible, you know, but.
1:25:23 Billy Corgan? I'm not saying it's, it's just the way I feel from my impression of watching the business from back then.
1:25:28 Speaker 01 I have to say that that project, Forever Now, was one of the few. Well, you know, one of the last albums where the band came in and they didn't have all the material. You know, and sort of indulge that and we're just kind of lucky that they came up with other.
1:25:45 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
1:25:45 Speaker 01 With with other songs that filled it out that um. That didn't sound some, didn't sound like throwaways, you know, that's the biggest problem here. You you want to get the record done, you know, and you've got.
1:25:57 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
1:25:58 Speaker 01 Nine great songs, you know, and you say, I gotta get it done, you know, and so. You just force out.
1:26:05 Billy Corgan? Yeah, but I'm saying is that, and you can go back to something, anything, your eclecticism, that's it. It has this pour over effect into the alternative community that's still.
1:26:14 Speaker 01 Ah, yeah, well, I think that that's a.
1:26:18 Billy Corgan? I'm not saying that's what you were going for, but I'm telling you that I think that was the result of it all.
1:26:22 Speaker 01 But I also think that most musicians would prefer not to be, you know, categorized. Because it doesn't allow them. To get out of the category.
1:26:34 Billy Corgan? Sure.
1:26:34 Speaker 01 You know what I mean?
1:26:35 Billy Corgan? Sure.
1:26:35 Speaker 01 You get in the category, you try and do something else, people call you a poser or, you know. Or they just downright don't like, they're so attached to what you have done that they can't open their ears to something.
1:26:50 Billy Corgan? But but in many ways, and I mean this as a compliment, the world that you created for yourself is now what's available to the modern artist.
1:26:58 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, that's why I um. As you say, there's a downside to the internet being. Maybe the principal music distribution point, you know, rather than a record store or something like that. That it's easy for people to just glide over glide over things. But then again, I find it. I find it useful. Like sometimes I'm doing a record and often I want to do some research before I do the record. I don't uh I don't do as much kind of like leisurely musical exploration as I should.
1:27:40 Speaker 01 Um, mostly because I'm always busy with some other thing. But when I got a project coming up, usually a project on my own, sometimes I'll ask my kids, you know, what are you, what are you listening to now? You know, what do you think is good? You know, and uh especially my youngest son, three Bob, he has very sophisticated musical taste. You know, he likes to, he likes a lot of different music. He likes to, he was the first one I ever heard the term math rock from.
1:28:11 Billy Corgan? Sure.
1:28:12 Speaker 01 And uh, and he played some of it for me, you know, and it's just.
1:28:16 Billy Corgan? And it's, it sounds like math rock.
1:28:18 Speaker 01 Yeah, just incredible technique, you know, incredible technique, but it's like, I'm not sure I can follow this.
1:28:25 Billy Corgan? Yeah, yeah.
1:28:26 Speaker 01 Um, and uh, so they'll make a suggestion or something like that. And I'll go look that up, but then the sidebar comes up.
1:28:35 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
1:28:37 Speaker 01 And that's where the fun starts.
1:28:40 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
1:28:41 Speaker 01 But you start in one place, you start hitting the sidebar and then you, you go to that thing, but then a new sidebar comes up. And then I find myself like traveling these circuitous paths and then discovering something that it, that is useful, might start out to be not what I'm looking for. But eventually I may think, hey, that's a thing that I haven't heard before. And I want to figure this out.
1:29:05 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
1:29:05 Speaker 01 And see whether I can make any use of it.
1:29:08 Billy Corgan? Yeah, I think, I think the last statistic I heard was there's like 200,000 songs released a day now.
1:29:13 Speaker 01 A day?
1:29:14 Billy Corgan? A day, yeah. I'd have, we'd have to fact check.
1:29:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, songs is a euphemistic.
1:29:19 Billy Corgan? Sure, sure. Well, we have math rock songs and you have bedroom pop.
1:29:24 Speaker 01 Exactly. Well, you know, to me, you know, in the strictest sense, you know, a song has.
1:29:32 Speaker 01 A story to it.
1:29:33 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
1:29:34 Speaker 01 You know, as opposed to a tune.
1:29:38 Billy Corgan? Yeah, one thing that might you might find interesting because I've noticed this because I grew up in a different era of songwriting is there's something about the disassociative nature of the internet that's influenced now how people are writing songs because so much of culture for young people is based on dopamine, TikTok, Instagram. So the music has started to resemble this dopamine TikTok thing. And by the way, a lot of artists are starting to release songs under two minutes. Similar to what you said.
1:30:07 Speaker 01 I think I've experienced that phenomenon. I can appreciate it, you know, don't write past, don't force yourself to finish it. If you're happy with what you got, that's fine, you know, and I don't know, I've just in recent years, I've been so disappointed with like the choices they make on Saturday Night Live about who the musical guest should be, you know, it's it used to be, it would be somebody you never heard of before. And that was when Hal Wilners had still had some influence.
1:30:39 Billy Corgan? God bless Hal. What a great, great guy.
1:30:41 Speaker 01 Geez, and that that one hurt, you know, when Hal, when Hal passed, you know, it was unexpected and it really hurt bad because, you know, he's been a longtime friend of mine, but also artistic collaborator like very few people are. He does, he did things that very few people would take on.
1:31:02 Speaker 01 I was involved in, you know, like a tribute to the Fire Sign Theater with him.
1:31:09 Speaker 01 Harry Smith.
1:31:10 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
1:31:11 Speaker 01 Archive tributes and be part of those shows and you get to meet like everybody that you ever wanted to meet Van Dyke Parks, you know, and, and, you know, here I am, playing a song with Garth Hudson after all these freaking years, you know, and.
1:31:28 Billy Corgan? Yeah, Hal was that guy. He was that guy.
1:31:31 Speaker 01 Who?
1:31:31 Billy Corgan? Hal, Hal was that guy.
1:31:33 Speaker 01 He was, yeah.
1:31:33 Billy Corgan? He was so in it.
1:31:35 Speaker 01 I was also involved in one of his most spectacular failures as well, which was
1:31:42 Speaker 01 in Australia.
1:31:45 Speaker 01 It was a show based around sea shanties.
1:31:50 Speaker 01 And uh.
1:31:51 Billy Corgan? How could it go wrong?
1:31:52 Speaker 01 How could it possibly go wrong? Yeah. And he had some great artists on there.
1:31:58 Speaker 01 But he kind of, you know, he's playing it by ear the whole time. It's a lot logistically to deal with, you know, and the personalities sometimes are very strange and the way he copes and the way his staff copes with it is uh cope with is kind of amazing. But we're playing on the uh we're playing
1:32:20 Speaker 01 uh in a stage set up by the Sydney Opera House.
1:32:25 Billy Corgan? Okay.
1:32:25 Speaker 01 And the audience is all on the the big staircase that leads up to the Sydney Opera House, about 5,000 or 8,000 people. And it's raining.
1:32:37 Billy Corgan? Well, sea shanties.
1:32:38 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's not raining really bad, but it's not raining.
1:32:42 Speaker 01 But Hal, unfortunately, he picks uh
1:32:47 Speaker 01 this guy named C six something or whether some guy to open the show. And he's supposed to come out and do like maybe five minutes of it. You know, kind of weird, you know, authentic sounding thing. The guy goes on for 20 minutes. Who won't leave the stage, you know, and it's getting really.
1:33:08 Billy Corgan? It's his big moment, you know?
1:33:09 Speaker 01 Yeah, and it's, yeah, this big moment. It's raining, you know, and people are getting very antsy about it, you know? So the audience already is not prepared for any crap. And some of it was uh some of it was good and some of it was not so good, you know? But the unfortunate thing, very sad thing that happened was um
1:33:34 Speaker 01 Mary Ann Faithfull was on there and she completely blanked
1:33:41 Speaker 01 the song, forgot the words. And people were very cruel to her after that, you know, it was um.
1:33:48 Billy Corgan? Sorry to hear that.
1:33:49 Speaker 01 Yeah, it was a sad, it it was one of his rare kind of um mis- misfires. Um, I got off pretty easy.
1:34:01 Billy Corgan? You sang, you sang the ballad of the one-legged sailor.
1:34:05 Speaker 01 Yeah, something like that. The Good Ship Venus by,
1:34:09 Billy Corgan? Okay.
1:34:10 Speaker 01 By,
1:34:11 Billy Corgan? These sounds intriguing.
1:34:12 Speaker 01 Loudon Wainwright.
1:34:13 Billy Corgan? Okay.
1:34:14 Speaker 01 Loudon Wainwright's version of The Good Ship Venus, which is a filthy, filthy song. But for some reason, the Australians are totally fine with it, you know? And I got to sing it with a, with a great Irish artist. Her name is,
1:34:29 Speaker 01 Camille O'Sullivan.
1:34:34 Speaker 01 And that was a lot of fun to be able to work with her. We did a couple of songs together.
1:34:39 Billy Corgan? Yeah.
1:34:42 Speaker 01 Yeah, Hal Willner. No replacement for that.
1:34:45 Billy Corgan? Yeah. Okay. So let's end on a, on a happy note. You're going on tour. I think this will air relatively at the time you're going on tour. I think you're starting in Chicago, my hometown, so I hope to see you there.
1:34:54 Speaker 01 Yes, I do.
1:34:57 Billy Corgan? Is there a name to the tour? I can't remember off the top of my head.
1:34:59 Speaker 01 It's called Damned If I Do.
1:35:00 Billy Corgan? Damned If I Do.
1:35:02 Speaker 01 And that's because I never know what audience expectations are. If I was, like I say, it's part of it, you know, part of my, you know,
1:35:15 Speaker 01 of my, my mojo is the fact that I am not stuck in a slot, something like that. But that also means I don't know what audience expectations are, you know? I have people who think that I retired after something, anything, and so they just come to hear, hello, it's me. Then I have people who have been there the whole time and they're open to anything. Then I've got Utopia fans, and if I don't play enough guitar, they get upset.
1:35:43 Billy Corgan? Okay.
1:35:44 Speaker 01 And then there are a lot of young people who are showing up, and I have no idea what their expectations are because they didn't grow up with it.
1:35:51 Billy Corgan? The myth, the legend, you see.
1:35:52 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think it's partly that. Some of it is second generation. Their parents played the music a lot. But then it's maybe because of my work with younger artists like the Lemon Twigs and Tame Impala and people like that, that they see my name and they become interested. And that is the point, you know, of working with intergenerational artists is so that you can get introduced to their audience and they can be introduced to mine.
1:36:22 Billy Corgan? Well, I wish you a lot of luck on the tour. Thank you for being with me today.
1:36:25 Speaker 01 Thanks, Billy.
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