Rolling Stone Senior Editor David Fricke spent two days in a Los Angeles
mixing studio with Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan for the cover
story of RS 721 (Nov. 16, 1995). There, Fricke heard more than 70
versions of "Bullet With Butterfly Wings" from their new Epic
double-album, "Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness." "I said to them,
'I don't know what you guys are listening for. I don't hear it. It's
like dog whistles -- waves completely unknown to man'," Fricke says.
"And they just said, 'That's exactly the way it looks, but we know what
we're listening for and eventually we'll hear it.' And I
guess they were right."
It wasn't until later, when Fricke spent three to four hours with Corgan
at the band's rehearsal space in Chicago, that Corgan really opened up.
"You could tell he had to warm up to the interviews. Once the record was
done and they had gone to Europe to do the festival shows, he was ready
to get down with it." says Fricke. "He was conversational and pretty
animated. He can be a little elusive if he wants to be. He's actually
quite smart about the whole process."
Fricke thinks Corgan is more willing to discuss things than people might
guess from past articles written about him. "I don't think he is a
put-on artist or a bullshit artist. I think he's genuinely interested in
music and genuinely interested in investing his life in it," Fricke
says. "How well do you get to know a person over the course of three or
four days? I couldn't say, but I was impressed with his ability to not
only answer the questions but to have a conversational attitude toward
the interview process and not just feel it was an interrogation, like I
was in there with the bright lights and the rubber hoses."