Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan has spoken about the intrusive negative thoughts he constantly obsessed over at the height of his band's mid '90s fame.
Last year, Corgan told New York’s WFAN Sports Radio, “I don’t know if you can be happy in the music business because the music business is sort of designed to mess with your head” and in a new interview with his long-time friend and supporter Howard Stern, the 56-year-old musician admits that even after Smashing Pumpkins found fame and success, he struggled to drown out the negative thoughts in his head.
Famously, Smashing Pumpkins were viewed as the 'black sheep' of the '90s alternative rock scene, with Corgan's unashamed love of classic rock and bemusement at his peers' punk rock guilt over their own success marking him out as a 'careerist' in the eyes of the sometimes sanctimonious Seattle grunge community, and the English music journalists who took their cues from the gospel of Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love. In Corgan's mind, as he remembers it, his band's every move was met with "constant criticism".
“Now, let me say this, maybe there was a lot of praise, but I didn’t hear it because when you’re in that mindset you just hear the criticism,” he tells Stern, as Smashing Pumpkins guested on the media personality's SiriusXM vehicle The Howard Stern Show. “My memory was like, we would get on stage and play to 15,000 people, and I’d walk off stage, and somebody would [say], ‘You shouldn’t have done that … You’re such an idiot’.”
