When Billy Corgan met The Delta Riggs
When the Smashing Pumpkins frontman touches down next month, he’ll be playing six shows backed by an Australian band he’s never played with before. Crazy brave, or just plain crazy?
The last time Billy Corgan toured as a solo artist, the conclusion of that experience was such a nightmare that he swore off the idea of performing on his lonesome, and has instead focused on playing shows with the Smashing Pumpkins, the Chicago-born alternative rock band he co-founded in 1988.
This knowledge makes it all the more surprising that he has agreed to return to the scene of past audience crimes, as it were, by touring Australia under his own name next month, having last done so on our shores in 2005.
This time around, though, the head Pumpkin will have reinforcements.
Backing him on a series of headline shows and Good Things festival appearances in early December will be Melbourne rock act The Delta Riggs, in whom Corgan has invested considerable faith and credibility, despite having never played music in the same room as its four musicians.
If this sounds like a bold artistic leap from one of the defining figures from the alternative rock explosion in the early 1990s, you’re not wrong, especially given his past misgivings.
According to the man himself, it’s a calculated risk that required careful negotiation and expectation-setting with the promoter, Destroy All Lines, which is presenting a tour composed of three festival appearances at Good Things – where this pairing is billed below Korn, Sum 41, Violent Femmes and Electric Callboy – as well as three headline “side shows”.
“I hadn’t done it for a long time,” Corgan, 57, tells The Australian on a video call. “I’m totally comfortable playing solo acoustic – and the economics, of course, aren’t bad. But the problem was, the last time I toured America in 2019, playing solo acoustic, the last show I played in Kentucky was one of the worst gigs of my life. I basically said, ‘I’m never doing this again’. So the only time I’ll play solo acoustic now is at my tea house in Chicago (Madame ZuZu’s Emporium), where it’s my world.”
Once the Australian tour offer came, though, says Corgan, “The first thing I said was, ‘I can only do this with a band’. And the second thing I said was, ‘I hope they don’t expect it to sound like the Pumpkins’, because there’s no way; you can’t recreate that monstrous sound without a lot of equipment, and a lot of expense. It’s one thing to get together with the boys in the band and whip that stuff up; it’s another if I was going to invite somebody else to learn those songs. That would be like a nightmare for me.
“So I said, ‘As long as they’re cool with me looking for a band, and it’s not going to sound like the Pumpkins, I’m happy to come play’. That’s the genesis of the thing – and then they sent a bunch of bands that they thought might work, and I thought the Riggs was the closest thing to what I would be after, emotionally.”
But before we look to the future with this run of Australian dates, let’s first review the past – because when an artist with 36 years and thousands of performances under his belt mentions in passing that a particular concert was one of the worst gigs of his life, it begs a follow-up question.
If he’s willing to revisit a bad memory: What was so bad about that fateful night in Kentucky five years ago?
“Oh, the audience just talked the entire time,” Corgan replies. “It was weird, because it was a sold-out show at a little theatre, maybe 600 or 700 people, which isn’t bad for a solo acoustic, right? (It was) packed, and I came on stage – and the audience was talking from the first song on. Generally speaking, if it’s like that, people kind of calm down after a couple songs.”
This time, though, they didn’t. Rather than blowing his cool, yelling or storming off – all sure-fire ways to get captured on YouTube in perpetuity, and make headlines for all the wrong reasons – Corgan opted to pause the show and tried reasoning with the talkers who were spoiling it for everyone else.
“I just said, ‘Look, there’s nothing I can do; I can’t play any louder. I don’t have a band. This is it. If you can’t follow what’s going on here, it’s just really not going to go well’,” recalls Corgan. “And the audience listened to what I said – and then I started playing again, and they started talking again. It was just a drunk, Kentucky crowd.”
Lest you think he’s either protesting too much or over-egging this tale, his version of events is confirmed by umpteen online witnesses. “I was there. It was a shitstorm,” wrote one fan on a Smashing Pumpkins forum. “Billy powered through and did not fail to deliver despite all of the madness. It was hurtful to watch just as a fan … couldn’t imagine how it must have felt for him on the stage.”
Says Corgan: “It’s the ultimate nightmare, to be up there with a guitar and people don’t want to listen – and then the people who do want to listen aren’t willing to stand up and tell the other people to shut the f..k up … It was really weird. I said, ‘That’s it. I’m never doing this again. I’m not going to put myself through this’.”
After being thanked for his frankness in reliving a night most performers would rather forget, Corgan shrugs and smiles.
“Totally fine. I’m not saying it wouldn’t happen anywhere else in the world, but it’s definitely an American problem,” he says. “We treat our stars with such weird fascination and disdain that I think eventually the numbers just add up wrong; you’re in the wrong city on a Friday night, and you’re just the clown in the corner. It has nothing to do with what you’ve accomplished or what you’ve done; it doesn’t matter if you play 14 hit songs in a row – it’s just the wrong night. That’s very American.”
When The Australian connects with Corgan in late October, he’s at home in Chicago and rehearsing for the upcoming shows with The Delta Riggs during a small window between live bookings: with the Pumpkins, he was soon due to play in South America, having only recently completed about 50 concerts across four months, including supporting US punk rockers Green Day at a run of US stadium dates.
His band has been in fine form of late: in a review of the opening show of the Pumpkins’ Australian visit last April, this writer observed Corgan and his core bandmates – drummer Jimmy Chamberlin and guitarist James Iha – are presently retaking their hard-earned reputation as one of the world’s great live rock bands.
Given the long gap between attempts to execute this sort of show, though, wherein the singer-songwriter will be backed by a band of non-Pumpkins, Corgan has firm ideas on how to present the performances.
“The key is, you can’t match the Pumpkins’ dynamics; it’s just impossible,” he says. “I don’t want to name names, but there are people that I admire, and what they basically do is, when they go out solo, they do the same version of the band that they’re in with rent-a-musicians, you know what I mean? I just don’t want to do that.
“This is why I picked The Delta Riggs guys, because I thought, ‘OK, these guys can help bring these songs to life in a beautiful way; somewhere in there can be something that feels like a different room in the house that I live in, musically’,” he says.
“It’s not so different, but at the same time, it’s not trying to be the same. That’s just the mentality, and there’s certainly enough songs; I mean, I’ve got, like, 400 songs. Between that and some covers, it’ll be a nice night of music, I think.”
Formed in Melbourne in 2010, The Delta Riggs have five albums to their name and about 55,000 monthly listeners on Spotify alone, with 7.2 million plays on their most popular song (2016’s Baddest Motherf..ker in the Beehive). Still, the band is not quite a household name, and it’s a fair bet many of those buying tickets to see Corgan won’t have seen The Delta Riggs before, nor heard their music.
According to frontman Elliott Hammond, this sneak-attack aspect is primed to work in their favour, in part because it’ll give him and his bandmates the chance to blow away the online doubters and haters who posit that Corgan has simply hired the equivalent of a karaoke band.
“I might be slightly arrogant, but I’d say he’s found probably the greatest rock ’n’ roll band in Australia right now to support him, and we’re equipped enough to do that,” says Hammond, 37, with a confident smirk. “I don’t think that we’re a karaoke band at all; we’re serious hired guns.”
Since multi-instrumentalist Hammond will play drums for the Riggs while backing Corgan, he’s faced with the unenviable task of playing Jimmy Chamberlin’s fearsome, muscular parts.
Taken together, these represent some of the most powerful drum performances of the past few decades, particularly the Pumpkins’ opening trio of platinum-certified albums: Gish (1991), Siamese Dream (1993) and Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (1995).
“I work well under pressure,” says Hammond. “I did a stint in Wolfmother; I still am active with Angus Stone and Dope Lemon. I’m used to dealing with bigger names – but I think Billy is going to be probably the biggest one that I’ll have had to be in the room with, and count a song in.
“That’s the thing about drums, as well: there’s really no hiding anything, especially with the Smashing Pumpkins’ style of drumming. It’s commanding, it’s enforced; it arrives. You can’t just slink into a part – you’ve got to commit to it. Yeah, there’s pressure there – but I’m OK, and the band is great, so I think we’re going to be fine.”
Of The Delta Riggs, says Corgan: “I trusted what they were doing musically. I heard the language that they’re working in, and I thought, ‘OK, I can work with that’. My assumption is: I have to figure out how to work with them as much as they have to figure out how to work with me. We have to meet somewhere in the middle.
“That’s why I wanted an intact band, as opposed to just getting four musicians to play my songs and say, ‘OK, learn these 15 songs, and then this is what we’re going to play’. I like that they have an intact musical language, and it’ll go quicker if I say, ‘Hey, I like what you’re doing. You guys figure that out on your own to where it works for you, and it’ll probably work for me’.”
On either side of the world, both parties have been working independently on rehearsing a lengthy list of material they are understandably keeping close to their chests.
The three headline shows will run for about 90 minutes each, while the hour-long festival sets – booked to close stage three – will feature songs from the Pumpkins’ 13-album career, as well as some from Corgan’s solo career, which includes three albums issued between 2005 and 2019.
The Delta Riggs haven’t been shy about posting excerpts of their learning progress on social media, including group harmony vocals in one of Corgan’s most famous melodies in 1979, and the detuned, serrated guitar riff to Zero, both of which sent millions of hearts aflutter in the mid 1990s.
Ahead of the live debut in Adelaide, three days of rehearsals are scheduled, in which any kinks can be ironed out while the four Australian musicians and their new American boss work toward a mutually pleasing outcome, while getting to know one another with their tools of the trade in hand.
“I have no concerns; I know that they can play,” says Corgan. “Whether we jive musically and all that? Well, we’ll see. Pressure has an interesting way of getting people to figure it out.”
At this, Corgan disarms with a smile. But for this notoriously demanding band leader – for whom rehearsal sessions of six to eight hours are child’s play – it’s unclear whether his comment should be interpreted as a promise, or a warning.
Billy Corgan’s Australian tour, backed by The Delta Riggs, includes headline shows in Adelaide (December 1), Melbourne (Dec 3) and Sydney (Dec 4), followed by appearances at Good Things festival in Melbourne (Dec 6), Sydney (Dec 7) and Brisbane (Dec 8).
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