Ñòàòüè î ãðóïïå Smashing Pumpkins
INTERVIEWS ON GUITARCENTER.COM
Guitar Center met up with Billy Corgan and Jimmy Chamberlin
at a hole-in-the-wall Chinese food joint in North Hollywood to talk
about Smashing Pumpkins, Fresh Cuts Vol. 2, studio chops and how
to make it big as a fresh, young band.
GC: You guys have seen some pretty dramatic shifts in the
music business. What’s good and what’s bad about Smashing Pumpkins
and the music business today?
Corgan: Well, I’d say the best thing is that we’re
out of a label deal – totally free agents. We we’re just talking
about how we’re going to start addressing our artistic relationships
with the world in a different manner because we don’t have to go
through some parental structure of “we don’t like it and it’s not
going to sell” – you know? We’re excited about the prospects of
sort of being our own business people in terms of how it interrelates
business.
GC: Basically, you’re cutting out the middleman.
Corgan: And that’s the best part. I think in this
world you don’t even need distribution. I mean, look, what’s great
is, if you want to put out your shit for free on MySpace, you can.
You don’t need anybody. You don’t need anybody inputting. And if
it’s not MySpace, it would be somebody else, so.
GC: What insight can you offer a young act that
needs to establish themselves without having the label marketing
support, or having the knowledge of someone like yourself?
Corgan: Great music is still the best marketing.
Word of mouth – I don’t care what peer-to-peer network you’re in,
who’s distributing your stuff – word of mouth is still the ultimate
thing. So at the end of the day, if you’re sitting on MySpace four
hours a day adding friends, as opposed to four or more hours working
on a song or getting your band to be really good, I still think
you’re better off getting your band good. Practice.
GC: Guitar Center is giving away a free compilation
CD in March with an exclusive Smashing Pumpkins track on it, Super
Christ. It also features a lot of undiscovered acts that you guys
helped select. How does a band like Smashing Pumpkins view this
opportunity and how can this opportunity help up-and-coming bands?
Corgan: We see it as a great marketing opportunity
for us. We’re about music and we’re about the more people hearing
our music, the better. Plus it gives us a chance to hear some new
stuff. We work so much and we’re so in our own little kind of self-contained
world, we don’t get an opportunity to hear a lot of real underground
stuff. For us it’s a cool opportunity to hear what’s going on in
the non-mainstream, in the non-record label, big management world.
Like, what are kids playing these days? Kids that work at Guitar
Center, they’re that core of what it was like when we were kids.
Chamberlin: I mean, I didn’t work in a music store,
but everybody I knew worked in a music store. We were dissecting
records. We were really getting into it. And it’s like that’s where
the music that Billy and I play today came from. It came from that
completely obsessive nature, “What’s So-and-So playing? What kind
of snare drum is he using? What kind of fuzz pedal?” It’s like those
are the kids that, as adults, are going to make a difference someday
because those are the people that are really into the nuts and bolts
of making music. So that’s what’s exciting about it for us.
GC: Can you tell us a bit about the recording
process for Super Christ? Where’d you track it, mix it, what gear
was essential to producing it?
Corgan: We recorded it at Sunset Sound in Hollywood.
There’re different rooms at Sunset Sound, but we worked in the one
that Prince did Purple Rain in, on an old API board. We’d never
recorded in there before. Drums sounded great in there, they’re
really kind of dark but they got a lot of attack. Old basses. Actually,
the bass I play on Super Christ, I bought at Guitar Center in Hollywood.
It’s a ’58 Fender P-Bass.
GC: Did you guys write Super Christ during the
Zeitgeist sessions or is it something that came after?
Corgan: We had the riff from the Zeitgeist sessions
and we always knew that we wanted to do something with it, so once
we got on tour we were like, okay, let’s go back to that.
GC: You guys have worked with many, many producers.
How involved in the process of arrangements, tracking the song,
producing, do you let someone come into your space to do that?
Corgan: Honestly, not so much anymore. And I don’t
think it’s because we don’t want advice. We actually do want advice,
but feel there are very few people that think about music the way
we do. And I know that sounds incredibly pretentious, but we have
a sort of philosophy. It’s like it’s asking them to think about
it a totally different way, and most producers these days, honestly,
they’re Pro Tools producers. They don’t think in terms of getting
a great band performance or getting a great band sound. They think
in terms of creating this massive wall of sound. Doesn’t matter
that the band can’t play those parts.
GC: Can you tell us a little bit about recording
with Roy Thomas Baker? Were there parts of the process where you
felt like you were being schooled?
Corgan: Every day.
Chamberlin: Unbelievable.
Corgan: It’s like going to a recording master class.
Chamberlin: The first night he mic’ed up the drum
kit, he had 414s over the toms, literally over the toms about this
close, about a half-inch away from the drum head, with cotton balls
taped to the top so there wouldn’t be any cymbal bleeds from the
top. Just mics everywhere, and literally, I played for about five
minutes, and when I went to listen to it, it was the loudest thing
I’d ever heard in my entire life.
Corgan: For example, let’s say you had a bass guitar.
If you don’t really need the rumble at 100 Hz and it’s going to
get in the way of the kick drum, he just dumps it. And he dumps
it in a way that you don’t hear that it’s been dumped, but he clears
a lot more space. And his whole argument is, see I can turn the
bass up louder and now there’s still room for the kick drum. Well,
he does that to everything. He carves stuff out.
GC: You guys worked with Alan Moulder and Flood
on Melancholy And The Infinite Sadness, two great producers, two
different producers. But the record is totally cohesive, how was
that achieved?
Corgan: Oh, yeah. Flood’s incredible. Flood is
a tremendous producer. Flood is very masterful with the sonics,
but where he really shines is he’s a great idea person. And I don’t
mean like he tells you, “Oh, put this chorus here.” It’s more like
he can see an ambiance of the song that you don’t necessarily see
and he would really fight with us – not negative a fight, just he
would really kind of push us to say there’s another vibe here that
you can get to. And I think you can see that when he’s worked with
U2 as well. He kind of pushed them to get to a little bit of a tougher
vibe. I think a perfect example on Melancholy is a song called By
Starlight, where the original version, the band sort of – rehearsal
version was very ’70s. It sounded like a sort of a sad song from
the ’70s. And he really pushed us to make it darker and prettier
and more atmospheric and more kind of Depeche Mode and nighttime-ish.
And when I look back now I really appreciate it. The song was the
same. He didn’t change anything about the song. He really pushed
us to a higher level with the way that we thought about our music
and I think if you look at the changes in our music since Melancholy,
he had a profound effect on the way that we think about music.
GC: How important is that type of experimentation
for a younger band that maybe hasn’t had that opportunity to be
educated by someone like Flood to say, hey, take a couple of steps
back to really look at how you’ve constructed this song.
Corgan: I think it’s also the Pro Tools problem.
And what I mean by that is, people fix the atmospheric or emotional
problems in a song with production. Flood wouldn’t save the song
with production. He would force us to save the song with our playing
and then we would produce it. Essentially what I would say is if
you don’t have the right emotional base in a song, you can never
produce it right. And that’s what he really taught us, was spend
the time getting that exact right feeling so that, even when you
play it on acoustic guitar, that feeling comes through. Even when
you play it heavy, that feeling comes through. Once you have that
feeling in your body, then you know what to do. Then the production
is easy. And a lot of times, if you look at the Beatles, it doesn’t
take a lot sonically to produce an atmosphere. You can produce an
atmosphere actually with very little instrumentation. It’s oftentimes
the way you play and the voicing of the instrument that’s key.
