Billy Corgan, now of Zwan
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Zwan
The Childrens Hour
Paramount Theatre, 206-628-0888
$25.50
8 p.m. Sat., April 26
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Maybe GRUNGE really is back. Or perhaps it just stepped outside for a smoke. For five years. And found its way back into the building again through a side door after bribing the security guard with a 20-spot.
Whatever the back story, after listening to former Smashing Pumpkins svengali Billy Corgan's latest project, Zwan, one can be forgiven for thinking that the Grunge Years never really ended in the first place. That distinctive Queen-meets-Black- Sabbath mash-up pioneered by the Pumpkins and Mother Love Bone well over a decade ago is splattered liberally about the group's debut disc like an errant can of Day-Glo paint, elevating otherwise straightforward pop compositions like the album's first single, "Honestly," straight into the heavens. Which, as it turns out, has been the Tall Uncool One's desired destination all along.
I don't know quite how to venture this opinion without sounding either corny or overly dramatic, but let's try it on for size anyway: After a lengthy, frustrating search, Billy Corgan has finally found God. And in so doing, has seemingly liberated himself from the demons that plagued the Pumpkins throughout much of that band's star-crossed career.
That said, Zwan's Mary Star of the Sea (Martha's Music/Reprise) is not exactly Corgan's Saved. Nor is it his Human Clay. In fact, it's a mistake to even call this "Billy's latest project." Zwan are way, way more than that (we'll return to this theme a bit later).
This God stuff is no trifling thing. You'll recall that Corgan is a guy who subtitled one of his albums The Machines of God. Who once tossed off lyrics like "Emptiness is loneliness/And loneliness is cleanliness/ And cleanliness is godliness/And God is empty, just like me." Who conceived a song about unbearable loneliness ("Soma") that closed with a sampled snippet of a TV evangelist wailing to an unseen audience, "You need to resist the devil so that he will flee!" And whose personal God complex ran deep enough that, when his band was shattering its Fleetwood Mac-like romantic entanglements and generally going to pieces all around him (during the messy recording of the Pumpkins' epic Siamese Dream), he simply picked up every damned instrument in sight and recorded the whole thing himself, like another God-channeling Midwestern musical genius before him, Prince Rogers Nelson.
Cherub Rock, indeedhis critics be damned, Corgan aspired to heights where angels feared to tread and occasionally emerged from the experience adored but with little except singed wings and a pained countenance to show for his troubles. His band's unique blend of overwhelming neo-psychedelic woo and intimate, "secret-in-your-ear" confession struck a chord with millions of listeners during its heyday, taking the Pumpkins to the headline slot on Lollapalooza's main stage, ringing up a furious din at the cash register, and making them the unlikeliest rock 'n' roll heroes since KISS first applied clown makeup. By taking the postmodern inventions of bands like My Bloody Valentine (who, through mutual producer Alan Moulder, had previously pioneered that nifty "loud/soft/loud" thing and colored their records with enough varying guitar voices to populate a cartoon seriesthe ever-astute Corgan promptly removed this page from the playbook and proceeded to fly about eight miles higher with it) and orchestrating a shotgun marriage with the classic rock moves and unapologetic ambitions of '70s FM radio acts such as Queen and Boston, Corgan somehow found a way to keep a foot in both the goth-kid camp as well as the Camaro faction of the high-school parking lot.
THE APEXand in many ways, endgameof this vision was Corgan's very own "Bohemian Rhapsody," the double-disc prog-rock orgy of the senses Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, a 28-song, two-hour-plus No. 1 album that spawned hit singles ("1979," "Tonight, Tonight," and the snarling "Bullet With Butterfly Wings") and fiercely executed angst- metal telegrams ("Zero," "Jellybelly," "XYU") in nearly equal proportions. The album was the Pumpkins' tour de force, a preposterously outsized statement as different in scope and magnitude from its peers as Dostoevsky is to Doonesbury, and set a standard for quality and sheer ambition that the band could never again live up to. While on the road supporting the album, touring keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin (brother of Wendy Melvoin, Prince's Revolution-era guitarist) died from a heroin overdose, an unhappy incident that also led to drummer Jimmy Chamberlin's dismissal. The band released two more full-lengths that never again captured their full potential and sold in persistently smaller quantities; original bassist D'arcy Wretzky eventually departed (to be replaced by Hole bassist Melissa Auf der Maur); and increasingly the Pumpkins exuded the aura of a ship with the wind sucked suddenly from its sails, adrift and seeking landfall.
So when the Pumpkins finally called it a day with a Last Waltz-style four-hour send-off at Chicago's Metro in 2000 (the same venue where the band had played one of its first gigs, opening for Jane's Addiction 12 years earlier), no one who followed them closely could claim to be surprisedthey had flown a little too close to the sun and were now paying the price for their perceived arrogance. For all of Corgan's years vision questing in an art form not known for its spiritual accommodation, he was left unfulfilled on some basic level and chose to walk away before his band became the alt-rock equivalent of hometown hero Michael Jordan, returning to a sport that needed him far less than he ultimately needed it.
