How many members of the Smashing Pumpkins does it take to perform an anniversary tour for the albums “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness” and “Machina/The Machines of God”? Per lead vocalist, guitarist, and frontman Billy Corgan, just one: the works’ “sole author.”
Otherwise known as himself.
That’s not necessarily an egocentric approach. Corgan, after all, is the alt-rock alchemist who wrote, produced, and sang the majority of the songs on both records, which celebrate their 30th and 25th anniversaries this year. As he sees it, stepping out with his new solo band — Billy Corgan and the Machines of God — is an exercise in carefully re-examining his own material without any external pressure or compromise.
“I think that’s the great hubris of a creator,” Corgan said on a Zoom call from his home in Chicago. “You feel these are your sculptures and your paintings, and you have the ability to once more reframe and re-illuminate why they’re attractive to you.”
His “A Return to Zero” solo tour begins this weekend in Baltimore, then heads to the Paradise Rock Club on Monday — a much cozier environment than Corgan’s most recent gig in Boston, when the Smashing Pumpkins performed at Fenway Park with Green Day last summer. The intimate club shows will thread together some of Corgan’s prior solo material, as well as music from different eras of the Smashing Pumpkins: the “Mellon Collie” period circa 1995, which yielded hits like “1979” and “Bullet With Butterfly Wings”; portions of their 2000 concept record “Machina/The Machines of God”; and songs from the band’s latest release, 2024’s “Aghori Mhori Mei.”
Altogether, Corgan will draw from a pool of over 100 songs for the tour, although he won’t necessarily cull enough material for a grandiose three-hour performance, as he’s done in the past with the Smashing Pumpkins.
“I’m 58 now, so I do have to temper myself,” he said with a laugh.
To Corgan, enmeshing the different eras in one setlist felt like “coming home,” and “more resonantly consistent” with the band’s first era, before their — in his words — “quote-unquote breakup” in 2000 and quasi-reformation around 2007. Following a rotation of lineup changes over the years, the band currently performs with three of the four founding members. Guitarist James Iha and drummer Jimmy Chamberlin are back in the saddle with Corgan, while original bassist D’Arcy Wretzky has not rejoined.
From an outside perspective, Corgan’s claim to the Smashing Pumpkins’ two album anniversaries might look like a catalyst for another fallout within the band. But the frontman said he’s been chatting with his bandmates “for years” about how to honor anniversaries in a way that was personal, rather than an opportunistic cash grab.
“One thing we’ve done successfully, I think, in this decade of our knowing each other, is if there’s not an even consensus, we don’t persist,” he said. “That was some of the problems in the ’90s — not taking into account, let’s call it, a balanced view of everybody’s take.”
So when the band had unspecified “differing views” on the two upcoming anniversaries, Corgan took the reins with his new solo group, which includes the Smashing Pumpkins’ touring guitarist, Kiki Wong.
“The fact that these significant anniversaries were going to go by with no particular unified voice of how to present them, I said, ‘Well, I’m just gonna do it myself,’” Corgan said.
Add that to the list of sizable projects that Corgan has taken on in recent years. Directly prior to this interview, Corgan described himself as occupying a “12-year-old brain space” while working on his memoir. (Per his wife Chloé Mendel Corgan, he said, he’s tried to write it on four separate occasions since they met, and “as far as I’m concerned, this [time] is the last.”) Corgan has also owned the National Wrestling League since 2017, and this year launched a podcast called “The Magnificent Others,” in which he interviews fellow cultural bigwigs like Gene Simmons and Sharon Osbourne.
Corgan’s extracurriculars involve his local community, too. Alongside his wife, he runs a plant-based tea shop and cafe called Madame Zuzu’s Emporium in Highland Park, located about 25 miles outside of his hometown of Chicago. (For the record, Corgan has complex feelings about fellow Chicagoan Pope Leo XIV being a White Sox fan instead of rooting for the Cubs; “The joke I’m telling now is, ‘it’s good he was named pope ‘cause that’s the kind of help that they need.’”)
With a daily routine that typically involves 12 to 14 hours of work across his various projects — fueled by an average of six hours of sleep — Corgan has continued to expand his identity as an artist and cultural figure. But that complexity sometimes gets muddled within the public’s narrower perception of Corgan and his role in the Smashing Pumpkins.
“One has to deal with the complication of, I’m so closely identified with the band that most people don’t really understand who I am without the band,” he explained.
“The band’s history after 2001 is rife with incredible external pressures on who the band needed to be in, let’s call it, this second era: a greatest hits band, an artistic band, a mixture of both,” he added. “Not that you’d want to, but you could find a voluminous treasure trove of material of people criticizing me for not being the band that people want me to be in. And me saying, over and over again, ‘The band you think I was in, I was never in. So why would I be in that band now?’”
To Corgan, the name under which he performs is “sort of inconsequential.” But in this case, performing with the Machines of God — especially to revisit some of his older work within the Smashing Pumpkins — casts off many of those notions about how he and the band should operate.
The freedom is the ultimate trade-off for any nitpicks the public might have about him striking out on his own.
“It’s very attractive to me to present this material without dilution — meaning, I don’t really care in this setting for that pressure,” he said.
“If you don’t embrace the freedom, then you’re kinda wasting, let’s call it, ‘the upside of the downside,’” he concluded.
BILLY CORGAN AND THE MACHINES OF GOD
With Return to Dust. At the Paradise Rock Club, 967 Commonwealth Ave., Boston, June 9, 7 p.m. Tickets available on the secondary market. crossroadspresents.com
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