Billy Corgan 2021-12-19

December 19, 2021 – Highland Park, IL, US
Live performance by Billy Corgan
Artist	Billy Corgan
Date	December 19, 2021
Event	Madame ZuZu's Christmas Show
Venue	Madame ZuZu's
Coordinates	42°11′11″N 87°48′2″W
Location	Highland Park, IL, US
Venue type	Teahouse
Capacity	300
Personnel	Billy Corgan, Chloe Mendel Corgan, Augustus Juppiter Corgan, Philomena Clementine Corgan
Order of bands	Janelle Lake, Billy Corgan
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December 19, 2021 was the second night of the Madame ZuZu's Christmas Show. Harpist Janelle Lake opened with a cover of "Today".

Setlist

1. "Silent Night" [Franz Xaver Gruber / Joseph Mohr] (acoustic) 
2. "Jingle Bells" [James Lord Pierpont] (acoustic) 
3. "The Magi and the Shiny Bright" (acoustic) 
4. "Silver Bells" [Jay Livingston / Ray Evans] (acoustic) 
5. "O Tannenbaum" [Ernst Anschütz / traditional] (acoustic) (live debut)
6. "Evergreen" (acoustic) 
7. "O Come, All Ye Faithful" [John Francis Wade] (acoustic) 
8. "God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen" [traditional] (acoustic) (live debut)

Notes

• Setlist incomplete and possibly out of order
• "Silent Night" with Chloe Mendel on vocals
• "Jingle Bells" with Corgan's children Augustus Juppiter and Philomena Clementine

Banter

…
BC: … it was about what I wanted to do. (crowd laughs) There's lots of things that I would do if I wanted to do them. It's the relationship between me and you that's the interesting part. Ha, my daughter says play "Rate in a Cage", you know. But I'll repeat the story I told last night. So a couple of days ago, I got a call from my brother, my brother never calls me. Usually when my he calls me it's something bad. And my father had died. Suddenly at 74. Pronounced dead on the scene collapsed in his house. Suddenly but certainly not wholly unexpected given the state of his health over the last ten years or so. Okay, fine, it is what it is. As you can imagine, it's a complicated thing when you lose any parent. I lost my mother 25 years ago literally to this same period of time right before Christmas. So, then I call his wife, and she says, "Well they came came and they worked on him, and pronounced him dead" and I kept saying "Don't let him go". And when they pulled him out of here and brought him to the hospital, he actually had a pulse. So I called the hospital. Somehow I found myself with 4-minutes of prompts. "If you want to talk about your blood results..." you know. Right? Four minutes. Finally I get through, phone rings,
> Operator: "Emergency?"
> BC: "Can I talk to the guy"
> Operator: "Yeah he's right here."
> BC: "Is he alive?"
BC: Guy obviously was not authorized to talk about those things. He hemmed and hawed. For whatever reason I said the right things. He said, "well he's alive." Amazing! How is he alive? He's alive. I'll call everybody back, "he's alive!" So I was working that day in the studio, actually the last day of recording on the massive 33-song album I've been working on for over a year and half, which you'll hear soon enough. I look forward to you hearing that. Imagine us, it's the last day at work, the last day of school. Christmas is coming, thank god. I sang 32 songs on the album in the past few months. As you can imagine that was quite the journey. And so, okay he's alive, so, let's just keeping working. Thank god he's alive. He's in Florida so it's not like I can go and visit him. You know, it's an ongoing situation. So [back in the studio], last song of the day, I'm supposed to play this kind of beautiful solo over an acoustic portion of a song, and we were waiting for a guitar to be changed, the strings to be changed in another room. So I had the guitar and I was playing most of the day, I said "well don't we work out the part with this guitar" and did the solo kind of off-the-cuff. It turned out really beautiful, it's in tune, sounded great. Listened back to it and thought "maybe we shouldn't bother with the other guitar." Just as I said that, …
…
BC: Is your mic on?
Chloe: Yes, I just wasn't close enough.
BC: OK, thank you. And now for the Christmas classic, "Silent Night"
Silent Night
…