Billy Corgan 2019-06-25: Difference between revisions

BC: Not bad.  [[w:Rolling Stone|''Rolling Stone'']] gave the album three stars.  Said it was overproduced and um, I was a bit dramatic.  They of course followed it up by giving Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness two and a half stars...and that album of course went on to be one of the biggest selling albums of all time, thanks to you.  But little did you know that we had completely fooled you with this...terrible work.  So...my father and my mother met, allegedly, at a high school dance, my father was playing in band.  My mother was 18, he was 18, he’d been playing in bands already for a few years.  He started by playing in strip clubs when he was 16 years old...and um, so when he met my mother, he was a seasoned musician.  And uh, they fell in love, allegedly, and not too long after that, I was born when both of them were 19 years old.  They were together, they were not together, they were together or not together, my brother came along and then they split permanently.  And uh, my father took my brother - who at the time was about this high - and he took him away to Puerto Rico, actually.  And I didn’t see my father or my brother for a very long and I went to live with my great-grandmother...who was born in Belgium and she barely spoke English, but she was an amazing woman.  So my mother was named after Martha and I lived with her and I lived with my grandfather, who was a terrible alcoholic but not a bad alcoholic in the sense that he was very kind.  And so, and the reason I went to live with them was my mother lost her mind and was committed to an insane asylum.  And I don’t know what happened to her there but when she came out...later - I didn’t see her for years - she was a completely different person, almost as if they’d transported her personality into another person in this being who looked like my mother.  So that year and a half that I - or a year - that I lived with my grandfather and my great-grandmother was this beautiful year of creativity and drawing and reading and...watching wrestling...and baseball.  And one day my father showed up and said, “Let’s go.”  The next thing I know I was living in a trailer with my father, my brother who did not recognize me, and my new stepmother.  And within maybe one day, my brother - ‘cause he didn’t know who I was - he leapt on me and bit a chunk out of my back about that big and that was my welcome to my new family.  And what followed was a lot of violence, lot of drugs, arrest, incarceration, and of course, my brother, who we named Spaceboy: [[Jesse Andersen|Jesse]].  My brother was born with a rare chromosomal disorder that was so rare when he was born, there were only a hundred cases in the entire world and so, doctors would come literally from hundreds of miles just to look at him because he was such a curiosity.  And, ‘course, he was our brother and I was tasked with the responsibility of caring for him, so he became my problem and I watched with horror at nine years old, ten years old, into my teens, we would be at a park and he would be playing in the sand and I would be sitting there and there would be people right there calling him a retard - I’m not talking about children, I’m talking about adults - a retoor [sic], a retard, a mongoloid, a gimp, I heard it all.  And so, my brother, who seemed fairly normal to us, was branded by the world to be this alien, which of course on some level I identified with because my home life was not good.  And I felt, in many ways, he had it better than me because he was not beaten where we were, so...where does this go?  Around 16 years of age, my brother was put into a quote unquote normal high school, he was the first of his generation to be taken out of special education and put into a conventional setting with the idea that the students needed to get to know someone like him and he needed to get to know students outside of a program where his feelings and his emotions would be protected.  Which threw my brother into an incredible depression and really scared the shit out of us because for the first time, that beautiful bubble that he lived in was popped.  And my response to his depression was to give him the [[w:Metallica|Metallica]] [[w:Metallica (album)|Black Album]].  Which started his lifelong love affair with the most vicious, evil, ungodly metal from Norway, I can’t even pronounce the bands names that he likes.  And so, in writing Siamese Dream, um, somehow in the murk of all of this trying to figure out what I was trying to say, this song came out and....