Billy Corgan 2001-06-12

The June 12, 2001 performance saw a guest appearance of Billy Corgan on Bozo: 40 Years of Fun!, which was a 90-minute special and final taping of The Bozo Show. Corgan performed with Jimmy Chamberlin, Linda Strawberry, Chris Holmes and Eddie Roeser of Chicago's Urge Overkill.

For those unaware, The Bozo Show was the program my generation and my father’s generation watched religiously; a sort of bawling, improvisational, and live offering, centred around a mischief maker who had an irritable bent; and was by many accounts the inspiration for The Simpsons' Krusty the Clown. So when I heard the show was going off the air after 40 years, due to an IP dispute with Bozo’s ‘owner’ Larry Harmon, I reached out to our local superstation WGN and said ‘I’ll do anything, I have to be involved’. Graciously WGN accepted my offer, and went so far as to suggest I might want to play a tune; which I did with Bob Dylan’s ‘Forever Young’. Truth be told, and with all respect to Bob, I still regret the opportunity missed in not writing my own farewell song to Bozo. … One last bit of information: anyone who watched the Bozo show remembers they had a contest called the ‘Grand Prize Game’ where one had to throw a ping pong ball into a series of buckets. Well, somewhere amongst my many things I have the last ball ever thrown in the ‘Grand Prize Game’, as Bozo himself was nice enough to hand it to me.

Banter
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