David Bowie

David Robert Jones (January 8, 1947 – January 10, 2016), known professionally as David Bowie, was an English singer-songwriter and actor who is regarded as one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century. Billy Corgan is a self-proclaimed life long fan.

The song "Zowie" from Corgan's second studio album, Ogilala, was written as a tribute to Bowie following his death in 2016.

Background with Billy Corgan
Corgan first met Bowie in the 90s. At the time, Bowie was also with Virgin Records, so they would occasionally encounter each other. They appeared together on a few television shows (it's unclear which shows). Eventually he asked Corgan to play with him on his 50th Birthday Party at Madison Square Garden in 1997. When Corgan asked him about why he had him play on "All the Young Dudes", Bowie replied that the lyric "Billy's picking stars off of his face" reminded him of Corgan.

In the long run, Corgan said he didn't get to know him too well because Bowie was apparently a very private person. In a VIP pre-show, Corgan explained the difficult time Bowie was going through career-wise when he shared the stage with Corgan, and watching how the music business treated Bowie served as a lesson for Corgan:I got to know David Bowie a bit in the ’90s. We were on the same label, we would cross paths here and there. He was treated horribly in the ’90s. It was really hard to watch. As he tried to find, and he did, eventually by taking that journey into whatever he needed to do. Towards the end of the ’90s, he started dialling back into this other thing, let’s call it the third version of himself.

When you're David Bowie and you've had incredible critical and commercial success through the first phase of your career, and don’t forget he had 12 or 13 failed singles before "Space Oddity" became a hit song. He was considered a nobody then he was a somebody. He was somebody through a very interesting period, then at the end of the ’70s Low and Lodger, went very arty…I might be telling this story wrong but from what I understand he was basically broke at the beginning of the ’80s and that’s what brought on "Let's Dance". ‘I’m gonna back to the larger than life’ and you know, he was playing stadiums, he was massive again. So, that’s ‘Phase One’ and ‘Phase Two’.

The expectations and the weight of your legacy is so immense. This is my own interpretation…[that] struggling very publicly to find a new voice in relation to the old one or find this sort of balance between things, he was treated very, very horribly. What I’m trying to say in my own language is that he wasn’t treated with the respect he was due. It's one thing to say, ‘I don’t like it,’ but people treated him poorly like they forgot the guy he was.

So it was amazing he was able to go through that and persevere towards the end of his life and make this great music. [To] draw people back to him to where they started realizing, ‘Oh my God, he really is that fucking guy’ and unfortunately that was the end of the story or as much as we know now. Thank God he wound back to it, I can’t imagine what people would say.