Billy Corgan 2019-06-25

June 25, 2019 – Utrecht, NL
Live performance by Billy Corgan
Europe 2019 (Billy Corgan) tour
Date	June 25, 2019
Venue	TivoliVredenburg Hertz
Coordinates	52°5′32″N 5°6′48″E
Location	Utrecht, NL
Venue type	Theater
Capacity	543
Personnel	Billy Corgan, Katie Cole
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Setlist

Set one

1. "Gotta Get Yours" (acoustic) (only performance)
2. "Hard Times" (acoustic) 
3. "To Scatter One's Own" (acoustic) 
4. "Faithless Darlin'" (acoustic) 
5. "Apologia" (acoustic) 
6. "Cri de Coeur" (acoustic) 
7. "Buffalo Boys" (acoustic) 
8. "Dancehall" (acoustic) 
9. "Aeronaut" (piano) 
10. "Processional" (acoustic) 
11. "Half-Life of an Autodidact" (acoustic) 
12. "The Long Goodbye" (acoustic) 
13. "Mandarynne" (piano) 
14. "Along the Santa Fe Trail" [Ray Noble] (piano) 

Set two

15. "Wound" (acoustic) 
16. "Thirty-Three" (acoustic) 
17. "Spaceboy" (acoustic) 
18. "Violet Rays" (acoustic) 
19. "Endless Summer" (piano) 
20. "Tonight, Tonight" (acoustic) 
21. "Shame" (acoustic) 
22. "1979" (acoustic) 
23. "Travels" (piano) 
24. "Disarm" (piano) 

Encore

25. "Today" (acoustic) 

Notes

• "Buffalo Boys" and "Dancehall" with Katie Cole on backing vocals

Banter

(incomplete due to lack of full show source)

Gotta Get Yours
Hard Times
To Scatter One’s Own
Faithless Darlin’
Apologia
BC: How are you? Como esta? (sprays his throat coat mist into his mouth)
Guy in crowd: What are you doing?
BC: (simultaneously, off mic) Cocaine. (begins putting a capo on his guitar) Yeah. This is a song called Cri de Coeur.
Cri de Coeur (abandoned after about 5 seconds)
BC: But it’s not the Édith Piaf version, it’s my song.
Cri de Coeur
Buffalo Boys (with Katie Cole)
Dancehall (with Katie Cole)
BC: [tape cuts in] You never know, heh heh heh. You never know. Looking into the audience that you are...I assume some people here have children. Does anyone have children? It’s okay, you can raise your hand, I’m not - I don’t work for the government. I know a lot of things goin’ on in this country. Heh heh. So um, yeah, wrote this song for my son Augustus...who came around about, almost four years ago now. And like me, he has a terrible temper. Impulsive. Loves music though, which is pretty cool. So, maybe someday he’ll understand what this song’s about. It’s not so much a warning as a kind of a “here it comes.” Heh heh heh, whatever the world is -
Guy in crowd: A warning.
BC: Thank you. Not quite a warning, kind of like a “here it comes.” So, I hope that means something for you, those of you who have children. One quick story on this song, if you’re interested. It’s like sometimes I pass something on Instagram, there’s always two people who are like, no, they don’t want to hear anything. Um, I wrote this song thinking that it would never get recorded, it was kind of a joke actually. And uh, thankfully, my friend and the great producer Rick Rubin pulled it out of the pile and said, “No, this is a great song” and I was so confused because originally the song kinda went like this: (singing and playing piano jauntily) Tumbling down the middle, the world survives, look out son, the air is alive. (stops playing piano and speaks) And I thought, no way, heh heh heh. I thought he was crazy. And that’s why they pay him the big bucks. And uh, so every time I sing this song, I get to think about Rick. And so, this is to you and to Rick.
Aeronaut (piano)
Processional
Half-Life of an Autodidact
BC: So, in the early days of the Smashing Pumpkins, my band, might’ve heard of them. We started somewhere around 1987 or ‘88, depending on who you ask. And uh, we used to practice in this warehouse, sort of some bootleg operation that was run by a drug dealer...who was a friend of my father’s, who was also a drug dealer, and um, somehow we got the space for free because of some drug deal...or some deal about to be made. The guy also sold bootleg T-shirts for some reason and I used to help him sell bootleg T-shirts as part of the price of us practicing there. And uh, the gentleman - who I think is now deceased - had built four practice spaces over here and four practice spaces over here behind a panel door and then we would be in the main area...because we were special. And, so we would be practicing these songs while this absolute cacophony would go on around us, mostly metal, and um, so we used to make fun of the bands by playing exactly what they were playing. So when they would stop, they would hear us playing the song they’d just been playing. And then when they would come out, they would give us these weird looks and we would, as soon as the door opened, we’d go back to doing like (smiling, rocking on heels, picking at guitar). Heh. Point being, we were always awful. We were awful in the beginning and we’re still awful. No, rotten people, we are.
Guy in crowd: Join the club.
BC: Thank you, I’ve made a career out of being awful, I appreciate that. So, the reason I’m telling you this to paint the picture: imagine us, early days, hot day like today, playing some forgotten new wave song and uh, I sang something and we finished the song and one of the band members, who I don’t remember which one, leaned forward and said, “What were you singing on that one part?” And I repeated the lyric and I’m sure it was something, you know, about the eternal depth of man’s struggle and some form of sexual frustration. And the band member kind of scrunched up their face and said, “That’s weird.” And my immediate reaction to tell ‘em to shut the fuck up. And I quote, I said, “Don’t you ever - in fact, don’t any of you ever, ever talk to me about lyrics ever, it’s verboten in this band.” True. And to their credit and to my eternal gratitude, they left me alone, they let me write about what I wanted to write about and be myself, and so I’m eternally grateful to my band mates for letting me be that person. And the reason I told you all those things was - generally speaking - up until recently, I pretty much have never talked about what my songs are about. Because early on, I made the mistake of saying something in the press and then of course it turned into, you know, “I hate children” or something, I don’t know. Something stupid. The early version of the meme. And so, even when I work with a great producer like Rick Rubin, I never talk about what the songs are about. He doesn’t ask, I don’t say. I could be singing about ice cream for all he knows. But in this particular song, Rick wanted me to do live takes and so I would go out into the room, record, come back in, he’d give me some feedback, I’d go back out. After a few takes, I came back and he said “Is this song about aliens?” And you know what, it is about aliens, which is pretty cool that he figured it out. And he goes, “Now, care to share?” behind the beard. And uh, I said, “Well, if you must know, this song is me singing to the aliens, ‘Get me the fuck off this planet. Come pick me up and take me away.’” So that’s this song.
The Long Goodbye
Mandarynne (piano)
BC: [cuts in] (over instrumental intro to Santa Fe Trail) But this song, I did not write. It features my panda-like piano playing. ‘Cause if a panda could play piano, it would play like me. And that’s not a joke.
Along the Santa Fe Trail (piano)
BC: See you in a few minutes.
[set break]
Wound
Thirty-three
BC: Still having fun? Now this next song, which comes off the Siamese Dream album from 1993...before most of you were born.
Guy in crowd: [unintelligible]!
BC: Heh...I try. Siamese Dream was an album that deals a lot with coming of age and struggling with one’s family.
Guy #2 in crowd: A very good album.
BC: Not bad. 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. 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 Metallica 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....
Spaceboy
Violet Rays
BC: Thank you, thank you, very kind, thank you. Now...after the Smashing Pumpkins broke up the first time...Jimmy and I formed another band called Zwan. Little did I know that here, it’s a form of Spam, meat in a can. You know what I’m talking about? Have you eaten Zwan? Right, it’s from here, right? I’m not crazy, right? Zwan, the meat?
Guy in crowd: Oh, Zwan! Oh, the sausages!
BC: Thank you. Yes, I didn’t know I was naming my band after a sausage. But the band did become a sausage party. And that translates into “a piece of shit.” But we wrote some good songs and I’d like to play you one of those songs now. For those of you, like me, who are somewhere halfway through life, may you live forever.
Endless Summer (piano)
(Billy takes his lyric iPad over to the guitar set up. He waves the guitar tech off for a second while he reviews lyrics and then does a fist pump.)
BC: Actually, I do know the words to this one. And if you do too, please sing along.
Tonight, Tonight
BC: In 1997...we were coming off the Mellon Collie record. And uh, we’d lost our drummer. And we’d been through death and destruction. Almost divorce, for me. And my mother died, the one I didn’t grow up with. Now this song, Adore being a lament on loss - by the way, not a good idea for record sales. If anybody out there is gonna write an album about death, doesn’t translate to record sales. And um, on this particular song...the recording is being very fractuous [sic] and uneven because we were working in a new way...without our drummer. And we went back to where we started, just the three of us, drum machine. On the particular day I wrote this song, I woke up out of a dream and I grabbed the guitar and I wrote this song straight out of a dream. And we recorded that day, just a couple hours later, the three of us sitting in a circle, just like we were back in my dad’s bedroom. And we re-did it live, which was a wreck. And in many ways, this song might be the last testament of that band. The band, of course, continues thankfully and thanks to you. But yet, in many ways, this is the song that probably ended that band. At least we went out together.
Shame
1979
BC: I’ve written many songs, probably somewhere in the range of 400 songs. And to me, they’re all important, but then you go through a life where people tell you, well, only these 10 are important or only these 20 or only these 50. And so, in the beginning, when I wrote songs, as a young person about 17 or 18 years old, I’d play a song for somebody that would go like this, you know. (plays 7 slow chords on the piano) Play it for a friend and they go, “Sounds like Pink Floyd.” And so that became the joke in the band, that everything sounded like Pink Floyd. And then we had a rule for years, you cannot mention eight bands when we’re writing songs. You cannot say it sounds like...Led Zeppelin or Metallica or the Cure or whatever, you just can’t say it. It was a rule and we held it. So over here you have the optimism of a writer - me - in a band that believes in me as a writer and over here, you have somebody saying it sounds like Pink Floyd. And um, eventually, you break through and somebody says, “Ah, it sounds like Smashing Pumpkins.” And then, if you’re lucky enough - and I am lucky because people like you have supported my music and I really appreciate that. (pauses for applause, but none comes) Thank you, you should congratulate yourself. (crowd cheers) But if you live long enough and you rock long enough, eventually you’ll play something for somebody and they say, “It doesn’t sound like Smashing Pumpkins.”
Guy in crowd: [1-3 unintelligible words]!
BC: Yeah. One of my favorite things is when a fan and I’m using that term (gestures that he is referring to the entire audience) liberally, heh - uh, I just did like a Trump thing, like a...(gestures as if talking with his hands, then gestures again while doing a quiet vocal impression)...liberally. (normal voice) Um, heh, sorry, I couldn’t help it. When a fan - unknowingly, I would like to assume - compares you to you, as if you are not you and the other version of you wrote something and the new version of you, in some sort of alien transfer, is responsible for not upholding what the other guy used to do. (one guy in the crowd laughs hysterically) Yes. And then, if you’re really lucky, you make new music and people get very excited. And you say “What do you think?” and they go, (whispers) “It sounds like the Pumpkins. They’re back, the Pumpkins are back.” (pauses for applause, makes a surprised face and gestures when none comes; only then do people clap) (normal voice) Yeah. But the fact of the matter is I really don’t give a fuck what anybody thinks. And what’s beautiful about that is that goddamn stubbornness that runs in my family, particularly on the Irish side. You can blame the Irish. Is that refusal to bend to expectation, to somebody’s idea of your past or your present or your future. And so when I write a song like this, which by the way I wrote coming down with a vicious flu and I felt awful and this song started coming through. And when I have that happen, it’s like “you have 20 minutes to write the song,” it’s gonna, it’s like a - you’re chasing this beautiful thing that suddenly appears out of nowhere. And some of the songs that you would know, that’s how they were written, they come to me and then it’s 20 minutes, boom. So I’m dying, I’m ready to throw up and this song shows up. And I actually stopped trying to write the song and whoever talks to me in my head was like, “No, you’re gonna write this song.” So I literally wrote the song laying (pretends to lie down and play air guitar) like this and jotting down lyrics. And so, the only problem with this song...is it sounds like Pink Floyd.
Travels (piano)
BC: [tape cuts in] Well...was anyone at my concert in Utrecht...(crowd begins to cheer)...in 2005? [Ed: Billy did not play in Utrecht in 2005 - he's thinking of his show in Ghent on 2005-06-08.] Where the man was yelling at me because I wouldn’t play Smashing Pumpkins songs? I remember that concert. This song is for him.
Disarm (piano)
BC: Thank you very much.
[encore break]
Today