When did the concept of "produced by" on the back of a vinyl album first occur to you as a music fan growing up?
Billy Corgan: I had a very early awareness of sound that was very personal. Of course later I figured out what I was reacting to, but I do remember having really deep emotional experiences listening to Queen, Black Sabbath, Cheap Trick, and The Beatles, where I connected the sonic information to an emotional quality that I saw as distinctive.
You've been very hands-on throughout your entire professional career as a co-producer on all of the Smashing Pumpkins albums. What motivated you to begin taking an interest in the recording process?
Billy Corgan: I was intimidated by the recording studio environment early on, and in that intimidation I defaulted to letting the people around me do what they do – get the drum sound, whatever – and I had some early experiences where I questioned people, or I suggested maybe that there was a different thing that they could have done. I didn't get a very positive response, which set me down the path of, "Well, I guess I should know how to do that, so when they say, 'No,' I can tell them why they're wrong." [I preferred that] as opposed to someone telling me, "No" and, "You don't know what you're doing."
Your debut album, Gish, holds up as one of those life-changing albums for most fans. It certainly was the first time anyone had ever heard a sound quite like that one. What made you feel Butch Vig was the right man for the job as your co-producer?
Billy Corgan: The first time I met Butch Vig was when we walked into Smart Studios to record what became our Sub Pop single ["Tristessa"]. I knew who he was by name and reputation, but didn't know anything else about him. I think [I liked] the fact that he wasn't pretentious; he was a hard worker and he wasn't intimidated by the scope of what Jimmy and I were trying to do. In fact, he seemed to welcome it. Then, in turn, he asked us to play at a higher level than we even knew we could play at, which just fueled our, "Alright, if you meet us there; we'll meet you here." That started this really incredible relationship between Jimmy, Butch, and I – we tended to feed off of one another's insanity.
Butch Vig: When I first met the Pumpkins I was thrilled to work with them because I think I had found someone, in Billy Corgan, who really set the bar high sonically. I knew right away that he was gonna push me, but I could push him right back. Quite frankly, on most of the albums or projects I'd done before Gish there was never any budget or any money. I had to do records really fast, in two or three days, or maybe five or six days, so everything just had to be by the seat of my pants. I'd have to make really fast decisions. When we went in to make Gish, I think the budget was maybe 30 days or something, and I was over the moon. I was really thrilled about that, because I always wanted to be able spend more time finessing a sound. As much as I love punk rock, rock 'n' roll, chaos, and noise, I like to hear the focus of that sound. I like records to be focused: I like to hear the instrumentation; I like to hear the hooks. Billy and the Pumpkins felt the same way. We were a good pair, and I think that was one of the first things we bonded on initially; setting the bar really high in what we could do sonically.
What made the pocket between Billy and Jimmy so special, and key, to the core of the band's sound?
Butch Vig: Billy and Jimmy had almost a sixth sense, in terms of the feel that they developed within songs. They are both amazing musicians. Billy can play crazy, shredding metal, muso-jazz chords, and rhythmically he's just amazing. Jimmy had rock chops, but he also had jazz chops and could play these crazy buzz fills. He had a great swing he could bring, even if it was a 4/4 rock track. So they really just had a bond, in terms of how they played, which I'm sure came in part from when they first started out jamming in someone's basement. They definitely had a chemistry, and I think that's one of the things that really made that band sound special.
Jimmy Chamberlin: We were very intuitive, and we'd listened to a lot of the same music, so our idea of where the destination was, both rhythmically and harmonically, was oftentimes very similar. Billy's got an understanding of my ability that I don't have, so he knows what that intangible feeling is in my playing. If I listen to two takes, and I think one may be marginally better than another, and he picks the one I think is probably not as good, he's probably got better reasons than I do.
Billy Corgan: It was, "What can't Jimmy do?" [laughs] Butch is a very good drummer, but he, of course, recognized very early on that Jimmy was sort of a savant and playing at a higher level, even then, than just about any drummer who'd ever walked through his door. They hit it off right away; it was like Jimmy played the way Butch wished he could play, and Jimmy hits drums in the way Butch wished that he could hit the drums – which pushed Butch. If you listen to the drum sound on Gish, it's still one of the great drum sounds of any record you'll ever hear. It's just so beautiful; I'm still struck by it.
Jimmy, I think it could be credibly argued that Gish's "I Am One" is one of best examples of that synergy in action, and one of your most celebrated beats. What do you remember about bringing that one to life in the studio with Billy and Butch?
Jimmy Chamberlin: "I Am One" was really begat out of a drum machine beat that Billy had come up with that was really almost impossible to play on a drum kit. It's just one of those things where somebody writes something on a drum machine with absolutely no idea of hand-and-foot proximity, and then says, "Hey, what do you think about this?" "Oh, it sounds great" "Well, can you play it?" "Well, I can come back in a week and play it, but in order to play it faithfully I've gotta do a single paradiddle on my floor tom, and then bring my left hand..." There's a pedagogical component to learning that. The genesis of moving my big [floor] tom over to the left was just trying to assimilate that beat.
Billy Corgan: If you go back and listen to "I Am One," and the drum balance on the toms, those are not geeked up; those are him hitting the drums. That's the concussiveness of the way he's playing coming through the room mics. Oftentimes when you hear drummers play, and then you see them live, they don't have the same power because they're aided by the studio balance. That is actually true to Jimmy's balance; what you hear is how Jimmy sounded in the room.
What were some of the challenges of being a co-producer for the first time working with Butch Vig, who was probably used to running the show from behind the board with most of his artists?
Billy Corgan: Butch Vig loves vocals, so when I was sitting in Smart Studios, circa 1990, and I was cranking the guitar, he was looking at me like, "Yeah, every guitar player wants to crank the guitar." And I'm saying, "No, you don't understand. The guitars need to sit here for a reason." I wasn't turning up the guitars 'cause I'm a guitar player, I was telling him, "This is the best way." Then I, of course, put what we call "Pumkinizer" around my vocals and then buried my vocal, like Exile on Main Street. He was looking at me like, "Wait a second." He pulled the faders down and said, "This is where the guitars should be, and this is where the vocals should be." I said, "That sounds boring." I put the faders back up, and I pulled the voice back up. "That's the sound. That's the sound." So I was saying that. And he was looking at me going, "Wait, you're the songwriter. You're the singer. You're the guitar player. Who am I talking to?" I was trying to say to him, "This is the producer talking." It's hard to have credibility in that moment, because they ultimately assume that you're like every other musician who wants to hear their part, their way.
Butch Vig: We'd go in the studio for 14 or 15 hours a day and just go to battle as co-producers. It wasn't like we were yelling at each other, but we were constantly trying to up the ante. I'd say, "Well, you can probably do that better." Or he'd say, "I don't think that sounds right. You can get a better sound on this." So we were just constantly pushing each other. I loved that. I respected that.
Your second album, Siamese Dream, set a new bar sonically and really solidified the band's "wall of guitar" as a signature sound. What was your vision for that aspect of the record?
Billy Corgan: I came in with a very strong mind that we needed to have a guitar sound that was idealized in the way that Cream or Boston had an idealized guitar sound. I'm not really sure how I arrived there, but it probably had something to do with the fact that Butch finished Gish and literally packed up the next day to record Nevermind with Nirvana. We were at Butch's for a 4th of July picnic, and we were probably some of the first people on the planet to hear that record. We were listening to Butch's mixes. The first song we hear was "[Smells Like] Teen Spirit," and the first thing through my mind was, "Wow, Kurt [Cobain]'s ripped off 'More Than a Feeling' by Boston." The second thing through my mind was, "Oh, by the way, Butch has ripped off my fucking guitar sound." So I think, in my mind, it was like, "Okay, I'm going to create a guitar sound that no one can follow!"
Butch Vig: We recorded Siamese Dream on analog tape, and looking back it's inconceivable how much work it took. Nowadays, in Pro Tools, it's so easy to slide things around to edit, cut, and paste. It makes the engineer's job so much easier. The great thing about how we approached Siamese Dream is – because we set the bar really high – we had to make sure everything sounded really good, and then the band had to play. They were great players, but we did a lot of takes. Sometimes I would do razor blade tape editing between takes – especially when they were cutting a basic track. Jimmy had to play drums a lot, and Billy had to play most of the guitar and bass on that record. There was a lot of burden, initially, just on getting the drums right; and once we had all that tracked, it really came down to Billy. It was just me and him in the control room, and it was immense, long hours – 12 to 14 hour days – of him playing guitar and singing. I had to keep him really motivated and focused to try to keep track of his vision. I've always loved working with bands that have a strong vision as a producer, and Billy Corgan had a very strong vision. I had never really done a record of that sonic scope. I remember it almost killed me, but was an immense achievement for me personally. Billy was a mad scientist with the guitars. A lot of times I would have to draw out a map, literally, of the song for his guitars with all these arrows, going, "Okay, this one goes to track 14 for the clean guitar through the second verse." For instance, on "Soma," that was one of the biggest guitar maps I ever had. I remember that was epic. I remember having to flip over the back of the track sheet and continue the map.
Billy Corgan: There is a sonic aspect to that. My voice is quite thin and small, so my voice tends to sound bigger, actually, in a wall of guitars. It's been weird for me in the last seven years, because as vocals have gotten louder in the sonic spectrum – and the general consensus is, "Well, you should have louder vocals" – it exposed my voice in a way that probably wouldn't be as exposed if it was still sitting in a pile of guitars. Fans are always complaining and saying, "Turn your vocals back down," but that's the way I like to hear it. Siamese Dream is probably the greatest: Jimmy on fire, and me singing behind a wall of guitars is probably the greatest expression of what we are capable of.
Jimmy's drumming took things to an entirely new level. What were you pushing him to do on Siamese Dream?
Billy Corgan: Siamese Dream was a tricky record as it pertains to Jimmy, because Jimmy was asked to be more than he was at that moment. And, at the same time, he was asked to be less than he was at that moment. Heading into the studio on Siamese Dream, Jimmy was very much still the drummer on Gish. When you listen to something like "Geek U.S.A.," that opened up the door to where Jimmy was going as a drummer. It's like a Disneyland ride. [laughs]
Jimmy Chamberlin: Billy's a great barometer for my playing; he knows what I'm capable of, and he challenges me to move beyond what I think I'm capable of. I hope he'd say the same thing about me. We both have a great admiration and respect for each other's talents. I've heard him do things on the guitar that are literally like Coltrane-level lead runs; just stream of consciousness playing that I've never heard another guitar player do.
Billy Corgan: I loved Jane's Addiction's ability to shift gears, I loved Bad Brains' abilities to shift gears, I loved The Beatles' ability to shift gears, but I felt like we found our version of that. I felt like we were no longer imitating, or in the shadow, of anybody; we were now in our own clear space. The nice thing is that time has born that out. There are still people, to this day, that don't like Siamese Dream because they loved the Gish band and feel I cut that band off to go in this other direction. It's this weird what-might-have-been thing. I feel like the progression of Gish to Siamese Dream to Mellon Collie..., that was who we were. We would embrace whatever we were into, and when we were done with it, we were ready to move on.
By 1995, heading into the double-LP Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, what made you feel the co-production team of Flood and Alan Moulder would be your best sonic sidekicks to achieve your next studio ambition?
Billy Corgan: Flood, I felt, understood what I was trying to get at. My sense of it is Flood came to see us play live and said, "I want to record that band." Flood being Flood, would be way more attracted to the band as we really were, as opposed to the shiny version. He's more than capable of doing the shiny version, but I think he thought the other version was going to be a lot more fun.
Flood: When you watched them live, at that time, during Mellon Collie..., I don't think I've recorded a better band. They were so amazing, but it had to be all four of them there. They all needed each other in different ways. The groove and the feel of the combination of all of them; when they were really on it, nailed it, and knew what they were doing, it was amazing. Jimmy and Billy are so creative. Sometimes Jimmy might come up with guitar bits, or Billy might a have technical idea, so it was a really special time because no one was really overbearing ego-wise at all. As co-producers, Billy was one of those artists I've worked with who just had creativity coming out of every pore and he wanted to push; he never wanted to stagnate. He had ambition and he was always pushing. They'd rehearse a song until it felt right. You could say "genius," or you could just say somebody's found their calling and they're not frightened by it. They wanted to embrace it and push it as far as they possibly could.
Alan Moulder: Flood and I, as a team, both have the same sensibility about what we want from a record. We both want excitement and passion, so the same things get us excited. We work very well together that way, and we're free to argue without fear of anything being personal. We always know if we're arguing that it's a creative argument. We actually enjoy arguing, because it's more like you understand what the other person's hearing and it makes you hear the song in another way you might not have thought of. So we're free to say what we think without having to worry about each other's feelings, because we know nothing we say is meant to hurt that person's feelings. It's purely the creative war, if you like. It was the same way with Billy, making that record, and he would be an absolute fraud if he was not a co-producer. The team of the three of us was great, and a similar thing; where nothing was ever taken personally from what was said. We all felt everyone was confident in each other, and nobody knows how the Pumpkins should sound more than Billy. He was ahead of the charge, in terms of the vision and headspace where things came from.
Billy, how would you describe the energy Flood brought to the sessions, in contrast to Butch Vig?
Billy Corgan: When we played particularly difficult songs, like "Fuck You (An Ode to No One)," Flood would have us practice the song every day, first thing in. So we started every workday with an hour of band practice, and afterwards we would do two or three takes of "Fuck You," or whatever was the crazy, prog- gy, heavy song of that day. "Bullet with Butterfly Wings" is another song that comes to mind. So we would get in a really good, almost live, frame of mind. Then he would track it, and sometimes he would say, "Ehhh, wasn't very good. We'll do it again tomorrow." We would never get too stuck on anything.
Flood: With "Bullet...," really early on when we were going through all the demos, it was quite obvious that the great thing about working with the Pumpkins was that it was obvious which tracks were going to be the real main players. That was most definitely one of them, and we all knew it because it had the energy we wanted to capture.
Were there any new recording techniques that Flood brought to bear in the studio you felt helped you do something new on the album?
Billy Corgan: Most producers usually get out of the way with me with guitars. They know that I'm a charging bull there. They don't have a whole lot to work to do with me on the guitar, so one could argue I've rarely been produced on the guitar. Vocally, however, I think I've benefited from working with great producers like Flood, who've gotten the best out of me as a vocalist. I probably haven't done as good a job when I've produced myself. That's probably the hardest thing to do, is to have a critical eye, because I don't know any singers who love their voice. I hear that all the time. It's really hard to hear your voice and hear it the way other people hear it. So, for instance, early on, Flood realized that recording me with headphones was not only a challenge for pitch, but it was taking away some of the nuances in the personality of my singing; which he wanted more of, not less. So he freed me up to sing with a handheld [Shure SM]58 and the speakers on full-blast in the control room. By doing so, he got the singer that he saw on stage. Obviously we wanted the best version of that.
The production of "1979" has long been the subject of lore among Smashing Pumpkins fans, so let's pull the curtain back. Is it true that that one almost didn't make it to the finish line?
Flood: "1979" had been running around for a long time, and it had started to turn into one of these songs that every album has – where you just grind, and grind, and grind away, and it just won't turn any other color except for gray. You spend all your time on that one song, and it usually doesn't make the album. So it got to almost the last day of recording at Pumpkinland [the band's rehearsal complex] before we were going to swap over into CRC [Chicago Recording Company], and I went, "Alright, that's it. You've got one more day." We'd spent a load of time going through the song again and it just wasn't happening, and I said, "One more day. That's all this song's got, and then I'm gonna chalk it. I'm gonna drown the child." And everybody was going, "No, you can't do that!" And I said, "I can. I'm so bored of it."
