Really, Billy? Smashing Pumpkins hold drummer auditions

The Smashing Pumpkins, how I remember them blissfully.

Just this week, Billy Corgan, the one-time rock god of The Smashing Pumpkins, announced that he’d be holding auditions to find a new drummer for his somehow-still-existing band.

As in, you could be a pimple-faced 15-year-old high school band geek today and the drummer of a multi-platinum and formerly awesome alt-rock band tomorrow.

The recent development in The Pumpkins’ devolution into rock’s longest running joke formed after original drummer Jimmy Chamberlin quit the band, leaving Billy Corgan as the sole original member. Unsurprisingly, Corgan was quick to let the public know he’d continue to truck on.

As a former Pumpkins junkie ho long ago played the band’s opus Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness so much that the cassette tape actually wore through and snapped, I must say that I’m really bummed.

This is just the latest in disheartening news to spring from the Corgan camp since the band began to unravel back in the late 1990s — and the slow, painful process of watching the Pumpkins rot has been a difficult pill to swallow.

Here’s a scene: The big family Hanukkah party, held in my grandparent’s basement, and there are no fewer than 15 separate piles of presents scattered along the walls. Each grandkid gets one, and, as a general rule, the piles vary in size depending on how much each set of parents wants to show off their wealth to the rest of the family.

Well, the Jacobs brothers tended to have the smallest pile of gifts while our cousins’ would consist of several boxes the size of small cars stacked atop one another. Usually, this dichotomy would bum me out, the sensitive 9-year-old that I was.

But this year — 1995 it was — I knew that my best gift was the smallest — the double-cassette of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, by the coolest band in the land, The Smashing Pumpkins.

My young mind rationalized the Pumpkins as the coolest band ever using the following logic:

1. The guitar riff of the song “Zero” sounds like the most violent car chase ever.

2. The band had a cute, blonde bassist who had an apostrophe in her first name.

3. I thought I was the only person in the world to realize that Mellon Collie really meant melancholy, which basically means infinite sadness.

4.“Bullet With Butterfly Wings” was brutal and loud, but “1979” was soft and pretty — such dexterity!

5.The one-two punch that begins tape two, “Where Boys Fear to Tread” and “Bodies,” will blow your speakers and terrify your parents.

6.The video for “Tonight, Tonight” was a total mindf**k.

And so it went, for several years, that The Smashing Pumpkins were everything to me. I picked up the band’s earlier work (“Cherub Rock” is killer) and buzzed my hair off. Whether this was to emulate Billy Corgan or not, I can’t remember, but I looked like a penis and grew it back as quickly as I could. Several Hanukkahs later, I even received the five-disc B-sides collection box set and carried it around like a lunchbox.

But I was no blind follower, and when The Pumpkins began to decompose, so did my adoration for them. First came Machina/The Machines of God in 2000, a record that was about as memorable as the pysch class you slept through today.

Then came the first breakup — during which a few band members actually made some decent work. Guitarist James Iha’s A Perfect Circle work was solid, and Zwan, the band including Corgan and Chamberlin, was at least passable.

Bassist D’arcy Wretzky, on the other hand, was arrested for buying a whole bunch of crack. Oops!

But then began the long climb toward both a reunion and the notion that Billy Corgan is batshit insane.

In 2005, the dude took out a full-page ad in the Chicago Tribune begging his old band to rejoin him. It worked, sort of, but the resulting album Zeitgeist (featuring only Corgan and Chamberlin) was anything but, and the band began a freefall into irrelevance.

Corgan’s statement that The Pumpkins would only release singles, not albums, because, “People don’t even listen to it all” made him sound like a bitchy child. Maybe people just didn’t listen to all of your record, Billy.

And now, with Corgan living out his notorious reputation as a weird and egomaniacal control freak, he’s attempting to hold on to the spotlight for just a few more minutes by holding public drummer auditions. Seriously, send your bio, picture and a video to pumpkinsdrummer@gmail.com, and it could be you.

The whole thing stinks of desperation and is the nail in the coffin of the credibility of a once-fantastic band.

So, though I don’t have the money or shamelessness to take an ad out in The Chicago Tribune, Gravity Rides Everything will have to do.

Please, Billy, stop dragging your good name through the mud. Continue to make music, sure, but quit the childish stunts, quit the lame excuses. Iha, who just formed a band with Taylor Hanson, is more respected than you.

Enough is enough, man, and it’s time to know when to gracefully bow out.