Biography

The last footage of Billy with hair is the video for "Bullet With Butterfly Wings".

Billy Corgan made a short movie with his friends in the early 1980s, titled "Alien 1/2". The premise was basically a semi-sequel to Ridley Scott's "Alien", before James Cameron's "Aliens" was released in 1986. Corgan and his friends play astronauts who travel to a distant planet, only to be attacked by an alien (it's actually a plush Tazmanian devil doll). Corgan and his comrades use such tools as a pink hair dryer to combat the beast, which flies above their heads, thanks to some fishing line. Action sequences include a spaceship landing on the planet's surface, which was achieved by a thin piece of paper, folded into a tirangular shape (for the spaceship), and what appears to be a flat picture of a red planet (most likely Mars). Corgan utters the dramatic line, "And nowwwww, the end is near!". Bits of this movie were broadcasted on VH1's "Before They Were Rock Stars".

After buying a pawn shop guitar, he discovered that it whined when he stopped playing it. Instead of trading in the guitar, he actually wrote the whine into the song "Mayonaise".

Only member of the The Smashing Pumpkins to appear on every album.

Composed most of the songs for both his bands, The Smashing Pumpkins and Zwan. He also co-wrote the album "Celebrity Skin" for Courtney Love's band Hole.

The basic Pumpkins philosophy from the beginning was that everything had already been done. You couldn't write better songs than the Beatles, you couldn't be heavier than Led Zeppelin or Black Sabbath, you couldn't be cooler than Cheap Trick. There was no way you were gonna top that. So all you could really do was try to rip off what you liked about it and sort of throw it back at people in a different way.

We used to compete with Nirvana. That was good. That was real. That was viscerally good. Now we compete with imitation-Nirvana. There's nothing good in that. ...It's really sad.

For a 6-foot-3 guy with no hair and a whiny voice, I've done all right.

We can look you in the eye and talk to you about life, heart, love, rock 'n' roll, whatever. But we do not have the moral authority to tell people how to vote or what to do to their bodies. We're just a rock band.

The thing that makes it all worth it is when somebody comes up and says 'I had a really hard time in my life and your album really helped me.' As long as that happens, all the idiots in the world and all the stupid press can say what they want to. It just doesn't matter.