Today Billy Corgan’s Smashing Pumpkins announced that three-fourths of their original lineup would reunite for a summer tour, a moment that Corgan, drummer Jimmy Chamberlin, and guitarist James Iha have been moving toward for a couple years. Corgan resuscitated the Pumpkins brand in 2007, after roughly seven years of dormancy, and since then he and a revolving-door crew of musicians (including Chamberlin on occasion) have released four albums of new material and toured extensively. In March 2016, on the LA stop of the band’s acoustic tour with Liz Phair, Iha joined Corgan and Chamberlin for several songs, mostly from 1993’s Siamese Dream. Soon after that show, Corgan began teasing a proper Pumpkins reunion—perhaps the closest he’ll come to acknowledging that he can’t reproduce the band’s early-90s cachet on his own.
The Siamese Dream single “Today” soundtracks the tour-announcement video, but the news doesn’t feel like the greatest anything to me. Iha might bring something new (or old), but the band is still the Billy Corgan show. Let’s hope he doesn’t use this slightly more complete reunion as an excuse to jack up ticket prices—we’ll find out when they go on sale Friday, February 23. But I’m not optimistic. Corgan is still the curmudgeon who banned Tribune writer Gregory Trotter from his eight-hour Siddhartha synth odyssey at Madame ZuZu’s tea shop in 2014. He’s still the loon who went on InfoWars in 2016 to talk right-wing conspiracy theories with Alex Jones. And if you believe Wretzky (I do), Corgan is still the guy who’s schemed behind his former bandmates’ backs while marketing the new Smashing Pumpkins lineup as their most authentic reunion.
