Billy Corgan on Heels vs. Babyfaces and the Donald Trump case

At Paquita, a tea shop in the West Village, Billy Corgan, the 57-year-old frontman and main songwriter of the Smashing Pumpkins, asked if there was a Pu-Erha fermented Chinese tea that he could try. “I'm a tea snob,” he said. In Paris he recently had a Pu-Erh that had been fermented for sixty years. “It was like drinking pure earth!”

The waiter recommended a sticky rice Pu-Erh. Corgan lifted the brim of the Cubs baseball cap that was perched on his shiny skull. “I'll try that,” he said.

The artist's entourage on this sunny morning included his two children, Augustus and Clementine, eight and six, and the Pumpkins' tour manager, who was sitting nearby. The children were with the Pumpkins on the band's stadium tour with headliner Green Day. “My son asked me yesterday, 'Are Green Day bigger than you?'” Corgan recalls. “I said, 'Yeah, they're probably bigger, but there aren't many bands in the world that are bigger than Dad's band.'”

“Growing up, my dad was very bitter about his missed musical opportunities,” he continued. “He would point at musicians on TV and say, 'That should be me – you're the reason I'm not on TV.' I heard that a hundred times. So I don't want my kids to see me as a passé model. I don't want to say, 'Daddy played there once' and 'Daddy was on the cover of that magazine when he still had hair.' I want my son to see me on stage. Now.”

Being in New York reminded Corgan of the slights the band suffered from local hipsters in the '90s, when the Pumpkins were establishing themselves as alt-rock stars with the albums “Siamese Dream” and “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.” “The New York hipsters made fun of us,” he said. “And what were they making fun of? That we cared too much about our music. We worked too hard. What does it mean to tell someone they're trying too hard when they have nothing? You'd meet snobs like Kim Gordon. Well, I didn't grow up in the same social classes as them. It's easy for them to judge people like us.”

The sticky rice Pu-Erh wasn't down-to-earth enough for Corgan, who is a down-to-earth guy. His lyrics and conversation are filled with confessionalism. As a latchkey kid in Chicago in the '70s, he watched a lot of confessionals on TV on unsupervised afternoons: “Phil Donahue and Oprah were both locals. Chicago was the center of daytime television.” On weekends, he watched professional wrestling shows, “which had a lot to do with how I saw the world. Good guys and bad guys” — in wrestling parlance, “babyfaces” and “heels.” The babyface “goes through a lot,” Corgan said, “but ultimately he'll pull through because the values ​​of the noble hero are stronger than the scheming of the heel.” (Or, if you will, the hipster.) The moment the heel begs for mercy before getting his just punishment is called “showing his ass,” Corgan explained.

Corgan is so immersed in professional wrestling that he now owns the National Wrestling Alliance, a once-prominent “league” nearly eclipsed by World Wrestling Entertainment. He devotes a lot of time to writing scripts for babyfaces and heels, but is frustrated by modern wrestlers' unwillingness to show their butts. They “want all the benefits of being a heel with the benefits of being a babyface,” he said, adding, “Heels generate a lot of excitement. But if you're not willing to show your butt at that critical moment — that's what people pay for.” Showing butts, however, doesn't help wrestlers' personal brand on social media, where “you see the heel walking his dog.”

As a wrestling impresario, Corgan also feels “limited by wokeness,” he said. “We're stuck in this weird straitjacket where we have to dance around the villain's most powerful weapons because the villain isn't allowed to say the horrible thing that would get him fired. In a movie, it's OK if the character kills the uncle, but if the character says the thing to the uncle that would get him fired, he couldn't be in the movie.” He paused. “But murder is OK.”

He reflected on the case of Donald Trump, a demonstrably hopeless villain who says things every day that could be deposed. Why, he wondered, can't the modern villain be more like him? “People have tried,” he said. “There was actually a guy who played the wrestling version of Trump. And that unsettled so many people.”

Is Corgan a wrestler?

“No, I don't want anything to do with that. Too dangerous. I did something at the Hammerstein Ballroom where I came out and hit someone with a guitar and they hit me full force in the back of the head with a phone. I got a concussion.” ♦