Billy Corgan is a longtime experienced American musician, singer, songwriter and guitarist of a very respected alternative rock band named The Smashing Pumpkin.
He is also a proud owner of the National Wrestling Alliance and he works a lot to make it better and better each day. He says that it is one of his greatest passions and that he loves to spend time investing in it.
Early years
Billy Corgan was born as William Patrick Corgan, Jr. on March 17, 1967, in Chicago, Illinois, United States. His father William Corgan was also a musician since he was a rock guitarist and his mother was named Martha Louise Corgan Lutz. He grew up raised as a Catholic since his mother was very religious.
His brothers are named Jimmy, James, and Jack. He often jokes about their parents being lazy while naming all of their kids except him and his younger brother.
He has a younger brother Rick with whom he was very close. His parents divorced in 1970 and his father William soon entered a new marital relationship so William Jr. and Ridey went living with him and their stepmother.
They had their home in a Village named Glendale Height. William gained a half-brother from his father’s new marriage and the brother has special needs.
Bill was very protective of him, especially because his stepmother was abusive, both physically and psychologically. His father got separated from his stepmother after a while and strangely all children stayed living with their stepmom.
During elementary school, Billy was one of the tallest kids in the generation. He was also an awesome athlete and he was especially good at baseball.
He was a huge fan of Chicago Cubs baseball team and wouldn’t miss any of the games aired on the radio. He was also a passionate baseball card collector.
After enrolling in Glenbard North High School he seemed to lose interest in sports and became an average athlete.
Bill soon got interested in guitars and decided to spend all of his savings on his first guitar. His father bought him a copy of Les Paul’s guitar and motivated his son to learn to play it well.
He pointed him to Jimi Hendrix and other good guitarists but he never offered to pay him piano lessons so Bill learned to play the guitar on his own.
He liked hard rock and metal guitarists and was fond of Black Sabbath, Queen, and Cheap Trick.
He also became a huge fan of The Cure. Bill began playing the guitar with fellow high school students and was even granted a scholarship as an honor student.
His grandmother had left him tuition to continue his education in college but Bill was stubborn and wanted to pursue only his music career.
Since Chicago was never known for its metal and hard rock bands Bill relocated to St. Petersburg. He was a leader of a band he formed. It was titled The Marked.
The band had a short life since it gained no success in that town. That is why Billy returned to Chicago to live with his father. In 1987 and 1988 he started playing with Wayne Static and his band Deep Blue Dream.
Career development
Bill came back to Chicago and came upon the idea to form his own band. He already had a name for it. It was going to be called The Smashing Pumpkins.
He started working in a record store because he had to earn his living. It was in that store that he got acquainted with James Iha, a fellow guitarist.
They clicked and started making demos together. Sometime later he has met Darcy Elizabeth Wretzky-Brown who was a bass player from Michigan.
The three of them formed The Smashing Pumpkins and started doing gigs in local clubs. One year later they gained a new member named Jimmy Chamberlin who became their drummer. In 1991, the band has released their first studio album.
This album was released through Caroline Records and was labeled as the fusion of alternative rock, hard rock, and grunge.
The album had moderate success and managed to enter the Billboard Album 200 chart. In 1993, the band released their new album titled Siamese Dream and it was a huge success.
This album is considered to be one of the best rock albums in the 1990s and was sold in millions of copies. The album was released through Virgin Records.
Their three singles became great hits: “Cherub Rock”, “Disarm” and “Today “. William was very hardworking but was also known as a very controlling person so the band often had disagreements.
In 1995, the band released their 3rd album titled “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness” which was again released through Virgin Records.
It was produced again by Billy Corgan and co-produced by Flood. The lead single of this album was a song titled “Bullet with Butterfly Wing” and it went as high as No.1 on US Billboard 200 chart.
This album was their most successful album. The album was certified diamond and brought them a huge financial benefit. The band was nominated for seven Grammy Awards and received nine MTV Video Awards. Their biggest hit was the song “1979” which entered No.1 on Billboard Charts.
In 1995 the band promoted their album on Saturday Night Live.
1996 brought a huge controversy connected to the band. Their keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin died with heroin overdose and Chamberlin was arrested for the possession of the drug that killed Melvoin.
Thus caused the band to give notice to Chamberlin and return to their trio assemble.
This happened in a period which was already very tense because Billy was getting a divorce then and his mother died in the same period.
All of those events influenced their next album which was named Adore and was released in the summer of 1998. The album was again released through Virgin Records.
The album didn’t sit so well by critics and fans so it had much lower sales than the last one. In 1999, Chamberlin returned to the band.
Their fifth studio album was released in 2000 under the name “Machina/The Machines of God”. This album was also not very successful and had lower sales due to the change of the sound.
They released their 6th album called Machina II/The Friends & Enemies of Modern Music in September 200, a few months before the band broke up.
Corgan decided to start a new band with Chamberlin. He named it Zwan and his friend Matt Sweeney joined them on it. After that, they hired a new guitarist and bassist so they became a quintet.
Zwan’s debut album was named “Mary Star of the Sea” and was released by the Reprise label. This album gained good reviews.
The members often argued and the conflict caused them to cancel their tour and break up in 2003 and Billy started writing poetry in the same year.
in 2004 he already had his book of poetry released. It is named “Blinking with Fists” and was published by Faber. The book entered the New York Times Best Seller Lists.
He also posted a lot of his work online. Some of it was his autobiographical stories and poems known as “The Confessions of Billy Corgan”.
Billy’s solo career has started in 2004 when he collected enough release materials.
He released his debut rock album a year later and titled it The Future Embrace. The album was produced by Bon Harris and released through Reprise Records.
The album was not very successful and eventually, less than 100 thousand copies were sold.
The same year he placed an ad in The Chicago Tribune and The Chicago Sun in which he spoke about his wishes to form Smashing Pumpkins again. Jimmy Chamberlin called Corgan and decided to give it another try.
In 2006 the band finally reunited and started recording music in the studio. They have recruited two new members, a bass player Ginger Pooley, and a guitarist Jeff Schroeder.
The first album of the newly formed group was named Zeitgeist and was released in the summer of 2007. It came very high on the Billboard charts in the US.
The band started touring in 2007 and it continued in 2008.
They have also released an EP titled American Gothic.
In the spring of 2009, Chamberlin left the band again but Corgan continued using the band’s name until the summer of 2009 when he founded another band.
The band’s name was Spirits in the Sky and they played a lot of covers while performing at various clubs.
In May 2017 he had released 250 exclusive solo recordings on vinyl in the form of an album named AEGEA. They could be bought only online.
The Smashing Pumpkins have released their tenth studio album titled Monuments to an Elegy.
Corgan created his own blog in 2015, where he posted vintage photographs named “People and Their Cars.”
His new solo album from 2017 was named Ogilala.
Personal life
Corgan had a very troubled personal life and had anxiety and panic attacks very often. He also fought with depression and most of these disorders were connected to the abuse he suffered from his stepmother when he was a child.
He fought with depression in 1996 and 1997 after the death of his mother Martha.
He had written a song in the memory of his late mother and it was named “For Martha”.
He also named his record label by her name so it is called Martha’s Music.
Billy is known as a huge fan of sports. He is such a big fan of Chicago Cubs that he occasionally gives comments about the team on the radio.
He threw the ceremonial first pitch several times at the beginning of Cubs games.
Some of his good friends are a basketball player Dennis Rodman and a hockey player Chris Chelios.
Billy calls himself a “wrestlemaniac”, due to his love for wrestling.
The Smashed Pumpkins had a single titled “Doomsday Clock” which was used in wrestling promotional videos.
He often commented on wrestling and opened his pro wrestling company. The name of the company is Resistance Pro. It is settled in Chicago.
In 2017, he purchased the National Wrestling Alliance.
In 1993, he got married to his girlfriend Chris Fabian, a skilled artist. Their marriage lasted until 1997 although they got separated two years before.
In 1995, Billy started going out with a photographer Yelena Yemchuk. They were together for almost ten years and she had done a lot of art for the band.
In 2005, he had a brief relationship with a violinist Emilie Autumn.
In 2006, Corgan started dating Courtney Love, a widow of Kurt Cobain and started living with her and her daughter Frances Bean Cobain.
The two of them parted in 2010.
He dated Jessica Origliasso from 2010 until 2012.
He became a pescetarian in 2013, and four years later he became a vegan. He also eats only gluten-free food.
In 2015 he became a father for the first time. His girlfriend Chloe Mendel gave birth to Augustus Juppiter Corgan and three years later to a daughter, Philomena Clementine Corgan.
He gained a lot of weight in 2010 and his fans started calling him Belly Conran but they weren’t aware it was his period of depression when he had suicidal thoughts and creative blockage.
Quick summary
Full name: William Patrick Corgan
Date of birth: March 17, 1967
Birthplace: Chicago, Illinois, United States
Age: 53
Profession: singer, songwriter, producer, musician
Height: 190 cm
Weight: 90 kgs
Net Worth: $50 million