Want to See Every Tree in America?

Corgan, a Midwestern suburban boy, had always championed big feelings and grand statements, and when he bleated “We’ll crucify the insincere tonight,” he not only really seemed to mean it, but seemed also to have an army at his back, believing in him and awaiting their orders. That type of spiritual and financial validation is not a good cure for megalomania, and the rest went more or less as you’d expect. Corgan spent the post-Mellon Collie decade chasing his creative impulses, lashing out at just about everyone who stepped in his path. When the Pumpkins finally broke up, Corgan openly questioned his bandmates’s sobriety and moral fiber. His first post-Pumpkins band, Zwan (shortened from True Poets of Zwan), only lasted for one album, and the post-breakup rhetoric Corgan leveled at his bandmates was even more vitriolic this time; he told the Chicago Tribune that his bandmates were “not very good people and not very interesting,” and added on LiveJournal, in a more LiveJournalistic fashion, that, “their filth is in their larcenous hearts.” Corgan never dialed down his persona or tried something different. He was Billy Corgan, after all. He dated celebrity-celebrities like Jessica Simpson and Tila Tequila, even getting re-involved with old flame Courtney Love. “He was so arrogant, it cracked me up,” former Zwan-mate Dave Pajo told the A.V. Club in 2008. “He would constantly bring up the fact that he sold 25 million records, or that his hit song was played at the Super Bowl or something. It just made me laugh.