Billy Corgan Details Zwan Reissue Plans, Recalls Stevie Nicks and My Bloody Valentine Memories

A few weeks ago, Stereogum’s VJ Winter spoke with Billy Corgan on the red carpet at the Songwriters Hall of Fame Induction ceremony held at New York’s Marriott Marquis Hotel. Among the evening’s honorees and attendees, Corgan offered a significant update on Zwan, the short-lived supergroup featuring Jimmy Chamberlin, Matt Sweeney, David Pajo, and Paz Lenchantin. The long-awaited reissue of their sole album is finally moving forward, accompanied by a wealth of archival material.

“All the Zwan songs from the original album, Mary Star of the Sea, are going to be remixed and remastered,” Corgan explained regarding the 2003 release. “There will likely be two additional LPs worth of unreleased tracks because there is so much material; I’m going to release it in different sets. Otherwise, the box set would be 20 records long, which is too much to ask of fans. There are over 60 unreleased Zwan songs— not just alternate versions, but entirely different songs. There was a tremendous amount of writing happening in that band.”

Corgan also shared vivid anecdotes involving two touchstones of alternative music history. Regarding Stevie Nicks and the Smashing Pumpkins’ cover of “Landslide,” he recalled:

Stevie asked me to produce an album once and it didn’t work out. I love Stevie. Stevie’s unbelievable. So to even know Stevie, I’ve been inside of Stevie’s house playing the piano with Stevie, talk about songs with Stevie, so I feel I got the best of that deal. And I was so glad to find a song that’s an incredible song that had never really been a hit before. I don’t think it was ever a single. And after that it’s been a hit like four or five times over. It’s a classic. I hear it in the airport. And every time I hear it it makes me smile because I think about Stevie calling me and saying, “Thank you.” Just Stevie to me. I always hold that in my heart. Stevie for me, especially alt generation, Stevie’s one of our Mount Rushmore. She’s incredible.

He also dispelled any doubt regarding the legitimacy of shoegaze and offered a memorable story about seeing My Bloody Valentine at Chicago’s Metro during the Isn’t Anything era:

I saw My Bloody Valentine play at the Metro in Chicago on Isn’t Anything. There was only a hundred people in the crowd and let me tell you one little story that I think you’ll enjoy. In the middle of the show — so, again, there’s a hundred people in a club that holds a thousand people, and I’d heard them but I’m watching Kevin do Kevin, right? And in the middle of the show, Colm, the drummer, breaks his bass drum head and they don’t have another one with them. So they have to run outside to get it. And Kevin stood there and played for 15 minutes while they changed the bass drum head and just went [shoegaze guitar noises] for 15 minutes straight. And then finally Colm went like [thumbs up] and they kicked back into whatever the song was. Like, they never stopped. It was incredible.

During the induction event, Corgan also performed a cover of KISS’ “Shout It Out Loud” alongside Goo Goo Dolls frontman John Rzeznik. Footage of the performance is available below.

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