Sarah Hwang

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.

It started with two crises, and a work of charity. Throughout David Bowie’s time in Los Angeles in late 1975, as he descended into a cocaine-addled psychotic netherworld of alien visitations and Aryan mythology, he had also become obsessed with the abstract, electronic sound of Kraftwerk. But his first attempt at assimilating this new movement proved a disaster, when sessions with, arranger Paul Buckmaster at Cherokee studios were abandoned, essentially unfinished. This was a rare setback, for even in the midst of crisis, David Bowie had proved remarkably adept, in control of the situation despite the psychoses that assailed him. After escaping from LA, via rehearsals in Jamaica and Vancouver for his imminent world tour, Bowie seemed to rebuild himself once again. Yet it turned out that the one event that truly made David Bowie pull out of his psychological tailspin was the act of rescuing the man who would be his companion throughout 1976, namely Iggy Pop.