Smashing Pumpkins

I was a rabid Smashing Pumpkins fan back in the day. RABID. Rabid.
I bawled for weeks the year they played the Phoenix in Toronto and I missed out on tickets.
I cried staring at Billy Corgan's eyes at the end of the "Bullet With Butterfly Wings" video.
I wore cords.
I shopped at Value Village.
I was full of angst (however unwarranted...but come now -that was par for the course, no?).
I liked the word "jaded" and hated people who didn't know that the Pumpkins' first major release was not Siamese Dream, but 1991's Gish (subtext -I hated a lot of people).
Hardly anyone knew Gish then, and hardly anyone knows it now, which is why it always surprises me when a mad commercial rock radio station like London's FM96, plays Siva -something they've been doing a lot in the last year or so.
1/3 of me is always mildly pissy that it took them so dang long, 1/3 of me is pumped cause the song kicks fucking ass, and the final third of me sort of wants to cry because it reminds me of Billy the way he was before he found God and went off the deep end.
I'm serious man. The guy has completely lost it. Post-Pumpkins he dredged up Zwan and while I truly did like Mary Star of the Sea (it was so dang happy and sparkly and I wasn't a black-nailpolish-wearing sixteen-year old anymore so I was SOLD on the sunshine), ol' Billy sounded more than a little out if it in most of the interviews I read during that time -on and on about the many different Zwans that existed within the band, religious references galore (none of which included the word "fuck"), bizarre opening bands made up of starry-eyed folk duos who blissfully played mandolins to crowds of akward hangers-on in Zero t-shirts.
As I said, I did like the album, I skipped a Politics class to watch them give a radio interview at the Edge, and I even shelled out $40 to see them play the concrete box of Guvernment that passes as a concert venue in Toronto, but I wasn't surprised when they broke up barely a year later.
What did surprise me however, was visiting billycorgan.com a couple months after that and finding -all non-threatening and deceiving on a sky-blue background- a collection of rants and diary entries from the man himself that made him sound a) illiterate b) like a six-year old child and c) crazy. Apparently he had found God and all was sweetness and light with his life, but not in a good way as far as I was (and still am) concerned -in an off his rocker's rocker kinda way, in a self-indulgent (and many would argue he's always been that way, but...) stream-of-consciousness-drivel-with-an-almost-scary-religious-thread-running-through-it-in-parts kind of way.
I mean I haven't been on the same wavelength as guy in years. I didn't run to the bookstore and buy his book of poetry whenever it was that the thing came out, and I haven't included a Pumpkins song on a mix in the last...at least three I've made but still -this shit's a little hard to take coming from him. I mean -whatever happened to God being empty? Just like you? Cause you seem to be pretty full of shit these days my boy.
I realize we're not all teenyboppers, and mad at the world forever, but it's such a Twilight Zone/Invasion of the BodySnatchers-type situation I just can't get my head around it.
And Siva makes me think of this. It makes me a little bit sad, like someone I used to know just died, and a helluva lot grateful that he waited until the post-Pumpkins phase of his life to go off and get saved because though it retroactively hurts me now, if he'd done it back when I was 15 and the Pumpkins were all I believed in, I don't know how I would have carried on.
So here's a cheers to Siva, and another round of good old-fashioned contempt for those who don't have a clue what I'm talking about.