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- [00:02]
Jake Brennan
This is exactly right.
- [00:11]
Nancy Glass
Double Elvis the Hulu Original Series Furious is now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney. Starring Emmy Rossum as Alice Black, Furious
- [00:21]
Jake Brennan
follows a rookie FBI agent on the hunt for Catherine, played by Lola Petticrew,
- [00:25]
Nancy Glass
a mysterious and calculating female serial killer. While Alice upholds justice, Catherine kills for it. Tara writes the rich and powerful men of New York in her pursuit of vengeance with secrets that change everything, Alice discovers there's a thin line between hunter and prey. Watch the Hulu Original Series Furious, now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney plus for bundle subscribers terms apply. Goodbye.
- [00:49]
Jake Brennan
Hey guys, time to dust off your detective skills while unwinding in the Caribbean on Virgin Voyages. 2nd True Crime Voyages Back by popular demand, this five night adults only escape sets sail March 20, 2027 Grand Turk in the beach Club at Bimini. The difference between this year and last will be that I will be on the cruise this year along with Zeth and he and I will be taping a live version of Disgrace Land along with podcast hosts from Exactly Right's Buried Bones Podcast of the Year award winners Wisecrack and other fan favorites. Get on this cruise with us guys and enjoy live podcast recordings, behind the scenes storytelling, exclusive meet and greets, and immersive true crime programming throughout this one of a kind voyage. Head over to www.virgin voy.com truecrime to secure your spot.
- [01:39]
Nancy Glass
I'm Nancy Glass, host of the Burden of Guilt Season 3 podcast. This is a story about a horrendous situation that destroyed two families. It's a scorched earth war that shows just how far someone will go to get what they want.
- [01:55]
Jake Brennan
Cindy said. I had to choose between the truth and my family. And I had to choose the truth.
- [02:00]
Nancy Glass
Listen to Season 3, A Burden of Guilt on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [02:10]
Jake Brennan
Disgraceland is a production of Double Elvis. This is a story about change. It's about a band that changed the sound of alternative rock by refusing to sound like alternative rock. A band that turned isolation into connection, revenge into melody and violence into beauty. It's a story about a Chicago record store clerk who changed into a rock star and a rock star who was hated as much as he was loved. A rock star who witnessed his band fall into the trap of self destruction and who also witnessed a shape shifting transformation that he could not explain. It's a story about the Smashing Pumpkins. It's a story about great music. Unlike that clip I played for you at the top of the show. That wasn't great music. That was a preset loop from my melotron called Blink 180F MK1. I played you that loop because I can't afford the rights to Fantasy by Mariah Carey. And why would I play you that specific slice of Tom Tom Club sampling cheese? Could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America on October 23, 1995. And that was the day that the Smashing Pumpkins released their double album, Melancholy and the Infinite Sadness. An album that silenced their many detractors when it made them the biggest rock band in the world. Right before an overdose and an arrest changed everything forever. On this episode, violence, beauty, isolation, self destruction, change. And the Smashing Pumpkins. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is disgrace. So I don't know what your life is like with your wife or your spouse, your husband, your girlfriend, your boyfriend, whatever, but my wife and I send each other reels on Instagram back and forth all the time. Maybe you do the same, I don't know. There's this one reel that my wife sent to me a while back that I can't stop thinking about. Maybe you've seen it. It's a clip of Billy Corgan from the Smashing Pumpkins talking with Howard Stern on Stern Show. And in this clip, Billy Corgan is relating this story about a strange encounter that he once had. Actually, it's two strange encounters that he had with the same person, but not just a quote unquote person. As Billy tells it, this person is a shapeshifter. Let's just say I was with somebody and I saw a transformation that I can't explain. That's what Billy says to Howard Stern. He doesn't identify the shapeshifter by name. He won't even say if this person was male or female. But he does say that the shapeshifter was naked when these encounters took place. And after agreeing to tell Howard more details in private, Billy reveals that the story is even more fantastical than you think. Now, I've heard of shapeshifters before, and I'm sure you have too. And I've learned about the skinwalkers of the indigenous American Southwest, the selkies of Celtic folklore. And there are, of course, the trickster gods of Greek and Norse mythology. But Billy Corgan isn't talking about folklore or mythology. He's talking about a real experience in the real world, in the here and now. So watching this clip my jaw on the floor. And my response was that this guy is full of shit. Maybe it's because Billy Corgan has said a lot of crazy things over the years, like how he and Kurt Cobain are the greatest songwriters of their generation and everyone else is a quote distant third. But I think it's more what Billy's contemporaries have said about him and the Smashing Pumpkins that gives me pause when it comes to the whole shapeshifter thing. Kim Deal of the Pixies once called Billy a self important asshole. Another Kim Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, writing in her memoir Girl in a Band, referred to Billy Corgan as a crybaby, saying his band took themselves too seriously and were in no way punk rock. Linda Perry, one of the four Non Blondes, one of the greatest pop songwriters of all time, once told Billy that he had bad energy as she kicked him out of her studio. Legendary indie producer Steve Albini described the Smashing Pumpkins as careerists, which to a caustic DIY dude like Steve Albini was just about the worst thing he could say about somebody. And then there's the pavement song Range Life, which takes dead aim at Billy's band, Smashing Pumpkins. After calling out the Pumpkins by name in one of the verses Stephen Malchemist sings, I don't understand what they mean and I could really give a fuck. Even when the Smashing Pumpkins became one of the biggest bands on the planet, back when rock and roll could still move the needle of popular culture, the Pumpkins success was acknowledged with slight digs from the rock cognoscente. For example, the Pumpkins were crowned Artist of the Year in 19801994 by Spin magazine and in the accompanying feature article Michael Azerad wrote that the Pumpkins untrendy videos, over the top production values, fraught interviews, dubious fashion sense, and most of all, Corgan's soul bearing lyrics all completely bypass any semblance of cool. This is how they were described by the publication, bestowing the year's highest honor onto them. Now, depending on what you think of the Smashing Pumpkins, Michael Azarai was either right, wrong or some mix of the two. But he did get something undeniably correct about the Smashing Pumpkins. He said that Billy Corgan was a quote, hero and surrogate of a vast audience of kids who were either alienated from the indie network or just came to the party too late, unquote. It was 1994 and music was changing fast. In fact, a lot of the change had happened already. How else do you describe the atmosphere of the so called alternative nation in the immediate wake of Kurt Cobain's Death. But Billy Corgan and Smashing Pumpkins. They weren't changing for anyone. Not yet, at least. The Smashing Pumpkins were a huge band, existing within a big culture full of figureheads who hated their bigness. They generated big energy and got Spin magazine Artist of the Year big in return, which is exactly what they had aspired to since the beginning. In 1988, Billy Corgan was working at a record store in Chicago making $12,000 a year. He was brash and opinionated. Like I said, the guy was a record store clerk. The first time he met Darcy Retzky, it was on the sidewalk outside of a club at night. Billy was in a typically combative mood. He picked a fight with Darcy, a woman he did not know, arguing that the band playing inside were some record label manufactured crap. When he found out that Darcy played bass, he asked her to join the band that he was forming. And this offer contained no guarantee that he would not argue with her again. In fact, the tensions between Billy and his fellow bandmates would become a defining factor of their volatile chemistry. But once Billy, Darcy and guitarist James Iha found jazz drummer Jimmy Chamberlain, the Smashing Pumpkins became official that year in 1988. The people they were then, definitely the person Billy Corgan was then, gave zero shits about what a writer at Spin magazine would say about them six years later. They just wanted to be huge. Stadium huge. With Billy as their lead songwriter, they plotted out intricately arranged and meticulously produced music to befit the their overblown vision of themselves. Where their contemporaries looked to the rawness of, say, the Replacements or Huskerdoo or Bad Brains for inspiration, the Pumpkins chased a widescreened polish sound that you could eat off of. Think Boston Smoking Queens, Death on Two Legs, or Led Zeppelin at their most arena sized. If you were fronting an alternative rock band in the 1990s, you did not utter those kinds of musical references. Maybe Zeppelin, but Boston Queen, The Pumpkins, Butch Vig produced debut album Gish, released three years after they formed on Caroline Records, may have had more in common with the heavy riffage of the Stooges or Sabbath. But that heavy riffage was buffed. It was waxed, it was polished, it was rooted in the guitar heroics of classic rock radio. And it quickly became the biggest selling indie rock record in history. At that time, the Smashing Pumpkin's Gish was hard rock, it was psychedelic rock, it was dream rock. Gish was the sound of change. And that change came four months before Billy Corgan's self described songwriting equal Kurt Cobain and his band Nirvana released Nevermind. Now, I don't want to blow too much smoke up Billy Corgan's ass, but Billy Corgan was a major reason why Gish did as well as it did. Billy Corgan was not only brash and opinionated, he had ambition. He was driven by this need to be a part of something bigger than himself, the need to be connected. And that's because his childhood had been marked by isolation and trauma. He was made to feel unwanted and unloved. The abuse he suffered at the hands of family members was both physical and psychological. Often he was merely invisible, sitting off to one side, watching his own family father, a guitar player himself, run drugs and guns for Chicago organized crime. A bad childhood did a lot more than just make Billy Corgan ambitious. Isolation and trauma can radicalize a person. You can become something ugly, something you don't recognize. You claw back at your abusers. You act out at your oppressors. And at some point you come to the realization that the only reasonable response to violence is more violence. Billy Corgan would get his revenge, though he did not have to shed any blood to do it. He just had to spill some ink out onto the page. And later he would reveal that the Smashing Pumpkins ballad Disarmed from their second album, Siamese Dream, was written because he didn't have the guts to murder his parents. Those are his words, he said. I didn't have the guts to kill my parents. So I thought I'd get back at them through song. And rather than have an angry, angry, angry, violent song, I thought I'd write something beautiful and make them realize what tender feelings I have in my heart and make them feel really bad for treating me like shit. Disarms the song with the acoustic guitar and the string section and those huge bells tolling in the background. You know, the one with the Killer In Me is the Killer in youn Line. Like pretty much all of Billy Corgan's songs, the lyrics in this one are a raw nerve. The personal nature of Smashing Pumpkin songs, second perhaps only to Billy's distinct nasally whine, is one of the band's constants. You can point to Jimmy Chamberlain's hyper aggressive drumming style or d' Arcy Wretzky's disaffected cool standing there on the bass. But it's Billy Corgan's band. He is their Svengali. He's also their asshole. He argued with them re recording their parts in the studio after they failed to meet his expectations, as he did. Darcy's bass parts and James Iha's guitar parts for their breakthrough album Siamese Dream. And if he could play the drums, I'm sure he would have re recorded Jimmy Chamberlain's parts too. But in 1994, when Spin magazine magazine was crowning the Pumpkins Artist of the Year, Billy Corgan was reminding himself why he was leading a band in the first place. To not be so isolated, to be part of something bigger than himself. He was going to therapy, and he was being nicer to his fellow bandmates. And Billy Corgan was trying to change. Perhaps the oddest thing about it was that there was no sound, no elaborate theatrics to announce such an unprecedented transformation. In the movies, you'd hear tendons pop and bones expand. Hair would sprout so quickly that it would make noise. As it did. The person going through the sudden physical change would howl in the twisted combination of pain, fear and disbelief, like an American Werewolf in London, the Fly or the Thing. But this wasn't a movie. And it wasn't a book either. But it all went down like that Kafka book, the one about the guy who turns into a bug. It just happened. One moment this person was themselves, and the next they were someone else entirely. Something else. Billy Corgan could only imagine what had transpired in the few seconds that his back was turned, the heads swelling in size, the mouth contorting into a devilish grin, the eyes going black. Now he was facing it. The thing that just moments ago was a different person. The thing he could find no words to explain. The same thing that now refused to tell him how or why it had suddenly changed into its present form. The Shapeshift Lifter.
- [16:44]
Nancy Glass
I'm Nancy Glass, host of the Burden of Guilt Season 3 podcast. This is a story about a horrendous situation that destroyed two families. It started more than seven years ago, when Cindy and Kenny were two 40 somethings who had just gotten engaged. Days later, they walked into a scorched earth war they never saw coming.
- [17:07]
Jake Brennan
Turn around and place your hands behind your back. The cops came to my house and threw me in jail.
- [17:11]
Nancy Glass
And to Cindy's surprise, her fiance, Kenny, was charged with abusing one of her children.
- [17:17]
Jake Brennan
I never once doubted Kenny, and I always doubted the accusation.
- [17:22]
Nancy Glass
On Season three of Burden of Guilt, you'll hear a story about the lengths someone will go to in order to get what they want.
- [17:30]
Jake Brennan
This case has got to be one of the most despicable.
- [17:34]
Nancy Glass
Listen to season three A Burden of Guilt on the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Chelsea Handler from Dear Chelsea. Every week the news gets worse, the world gets crazier, and Yamanika is here to tell whoever's responsible, you're the problem.
- [17:54]
Jake Brennan
Do you know I just found out who Sydney Sweeney was? If he got a bunch of women, then I should have a bunch of men do better or do less so I don't have to do so much. I'm Yamanika and I'm out. Listen to youo're the Problem With Yamanika starting on July 4th 15th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Joy is essential, and it's also elusive. But now there's a new and exciting way to start your journey toward a more joyful existence. Joy101 if you're craving inspiration, support and useful tools to maximize your joy, tune into these candid, uplifting and moving on air chats. Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb starting June 10th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. The success of the Smashing Pumpkins debut album, Gish, created an atmosphere of great anticipation for record Number two. So when Siamese Dream was released by Caroline Records parent company Virgin Records In July of 1993, it debuted at number 10 on the Billboard album chart. Siamese Dream immediately put the Smashing Pumpkins in the conversation. Or perhaps in the argument is a better way to put it, seeing as how much the sound of the album flew in the face of grunge. Less discerning listeners may have lumped the Pumpkins in with Nirvana and Alice in Chains and Soundgarden and all those Seattle bands, but Siamese Dream boosted a much more produced sound than was in fashion at the time, and this was immediately a point of contention with the band's peers. Which was the whole point as far as Billy Corgan was concerned, because in his eyes, music was competitive. This wasn't the 1960s. This wasn't Brian Wilson fanboying over rubber sole and being inspired to make Pet Sounds, and then Paul McCartney falling in love with Pet Sounds and being inspired inspired to make Sgt. Pepper's. This was the 90s. This was the age of the East Coast west coast hip hop beef. This was Blur in Oasis going for the jugular in the press and on the charts. And this was us versus them, me versus you. And if the less discerning listeners and critics wanted to compare the Smashing Pumpkins to Nirvana, let them. Kurt Cobain was a worthy adversary For Billy to square off against Kurt instilled in Billy that fighting spirit. That is, until Kurt took his own life in a room above his garage. And then everything changed again. Billy Corgan slipped on the plaid lumberjacket. Its muted color palette was a change from the candy colored paisley shirts in his wardrobe. It was less psychedelic and more down to earth and decidedly Northwestern. Courtney Love had told him the jacket was hers when she gave it to him. This was back when the Smashing Pumpkins played Seattle. But Billy and the Pumpkins weren't in Seattle anymore. Tonight they were on stage at Radio City Music hall in New York City, running through soundcheck for the MTV Video Music awards. It was September 8, 1994. The Smashing Pumpkins were slated to perform that evening alongside Such fellow nights 1994 luminaries as Boyz II Men, Green Day, Salt N Pepa and the Beastie Boys. But it was the writer in the room working on a piece for Spin magazine, who clocked the jacket. The jacket wasn't Courtney's. It belonged to her deceased husband and the writer was Michael Azerath. It was Azeroth's job to remember all the little details. Details like that jacket. The the biography he'd been working on for years about Kurt Cobain and Nirvana was set to publish the following month. Speaking of months, here are some other five. That's how many months Kurt Cobain had been dead for. So what's with the jacket, Billy? Is this some hopeful transference of artistic greatness by osmosis or a ghoulish seizing of the greater cultural moment? Did he really buy that it was Courtney's jacket? Well, it was complicated before Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love became the most argued about rock and roll couple since John and Yoko. Courtney's affair with Billy Corgan was the worst kept secret in alternative rock. In October of 91, Courtney hopped on a plane to Chicago. She found Billy in his apartment. He was not alone. The betrayal stunk. Courtney stormed out. She used the last 10 bucks to her name to take a cab to the Metro club Nirvana just so happened to be playing. This was weeks after the release of Nevermind. The show is sold out. 500 people, give or take. It's since gone down in legend. But Courtney had no ticket. So she talked her way in, still reeling from Billy's infidelity. And she made her move that night on Kurt Cobain. Let's roll that back real quick. Courtney Love went to Chicago that day for the express purpose to see Billy Corgan, not to see Nirvana. That part was Happenstance. But you gotta wonder, if Billy Corgan hadn't been with another woman, then Courtney wouldn't have gone to the Metro. And then, well, the rest, as they say, wouldn't be history. History is what was on Kurt's mind two and a half years later when he was writing a suicide note on Excelsior Hotel letterhead in Rome. Before he swallowed 60 roofing pills. Kurt laid his feelings bare on little pieces of paper. He suspected that Courtney was sleeping with someone else. The same someone else who was now wearing Kurt's plaid lumberjacket while warming up for the VMAs. Billy has since caught on to the jacket's true origins. He had the writer to thank for that. And the decision was made to not wear it at the actual show that night. Because to appear before millions of Americans watching at home wearing that, to do so would be ghoulish. Especially on a night that featured a heartfelt tribute to Kurt from his 10 foot tall bandmate, Krist Novoselic. But before we took the jacket off, however, Billy Corgan couldn't help but feel the weight of it on his shoulders. It smelled of stale cigarette smoke. Its texture was somewhere between fuzzy and prickly. It was the jacket of a dead man, the jacket of an addict. An addiction had already threatened to rip apart the Smashing Pumpkins. To make Siamese Dream. The band had decamped to Marietta, Georgia, just outside Atlanta. This is a tried and sometimes true strategy for bands with junkies and users. Get out of town, go somewhere unfamiliar. You can't score in an unfamiliar place, okay? If you believe that, then you underestimate the determination of a drug addict. The Smashing Pumpkin's heroin abusing drummer, Jimmy Chamberlain, was not particularly tripped up by this geographic relocation. He found a source and he found a fix. Strange people began to haunt the studio. Then they were gone. And then Jimmy was gone too. One day turned into. Into more than one day turned into three, four, five days. And someone said they saw Jimmy Chamberlain in Atlanta. So spirits were once again high. Someone else said he was in a crowd at the 40 watt in Athens, watching REM perform. After a week of missed studio sessions, Billy Corgan's phone rang. It was his drummer, Jimmy Chamberlain. Jimmy said he'd done so much cocaine that he'd actually gone blind. It was like that fucking Sabbath song, Snowblind. Reeling, Jimmy Chamberlain promised to get help. He entered rehab for heroin and alcohol and returned to Marietta to finish tracking his drums. But Billy Corgan was keen to punish Jimmy Chamberlain for his sins, for making a Very stressful process. That much more stressful. Album number two was no joke. They were all failing him. Not just Jimmy, but James and Darcy. Tim. Billy had gone back and erased a bunch of James guitar parts in Darcy's bass tracks and re recorded them himself. Like I said, he wasn't competent enough a drummer to do that with Jimmy's parts. So when Jimmy Chamberlain returned from his lost weekend, from his boondoggle, from his Snow Blind REM show, Billy Corgan had Jimmy Chamberlain do take after take after take. Again Jimmy again, Jimmy again. Jimmy Chamberlain kept playing until he was worn out, until every last illicit substance dripped from his pores, until his fingers literally bled all over the drum kit. The killer in me is the killer in you. Siamese Dream was a violent undertaking. As violent as the Smashing Pumpkins performance was at the VMAs on September 8, 1994. The version of Disarm that they played that night was no longer the tender aching ballad with strings like it was on the record. Tonight the song was different. Tonight it was attacked. Tonight it bled like Jimmy Chamberlain's fingers bled back in Marietta, Georgia. Tonight it changed. The Smashing Pumpkins technically did not win anything at the VMAs in 1994. The award for best alternative video went not to Disarm, but to Heart Shaped Box by Nirvana. Still, something was happening. Billy had wrapped himself in the jacket of his songwriting equal. His creative adversary, like a heavyweight, wraps himself in the belt of the opponent he's vanquished. And while I'm not trying to insinuate that Billy Corgan felt he had defeated Kurt Cobain, you get the sense that in this moment, moment, Billy Corgan understood he suddenly had the world's attention in a way that he'd never had before. But the world is a vampire sent to drain. And when the Smashing Pumpkins chose this moment to double down on their bigness and deliver their most ambitious album to date, that's when the vampires, the Shapeshifters and the hard to kill habits all came crawling from the shadows. We'll be right back after this. Word, word, word. Looking back, the music of the 1990s was incredibly rich. The year 1995 was no exception. That was the year of Radiohead's the Bend and what's the Morning Glory by Oasis. It was the year Alanis Morissette released her massive record Jagged Little Pill. And also the year that Billy Corgan's tormentors, Pavement dropped their weird and polarizing wowee, zowie. But perhaps the boldest and biggest statement that year came from Smashing Pumpkins. Melancholy and the Infinite Sadness had no less than 28 songs spread across two seats CDs. It clocked in at 120 minutes and it debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 and sold close to a quarter million copies in its first week alone. Melancholy was absolutely meant to be this monumental next level statement. We know because Billy Corgan said so. He wanted it to be the wall for Generation X. The wall, as in Pink Floyd's legendary double album from 16 years prior. Now, when the Beatles made the Beatles, aka the White Album, or when the Rolling Stones made Exile on Main street, two of the greatest double albums of all time, those bands didn't do so with the same kind of intention. They weren't name checking other ambitious albums from the recent past. Not that there were any. They were just laying down songs in the studio. Great songs, but too many songs for one album. So at some point someone, Ringo or Mick Taylor or whoever was like, yo, this may need to be a double album. Billy Corgan's intention here is key because it was all about taking what the Pumpkins were and amplifying it, making it bolder, underlining it, super sizing it, changing it. So when the band went out to Tour melancholy in 1996, they were no longer a quartet. They were now the supported by a fifth member, the keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin. Now Melvoin was the brother of Wendy Melvoin, who you may know as a member of the Revolution, the band that made Purple Rain with Prince. He was also a member of the Family, a band the Prince assembled and which featured Jonathan's other sister and Wendy's twin, Susanna. And though Jonathan's musical pedigree was well known to Billy and to others, his predilection for hard drugs was not. But a few months on the road changes everything. By the evening of July 11, 1996, six months into the tour, Jonathan Melvoin and Jimmy Chamberlain had both OD'd at least one time. When confronted by Billy, the two offered up the standard junkie bullshit that they'd gone too far, they'd seen the error of their ways and it wouldn't happen again. But on July 11, it happened again. At 11pm that night, in a room at the Regency Hotel on Park Avenue in New York City, Jimmy and Jonathan were shooting heroin. Everything went black. When Jimmy came to around 3:30am the following morning, July 12, he was shocked to see that Jonathan was still unconscious. Jimmy tried to shake him awake, but Jonathan was out cold. A phone call was placed to The Pumpkin's security manager. And minutes later the security manager was in the hotel room dragging Jonathan's body into the shower where cold water rained down. No response. At 4:02am a call was placed to 91 1. At 4:15am paramedics arrived at the hotel room. And around the time Jonathan Melvoin was declared dead, Jimmy Chamberlain was taken into police custody and placed under arrest. The death of touring keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin happened at a time when being a rock star was synonymous with being into hard drugs. Just weeks earlier, Bradley Knoll of Sublime had died from a heroin overdose. And Depeche Modes Dave Gahn had been dramatically brought back to life after a speedball nearly killed him. Shannon Hoon of Blyde Melon was dead. Kristen Path of Hole, she was also dead. Stone Temple pilot Scott Weiland was back in rehab. But the Smashing Pumpkins were eager to distance themselves from what the media was making out to be an epidemic. So the first thing Billy, Darcy and James did after they were hauled down to the 19th Precinct and questioned on the morning of their drummer's arrest was to fire their drummer, Jimmy Chamberlain. It was a time of transition. A time in which their founding member, now their former drummer, pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct and began his court ordered drug treatment. The time in which the melancholy tour at last resumed after a month of canceled dates with Filter's Matt Walker behind the kit and the frogs as Dennis Flemian on keys. It was a time in which Billy Corgan shaved off his thinning hair. His shiny bald head signaled the start of something new and the aesthetic was minimal and the emotions were stark. The contrast was high pale white skin, black eyeliner, black fingernail polish clothing, also black. In just two years time, the Smashing Pumpkins would rebrand themselves as the ultimate alternative outsiders as goths who had emerged from under a cloak of paisley shirts, plaid lumberjackets and big polished Boston sized riffs. The transformation would be complete. Ever since he revealed his strange experience with the shape shifter to the public, he wondered if perhaps he had hallucinated the whole thing. But he'd been sober at the time. Did people hallucinate while they were sober? Surely it was possible. That was the whole point of the shapeshifter though, wasn't it? That anything was possible. Hallucinations or not, it didn't change what he saw. This was his reality, not someone else's. And they weren't there. They didn't bear witness. Perhaps one had to be open to the experience in order to have it. But there had to Be a reason that he had been shown this profound and inexplicable thing. Just like there had to be a reason why the United States government had invited him to a closed door, off the record meeting. Wait, what? That's right. The United States government had invited Billy Corgan to a closed door, off the record meeting. Something about cultural influence, disclosure. He didn't know why he'd been singled out. But then, the abductee has no clue why the aliens picked them to poke and prod, do they? Billy wasn't expecting to see it a second time, but he should have. These things are bound to recur once your eyes have been opened. It's tough to close them. And they were alone again. The naked body, just as he'd remembered it before. The turn. He took in the contours of the flesh, the slope of the hips and the arch of the back. It was hypnotizing. The spell had been cast. And so the change began. The lights became darker and the darks became light. The form was now fluid, the body rearranging itself as every other. The point of focus in the room faded away and time ground to a halt. He realized that his heart was pounding, his head was spinning, and unless his eyes were deceiving him, he was the subject of the gaze, of the shape shifter. Yet again, Change is inevitable. People change, and bands change. And after three records of anthemic, cathartic guitar rock, the Smashing Pumpkins changed dramatically for the first time. Isolation, the thing that had motivated Billy Corgan to start a band in the first place, was bearing down hard. Billy's mother was dying and his marriage was coming to an end. Jimmy Chamberlain was still Persona non grata. And so drum machines were becoming more commonplace. Billy, for one, wasn't sure what the new record was going to be, but he knew he wanted to make it together with James and Darcy, with the people that kept him from being isolated like he did as a child. So he rented a house in Los Angeles. They could all live there and record there, just like the Red Hot Chili Peppers did with Blood Sugar Sex Magic. But James needed space. James went to his own house every night after the sessions. And so here comes isolation. And here comes change. The Smashing Pumpkins fourth album, Adore, was released in June of 1998. It was quieter and gloomier than the band's previous albums, and it locked onto the electronica zeitgeist by incorporating more loops and machines than the band had ever done before. And the critics dug it. The public, not so much. After performing well upon its release, Adore quickly fell off the charts. For the first time in his career, Billy Corgan was not leveling up. And thus he felt more isolated, isolated than he had in years. Maybe the change was too much, too fast. In the video for the album's first single, Ava Ador, Billy James and Darcy have gone full goth. Billy's head and face are so white and his long gown is so black that he looks like Nosferatu. It's kind of a shock, actually. But perhaps not as shocking as what went down just one and a half years later. January 25, 2000. The south side of Chicago. Lee Darcy Retzky exited the building on West Grand Avenue and made a beeline to the car parked alongside the curb. She slipped into the passenger seat while the driver, Tony Young, settled in behind the wheel. The three bags of crack cocaine Darcy had just purchased were safely hidden inside Tony's pocket. Darcy was unaware that she was being watched. Across the street, undercover cops sat in an unmarked vehicle. They had seen Darcy and Tony walk in and out of the building. And while they didn't witness the deal go down on the inside, they knew it had gone down all the same. Now they just needed to wait for a reason to pull the car over. Any reason to nail the prodigal daughter. Darcy wasn't even supposed to be here. Four months earlier, in September of 1999, she quit the Smashing Pumpkins and left Chicago for Los Angeles to pursue an acting career. The decision was shocking at the time, especially because Jimmy Chamberlain had finally rejoined the band that spring. But what should have been this triumphant redemptive moment was suddenly sour, and the Pumpkins had only been whole for less than a year before they splintered apart again. Darcy gave no public comment. She went deep into civilian life. And then, in January, she quietly returned to Chicago. Much had changed since the last time she'd been here, back in 96, when Jimmy was fired, Darcy had gone on MTV with Billy and James. They all told Tabitha Soren about how they didn't tolerate hard drugs in the band, that they were breaking with the stereotype of the live, fast, die rock and roller. They weren't the ones that would burn out. Instead, they would fade away. And now, in Chicago, in the year 2000, the Darcy of 96 was fading away fast as she became the thing she once spoken about. Tony turned the key of the ignition and put the car in drive. He pulled away into the darkness without the car's headlights on. Offense number one. He made an illegal U turn. And then another offense. Numbers two and three. The Flash of blue lights in the wall of the siren came next, and Tony Young pulled the car over. Cops flanked either side. Tony and Darcy were searched, and the cops found the crack easy. Tony said it wasn't his. He said Darcy gave it to him to hold. And Darcy may have been a hypocrite, but she wasn't a liar. She confessed, confirmed Tony's story. She was arrested and charged with possession. And while Darcy began an arduous legal process, her former band with a clean Jimmy Chamberlain, put the finishing touches on their newest record. Darcy had played on the Pumpkin's fifth album, Machina and the Machines of God, but it was Melissa Offdemar, formerly of Hole, who's going out on tour as her replacement. Whether it's the Pixies or the Police or the Smiths or even the Beatles, the stories of clashing egos and controlling taskmasters are often the driving force behind a band breakup. In the case of Darcy's breakup with the Smashing Pumpkins, it was years before anyone said anything about what had happened. Darcy's arrest for crack cocaine suddenly put her in a different light. And so when Billy Corgan later said that Darcy didn't quit, but that she was fired for being a mean spirited drug addict who refused to get help, you had to admit that that kinda tracked. Darcy, on the other hand, offered up her own point of view, and it too seemed to be legit. In 2018, nearly two decades since she'd spoken to the press, she gave an interview to Alternative Nation. She referred to her past relationship with Billy as incredibly abusive, saying that he loved to humiliate people and shame people in front of other people. She described the fights and arguments as constant and left because she didn't have the energy to fight anymore. She even included a dig at Billy's unbelievable shapeshifter story, adding, I honestly think he may have a brain tumor. And so we've come full circle back to the shapeshifter thing. Did that actually happen? Do I think Billy Corgan saw someone transform in front of him not once, but twice? Do I think Darcy was fired because she broke the cardinal rule of the band by using hard drugs? Or do I think she quit because, as Kim Deal and Kim Gordon in Pavement have previously stated, Billy Corgan is an asshole. What I believe and what you believe is all subject to change. Perspectives are always changing, just like the music and just like the Smashing Pumpkins, because people are always changing. The goal is to steer clear of any change that turns you from someone who makes great music into a total disgrace. I'm Jake Brennan and this is Disgrace. All right, guys, thanks for checking out this episode of Disgraceland. Question of the Week an obvious one. Do you think Billy Corgan actually saw somebody turn into, I don't know, whatever the hell he says he saw them turn into? Do you think he saw a shape shifter? Not once or twice. And if the answer is no, I want to know why. Why? Same with if the answer is yes, 617906-6638 voicemail and text. Call me with your answer and you might hear yourself on the next bonus episode of Disgraceland. The afterparty coming up right after this. All right, here comes some credits. Disgraceland was created by yours truly and is produced in partnership with Double Elvis, the Exactly Right Network in Iheart Publishers. Podcasts credits for this episode can be found on the show notes page@gracelandpod.com if you're listening, as a Disgraceland All Access member, thank you for supporting the show. We really appreciate it. And if not, you can become a member right now by going to Disgracelandpod.com membership. Members can listen to every episode of Disgraceland ad free, rate and review the show and follow us on Instagram, Tik Tok, Twitter and Facebook, Facebook Disgracelandpod and on YouTube@YouTube.com Disgracelandpod Rocka Rolla He's a bad, bad man.