Billy Quotes - '96
Billy : "Before the band was formed, I'd tell people I was going to form this band--nobody believed me. When I said the band was going to be big, nobody believed me. By the time I said I was going to do a double album, I'd built up enough 'nobody believed me' that people started believing me!"
Guitar Player, Jan '96
Billy : "I could be wrong, but to me it seems so much more important to communicate in all these other ways as well. I know what it's like to think, 'I'm going to be a great guitar player and nothing else.' I know what it's like to be an insecure songwriter but a really good guitar player, who uses his guitar playing to buttress the songwriting. I've been on both sides of it, and there's so much more satisfaction for me now. The best analogy I can draw is that the guy who plays the solo gets 20 seconds in the spotlight, but the guy who writes the song gets the full three minutes. That's the difference."
Guitar Player, Jan '96
Billy : "I believe that God deals you a weird deck of cards, some positive things and some negative things, and you need the ability to put all those things together. There's no better window to your potential than yourself. You know what you're capable of, and it's pretty difficult to live life knowing that your potential and capabilities are unfulfilled."
Guitar Player, Jan '96
Billy : "We've pretty much maxed out the band we formed eight years ago. The double album has accomplished what I hoped it would: People can't just write us off anymore. ... If people don't respect us now, they never will."
The Greenville News, Jun '96
Billy : "I think the band can still go further. I don't think we've reached everybody that we're capable of reaching yet."
I : "Will you know where that point is when you've reached it?"
Billy : "I think we'll know when people stop asking us where we're going (laughs). I'm being snide."
Big O Interview, Mar '96
Billy : "One of the greatest compliments I get is when somebody says to me : "You say exactly what I wish I could say. You say the things that, if I could articulate and put my thoughts together, that's how I would say it." That's a great compliment, and I think that personally I've had a willingness to go into territory that most people would never go into. We take our lumps for it, but I'm proud that I've had that balls to do it. I wouldn't have it any other way, you know. It's hard sometimes, because I get sick of talking about why I am the way I am. The simple answer is I don't know. I was always this way."
Big O Interview, Mar '96
Billy : "We can intellectualize till the end of time but there are certain common truths. And there's an integrity that you know, when you go to bed. My base of integrity is when I go to bed, do I lie in bed questioning what I did? Do I lie in bed thinking, "I'm such an idiot. Why did I do that? Why did I sell myself out there?" Most nights I go to bed feeling pretty damn good, because at least I go to bed with a clear conscience."
Big O Interview, Mar '96
Billy : "Actually, about two months in (to recording Mellon Collie) we started
doing test albums. One night Flood and Jimmy and I piled in my car and drove around for three hours and listened to the whole thing, trying to get an impression of how it was flowing, what was working and what wasn't. At that point we had to cut some. We felt it was really important that it flow, that it not get boring, that it not suffer."
Impact Magazine, Jul/Aug '96
Billy : " When we first started as a band people would say, 'What are your influences' or 'What are you listening to'..and then you would say 'Oh, we're listening to this and this and this' ..and then you would read a review and it would say, 'They sound just like' ..and then they would list your influences...and you're influences would be used against you, as an example to show that A) you weren't original, B) you were ripping other people's music, and C) you weren't really worth listening to because you might as well listen to these other great bands."
'Berlin Bullet' Interview, Apr '96
Billy : "I dunno, is this an interview or a counseling session? Are you here to help me or ask me questions?"
'Berlin Bullet' Interview, Apr '96
Billy : "People should just recognize us for our achievement and our power as a musical unit. We never really get in with alternative rock, that community never fully accepted us and we're not quite mainstream."
Hit Music, '96
Billy : "I think that given all that happened to music, we come out looking pretty good. We've stayed our course, we haven't sold out. You can look at the double album two ways. You can call it totally pretentious over indulgence, or you can look at it as right when the career move would have been to come out with the hit album, we do the opposite. To me, that's integrity--doing exactly what you want, not what people expect you to do."
Hit Music, '96
Billy : " The very notion that you're not being pretentious when your standing up there singing your songs is so wrong. The very act of rock and roll is pretentious: "Hey sit still while we assult you for an hour with our music"--it's totaly pretentious."
Hit Music, '96
Billy : "It's weird, so many people seem focused on the band breaking up that you almost feel obliged to."
Hit Music, '96
Billy : "Well, I mean thats a slight misrepresentation. The joke was like...I came up with the name, kind of like a, telling some jokes with some friends & I thought oh that would be a stupid band name to have. There was no band, I hadn't even met anybody in the band and people would say, I would say - Oh I'm going to start a band. And they would say - Oh what's the name oh it? I'd say Oh The Smashing Pumpkins, ha ha. There was no band. then when I met the band, they were like what are we going to call it, I was like why don't we just call it this funny name for a while and we'll just figure out a real name eventually. Then people would come up, 6 months later - Hey how is your band, The Smashing Pumpkins? It just...people wouldn't forget it. So that was the #1 thing to happen, which is recognition."
KROQ Radio, Feb 2 '96
Billy : " BC: Um...sometimes you just gotta open up your brain and just see what comes in. Mayonaise was like one of those. James said what are we going to call this song. And I just said, kinda went - Mayonaise! And that was the end of it. I spend more time explaining Mayonaise then we actually spent writing it, recording it, and playing it."
KROQ Radio, Feb 2 '96
Billy : "It's very hard to explain how the band works, but the bands works so, all I want to say is that I love my band members. They are amazing people. They are all individuals if you ever met them. I mean they are not my pawns. We are a real band. If you ever seen us play live you know that, we are not a bunch of automatons."
KROQ Radio, Feb 2 '96
Billy : "There are four ZERO shirts."
KROQ Radio, Feb 2 '96
Billy : " BC: Well, it's interesting. One of those crazy Courtney stories. (laughing) Um. We were playing in Seattle and for some reason it was summer but it was cold. And, you know, she goes, 'Here, I brought you this coat'. And it looks awful Seattle-like and I look at her, and she goes 'Don't worry, its mine. It wasn't his'. Fine. So, I'm wearing this coat, da-da-da, I go to New York to do the MTV awards, and people who knew Kurt, and who know me were going 'Oh my god, you're wearing his coat. What the hell is going on?' And I'm like, 'Told the story, off goes the coat'. I do the SPIN interview, and the guy was the one who wrote the Nirvana book, Come As You Are, whatever. So, and he asked me about the coat. It was an innocent like 'I didn't know'. And suddenly its in the thing like I'm wearing it like some kind of badge. And then I'm Kurt Jr. or something, you know? So there's one of those crazy Courtney stories."
KROQ Radio, Feb 2 '96
Billy : "Um, we always just try to think 'what's the best thing for this song?', you know? And, not really, 'cause people are like (takes on some sort of farmer's accent) "Well, I came to hear Disarm and I didn't hear that string part'. And its like, well, you know, if you want to hear the string part, listen to the album. I mean, we try to make the best album, and it's just those kinds of decisions. We sit around and go 'what ridiculous things can we do now?'"
KROQ Radio, Feb 2 '96
Billy : "That's a difficult question. I think an audience deserves to expect a lot of us musically. I think they deserve us to be good, in good health, well rehearsed...all of those things. But what the audience doesn't deserve is me on a string. I think anybody who knows Smashing Pumpkins knows that I'm a highly emotional person and that you can't put me in a box. I'm not who I am because I'm a normal happy go-lucky kind of guy, the world is great person. I'm a complicated, emotionally dense person, and so that person comes out on stage from night to night id different person depending on circumstances and events. What I have trouble with is the expectation that I'm supposed to behave a certain way."
Rip Magazine, Jun '96
Billy : "Any way you slice it, there is not another band in the world that is like the Smashing Pumpkins, who can play hard rock, pop music, psychedelic music, gentle music,"
Manchester Guardian, Mar 8 '96
Billy : "There's a lot of chemistry in the band that the outside world could never witness," he says to me. "In our band, D'Arcy is absolutely the mortal authority. She's the moral conscience-it's really hard to do something if D'Arcy thinks it's f*****d."
Details Magazine, Oct '96
Billy : "I was a well-behaved nightmare. My stepmother told me that at five I was complete intimidating. People have told me that at five I was pretty capable of carrying out completely adult conversations about completely adult things."
Details Magazine, Oct '96
Billy : "My first real kiss was with somebody I really, really liked, and still like, and it was in my bedroom in the suburbs. There was no music playing, and it was after school, I think. When you're young like that, and especially being as weird as I was, I don't think it was so much of a romantic love as it was a love of the spirit and the connection that two people can have at that age. We still have that same connection. It stopped articulating itself as a romance, but we're still really good friends. I love her very much."
Details Magazine, Oct '96
Billy : "I want the power and emotional content to be so overwhelming it's almost hard to watch. Because when I go see other bands, I want them to take my breath away."
Details Magazine, Oct '96
Pumpkins' Quotes Menu
Hello Kitty Kat Page
Redhead Cat's Main Page
Email: s339086@student.uq.edu.au
