Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan Talks About Guitar That Was Stolen In Detroit – Meltdown
A couple weeks back, I interviewed Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan. He told me the story of losing a guitar from St. Andrews Hall back in 1992.
“We drove up from Chicago in 1992 to play a quick gig. We didn’t have a full road, and at the end of the show, a guy walked on stage and literally walked off with one of the guitars….went out the back door and fans saw the guy walking down the alley with the guitar. I offered a reward for it at the time, $10,000.”
He continued, “A decade later, I think I offered a $20,000 reward, no questions asked, no police. I kept hearing rumors. The guitar was here and there, but no one would ever fess up to it. And after 27 years, I was contacted by a man who knew somebody who knew somebody who had the guitar. I’d gotten a couple of those calls through the years, so I was very skeptical, but it turned out to actually be the guitar and the people claimed, you know, and again, I don’t really care, but people claimed that it had been in their basement for 20 years and no one knew whose guitar it was.
But yeah, I got that guitar back up for 27 years. It was pretty wild.”
I asked him if he’d used it on the upcoming ATUM albums.
“Uh, I haven’t, it’s very particular sound, but for fans of the band, it was the guitar that I used on our first album. It’s very much the distinctive sound of our first album, Gish. So, it’s very much of that time to me and, uh, I haven’t been inspired to write any songs on it, but it’s pretty cool to play the guitar cuz it certainly brings me back. Cause that was the guitar I played on stage during all those early tours. Yeah, very sentimental to me. Very important to me.”
-Meltdown-
