Billy Corgan Tells Crazy Stories About His Childhood - Joe Rogan

Hello freak bitches. To be, you're certainly eccentric. Yeah, that's fine. I come from a long line of eccentrics. My father was a drug dealing, gun toting, musician. Was he really? Mad man. Yeah. Drug dealing. Oh yeah. What kind of drugs? You name it. Really? Oh yeah. Wow. It's like quick stories. When I was a kid, my father was a musician, so I remember I used to like, I wasn't allowed to touch his guitars, but I was allowed to look at them. So I remember one day I was walking past the bedroom and I saw a guitar case under the bed and I was like, oh I wonder what that is. Did he get a new guitar? So I went and slipped the thing out and I flipped it open. It was a sawed off shotgun in a guitar case. Just laying there, you know, in the house. Or you know, I'd go to open something. It would be like 10 pounds of weed, you know. That was the world I grew up in. Where'd you grow up? Outside of Chicago, about an hour outside. Wow. Yeah, my dad got arrested a bunch of times in massive busts and drugs. It's just crazy. And people knocking on the door in the middle of the night and getting shot at. My dad says he's been shot at nine times. Never hit? No. That's lucky. Stabbed two or three times. Jesus Christ. My favorite story, one of my favorite stories with my father was he was doing a drug deal and or he was buying drugs. And so he stops and wearing the guy got in the car and then the guy pulled out a gun and stuck it in his ribs. You know, and did like give me all your money. And my dad looked and said, kill me. Because he was unhappy. So he figured, fuck it. He said, just kill me. And the guy flipped out and left the car. Jesus Christ. He told you all this? Oh yeah. I got a lot of these stories post haste. Is he still around? Oh yeah, he's still around. He's still kicking. How is it for him like seeing you as a son? Um, that's a weird thing because in the beginning he was very dismissive of the music. Yeah, he was not supportive of me playing the guitar. My father was a great musician. I mean, I mean that with great sincerity, my father was truly talented. And in the beginning, he was not supportive at all. Didn't want me to play the guitar. Didn't want me involved in music. And even after I put on my first album, which went on to be at the time was like the most successful independent album ever released. So it wasn't like an insignificant moment in my life. My dad just kind of shrugged his shoulders and was like, it's okay. You know, it was like, what are you talking about? Like, wow. You know, and if you know my early, it's like, you know, it's guitar heavy. There's cool stuff, solos. And he was just like, eh. It wasn't until my second album and the band blew up that he started to kind of change his tune. Then he became more supportive. Then he got really weirdly jealous. And then he started doing weird things like he'd call me and be like, um, if you need me to write you any songs, like I'm like number one. And he's like, he's asking me to write songs. It was so weird. But then he was also on a lot of drugs. And so there was that, you know, there's that interweave of like, and weird stuff like, you know, um, you know, one day he calls me and he's like, my dad, uh, always played this cool 1964 purple flying B that was like his guitar, you know, and you know, my dad to me was like a star and he still is in my mind. So, um, he told me one day, you know, when I die, you know, I'm going to give you my guitar and then fast forward four years later, he calls me up. He's like, yeah, I'm going to put this guitar in eBay. So did you want to buy it? No, I had to buy the guitar you're supposed to get when he dies. Yeah. Fuck. Yeah. Just weird stuff like that. It's been a lot of that. So anybody who's grown up in that, those types of situations knows what I'm talking about. It's like wacky world. You're never quite sure what angle is going on because the need for money depending on what situation is going on, you know? Yeah. So you didn't reinforce, you reinforce this idea that I've always had that everyone that I know that's interesting came from a fucked up childhood. I couldn't argue against it. It's hard because do you have children? I have one son. Yeah. He's just going to be two. It's for me, it's so it's a conflict because I take care of my kids and I'm around and I give them a lot of love and they're not fucked up. And I'm like, damn, my kids going to be boring. All of my friends, all of them come from fucked up households. It's all chaos. And they created the pressure created these diamonds. Yeah. There's something to be said for the adversity. And my dad would even say to me weird things like, it's good you had a fucked up childhood because it made you successful. Yeah. And I'm thinking like, I would have preferred like Disneyland with you. You know what I mean? Maybe I wouldn't have been miserable at Disneyland if it wasn't for you. Yeah. Man, I think your story is amazing though. I mean, I know it probably sucked growing up like that, but damn, to be able to tell everybody your dad was this guitar playing gun toting drug deal and psycho. I mean, that's a bad ass story. Yeah. I think you appreciate this in the gangster tradition. So there was this thing that happened when I was probably about 10 or 12 where there was a local club and my dad played there all the time. And I came back to the house one day and the house was full of like smoky equipment. Like you could smell like smoke fire. And he said, oh, the club burned down. And so they had ran in the fire, retrieved the gear, some kind of story like that. And so that was the story for years was he was eating across the street pancakes at four in the morning and saw the club burn down. Years later, I heard the real story. He was in a car with a chick doing whatever. And he saw some mob guy walk in the club with gasoline, light the club on fire. So he knew it was arson, but because he knew it was mob related, he couldn't say anything. And that's like, that's like every story is like there's the real story in the story. I got when I was a kid. Jesus. So he ran into the fire just to get equipment. Yeah, I think he ran in and got his guitar. He was able to save his guitar. And then, and then, and then of course the police and came to question him because they knew he was there on the scene or something. And of course he said, I didn't see anything because he didn't want to die. Because, you know, Chicago with the mob, I mean, forget about especially back then in the 70s, it was like they ran the town.