Apparently, there is no love lost between Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips and Billy Corgan, and it all stems from when they toured together during Lollapalooza in 1994.
It’s another nugget to come via the new oral history of the fest, LOLLAPALOOZA: The Uncensored Story of Rock’s Wildest Festival. We’ve already found out that Perry Farrell, who founded the event regarded Green Day as a “boy band”. Now it seems that Billy Corgan’s behaviour during the 1994 event, well, left something to be desired.
Kevin Lyman, who was an artist liaison at the time and went on to create the Warped Tour, recalled Corgan being mean to his guitar tech Billy Howerdel, who would go on to form his own band, A Perfect Circle: “Billy Corgan was treating (Howerdel) like such shit, throwing guitars at him, just being horrible.”
Howerdel largely backs this up. “I got fired off that tour working for Billy and (Pumpkins bassist) D’arcy (Wretzky) — the first and only time I’ve been fired from a job. I don’t remember guitars being thrown at me, but there were a lot of behaviours that just didn’t seem healthy, that you definitely didn’t want to be around anyway.”
This was noticed by other artists, including Wayne Coyne of the much-lower-down-the-bill Flaming Lips: “Billy Corgan was such a raging asshole, especially back then, that you didn’t want to stick around and watch them.”
“We liked a few of their songs, but we would just despise him after a while. So we’d leave right after the Beastie Boys played to avoid the traffic, because the audience was also starting to clear out.”
And the bad feeling apparently lingers more than thirty years on. “We’re still avoiding him to this day,” says Coyne. “We’ve played shows in the past couple years where he’s hanging around and you can tell he wants to come into our dressing room. And we’re like, ‘No, we’re not here!’”
For his part, Corgan admitted that he felt under pressure during the tour. Nirvana had originally been scheduled to headline, but after Kurt Cobain’s death, the Pumpkins were bumped up the bill. They faced hostility from audiences and were fully prepared to give it back.
“So we’re headlining what became historically the biggest Lollapalooza ever. And there they are. There are the same football players who used to bully us in the hallways. I looked at it as, like, ‘No. You’re the enemy and we are here to take you on.’”
He admitted that he still has strangers approaching him saying they “refuse to ever see the band or listen to the band” after seeing them at Lollapalooza that summer.
LOLLAPALOOZA: The Uncensored Story of Rock’s Wildest Festival is out now.
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