Billy Corgan says he will never reunite Smashing Pumpkins, in case you haven't been listening to Billy Corgan for the last decade or so

By Sean O'Neal | May 6, 2011 | 5:39pm

Aux Features Music

If it wasn’t already clear from his recent berating of Pavement over a minor, ambiguous lyrical slight from 1994, Billy Corgan is the type to hold grudges. Long, deep grudges, the kind that sustain him, as his body is essentially 60-percent water and viscera and 40-percent cumulative huffy inhalations through the nose, in defiance of everything we know about human anatomy. So it’s probably not surprising to learn that his unique physical composition has made Corgan immune to the virus of ’90s nostalgia, and he’s not planning on cashing in with a Smashing Pumpkins reunion anytime soon. “That’s just one of those things that are never going to happen,” he tells Rolling Stone in a new interview. ‘If you don’t see somebody for a while, there’s the old thing, 'Absence makes the heart grow fonder.’ Well, we haven’t had absence. The things that have happened between us in the interim haven’t been good. There’s been lawsuits and lots of stupid stuff. It’s only made it worse. If it was bad before, it’s really bad now.”

Of course, Corgan already did put together a new Smashing Pumpkins/Smashing Pumpkins tribute act with original drummer Jimmy Chamberlin, and although Chamberlin left the group again in 2009—either because he was fed up with Corgan being so domineering, or because a domineering Corgan fired him, depending on which account you believe—Corgan says that there is no “super bad blood between me and Jimmy” that would prevent them from possibly playing together again. However, as with the previous Smashing Pumpkins “reunion,” that’s as far as it’s ever going to go, as Corgan says he “cannot in any way, shape, or form ever envision standing on a stage, playing music again with James [Iha] and D’arcy [Wretzky]. I just don’t see any situation where that would be possible.”