corgan is often attacked for his oversized ego, but he actually strikes me as fairly humble - if startling and slightly painfully pretentious. iha, on the other hand, doesn't seem to be able to get over himself, and that's what strikes me as the root of the problem.
jeb tweebance
again
deathtokoalas
i told you....
but, wait.... ...are you paul mccartney?
Susie G
Billy Corgan can be quite the musical genius but he's also a control freak and I think that eventually drove the band insane. The fact that Corgan has had rocky relationships with MANY people besides James Iha is more a testament to his lack of character than anybody else's. Ive always been fond of James and Darcy and it stopped being the Pumpkins without them.
Gordon Mccracken
drug issues are well known, could see her functioning, touring, recording with any professional band?
deathtokoalas
afaik, her horrible drug problem is that she likes pot and the reason she's not making music is that she's grown out of it and was never really that into it in the first place. heroin is a tour problem. marijuana is not a tour problem.
not to be rude, but the reality is that nobody really cares about d'arcy, anyways. i think iha at the least provided a sort of creative foil. outside of the odd vocal part, i really don't think d'arcy contributed anything.
when i saw 'em in ottawa back in '96, i wasn't even convinced she was playing.
people move on and blah blah blah. it's probably too late now to reconstruct what's been lost. but, i think billy needed james on a certain level. d'arcy? they honestly probably would have been better off with a better bassist....
Gordon Mccracken
I am pretty sure she was arrested for crack possession
evenflowjimbo
Eh. I can see why he doesn't want to talk to him anymore. Billy is super Republican and just seems like a total asshole.
deathtokoalas
i get more of a libertarian vibe from him, but you have to put it in the context of the american political spectrum. you get the same kind of thing from krist novoselic and a lot of other people that came out of the period. they're out there working with these kind of right-wing groups and stuff, but if you listen to what they have to say they're obviously not really aligned with their politics.
where billy and krist (and jello and chomsky and countless others) are absolutely right is in looking at the democratic party and understanding that it's a hopeless vehicle - there's not a significant difference between it and the republican party. supporting the democrats is worse than a waste of time, it's making things worse. so, when you understand that the united states is a one-party state - and there's a lot of rhetoric, but i mean really come to terms with it and grasp it - then the obvious next step is to look at third parties.
in the united states, there is not a third party on the left. what you have are people like jesse ventura or ron paul that have some good policies and some horrific policies. if you're serious about breaking the two-party system, the reality is that that kind of right-libertarianism is the only option at the moment. you can hope for wealthy artists to support more egalitarian movements, but you can't expect them to go out and build them - that's something that has to be done from the ground up.
i'm about as left-wing as you can get, but if you were to take me back to 2008 and make me vote for obama or paul, i would have picked paul. that would not have been an endorsement of paul's social darwinism, it would have been a rejection of obama's imperialist rhetoric. they're both evil in their own ways, but the libertarian right is considerably less evil than the interventionist left.
i agree that it would often be best if billy just shut up when it comes to certain things, but it's hard to blame him for being realistic about what our options are in terms of actual political shifts.
Gordon Mccracken
I concur, I was raised in a Democratic leaning house hold but have seen the hypocrisy within it and lean Libertarian myself.
metal134
According to Billy Corgan and Jimmy Chamberlin, she wasn't playing, some of the time.
Leo B
D'Arcy could definitely play the bass. If you are a seasoned guitar and/or bass player you can clearly see and hear that on the live clips. With the high standards Billy has he would surely have fired her if she couldn't play.
You could say she lacked a bit of energy and inspiration in her playing though, but I think Billy also wanted the bass to be a bit more discrete in their music. It does seem to me however, that D'Arcy didn't share the same passion for music as the other three in the band, she always seemed a bit distant
deathtokoalas
i'm not really arguing that she couldn't play. i'm suggesting that she probably didn't.
there were relationships involved, it must have been messy and confusing...
the argument corgan generally used was "i can do it faster" - and it might have even been true at the time.
but that sounds like an excuse to me. what that really means is "it's my song, and i want the bass to sound the way i want the bass to sound so i'm playing the bass and if you don't like it then go home."
Leo B
oh you meant in the studio. I thought you meant live lol
deathtokoalas
i'd be surprised if she played on anything in the studio at all after gish.
and i did say that it didn't seem like she was playing when i saw them in '96 (with a big budget) on the mellon collie tour.
there were actually a few points (notably the rocket stage show) where i wasn't entirely sure that billy was playing either, while there were points where it was pretty obvious that he was.
it's hard to speculate further.
metal134
I didn't say she couldn't play. But Billy was quoted as saying (and I wish I could remember the exact quote) that he ended up recording most of James' and D'arcy's parts himself on the albums, which was later corroborated by Butch Vig.
ZeroGravitySubstance
You are correct about Billy recording all the bass and guitar parts on the first two albums but that was not the case on Mellon Collie. James said for all the lead parts it was divided up about fifty/fifty and who knows how the rhythm parts were divided up. And yes, D'arcy is not the greatest bassist haha.
rlos duarte
well said
VTK XTO
Lack of character? Maybe he's got a tough personality, but Corgan can never be accused of lacking character.
OD138
You know for a fact she's only into pot? I bet you're wrong about that.
deathtokoalas
i do appear to have been wrong; she has a problem with crack cocaine, as others pointed out.
Mattydigs
Which is fair. A true artist sacrifices everything for the good of the song.
Creat Swartz
Are you serious? Billy humble. That is a good one!
deathtokoalas
in twenty-whatever years, the truth is that i don't think i've ever read or seen him say anything positive about himself. he only deprecates himself.
it's an imaginary media construct.
