Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne says Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan was a “raging asshole” on Lollapalooza tour: “We’re still avoiding him to this day”

The Flaming Lips‘ Wayne Coyne has said that Billy Corgan of The Smashing Pumpkins was a “raging asshole” on the original Lollapalooza tour.

• READ MORE: Billy Corgan on his new podcast ‘The Magnificent Others’: “I’d like to celebrate people in the culture who are misunderstood”

The revelation comes as part of a new book Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock’s Wildest Festival, published on March 25. The oral history paperback details the ambitious and bizarre conception of the touring music festival by Perry Farrell, who had originally conceived it as a farewell tour for Jane’s Addiction.

In the book, Corgan reflects on the origins of the tour, saying: “Lollapalooza was supposed to be Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Beastie Boys, and then Nirvana dropped out and we slotted down and became the headliner.” He added: “I would have welcomed the challenge every night to try to blow them off the stage, and I know that [Kurt Cobain] would have tried to blow me off the stage every night.”

The frontman went on to say that it was a daunting task taking over as headliner, saying: “You talk about going into Middle America at the height of MTV, in 1994, and I was twenty-six or twenty-seven. I was not prepared for that at all.”

He went on to admit that there was hostility between him and the audiences, saying: “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.’”

His behaviour on the tour, he admits, continues to follow him, as he explained he still has strangers approaching him saying they “refuse to ever see the band or listen to the band” after seeing them at Lollapalooza.

It turns out that feeling extended to some fellow artists and crew members on the tour. Kevin Lyman, who was an artist liaison on Lollapalooza in 1994 and went on to create the Warped Tour, recalled Corgan being mean to his guitar tech Billy Howerdel, who would go on to form A Perfect Circle.

“Billy Corgan was treating [Howerdel] like such shit, throwing guitars at him, just being horrible,” Lyman said.

Howerdel himself went on to say: “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.”

Another account of Corgan’s behaviour comes from Flaming Lips singer Coyne, who said: “Billy Corgan was such a raging asshole, especially back then, that you didn’t want to stick around and watch them.”

He went on to say: “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.”

Coyne added that he’s still not on friendly terms with Corgan: “We’re still avoiding him to this day. 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!’”

Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock’s Wildest Festival was written and curated by best-selling authors Richard Bienstock and Tom Beaujour.

The pair recently shared on Rolling Stone podcast Rolling Stone Music Now that one of Farrell’s ideas was to include a giant burrito meant to be shared by all festivalgoers. Farrell was “obsessed” with the idea, Beaujour revealed. “It’s truly the most prodigious health hazard you could think of, but that was what he was really going for.”

Green Day‘s Billie Joe Armstrong also shared that Perry Farrell dismissed the group as a “boy band” and didn’t want them on the bill in 1994.

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