The Edge

When alternative rock exploded in the 1990s, one of the movement’s paramount unspoken rules was no guitar solos. Rules are made to be broken, though—especially in rock ‘n’ roll and even more so in alternative—and one of the first bands to buck the trend was Chicago’s Smashing Pumpkins, which released a string of seminal U.S. alt-rock albums throughout the late 1980s and 1990s and boasted one of Generation X’s most articulate spokesmen and first bona fide guitar heroes in Billy Corgan.

To fully appreciate Corgan’s sheer musical “out-there-ness,” you have to keep in mind the context of the times. When grunge hit big and everybody else was gazing at their shoes, sticking to the chords and so not soloing, Corgan stepped forward with lengthy and unconventionally next-level instrumental breaks that could go from shredding, screaming incendiary intensity in one song to delicate, whispering beauty in the next.

More than 30 million albums later and fresh from the success of the Smashing Pumpins 2007 Zeitgeist reunion album and world tour, Corgan worked closely with Fender to create his signature model, the Billy Corgan Stratocaster guitar. Released in June 2008, it’s an extraordinarily versatile and modern take on the Stratocaster, meticulously crafted to Corgan’s exacting specifications and specifically designed with custom-wound pickups to get the high-gain sound and signature mid-’90s buzz-saw tone that helped make Corgan such a distinctive and influential guitarist.


FN: What attracts you to the Stratocaster?
BC: Hmm, where can I start? Well, my first real guitar was a Fender Mustang®. It was more of an economic thing—I couldn’t really afford any other guitar, and I think I got it for a couple hundred bucks. And I always loved that it had this sort of Indian thing—you know, there wasn’t a lot of sustain on the guitar, and I think in my early playing I was sort of attracted to that kind of Cure style of playing, even though I didn’t know the Cure existed—but that sort of open-string-y type thing. So in the early days of the band, that’s what I played, but I could never get the gain that I wanted.

And then Jimmy (Smashing Pumpkins drummer Jimmy Chamberlin) actually sold me my first Stratocaster, which was a 1973-ish-era Strat®. And playing the Stratocaster through a high-gain amp—it suddenly was like it evoked all the things that I liked that I’d been hearing on recordings, whether it was Hendrix or Blackmore. And I’d never put it together—it was never a choice of, like, “Yeah, I want to play a Stratocaster.” I just got one, and when I played it, it suddenly brought alive what I was looking for in music.

If you were to ask specifically what it was that I liked about the Stratocaster right away, never really having even really played one—because my father played Gibson®, and so I attached what I thought was good sound to my father’s playing; he’s a different type of guitar player than I am—was the idea that you could play a very individualistic style, and yet you don’t end up sounding like everybody. And what I mean by that is if you think of the difference, say, between Jimi Hendrix’s playing, Ritchie Blackmore’s playing, Uli Jon Roth early days Scorpions playing, my playing—you have completely different guitar players; Yngwie Malmsteen; completely different guitar players, yet the instrument never makes their playing more narrow. In fact, it becomes more expressive.

The fact that the Strat was originally based on the thinking of a violin makes complete sense, because the whole point of playing violin is to express the person’s personality. And I think the Strat is the preeminent personality guitar—if you want to be an individualistic player, this is the guitar for you.

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