billy corgan: the aftermath

i just submitted my review of the billy corgan show on tuesday night (it's now published here). i tried to mostly not talk about what happened after the show since it wasn't really relevant to the
performance (which was good enough to take me from being bored at first to having sore cheeks from smiling at the end), but the way he ended things kind of ruined it for everyone. and since a blog is for expressing opinions, that's what i'm going to do here.

for anyone who hasn't heard, at the end of the show billy came back out and had a talk to the crowd, which was really cool, but then he had to ruin it all by cracking it at the few stupid people who were heckling, throwing down the mic and walking off stage. it was by no means as bad as this article makes out, but it definitely left most of us with a sour taste.

i can see why the heckling would be annoying. but there's a few things about the way he handled it that bugged me. first, people yell out stupid things at every gig, so it's just something you need to expect and ignore really. as for people calling for pumpkins stuff, yeah most of us knew there
was no chance of them being played, but he's also gotta expect that in that if he'd never been in the pumpkins, none of us would have been there. and then when he came out at the end to tell us he wanted to tell us some things, someone yelled out "tell us about the pumpkins billy", to which he replied "can i just live my life for today?". but he was the one who took out a full page ad in the chicago newspaper on the day his album came out, and the day the tour started, to say he wanted to get the pumpkins back together. he brought this issue back into the spotlight, and was kind of vague about it, so why be surprised when people want to know more? but aside from all that, the thing that i really think he handled badly, was to get annoyed at the whole crowd just because of a few people. there were probably under 20 things (i think it would be closer to 10) yelled out that could be considered negative or about the pumpkins (and i recorded his speech if anyone wants to hear this), which means a maximum of 20 people yelled stuff. the palais holds how many people? i'm gonna guess (very conservatively) at least 1000. so out of that you've got 20 people being dickheads, and 980 who are really appreciative to be there and hanging off your every word, booing at people for saying stupid shit and telling them to shut
up. 20/1000 = 2% so why focus on 2% of fuckheads instead of just enjoying the fact that 98% are having an awesome time and pretty much worshipping you?

if you got 98% on a test, you'd be fucking psyched. you wouldn't consider you'd failed the subject.