Billy Corgan's Guitar Heroes

[michelej1]

Riverfront Times Music lists Billy Corgan's Top 10 guitar heroes. I've included the excerpt about LB.

http://www.riverfronttimes.com/2008-...guitar-heroes/

By Shae Moseley, November 18, 2008

Smashing Pumpkins vocalist Billy Corgan is a guitar hero. This is not my declaration, it's actually official: His spindly frame, bald dome and skeleton-like flanges have been motion-captured by Neversoft, the makers of the über-popular Guitar Hero video game series. Corgan appears as a playable character in the franchise's recently released Guitar Hero World Tour, as does a new, game-exclusive Smashing Pumpkins single, "G.L.O.W."

The song recalls much of the drop-tuned supersonic buzzsaw riffage found on the band's 1995 double album, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. Like the song "Superchrist" (which was also unconventionally released, on a Guitar Center compilation CD last spring), "G.L.O.W." shows promise; it has more raw emotion and a more experimental direction than anything on last year's underwhelming Zeitgeist. (Incidentally, how is it that we as Smashing Pumpkins fans can be so perpetually optimistic about the band's future creative direction, considering its sordid past, checkered reputation and wildly unpredictable frontman?)

But Corgan's legacy as a guitar legend was secure well before people started shredding away in front of flat-screen TVs or tapping out the lead riff of "Today" on a miniature plastic guitar with no strings. By constantly reinventing his approach, his sound and his rig, Corgan forged new frontiers in guitar rock during the '90s, when most thought the genre was at a dead-end. But where did this organic and instantly recognizable playing style come from? What convoluted and seemingly disconnected amalgam of influences could have produced this constantly evolving guitar genius? In honor of Smashing Pumpkins' twentieth anniversary tour, here's a look at Billy Corgan's guitar heroes.


Fleetwood Mac's Lindsey Buckingham

Surprisingly, a cover of Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide" (an outtake released on 1994's Pisces Iscariot) became one of the band's most popular recordings. Buckingham's gentle finger-picking style and Fleetwood Mac's highly stylized, soothing folk-rock informed much of the lighter fare on Mellon Collie as well as 1998's underappreciated Adore.

Sonic Evidence: "Landslide," "Stumbleine," "Thirty-Three"