Billy Corgan on whether D’arcy Wretzky will ever rejoin Smashing Pumpkins: “That’s a dead end”
“She made it very clear that the bridge is burned”
Photos: Rob Ball / Wireimage, Frans Schellekens / Redferns
Billy Corgan has reiterated that there’s no chance of Smashing Pumpkins’ original bassist D’arcy Wretzky rejoining the band.
Speaking to Premier Guitar in an interview about the band’s latest album, Cyr, the frontman shut down any possibility of Wretzky returning to the fold. “D’arcy, that’s a dead end. That’s what I always tell people: She made it very clear that the bridge is burned,” he said.
Corgan then also brought up the period from 2016 to 2018 that he and Wretzky had reconnected, saying they were in fact trying to better their relationship, before it all soured again. “One thing I’d like to point out, her and I spoke for two years before it turned into a public fiasco,” he said.
“So we had two years of conversations about making amends and trying to put some pieces back together. So no one was more disappointed than I that not only did it end poorly, it turned into some stupid clickbait thing.”
In 2018, Wretzky gave her first public interview in 20 years, where she denied being invited back to the Smashing Pumpkins. Wretzky further substantiated her claims by sharing a lengthy text conversation between Corgan and herself publicly on Facebook [per Consequence Of Sound].
Fans have long pined for a reunion of the band’s original lineup. By the release of 2018’s Shiny and Oh So Bright, Vol. 1, original guitarist James Iha and drummer Jimmy Chamberlin had returned to the Pumpkins entirely; Wretzky, however, was noticeably absent.
Admitting that some wounds between Iha, Chamberlain and himself still run deep, Corgan said in the interview, “In the case of us three, we chose to make the band more important.”
“It’s not like we don’t have issues. It’s not like we’re magically okay and somebody else isn’t. The issues are there; we’re a family, we go through them,” he said. “The way the three of us have chosen to deal with that is to put it through the band and put it through the music.”
“At the end of the day, I was made out to be this evil person but the decision was [Wretzky’s].”
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