Billy Corgan Fired Smashing Pumpkins Drummer For Being A "Twitch" With "ADD"

Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan has a notoriously strained relationship with the people he's played music with, so it came as no surprise when he fired drummer Mike Byrne back in June. Though the reasons for Byrne's dismissal weren't made entirely clear at the time, Corgan discusses his decision in a lengthy (and occasionally confusing) blog post made on the Smashing Pumpkins' website, in which he blames the 24-year-old Byrne for holding up the recording of the band's upcoming albums, calling him a "twitch" with "ADD."

"Mike Byrne has taught me a lot about his generation," Corgan writes in the blog post, "And watching the twitch up close, the ADD of it all, I'm starting to understand what he found boring about The Mighty SP. He wasn't wrong. But he also wasn't right, too."

Following Byrne's depature from the band, Corgan recruited Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee to record drums for the next Smashing Pumpkins album, Monuments to an Elegy. Corgan seems to address this situation in his blog post (again, it's pretty confusing), saying that "the best way to replace something is to best it, not join its shallow-pool ranks."

"Great musicians like MB are capable," Corgan continues, "if they are willing to stop looking into the shiny sun and wonder, quite rightly, what lies on the dark side of the moon."

Corgan concludes the post with some more muddled poetics, saying, "[W]here there is glittering, yet false illumination, we (the collective We) must destroy it by being more real, more true, more-more. It works every time IF you can pass the muster of your own oblivion; or yawn. Mix that with kinetic, electric, hyperbolic punk rock I-don't-give-a-f**k-how-you-do-it and maybe, just maybe, someone wakes the f**k up from that coma they're in."

You can check out the entire blog post over at the Smashing Pumpkins' website.

If you enjoy Billy Corgan's music more than his rants, check out the new Smashing Pumpkins song "One and All," from the band's upcoming album Monuments to an Elegy, which is set for release on Dec. 9.

You can check out Smashing Pumpkins' "Being Beige" right here:

Tags

Billy Corgan, Smashing Pumpkins, Tommy Lee, Motley Crue