Smashing Pumpkins bassist D’arcy Wretzky trashed Billy Corgan about the ongoing reunion and her lack of involvement in it, telling Alternative Nation:
“[Billy] has been telling people, ‘Well [The Smashing Pumpkins] haven’t played with [D’arcy] at all in 18 years.’ Right dumbass, because then it wouldn’t be a reunion!
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“He says that he’s invited me to come out and play for all of these things, which is a complete lie. He’s never invited me to anything. In fact, my feelings were a little bit hurt because he did the solo album tour, and he didn’t tell me when it started.
“I was texting him saying, ‘Where the fuck are you dumbass?’ He’s like, ‘Oh, I’m in New York. The tour started.’ Then I’m like, ‘Where are you?’ ‘Oh, the tour ended, you missed it.’ He thinks it’s a privilege for anyone to be in his presence, so therefore he shouldn’t have to tell me, and I shouldn’t have to be invited.”
She added:
“There were no talks, nobody ever approached me. As far as I know, nobody every approached James either, or me. One thing that did happen was I think this was in [the late 2000s/early 2010’s], I’m not sure which tour it was, Billy was playing in Europe, and he had his people contact ‘our people.’
“James and I have the same business manager, that’s the extent of ‘our people,’ at least mine anyways, I can’t speak for James anymore. He won’t return my phone calls or read my texts. I have no idea what Billy has been saying to him.
“But anyways, Billy came and asked us if we would mind him using our faces on t-shirts because he wanted to sell more t-shirts because the tour wasn’t doing well. We said, ‘Sure.’ Then he came back to us with, ‘Well, would you mind putting in some money to help make them?’ We were like, ‘No!’ This was all done through his lawyer and our business manager.
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“He said that to me this time, he texted me like: ‘Well you at least deserve to have your face on a t-shirt.’ He was furious that I told people I wasn’t going to be on the tour, he was absolutely furious. He’s telling me that I’m making a fool of myself telling people that I hadn’t been part of recording, and wasn’t going to be part of a tour that hasn’t been announced. He always threatened to walk away; I’m the only one who ever did.
“I forced him to fire me, I didn’t want James to fire me, I didn’t want the situation of they had hired Melissa already just in case. They hired Jack Bates for this tour. I made Billy spell it out, because he was doing his nonsense double talk crap bullshit. Everyone was telling me: ‘Well that doesn’t sound like he doesn’t want you on the tour.’ Nobody could see it, so I finally made him spell it out for me.”
Focusing on Billy’s offer to have her make only sporadic appearances on the tour, D’arcy said:
“It was just unbelievable, really just disgusting. The fucking nerve, and then for him to come back and say, ‘Well, we haven’t seen you in this long, and you haven’t done this, and you couldn’t even make it to this. Everyone has shown up, and you didn’t?’ How could I, I didn’t even know you were there?”
Wretzky also said:
“You have to see the texts to understand, but when it comes to money, he’s just disgusting.
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“We almost immediately started talking about a reunion, because he said to me: ‘Well, maybe you know, and maybe you don’t, but with this wrestling thing I kind of got myself a bit into a bit of a hole.’
“That was one of the first things he said to me, it was like the second conversation we had, but we didn’t want to do the ‘reunion.’ We both wanted to do the band again, be a band again, not just do a reunion.
“Billy always said, ‘Oh, I’ll never do just a reunion and play the oldies just for money.’ That’s exactly what it is now.”