Billy Corgan Remembers Exact Moment He Wrote Smashing Pumpkins Hit “1979,” Right Down to the Weather

The Smashing Pumpkins cemented their spot in the alt-rock canon with their massively successful track “1979” from Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. “1979” became the band’s highest-charting single following its 1996 release, viscerally appealing to an audience of teens and young adults who were not only staring down the start of the rest of their lives but also the start of an entirely new millennium. Things felt weird. A bit finalistic.

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And indeed, those feelings weren’t lost on Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan. In a video shared to the Smashing Pumpkins’ YouTube channel, Corgan described the exact moment he came up with the idea of “1979,” right down to what the weather was doing that day.

The Origin Story Of “1979” By the Smashing Pumpkins

Billy Corgan might be bona fide alt-rock royalty now. But in 1984, he was a pizza delivery slinging ‘zas all over the windy city of Chicago, Illinois, in an old family beater. Corgan recalled sitting in that beat-up car during one particularly miserable shift at the pizza shop. The rain was coming down in cold, dreary sheets as it’s wont to do off the shores of Lake Michigan. A stoplight kept Corgan from getting further down the road, which got the musician thinking. Was he going anywhere? And if so, where?

“There was a particular feeling that I got,” Corgan recalled, “which was, like, in the rearview mirror of my life was youth, childhood. And it was about to go away. In front of me was everything that I hoped to become, everything that I was hoping to do in life. For some reason, in this exact particular moment at this particular stoplight with the wipers going off in front of me, that’s the feeling that I wrote the song of. So, I wrote a poem.”

Corgan said he finished the poem on a typewriter after his pizza shift was over, later saving the original copy for his archives (something that likely seemed like an absurd formality for a pizza driver making right around minimum wage). And while most rough drafts typically vary slightly from the final product—just take Bob Dylan’s earliest versions of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” for example—the same wasn’t true for Corgan’s song.

From Rough Draft To Album Single

The best songs tend to fall out in one fell swoop, and that includes the Smashing Pumpkins hit “1979.” A brief wave of mortal awareness helped inspire frontman Billy Corgan while in the middle of a pizza delivery shift on a rainy Chicago day. “I wrote the song with this notion in mind of what it’s like to be at that precipice between youth and adulthood, not that I’ve ever become an adult. But that was the sensation at the time,” he joked.

Whether or not Corgan felt like he ever truly made that transition from youth to adult, he certainly managed to capture that wistful feeling that often comes with age. And as “1979” shows, when inspiration strikes, sometimes it strikes all at once. “What you actually hear me sing on the song is the poem that I wrote with no alteration, which is very, very unusual,” Corgan said. “Then, when I went to sing the first line of shakedown, nineteen seventy-nine, it didn’t ring. So, that’s what started the song with shakedown, nineteen seven nine.”

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