The Big Zwan Theory.
 

Zwan formed at the same time Matt Sweeney met Andrew WK and became his manager, and I would almost guarantee that Matt and Billy discussed Andrew's concepts while working on Zwan. The 33 1/3 book for "I Get Wet" is filled with anecdotes of Matt trying to wrap his head around Andrew's philosophy and figuring out how to achieve it. Someone should ask Billy what his thoughts on Andrew WK are tbh.

My theory is that Billy saw Zwan as an opportunity be the vanguard of an actual cultural movement based on hope, spirituality, and redemption.

The video for Lyric lays the plan out perfectly:

• It starts with the band taking to the street with their song/message of hope.
• Kids in the street hear the message and start tagging along.
• They all arrive at The Metro where there's an ecstatic, rainbow-colored celebration.
• The band hit the street again, where the crowd has become a full-blown march of young people holding signs with "Hope" "Faith" "Grace" "Happiness".
• The band break off from the march and laugh together at what they've achieved.
  

16 years later, and I am still pissed off that Billy abandoned Zwan to reanimate the Pumpkins' corpse. He thought he could use his 90s fame to break MSOTS into the mainstream and get instant success. He had a phenomenal band with an inspiring message. All he needed to do was build on the indie groundswell a bit longer until the mainstream came around.

All that "sex acts in public/drugs across borders" shit is garbage, too. Did anyone get caught? Was there a tabloid scandal? No. This is simply Billy judging consenting adults for not doing what he wants. As soon as fame came into the equation, he used it as a threat. DO WHAT I SAY OR ENJOY THE WHITE VAN. Thing is...this doesn't work on people who have careers to fall back on you asshole.

I've said it before, but Zwan should have been to the Pumpkins what Wings were to The Beatles. Who knows...they could have had their movement.

Big if true is all I'm saying.

Bruh it all came back to Billy and Paz having a thing. He clearly got butthurt when she started banging the other band members and I fully believe that's why he broke up the band. Also, there was no indie groundswell. Zwan got terrible reviews from the snarky indie outlets like Pitchfork and lukewarm reviews from even the regular outlets like Rolling Stone etc.

Zwan 2001 had an indie groundswell.

Well, they did and they didn't. Some days, the good days, they did. Then there were the bad days. It's all mixed up. To settle this argument, I'd just like to cite, and point you to,

As a college kid at that time i can tell u that all the zwan fans i knew were just regular pumpkins fans

All the “indie” fans that i knew did not know of zwan or if they did they gave jackshits about zwan

So

I dunno

i'm a pumpkins fan & even i don't give a shit about zwan

like yeah, they had some great songs but didn't release them officially. breaking fucking news in the world of boldemort corgan!

i enjoy Matt Sweeney though. he kind of reminds me of Paul F. Tompkins in a way. hell, they even both have an internet show where they interview various artists of their time! are they just each other in disguise?

You may be onto something here, I don't know. I've always figured that Billy's ego got the better of him in that he just assumed that starting a new band with a somewhat different sound than the Pumpkins would translate to immediate record sales and renewed interest in him (not his band... HIM). But as these things tend to go, even though you're not exactly starting from scratch like a totally unknown band, your new stuff is always going to be a little divisive. If it sounds like your old band, then people will criticize you for that. If it sounds nothing like your old band, then people will say they long for your glory days. If it's somewhere in the middle, you're not going far enough one way or the other. It's just how these things go and Billy should have been prepared for that. If he had been, maybe he could have built on what he started with Zwan and eventually had a successful second band. It's kinda sad to listen to that album (which I love and I think is better than anything he's put out since) and wonder what might have been.

I mean…right after Machina and all the associated occultism/symbolism…I wouldn't put it past him

Can you find any interviews from that time where he even slightly alludes to this sort of thing?

If true it adds a layer of what some would call pathos to the downfall of the band due to immoral behavior

Some but not me, mind; I think it's hilarious

Nah, this isn't true.

Zwan had gained a lot of positive indie press due to their live shows throughout 2001 and 2002. They had indie cred with those songs and people were optimistic about the album. The articles & interviews leading up to their debut pitched it as the resurrection of Billy Corgan.

This kinda faded when Paz joined and the new songs in the fall 02 tour shifted tonally in a much poppier direction. Once the studio tracks started leaking... sheesh. MSOTS got great reviews but had no indie cred whatsoever because of the production and tracklist. The band just morphed from something cool and semi-obscure into Corgan's saccharine pop behemoth.

The production of Mary Star of the Sea the album, and the aesthetic of that album, could not be further removed from the Glasshouse / Galaxy / Emerson shows. It also wasn't what Pajo and Sweeney signed up for. The band 100% disintegrated because Billy wanted to make a chart-topping pop record and wouldn't settle for an indie audience, and he went ballistic because Paz banged Pajo and they probably took the piss out of him.

Billy overthought it, got greedy and his song-writing's never been the same since. Well... Ogilala recaptures some of it I guess.

Interesting. I do remember a lot of really positive buzz early on about Zwan and hearing that the early shows were fucking amazing but I could never find good recordings of them online back then. Are there any really high quality ones out there? How different was their early sound from what wound up on the album?

The first Glasshouse show is probably the most well-known and circulated of the early shows. But this Galaxy show has excellent sound quality:

https://archive.org/details/zwan2001...nnivd1t02.flac

And a Djali Zwan show:

https://archive.org/details/zwan2001...2-14bd1t14.shn

Most of these tracks were dropped after these shows.

Cast A Stone is Zwan's best song.

Ah, thank you!

^ 100% this

I love MSOTS, but the way it came out was bizarre. Zwan was essentially an indie supergroup with an underground following, and MSOTS managed to alienate their existing audience, while pandering to a totally non-existent mainstream audience. Suddenly their CD was in Walmart, they had big-budget videos, they were on TV. It's like Billy got confused and thought he was still in the Pumpkins circa 1996.

I mean, yes, the major label push would be needed if he was trying to start a cultural movement - but that's not much help if the mainstream has never heard of you. Zwan 2001 should have released an album, toured extensively in a white van, and *then* released MSOTS. Even Paul McCartney toured in a van with Wings, and he'd just left the fucking Beatles.

Zwan has always been such a divisive and anomalous band. By the time the Pumpkins dissolved the whole era of alt rock was dead and buried. For whatever reason I figured that was the end of Billy being in bands. I thought he would go the producer route seeing his credits from 97-00. Then out of nowhere, and so quick, Billy and Jimmy were back on the scene with a new band. I think it was late 2002 when a four-disc set made the rounds full of live tracks and the Spun stuff. All of my still hardcore SP friends hated Zwan almost immediately. I actually really dug the AOR style music. Because I had no clue who David Pajo and Matt Sweeney (at the time, I have actually come to really love him) were I never associated Zwan with indie music. I do not remember any advertisement or popular reporting on the band before the album. I find that odd because it was half the Pumpkins in a new band. SP was still mainstream enough to warrant that I would think. During the lead up to MSotS I had only heard the raw live stuff / acoustic songs and seen few pictures including the True Poets stuff with the deer. I had this mental picture of what Zwan would be like visually. When the music videos and the album art dropped it was like a death blow. It was all so jarring as they had zero visual chemistry together. It was always so cringy and awkward. Billy clearly had a thing for Paz as well which fueled it. Billy playing flowery bubblegum pop music with diezel amps and flying V guitars.

i hate Billy fan fiction. especially when it doesn't ******* James and Billy having sex

Zwan has always been such a divisive and anomalous band. By the time the Pumpkins dissolved the whole era of alt rock was dead and buried. For whatever reason I figured that was the end of Billy being in bands. I thought he would go the producer route seeing his credits from 97-00. Then out of nowhere, and so quick, Billy and Jimmy were back on the scene with a new band. I think it was late 2002 when a four-disc set made the rounds full of live tracks and the Spun stuff. All of my still hardcore SP friends hated Zwan almost immediately. I actually really dug the AOR style music. Because I had no clue who David Pajo and Matt Sweeney (at the time, I have actually come to really love him) were I never associated Zwan with indie music. I do not remember any advertisement or popular reporting on the band before the album. I find that odd because it was half the Pumpkins in a new band. SP was still mainstream enough to warrant that I would think. During the lead up to MSotS I had only heard the raw live stuff / acoustic songs and seen few pictures including the True Poets stuff with the deer. I had this mental picture of what Zwan would be like visually. When the music videos and the album art dropped it was like a death blow. It was all so jarring as they had zero visual chemistry together. It was always so cringy and awkward. Billy clearly had a thing for Paz as well which fueled it. Billy playing flowery bubblegum pop music with diezel amps and flying V guitars.

It was a bait and switch on the band. Billy to cash in their indie cred and when the studio album came around he pulled the rug from under their feet. Billy was the one with the record deal, and everyone else was along for the ride. Billy made the poor executive decision to make the flowery pop album, promising the band that they'd put the other type of material out later.. black zwan, djali zwan, etc...

When the band pushed back he told them to stay in their lane and enjoy their per-diem. which they did, Eating lobster every day and sticking it to billy. They had careers to fall back on, and billy hated that he didn't actually have all the control. so he broke up the band.

boo hoo. cry baby twat bald headed fester...

You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to FoolofaTook again.

don't post about RAP

Billy trying to be all uplifting just feels so false, especially since he comes off like such a petty douche. Billy just can't pass off spirituality and enlightenment because he clearly isn't either. Billy equates being a narcissist/sociopath to being enlightened. Sorry, there was nothing about Zwan that I liked. The album was pretty cringy. Somewhere during Machina, he snapped.

Zwan has always been such a divisive and anomalous band. By the time the Pumpkins dissolved the whole era of alt rock was dead and buried. For whatever reason I figured that was the end of Billy being in bands. I thought he would go the producer route seeing his credits from 97-00. Then out of nowhere, and so quick, Billy and Jimmy were back on the scene with a new band. I think it was late 2002 when a four-disc set made the rounds full of live tracks and the Spun stuff. All of my still hardcore SP friends hated Zwan almost immediately. I actually really dug the AOR style music. Because I had no clue who David Pajo and Matt Sweeney (at the time, I have actually come to really love him) were I never associated Zwan with indie music. I do not remember any advertisement or popular reporting on the band before the album. I find that odd because it was half the Pumpkins in a new band. SP was still mainstream enough to warrant that I would think. During the lead up to MSotS I had only heard the raw live stuff / acoustic songs and seen few pictures including the True Poets stuff with the deer. I had this mental picture of what Zwan would be like visually. When the music videos and the album art dropped it was like a death blow. It was all so jarring as they had zero visual chemistry together. It was always so cringy and awkward. Billy clearly had a thing for Paz as well which fueled it. Billy playing flowery bubblegum pop music with diezel amps and flying V guitars.

You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to FoolofaTook again.

don't post about RAP

Big if true is all I'm saying.

haha you guys actually like Mary Star Of The Sea

And I don't know what you guys are smoking, I don't remember Zwan having any "indie cred". I remember it being seen as Billy Corgan's sugary new "super group".

yeah but you're fuzzyroes