I never bought that “Zero” was originally intended to be a “character”
I was watching an old interview with Billy before they started doing studio work for Mellon Collie, and he mentions that yes, it was going to be a concept album, but not one with any overarching storyline or characters. He said it wasn’t going to be like The Wall, and that it instead was just “conceptual” by means of it being about a lot of different things in his life, and the band’s life.
“Zero” just seems like it was initially only the name he titled a song that had the line “I’m your lover, I’m your zero.” Which, to give him credit, is kind of a cool lyric I guess—to say you’re worth nothing to someone. But I don’t think it was ever any deeper than that. He probably had the first Zero shirt made as a call-back to that line about feeling worthless, wore it on stage for the first time, and the press or whoever started asking, “So who’s Zero?” And he, as he often does, decided to come up with some bullshit thing about how Zero was some piece of a deep concept storyline.
Kind of like how he totally made up how deep the concept story was for Machina... and then asked fans to send in their best guesses during that essay contest... and then just picked one that sounded the best and pretended it was his idea all along.
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