As we told you he would last month, Billy Corgan participated in The Red Book Dialogues, a series of discussions held at NYC’s Rubin Museum of Art. Corgan and his fellow participants (including David Byrne, Jonathan Demme, Gloria Vanderbilt and Alice Walker) were invited to “respond to and interpret a folio from famed psychiastrist Carl Jung’s Red Book as a starting point for wide ranging conversation” accompanied by a psychoanalyst.
In a news post on the official Smashing Pumpkins site, JillySP describes Corgan’s turn with the book: Dr. Morgan Stebbins, psychoanalyst, handed him the book and Corgan opened it to this painting. “Corgan began to free-associate his reaction to the painting: to the Egyptian boat, on the river of mortality, shadowed by a giant fish with teeth (‘I am a Pisces,’ he laughed), to the myth of Orpheus. Not even two minutes into the discussion, Corgan joked, ‘Do I need to be committed?’”
Corgan continued, discussing his childhood (“his teachers used to complain about his intensity, asking his step-mother to tell him to stop staring at them”), songwriting (“an empty vessel experience”) and more. Click here for the aforementioned review; if you’d like to watch the entire dialogue, go thataway.