An evening with Billy Corgan

There are some places you never expect to find yourself. For me, a hippie's funeral was certainly on the list. Friday evening, however, that's exactly where I ended up. The event, which was held at the Echoplex in Los Angeles, was advertised as "An All Star Tribute to Sky Saxon featuring Billy Corgan." I knew little to nothing about Sky Saxon, but was able to do enough research to determine that he was the frontman for sixties-rock pioneers The Seeds, and that he had passed away last month in a hospital room in Austin, Texas. Ignorance aside, the chance to see Billy Corgan perform in an intimate setting was enough for me to purchase tickets, no questions asked.

Tina and I arrived at the Echoplex not really knowing what we should expect. Surveying the room, it became apparent that we were grossly out of place. While the crowd was admittedly rather diverse, the overwhelming majority consisted of "flower children" of various shapes, sizes, and levels of insanity. A woman wearing a costume which successfully confused the themes of German beer maid and 90s-era club kid offered us flowers to pin onto a fabric-covered wall in front of the stage. "Take a flower for Sky," she urged. We obliged. Upon entering the venue's main auditorium, we were met with what can only be described as a shrine honoring Sky Sunlight Saxon, complete with photographs, candles, incense, flowers, and mourners holding silent vigil. Trippy projections danced across the backdrop behind stage, as psychedelic rock of the eeriest persuasion echoed throughout the dimly-lit club. The effect that this multitude of stimuli had on my psyche was only intensified by the fact that I'd slept for a mere six hours, worked for eleven, and managed to eat absolutely nothing in between. Luckily, I was able to order a surprisingly delicious (albeit overpriced) sandwich from the bar, and devour the whole thing before the show commenced.

Around nine o'clock, a man dressed in a white robe with a white beard, long white hair, and a white headband took the stage. We'd seen this Man-in-White roaming the parking lot before doors opened, and the two guys behind us in line joked that it was God. Further supporting their assumption, "God" led the entire audience in a Chakra cleansing exercise where we were asked to close our eyes, inhale and exhale rapidly, and then "send our soul to the center of the earth" for rejuvenation. It's hard to say whether it was my soul's journey to the earth's core or the salami sub, but I was no longer feeling tired, and the energy of the flower children surrounding us was nothing if not infectious.

As "God" played acoustic guitar along with a recording of Sky Saxon singing (a la Natalie & Nat King Cole's "Unforgettable"), I was distracted by a man cracking jokes with his friends backstage. Lurking a mere ten feet away in a shadowy corner offstage stood the reason I was here to begin with: Billy Corgan.

The weirdest thing about seeing Billy Corgan up close and personal is that he does not look like an alien. He looks like a person. A regular person. I had seen him live twice before (with The Pumpkins in 1996 and with Zwan in 2003), but there was something about this particular encounter that felt different. He immediately seemed less guarded, more personable, and more accessible than he had the previous two times I'd seen him. Tonight, he was a man without pretense. No dramatic makeup, no androgynous man-dress, no skin-tight silver pants, no iconic "Zero" t-shirt. Just an average looking dude in a military-style cap and a long sleeve T-shirt. Earlier in the night, I had overheard a stranger telling her friend that she'd seen Corgan perform once before, but it was on "the night he got pissed off and played with his back to the audience." As he took the stage alongside members of The Seeds, The Electric Prunes, Strawberry Alarm Clock, and a 19-year-old who was introduced as the new drummer for The Pumpkins (really, Billy? Really?!), it became obvious that that notoriously acerbic and megalomaniacal incarnation of Billy Corgan would not be making an appearance here tonight.

With Billy in the familiar position of guitar and lead vocals, the makeshift band started their set off with a cover of the 1969 hit "Spirit In The Sky." I couldn't help but laugh each time Corgan sang the line "Ya gotta have a friend in Jesus." A far cry, I thought, from 1996 when I'd witnessed him announce to an arena full of screaming fans that "God is empty just like me." After playing a handful of Seeds covers, as well as a couple of tunes Corgan had co-written with Sky Saxon before his death, Corgan exchanged the Epiphone Casino he'd been playing all night for his signature black and white Fender Strat. He then introduced the song they would close their set with as a new piece he'd written in response to Saxon's death. "This song has lyrics I never would've written before I met Sky," Corgan shared. Entitled "Freak," the song was refreshingly reminiscent of the vintage Pumpkins sound I've been desperately missing since their 1994 release Pisces Iscariot, and would ultimately serve as my favorite moment of the night.

What followed Billy & the gang's set was a bizarre and disorganized mess of poorly executed ideas, the low point of which occurred when a parade of what seemed like every person who'd ever met Sky Saxon was given the opportunity to come up and say a few words. A close second was the long-winded set by Strawberry Alarm Clock, which answered once-and-for-all the question no one asked: should middle-aged men wear kaftans?

Corgan reappeared later in the night, this time wielding an electric bass, and engaged the audience in a thoroughly enjoyable instrumental jam-session with "God." Calling themselves "Yahowha 33" (a reference to the Hebrew Tetragrammaton and the presumed age of Christ at his death), the two men exuded an energetic chemistry more inspiring than any of the supposed words of wisdom the rest of the evening's presenters had bestowed upon us. Rock'n'Roll truly does speak louder than words.

What really struck me about the evening, was the fact that although I was not familiar with Sky Saxon as a musician or a man, I found the sentiments expressed by his family, friends, and fans in attendance to be entirely relatable. This person had touched their life in some way, and they had gathered together to pay him his proper respects, the same way we had gathered to remember our friend Donna after she lost her battle with cancer two years ago. How ironic, I thought, that what brought me to this concert in the first place was the same man whose music served as the inspiration for the Donna To Dusk concerts.

Coincidentally (or perhaps serendipitously), I walked away from Sky Saxon's tribute concert thinking the same thing I had when I walked away from the first Donna To Dusk concert: "Donna would have loved this."