It's 11:30 on a Friday morning and Billy Corgan is in his teahouse, trying to get a raffle going. The Smashing Pumpkins frontman works the floor (and, later, the counter) at Madame ZuZu's, his suburban beverage emporium and antiques outpost, chatting with fans, handing out drinks, in no apparent hurry to kick off the eight-hour improvisational modular synth jam—anchored around Herman Hesse's sophomore-year staple Siddhartha, no less—he'd perform that afternoon. There was no line—and nowhere to sit—when I arrived, so I planted myself near the back with the rest of the latecomers. Minutes later, Billy, all smiles, walked up to the stragglers section to apologize for the run on chairs. Then he asked if we'd heard about the raffle.
In 2012, Corgan opened Madame ZuZu's Tea Shop in a sleepy commercial stretch of Highland Park, Illinois, the North Chicago suburb where he's lived for the last decade. As Corgan goes, ZuZu's is uncharacteristically modest: a bright, homey, 50-or-so capacity storefront where a bitter-as-anything hot chocolate and a two-cup pot of oolong will run you $15.66. Friday's crowd was a mixed bag: Schaumburg dads, twentysomething 90s-revival types in chokers and crushed velvet, a Tribune reporter (more on him in a minute), and several exceedingly cute children. Not a Zero shirt in the bunch, but any German lit professors or modular synth nuts in the building were vastly outnumbered by the Pumpkins loyal, enlivened by the possibility of seeing Billy Corgan doing something—anything—in a space the size of ZuZu's.
Just before 1, a ZuZu's manager stepped to the front to remind us that—these vintage synths being "sensitive" to newfangled technology or something—anybody with a visible cell phone would be immediately expunged from the premises. "Airplane mode," she warned, "means nothing to me."
And then, well, there it was: a free download of Sonoma State University professor Adrian Praetzellis reciting Siddhartha, set to a buzzing, insectoid drone. After a few minutes of that—and not a whole lot else—Billy seemed displeased; he called for a tech, and the pair loudly deliberated while the narrative rolled on behind them. But even when it was going well, it was never really going all that well; the sound kept spiking during the most mundane passages and flattening out during the dramatic upswings, with little apparent relationship between the music and the text.
This went on for some time. Some of it sounded like Vangelis; some of it sounded like the hockey scenes in Strange Brew. None of it was all that compelling. Smiles quickly tightened, and eyes began to wander; this was, on some level, exactly what we'd been promised, but there's a pretty big difference between "all-improvised" and "kinda thrown together," and after a few trying minutes, you could tell which way this one was leaning. Billy certainly knows a thing or two about modular synths. But with a rig that big—and that complicated—there's that much more room for error, and up there without a net, he seemed to be struggling to put it all together. Perhaps if Billy'd kicked things off with a couple words about Siddhartha, or modular synths, or why seven hours wasn't enough but nine hours might just be too much, the whole thing might've held its center. As it was, it felt less like a musician trying to stretch his legs with an ambitious conceptual piece and more like a famous (and possibly very bored) dude looking to burn off a Friday afternoon with a wall of synths and a book on tape.
A little after 2, Airplane Mode made the rounds, strongly suggesting we make room for the small crowd that'd formed outside. Nobody seemed too broken up about being asked to leave. Once outside, I saw the tweets: not just Oneohtrix Point Never's—whose afternoon-long bomb-toss might be the best thing to happen on Twitter in some time—but Gregory Trotter's, the Highland Park Trib correspondent who'd been circulating before the set. Corgan, displeased by a zinger-clotted preview piece by another Tribune writer, insisted Trotter leave ZuZu's well before our shift had ended, quite literally walling himself off from criticism.
With the afternoon ahead of me, I'd briefly considered taking another turn in the ZuZu's line, worried I hadn't seen enough. After hearing about Trotter, though, I was on the next train back to Chicago. Turns out, I'd seen plenty.