Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan was a teenage metalhead, and in a new interview with The Guardian the 58-year-old musician has singled out a Metallica classic as a song that saved his life.
"Fade to Black by Metallica showed me the power of music when I was going through some hard times as a teen," Corgan states, "When you’re really down, a song really can save your life."
James Hetfield wrote Fade To Black, Metallica's first ballad, following the theft of his beloved Marshall amp in Boston in the early hours of January 14, 1984. Recorded for the San Francisco band's second album, Ride The Lightning, and credited to all four members, the song is, to quote James Hetfield "a suicide song".
"I'm sure I wasn't really thinking of killing myself," Hetfield clarified in one interview around the time of the album's release. "But It was my favourite Marshall amp, man!"
Talking to Conan O'Brien for his Conan O'Brien Needs A Friend podcast in the summer of 2023, Billy Corgan explained why the song meant so much to him at the age of 17, and why it continues to mean so much to him.
"So I'd got kicked out of my house," Corgan began, revisiting his teenage years. "My dad wasn't in jail at that point, but he was in some form of like, work release, where you got to be in the jail at night, but you could be out during the day, and he wasn't living with us anymore. And then I got kicked out by my stepmother, so I ended up living with this drug dealer. And I have this enduring memory where I latched onto the song because it seemed to sum up what I was going through, this kind of existential crisis in my life.
"I'd seen Metallica live," Corgan continued, "and I'd seen the power of what they were creating. This was back in the day of the boombox, and I remember sitting at the guy's kitchen table, where he used to fiddle the seeds out of the weed that he'd sell to cute, young teen girls, and I was playing the song over and over and over again. I must have played it 14 times in a row, and he came down and he was like, 'You gotta leave', he threw me out for listening to the song so many times. So I was thrown out of my house, and then, because of this song, I was thrown out of the drug dealer's house where I was living."
Corgan went on to describe Fade To Black as "timeless", adding, "somehow it lives beyond the band, it's like a movie unto itself."
"What a song," he concludes. "James [Hetfield] is such a talented songwriter."
"I love that lyric in there, 'I was me, but now he's gone.' I still get the feels on that."
You can listen to the full 'Billy Corgan And The Songs That Inspired Him episode of the Conan O'Brien Needs A Friend podcast below.
Talking about Fade To Black to Metal Hammer's Dave Everley in 2022, Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich recalled, "Everybody seemed to be caught off-guard by the fact we’d done it. We surprised everyone but ourselves."
The song was considered controversial at the time due to the fact that it was the first Metallica song to feature an acoustic guitar. When the quartet first played the song in Bay Area clubs, some of San Francisco's 'Trues' - the community's most hardcore metal purists - pulled out handkerchiefs, and pretended to cry, to mock the band for what they perceived as 'selling out', an accusation Metallica always laughed off.
"You can hear that the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal inspired the first record," Lars Ulrich continued, referring to Kill 'Em All. "But if you step back further than that, you get to Deep Purple’s Child In Time and Judas Priest’s Beyond The Realms Of Death, even Stairway To Heaven – those big, brooding, epic songs. That kind of song was always in the background for us – we knew in our hearts that was part of the Metallica sound, but we just didn’t have the skill or finesse to tackle it on Kill ’Em All. By the time Cliff [Burton] and Kirk {Hammett] had come onboard, we felt we had the ability to go down that path."
