Pitchfork

Photo by Kristin Burns

Hey kids! Wanna sound just like your real-life guitar hero, Smashing Pumpkins leader Billy Corgan? Oh sure, you could stub that big toe pretty good, then make haste towards the microphone... or, er, you could head on down to wherever Fender instruments are sold and pick up one of the iconic guitar makers' new line of Billy Corgan Stratocaster guitars.

"Designed," as the press material would have us believe, "for maximum sound versatility"-- so that's why Mellon Collie was so long-- "the new Billy Corgan Stratocaster is an especially modern take on the iconic Fender Strat® model, built especially for a high-gain sound and designed to create Corgan's signature mid-'90s buzz saw tone."

Guitar tech geeks, rejoice: the Billy signature Strat sports "three DiMarzio pickups (two of which are custom-wound for the instrument), a string-through hard-tail bridge, jumbo frets, a satin nitrocellulose lacquer finish and a vintage tweed case." You can fondle Corgyboy's frets on one of two axes: the first, with "an Olympic White finish, with a black pickguard" and the other, "black finish with a white pickguard, reflective of Corgan's signature style." Yeah, he does like black and stuff.

Billy and company are still planning those big anniversary runs in NYC, L.A., and Chicago, though that's going down in August-- not, as first believed, in September. The first Chicago area date was just announced for August 9 at Hammond, Indiana's Horseshoe Casino.

The Gish shows, too, are on, though those have been moved back to 2009. The Gish box is still in the works, and the band wants your vintage Pumpkins photos. And there's also that DVD of their Fillmore run from last summer, but no further details have emerged since our last report. You guitar guys never can keep to a schedule, can you?