My Chemical Romance brought out surprise guest Billy Corgan to perform “Bullet With Butterfly Wings” during their concert Friday in the Smashing Pumpkins’ native Chicago.
Prior to the performance, singer Gerard Way spoke of his love for the Pumpkins, and how seeing the band’s tour around Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness inspired his own music. “We saw that and was like, ‘We would love to do this, it would be real fucking amazing.”
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Way’s introduction then jumped forward a few decades: “It’s the pandemic right, and I’m super sad about it. And I come across this video, it’s late night and I’m sitting alone… I’m scrolling through Instagram and I see this fucking kid in his room playing along to ‘Bullet With Butterfly Wings’… I’m watching this thing and I felt the blade of Christ enter my chest, it was wild. I never felt anything like that in my life.”
My Chemical Romance welcomed “Bullet With Butterfly Wings” into their Long Live the Black Parade Tour setlist over the past month, performing the track a couple times perhaps as a precursor to Friday night’s collaboration.
“This song is the ultimate rock defiance to me, it’s like searing an imprint on the universe in pure fucking defiance. It is the best rock n’ roll song ever fucking made,” Way added Friday. Corgan then joined My Chemical Romance onstage to perform the Mellon Collie hit.
(In a 2005 interview, Way called the Smashing Pumpkins one of “my favorite bands of all time,” and admitted, “I had patterned our career off The Pumpkins because they were able to do such free and artistic music.”)
“Great fun! And fantastic gig by the boys,” Corgan wrote on social media after the show. “Just killed it in front of a massive Chicago crowd.”
While the Long Live the Black Parade Tour shows have been mostly rigid in their setlists, the band was sprinkled in local surprises at some gigs: At a show in their native New Jersey, My Chem dropped a surprise rendition of Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer.”
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