Fuck Around and Zwan Out

Thoughts from a Zwan Enthusiast 20 years later

2002 was a bad year. 

My parents were starting to fight, school felt more pointless than ever, and post-9/11 culture was a 24-7 klaxon that adults couldn’t guarantee my safety, or their own. I had begun to discover music (good) but was deep into nu-metal (bad), listening to nothing but Tool and alternative-in-theory local radio. Guitars tuned down to stupid and lyrics telling me everything sucks and everyone will eventually betray you. 

Like any precocious baby goth, I had two terrible ideas stuck in my head: that happy music was intrinsically pop, and there was nothing good, serious or redeemable about pop. Grooves were for happy Muzak. Dancing without the risk of an elbow in the sternum was weak shit. I tricked myself into liking the dark stuff, wore a flame-printed beanie from Hot Topic everywhere. When my grades started to dive, my parents confiscated the hat as a last-ditch attempt at finding something I liked enough that taking it away was punishment. (It didn't work.)

Then one night, drifting off to sleep, a laser-beam-jet-engine flanged guitar sounded like it was being warped across the galaxy into my stereo. A nasally voice repeated a phrase three times: “I believe, I believe, I believe.” 

I sat straight up in bed. My adolescent conviction that I had seen it all, heard it all, was suddenly challenged. By the end of the song, I wasn't the same person.

After The Smashing Pumpkins' 2000 breakup, Billy Corgan founded... well, technically two versions of Zwan. “The True Poets of Zwan” would be the electric pop-rock ensemble, and “The Djali Zwan” would be the more stripped down, folky, acoustic-leaning group. Joining Corgan in flight were Matt Sweeney, David Pajo, Jimmy Chamberlin and Paz Lechantin. Jimmy Chamberlin is, of course, the Pumpkins' uber-mensch jazzbo drummer supreme. Sweeney was more well-known as the guitarist for the band Chavez, but had known Corgan since the early 90s. David Pajo came from post-rock alumni such as Slint and Tortoise. Paz Lenchantin played bass and violin in A Perfect Circle.

Sometime in December 2002 I fired up my Netscape browser and pointed it to Zwan.com. They had put the first five songs of Mary Star of the Sea up for free in an attempt to beat the P2P revolution. I listened to them probably 100 times each, trying to satiate this new gnawing hunger for candy-coated fuzzed-out jangle. 

The cover art was shockingly different from the rest of my sad-boy library. Huge rust-red block letters on pristine white, cartoon guitars and rainbows swirling from the center, and silhouettes of birds attempting to escape the boundaries of the artwork. The record almost taunted me when I brought it to the checkout counter. “Hey! This kid is buying something with COLOR and HUES!” 

I opened the case and a sheet of stickers fell out. More loopy neon guitars, a rainbow cracked in two, and a crimson-on-gold cartoon cowboy strumming guitar. What was this?

The music did something to my brain. Huge power chords with nimble arpeggios and folky distorted finger-picking combining for guitar sensory overload. My ears didn’t know where to focus, bouncing from part to part, trying to deconstruct this sonic sunshine. The drumming was busy, jazzy, intricate, but it grooved. How could something so well-composed make me actually want to dance without my elbows?

I didn't know what to do with this positivity. The lyrical references to faith, spirituality, love, hope and altruism, freeing yourself from desire of possessions, looking beyond the corporeal, were all so foreign to my undercooked baby-nihilist brain. One song was called “Declaration of Faith,” one was “Jesus, I,” linked together with the title track through a shifting multiple time-signature guitar ostinato (if that thing wasn't written by David Pajo I will eat my terrible Hot Topic beanie).This was a very far cry from a man-child yarling how “She fuckin’ hates me” over Drop C guitars.

My listening became ritual. The first half of the CD was for the bus ride to school, the second half for the bus ride back. After getting home, I’d listen to it over again from the beginning while walking my dog. I would try to play along, never getting too far by ear but surfing fan sites for the most accurate chord charts I could. A friend of my dad's was upgrading his music equipment, and needed somewhere to store his soon-obsolete electric drum set. Soon I was throwing myself into the deep end of drumming. Friday nights I would guzzle terrifying quantities of root beer and pound along with the album from start to finish, not knowing how to even properly do a drumroll.

One day, a girl who also was very much into music (but of course not the music I liked) asked if I liked Zwan. I confirmed that I did, in fact, like Zwan.

“You know they’re a Christian band, right?” she retorted.

Time slowed down. “No they’re not!” I stammered, doing the mental calculus of my convictions. It was unthinkable, irreconcilable. Christian bands were some corny-ass shit! How could a Christian band rock? Sure, they talk about faith and Jesus and God a lot, but they weren’t that kind of Christian. Right?

On the way home I started to think very hard about if I had, in fact, been listening to a Christian band. There was a single “Fuck” on the record, which immediately quelled any counter-arguments my mind could come up with. Christians don’t swear. But while I reflected, I also asked myself exactly how bad it would be if they were. While there was so much suffering and general Bad Stuff™ going on, I found myself enjoying… doing things? With other people?

I made a friend, and another. I found out that friend's twin brother spoke the same weirdo moon language of rock jargon and Simpsons references. Seventeen years later, I was there for the birth of his daughter. Three years after that, he was my best man. Back in 2003, I was starting to write my own half-baked music and entertaining the idea of joining a REAL band. Not like the one that had kicked me out so their buddy could play bass instead. But not before asking me to be their manager, as I “knew a lot about the music business” at the ripe old age of 12. 

(If I may digress for a moment, I've been told that in 2004, someone suggested me for a project two towns over. The founding member responded “Nah, I don’t want a bass player who lives that far away.” “He likes Zwan,” the suggester rebutted. Instantly:  “He’s in.” That band turned into A Troop Of Echoes and we’re still together, 19 years later.)

I came to the stark realization that I was starting to become just *slightly* less of an asshole. I tried to be a little less mean to people and to myself. Maybe being kind was the key to having a little more fun in life, to enjoy cartoony guitars and rainbows instead of chugga-chugga Guitar Center riffs and shallow, too-cool-for-feelings nihilism. 

Spring came, and the local alt-weekly finally delivered what I had wanted so long: "Zwan live at the Orpheum, tickets available now." Being 13 and thus definitionally an idiot, it didn’t even occur to me to ask my parents for a ride to Boston. I thought to myself “I’ll catch them the next time.” 

It was the first week of September when I pulled up Netscape to start my routine homework-shirking and saw the news.

“ZWAN CALLS IT QUITS”

I was heartbroken. I was stunned. I was flabbergasted. My favorite band in the world was just gone for no (apparent) reason and I could. Not. Deal. How could a group of people capable of so much joyful creation just not get along? 

I never got to see them in concert. I hadn’t gotten into the bootlegs and show recordings, save one Easter Egg compilation hidden on the website.Trying to find more Zwan material brought me to a dedicated Billy Corgan Winamp broadcast channel (sidebar: does anyone even remember those?) that introduced me to the Smashing Pumpkins, spawning another years-long deep dive. 

With a single album and just a few bootleg recordings, I made the tactical decision to leave my Zwan fandom behind. Why should I make time for a dead band with one poorly-reviewed album, whose members absolutely despised one another?

That, of course, was a lie. My Zwan interest (Zwan-trest?) ebbed and flowed over the next 20 years but never fully evaporated. In college I found bootlegs and shows that I didn’t have the technical know-how to trade and listen to as a teenager. A multitude of rough cuts and unincluded songs were revealed, each with its own lesson. I became able to parse out individual guitar lines, to analyze the melody and harmonies, and notice subtle synths that just sounded like texture before. In 2023 I’m delighted but unsurprised at the number of positive Zwan re-evaluations. Real heads always knew.

Billy Corgan has made a number of... confusing... moves, to say the least. Being a fan means separating art from artist in a way that I couldn't actually conceive of in 2003.  But most shocking of all, Corgan has started to do something that seemed unthinkable 20 years ago: speak positively about the music.

During a five-year period where Troop was actively touring across the country, we stumbled into another ritual. The ride back to home soil would, at some point, be punctuated by Mary Star Of The Sea on the car stereo. In one particularly surreal moment, an all-night drive from Baltimore in a rented minivan culminated with driving over the Tappan Zee Bridge in the middle of a snowstorm. In full whiteout conditions, a gaggle of 3-ton plows our only companions on the road, with the molten metal intro for “Ride A Black Swan” blasting, I realized I had done it. I was in a touring band making music that we wrote. That music was and is still, ever so slightly, influenced by Zwan.  

I think 13-year-old me would be pretty impressed that a niche one-album band led me to the people that made my life what it is. To embrace feeling things, even when it's corny. To help realize my dreams. 

I lost the hat, though. We're only human.


Recommended Listening -

11/16/2001 - https://archive.org/details/zwan2001-11-16.schoeps.shnf
The first gig. Much of this setlist is never performed again after this string of shows. Worth it to listen to the initial four piece lineup with Pajo on Bass.

04/05/2022 - https://archive.org/details/zwan2002-04-05.shnf
The first show with the five piece line-up.

01/25/2003 - https://archive.org/details/zwan2003-01-25.flac16/zwan2003-01-25d1t07.flac
“A Zwan Christmas” - the last in a string of 5 gigs in Chicago at the Metro right before the album dropped. Live arrangements are in tight form here, with some real stretching (but not in the truest sense of a “jam”). Dig the near-Frippertronics intro by Pajo on “Ride A Black Swan”

02/08/2003 -  https://archive.org/details/zwan2003-02-08/zwan2003-02-08
An acoustic in-studio FM broadcast. The mix is in good form, but the mix of Sweeney and Pajo is excellent. Bonus points for adding audience recordings of “A Certain Kind of Change” (performed here for the second and last time) and “A New Poetry”, which were not broadcast.

06/09/2003 -

Pinkpop Festival. By now the inter-band vibes are at their worst. While other gigs before the summer have Billy putting on a smile, he looks like he wants to be anywhere else in the world while onstage. It’s a shame as this is the tightest the band has sounded. 4 days later will be the last Zwan show ever.


(Many special thanks to Julia Ramsey for helping edit this post)