Say Hello to Smashing Pumpkins' New Drummer?

BY Keith CarmanPublished Jun 9, 2009

Striving to strike up newfound interest in Smashing Pumpkins, sole original member Billy Corgan has been on a tangent of unusual ideas as of late. His greatest was perhaps the open call for drummers back in March. It seems as if that call was a successful one because Corgan looks to have found his man.

According to Smashing Pumpkins fan blog Hipsters United, the great bald one has settled on a young man by the name of Mike Byrne. And young is the operative word, given that the Oregon-based skins man is 19 years old and would have been only a year old when Smashing Pumpkins' debut effort, Gish, was released.

While no official statement has been made by the Smashing Pumpkins camp, a little internet digging has pulled up some interesting points about Byrne being a bona fide Pumpkin. As Hipsters United points out, his MySpace account lists him as "off for another couple of weeks at pumpkin camp." Also, Corgan blogged on Friday that he believes he has found his "drummer of the future," adding that "all indications are really good that he's the man for the job" but that he wanted to "work with him some more before it becomes official." And the real kicker here is that Portland musician Ben Spees (who's helping record the latest album by Byrne's band Moses, Smell the Roses) recently tweeted, "billy corgan posted about mike in his blog. drummer of the future." And tweets never lie, right?

So it's not yet official but looking pretty likely. And just think: Byrne was probably barely on solid food/not unloading into his Pampers when Corgan was up to this:

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