‘90s Rock Legend Didn't Think His Song Would Succeed on Radio-It Became a Career-Defining, Grammy-Winning Smash
In 1995, the Smashing Pumpkins went big with the release of "Bullet With Butterfly Wings." The lead single from the 28-track, double album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness was an anguished and defiant anthem at the height of the grunge era.
"Bullet" featured distorted guitars and screams from frontman Billy Corgan. It became Smashing Pumpkins' first Top 40 hit, peaking at No. 22 on the Billboard Hot 100 in January 1996, and won the band a Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock Performance. Thirty years later, it remains the band's second-highest top-charting song, bested only by "1979" from the same album.
Amazingly, songwriter Corgan didn't think "Bullet With Butterfly Wings" would succeed on the radio. In an interview with Ultimate Classic Rockpublished in May 2026, Corgan, 59, admitted he was against releasing the song as the album's first single.
"[With] Mellon Collie, you know, there was a sort of planned idea for singles, but ‘Bullet with Butterfly Wings' came out first," he told the outlet. "I fought it, and kind of eventually gave in."
"I wasn't sure that ‘Bullet' was going to be a successful radio song," the music icon added. "Back then, I really didn't think about it much. I just tried to write the best songs I could. …So the entire time I was writing ‘Bullet,' I wasn't thinking, ‘Oh, I've got to make this part shorter or longer, because of the radio stations,' I didn't think about it at all, and I was convinced 'Jellybelly' was going to be the first single off of Mellon Collie, and it never even became a single at all."
Corgan previously explained that he was surprised when a Virgin Records executive insisted on releasing "Bullet With Butterfly Wings" as a single.
"I didn't get it at the time," Corgan said during a 2025 appearance on Joe Rogan Experience. "I actually had to be talked into it. We were putting out our double album, it was this big pressure moment, '95, and I wanted a different song to be the first song. And the guy from the record company called, who's now passed away, his name was Phil Quartararo, lovely guy. And he literally did the thing on the phone, ‘Kid, it's a smash, you've got to trust me.' And I trusted him. I thought he was crazy."
Decades after releasing the career-defining hit, Corgan noted that fans still reference him via the song's lyric, "Despite all the rage, I am still just a rat in a cage."
In a May 2026 episode of his podcast, The Magnificent Others, Corgan told guest Barry Williams, "I'm the rat in the cage guy. That's what I get in airports, you know, because my one song, you know. ‘So like you're the rat in the cage guy, right?'"
Sticking to that theme, in fall 2026, Corgan and the Smashing Pumpkins will hit the road for The Rats in a Cage Tour to celebrate 30 years of Mellon Collie and Infinite Sadness.
Corgan told Ultimate Classic Rock he has no regrets over how things ended up with the Smashing Pumpkins singles 30 years ago. "I can't complain, because with hindsight, you look at it more like, ‘Well, did it all kind of work out?'" he said. "Certainly, with that album, it worked out."
Related: 1993 One-Hit Wonder Became an Era-Defining Classic, Despite Never Hitting No. 1
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This story was originally published May 26, 2026 at 7:42 AM.