Billy Corgan hopes to make wrestling a smashing success

Good, I've been keeping busy. I've had such a crazy year with getting the album done and going on tour that I've been kind of neglecting the life stuff, so I've been running around trying to take care of house stuff. I've written a lot of a draft of a book I'm writing.

You are a huge sports fan and a big supporter of wrestling, where did your interest start?

There used to be a show on in the '70s and '80s called "Bob Luce Wrestling." I've been meaning to Google him after meeting a couple people who knew him, he did some cool stuff. He had a very lo-fi local program and I was just a kid. I didn't realize it was a lot of really big stars at the end of their careers, these really larger-than-life guys who were sort of at the end of their runs. It was all very personality-driven which drew me to it. One of the things I like about rock 'n roll is the larger-than-life personalities.

Sports and music don't necessarily mix, but wrestling seems like the overlap, the wrestlers even have their own theme songs.

You know what it is? There's a certain affinity wrestlers and musicians have because the lifestyle is really, really similar. The object of the job is very similar, although obviously in very different forms. The audience focus, personality driven, and creating some drama about what's going to happen. It's very similar and hanging with wrestlers for a couple of years, we have very common experiences. There's just a natural affinity there.

Were you constantly a big wrestling fan?

When I went into my goth teens, I totally lost interest. I actually missed some really good periods in wrestling which I have gone back and reviewed. I didn't really get back into it until the late '90s when I would come across UCW flipping cable channels or watch WWE which was the height of Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Rock and those guys, which is now considered one of the greatest periods ever. I kind of got sucked back into it, and I was surprised there was this new attitude brought to it, it seems like something that would never change if that made sense. Any time I clicked in during the '80s or the early '90s it was just sort of the same old shit. It really wasn't until the '90s that they had this revolution and all this new stuff got thrown back in, and I enjoyed it again. It was like when I was a kid and I didn't know what was going to happen and I could appreciate the edginess of the product. At that point I was fairly well-known so I could go meet people backstage at shows, and I started to make some friends and they began smartening me up on the business and what really goes on. It's a pretty fascinating business behind the scenes. That led to Resistance Pro, certainly nothing I planned on but something I always thought possible.

What do you want to achieve with Resistance?

I think there's an interesting divide in wrestling right now. You have WWE which has moved very much toward the entertainment product and the indie wrestling scene which is very similar to the indie rock scene in that it's very particular for a particular audience. So what we see in our company is there's a gap in between. People who like the old-school wrestling mentality don't necessarily have a place to go find it. But maybe with a 2012 take on it. We like to call it "old school new school." It's some of the old values system but updated, which is pretty similar to what I've done with my band. I took classic rock values and updates them to a different generation. That's kind of our approach. We want to have a lot of fun with it, to kind of bring back a little bit more whimsical spirit. Not fantasy, but maybe a little more of a wink and a nod because everyone realizes it's fake. It does come down to how well you are able to perpetrate what you are trying to pull off by getting people emotionally tied to the storylines and the people in he ring.

As you are aware, Chicago is a great sports town. Where do you see Resistance fitting in?