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Billy Corgan’s New Label to Release Germs Songs

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Smashing Pumpkins head honcho Billy Corgan — who’s already busy with new Pumpkins material, a holistic lifestyle blog, and his romance with pop singer Jessica Simpson — plans to launch a new record label that will release new material from trailblazing ’70s L.A. punk band the Germs, among others.

According to a post picked up by the LA Weekly‘s Off the Record blog, Corgan will team with frequent collaborator Kerry “Studio Dog” Brown to helm a new, as-yet-unnamed imprint that will release fresh cuts from the Germs and a bevy of older, relatively obscure acts like ’60s flashes-in-the-pan Strawberry Alarm Clock and the Electric Prunes.

“In the very near future we plan on recording two [Germs] songs that [the late] Darby Crash wrote with Pat Smear, ‘Out of Time’ and ‘Beyond Hurt – Beyond Help,'” Brown writes. The songs will feature the Germs’ three surviving members, with actor Shane West taking on Crash’s vocals — he’s become the band’s de facto frontman since portraying Crash in the 2007 film, What We Do Is Secret. Release dates are still to be determined.

Corgan is also working on Teargarden by Kaleidyscope, the free, 44-song Smashing Pumpkins album he plans to release over the next few years, one track at a time. The first track, “A Song for a Son,” surfaced in December.

And he’s curating Everything from Here to There, a blog where he posts lengthy musings on the spirituality for folks who are “drawn to the Hidden Truths, drawn to God as something beyond limitation, and drawn to Love as the greatest force in the Universe.” He posted in December that he’s planning to write a similarly themed book, God Is Everywhere From Here to There.

And then there’s Corgan’s widely publicized romance with singer Jessica Simpson — the couple was spotted in public repeatedly throughout the end of 2009. A tabloid report earlier this week claimed that Simpson’s inner circle was concerned about her falling for a rock star who’d contemplated suicide and battled depression.