Fan Fare

Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan knows about dropping out of the limelight, or as he says it, how to “burn” down a career. The 1990s superstar faded from view in recent years, coincidentally just as “Gravity” singer John Mayer was seeing his own career gain steam.

Now, in light of Mayer’s recent misstep in his Playboy magazine interview, Corgan is warning that his fellow rock singer is on a bad path.

“He’s trying to destroy his career,” Corgan tells Rolling Stone, in an outtake posted on Thursday from an interview profile the magazine ran this month.

“Rather than take a year off or change his musical direction … some part of it is irritating his soul to the point where he’s trying to blow it up,” Corgan told the magazine. “Certainly a talented guy, but empathetically, standing on the sidelines, it’s hard to watch someone literally burn their career to the ground — speaking as somebody who’s done it.”

As of Thursday afternoon, Mayer had yet to respond to Corgan’s comment on the social networking website Twitter, where the rock and blues singer generally comments about all things big and small.

Mayer used the “N” word in the Playboy interview that ran last month, and said that he has an aversion to sleeping with black women because, as he said, his penis is “sort of like a white supremacist.”

He apologized for the comments that many viewed as racist. In the same interview, he also described former flame Jessica Simpson, the actress and country singer, as “sexual napalm.” As it happens, Corgan is good friends with Simpson, and he didn’t take kindly to those comments.

“I think for any person who has celebrity to sort of drop rocks at somebody else’s feet like that — there’s things you should really just keep your mouths shut on,” Corgan told Rolling Stone. “There’s things that should just be left alone.”

Corgan is trying to reconstitute the Smashing Pumpkins, now that he is the only remaining member from the original band. Last year he got a new drummer after open auditions, and this week it was revealed that the band will do the same thing to get a new bassist and keyboardist. Don’t count on Mayer to try out, for one thing he’s used to playing lead — for now.