Smashing Pumpkins: Fresh Fruit or Rotten Veg?

Say what you will, but she spun a nasty Twister wheel back in the day:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPMdvnC6ldc

(I love how Kurt volunteers at around 1:10.)

Chamberlain rejoining the band (even if he's not yet committed beyond their current dates) has seriously reinvigorated my interest in the band over the last couple of weeks.

Sounding great.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpDHl1BlpBs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zch5JVN1uFg

show in camden was great. JC is joining the house band on Seth Meyers' show tonight, dunno for how long. he tweeted that there might be a "pumpkin gem" in the set. i think he means Ruby

https://scontent.fman1-1.fna.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xap1/v/t1.0-9/12108956_10153620687506397_5401487902949253546_n.jpg?oh=b6069b84c461a6a2b01c29cd12aa5810&oe=56C491DD

There was the same headline in a free recipe book with my veggie box delivery last week.

http://www.avclub.com/article/mellon-collie-foretold-both-glory-and-doom-smashin-226274

"Porcelina" is a high point of the record, if you ask me, but oh well. And the cover of the album....I guess it's an iconic image at this point twenty years on, but man it is gorgeous.

i didnt notice the angel was masturbating until a couple years ago

LOL at anyone who considers fucking Bullet the "high point" of MCIS, and thinks Porcelina is an energy sapper....NEXT!

"the unabashedly rockist 'Muzzle'".... yeah, it's a fucking rock song! christ

idek what rockist means in that context

to single out "porcelina" and "ruby" as slogs is to fundamentally misunderstand this record i think?

absolutely! they're the high-watermarks of SP1!

I don’t want this album viewed as an artistic failure publicly. And the way that it will be viewed as an artistic failure publicly is if it doesn’t sell.

billy otm, statement borne out by the "failure" of adore. actually kind of surprised at the lack of petulance in that quote, given most every other corgan interview i've skimmed

'Porcelina of the Vast Oceans' and 'Thru the Eyes of Ruby' are two of my personal highlights of this record and I don't find them slogs at all. I think Brad is totally OTM. I've also never understood the huge fuss over 'Bullet with Butterfly Wings' and '1979' either - I like both plenty, but I consider neither to be highlights. I'd go as far as saying '1979' is one of the most overrated Pumpkins tracks ever, actually.

i believe it to be their very best, but i guess it's overrated if you say so

idk i have a hard time seeing mellon collie as anything other than the peak of 90s alt rock. and i'm not even a big smashing pumpkins fan.

"Porcelina" sounds as big as its full title implies, and I love it for that reason.

the thing about it being the peak of '90s rock is i consider the last five tracks to be a deliberate troll of '90s rock

yeah I don't really think there's any precedent for a RAWK album that ends with five basically guitar-free ballads, nor anyone who's been foolish enough to try that since

Anyone else excited for the second leg of the IN PLAINSONG tour? With a 7-8 suite of Siamese Dream songs in the middle! Check out this setlist from one of the shows last year, with the Adore suite in the middle:

Tonight, Tonight
99 Floors
Today
My Poor Troubled Heart (traditional)
Dorian
For Your Love
Drum + Fife
A Stitch in Time
Mayonaise
Prairie Song
Jersey Shore
Sparrow
Perfect
To Sheila
Behold! the Night Mare
For Martha
Blissed and Gone
Ava Adore
Now (And Then)
The Crying Tree of Mercury
1979
Run2Me
Pinwheels
Stand Inside Your Love
Landslide (Nicks)
A New Poetry
---
Spaceboy
El-A-Noy
---
Cardinal Rule

Sparrow
Perfect
To Sheila
Behold! the Night Mare
For Martha
Blissed and Gone
Ava Adore

fuck

right?? and there are far fewer SD-era songs that work acoustically, so that pretty much guarantees we'll get Luna and Spaceboy along with Disarm and Today. We could get the first performances of Sweet Sweet since 1994! I made a list of all the possible SD-era songs they could do in this format:

Soothe
Luna
Sweet Sweet
Disarm
Today
Rocket
Spaceboy
Obscured
Whir
Glynis
Blissed
Smiley
Apathy's Last Kiss
Soma? (they did it in 96)
Hummer? (did it in 93)
Moleasskiss? (kind of a stretch but i could see him working it out, such a killer song, a lost classic, could've been a single)

Mayonaise could work acoustically, but I never need to hear that song again. Hoping Bill digs deep like he did last year with the Adore material (Sparrow???!!)

please please please let "obscured" happen

obscured is the best song

Always loved "Whir." In 1994 I was 12 and I thought that songs like that were what college kids listened to. It's got that college-y, angsty, Gen-X-y feel that we've all come to know and love. "Obscured" is so great, though.

gonna keep this streak alive and give a nice big shout out to my jam "obscured"

I never cared for "Apathy's Last Kiss," but this rough mix without all the flanger/chorus/phaser is really good

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8sue6FKHBM

Cardinal Rule
Stumbleine
Tonight, Tonight
World's Fair
Space Oddity [David Bowie cover]
Thirty-three
Jesus, I / Mary Star of the Sea
Mayonaise
Soma
Rocket
Spaceboy
Today
Whir [live premiere]
Disarm
Sorrows (In Blue)
Eye
Saturnine [live premiere]
Identify
1979
Stand Inside Your Love
Pinwheels
Lily (My One and Only)
Malibu [Hole cover]
Spaniards [live premiere]
---
Angie [The Rolling Stones cover]
Amarinthine [live premiere]

IDENTIFY??!??!????!!???!?

wacky

God, imagine Corgan doing the vowel-mangling bit on Angie. *shudder*

I'm stoked on MARY STAR OF THE SEA - easily the best song on the Zwan album. Best Zwan song though will forever be CHRYSANTHEMUM

a Flood-produced version of Identify with Bill on vocals leaked recently:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDwW4yFj-dE

Corgan's voice is really similar to Jagger's!

He's like batshit wild man jagger

Tape Op article on the history of Smashing Pumpkins in the studio is pretty amazing

http://tapeop.com/interviews/115/smashing-pumpkins-a-studio-history/

I appreciate how they're all pretty much acknowledging that in the studio the band was a duo.

yeah that struck me and not just coming from Billy acting like a dick but all the producers p much just talk as if it was billy and jimmy only

i really dug the part about chamberlain having to move drums around his kit to physically perform a beat corgan had cooked up on the drum machine

also 30 days to do Gish! that was kind of a crazy investment on an underground band in those days

Well they were already signed to Virgin and the record came out on Caroline for that underground cred, man, etc. etc. But the point still holds, that's a pretty big indulgence for a band that just had the couple of singles out at that time. Were times just more flush in general as we keep hearing or did someone in the Virgin corporate structure figure this was a solid bet from the start?

Anyway, definitely an interesting read. I skimmed once it hit Zeitgeist of course.

Well they were already signed to Virgin and the record came out on Caroline for that underground cred, man, etc. etc.

ah i didn't know that so i guess it worked...but yeah then i guess it's probably not as big a deal...1990-91 I'd imagine everyone is pretty much swimming in cassette/ascendent CD market money, but yeah I thought with Caroline that's staking a pretty big bet

good article, and i don't even really like this band. interesting about them pretty much being a duo in the studio, and yet everyone says they were amazing live (at least at some point). maybe that was primarily corgan and chamberlin too ...
also that album cover for Zeitgeist remains a thing to behold.

i feel like zeitgest's album cover is trying to makes some kind of POLITICAL STATEMENT but it's hard to discern what it might be....

http://diffuser.fm/files/2015/07/Zeitgeist.jpg

http://pixel.nymag.com/imgs/daily/following/2015/12/04/thinky.w710.h473.2x.jpg

i mean, i like heavy handed adolescent rock imagery as much as the next guy [ #pinkfloydrules ] but lol come on billy

Jimmy Chamberlin: On Machina, I think we got – in my opinion – to where we always wanted to be sonically. That record, for me – drum-wise with the distortion and the (Eventide) Omnipressor on the snare drum, the crispy-and-crunchiness of those drums, and how they interface with the guitar dynamics – from a production standpoint, really is our crowning achievement.

lol wow jimmy

everyone says they were amazing live (at least at some point)

as noted on this thread, I would rank them as one of the worst bands I've ever seen, def one of the worst professional shows I ever saw

interesting to see Corgan accurately assess his qualities as a singer tho

huh I guess that's NOT noted on this thread, must've been some other Corgan-related thread. anyway, it's here now!

xxp ha yeah, i've heard that too - i guess it's just Flood who says they were the best live band.

Reading that, and this thread, made me come to the idea that Billy was cursed with a talent for making amazing guitar sounds and symphonic rock music, and by teaming with Jimmy they inevitably made high-fructose, insanely palatable hard rock that was the perfect distillation of what the mainstream market wanted to hear at the time, myself included. BUT, and it's a big BUT, he had nothing to say beyond "sucks to be me". So this band is making beautiful, bombastic, addictive music, the platonic ideal of 90s rock, and in order to get that you have to listen to a guy mining his one-note personality in ever-increasing depth. As soon as the palatability of the music falls away, you're left resenting how much attention you paid to the guy's trivial whining. And the public persona from Machina on, which coincided with the rise of online access to artists and the ability of the artist to speak directly to the public rather than through a PR machine, placed the focus ever more squarely on the whiny-dick aspect which just soured the relationship with the public further.

Reminds of The Great Lost Project he had at the end of the original band there, the animation/story "Glass and the Machines of God" thing:

https://spfreaks.wordpress.com/2012/09/30/the-story-of-glass-and-the-machines-of-god/

If Corgan can put all that stuff on the radio channel on the reissue I would be appreciative. But in the meantime!

https://spfreaks.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/pic02.jpg

(I don't think it's any surprise that Gerard Way figured out how to do this angle much more effectively.)