Smashing Pumpkins: Fresh Fruit or Rotten Veg?

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.)

BTW if you want to feel your face melt, try reading this. (You won't succeed.)

https://spfreaks.wordpress.com/2000/01/01/glass-and-the-machines-of-god-a-modern-fable/

As for the original band live, I have enough bootlegs -- and my own memories -- to know that they could bring it as they chose. That said I think the best they were overall was at the start of the 90s -- we're talking 1991, Billy seemed to be more given to being in a trance on stage more than anything else -- and during the 2000 shows, so essentially the beginning and end of the phase. The late 1996 arena show I saw which was them making up for the earlier cancellation after Melvion died was too big and crazed for its own good. But I will say that the two 1994 shows at Lollapalooza I saw (here and here) definitely had great moments, and that first one starting with "Geek USA" into "Rocket" was one of those jawdropping moments. Everything just WORKED.

As discussed elsewhere, their homecoming Lollapalooza gig on that tour was terrible.

I was at the '94 Lollapalooza show at the Concord Pavillion and it was godawful. Corgan hectoring/whining at the audience throughout, songs cut short/played ineptly, extended wankery, terrible singing, loads of false starts etc. We left early.

Note I said moments. Not the whole thing, believe me.

re: zeitgeist cover

the sun is rising on a new age of american dominance as sea levels drastically fall after american scientists come up with a geoengineering breakthrough that generates only american flags as a side effect

They were sort of weird and uneven at the final Metro show too, but great at the final United Center.

saw them at the chicago suburbs stop on the adore tour, fwiw they seemed a totally solid arena act. Mostly good, a couple of great moments, none of the disastrous stuff mentioned a few posts up.

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

I interviewed Butch Vig a couple of weeks ago and he said by comparison they spent like fifteen days on Nevermind

re: the excellent tapeop piece, I had no idea Adore was originally a Billy solo album. Don't think that's ever been made public.

It makes total sense. That fact that it was billed as an SP album was most likely a marketing thing above all -- can't imagine a BC solo album would have sold half as much, especially given the material.

BC and JC's collective delusion re: Machina and Zeitgeist is depressing.

Delusions about what? They've admitted the record was a failure in many respects - unfinished, didn't sell well, not marketed correctly - but they're talking about snare compression and mic bleed here. I don't think JC is necessarily deluded when he says the production on Machina was the culmination of their sound. It's geek shit. Bill's "undersea" description of the sound is spot on. Not going to defend Zeitgeist.

Agreed re: Machina. And I freely admit I really want that remastered box to come out.

Me too. Took a long time but I've totally come around on Machina. The "Judas Priest meets Simple Minds" concept for the guitar sound is brilliant.

I personally think MACHINA/The Machines of God is a very, very good album and I love most of the material on it. Could it have been better? Undoubtedly. Can't wait to see what Corgan will do with the eventual remaster.

I agree that it's a very good album

Kinda worried that corgan will fuck up the reissue (re-recording, remixing, re-sequencing, spoken word bits (?))

wait is there evidence he's doing any of that?

i mean i guess i imagine he'll have to resequence definitely

http://www.smashingpumpkinsnexus.com/single-post/2014/05/23/MACHINA-REISSUE-UPDATE

maybe not quite all those things but I am concerned

lol yeah anything that bill said 2 years ago is basically useless, dude abandons 90% of the stuff he announces. since 2014, the Machina reissue has been held up by label/legal issues. the Adore reissue came out in September 2014, and shortly after the Pumpkins' parent company (EMI?) was sold/reorganized so the reissue project (which originally included Zwan, ChicagoKid, FutureEmbrace, & Zeitgeist) is on indefinite hold. Sucks

Wait, ChicagoKid? What's that? (Honestly I wasn't expecting a Zwan reissue of any sort given how that fell apart but I wouldn't mind; I know there were a slew of songs that never got anywhere like a formal release.)

the acoustic record Billy recorded in early 2004. he played a couple shows with that material in april 2004 in chicago, and the story goes he went online the next day, saw people complaining that he wasn't playing distorted guitar anymore, and canned the whole thing. it's finished and just sitting in the vault - he frequently brags that "my friends say it's the best thing I've ever done." ugh, just release it dude! lemme see if i can find a recording of one of those shows...

here we go: https://archive.org/details/bc2004-04-19.flac16

he played "The World's Fair" at the In Plainsong show I saw this past April...

that tapeop piece was tough to get through, like Billy can't say a single thing without asserting his know-it-all attitude and dripping condescension

Siamese Dream was a tricky record as it pertains to Jimmy, because Jimmy was asked to be more than he was at that moment. And, at the same time, he was asked to be less than he was at that moment.

you don't say

xpost yeah, and as a result i start to read everybody else's tone as having in the back of their mind the potential that billy may interpret something as a slight and blow up at them or something.

I'm not really sure how I arrived there, but it probably had something to do with the fact that Butch finished Gish and literally packed up the next day to record Nevermind with Nirvana. We were at Butch's for a 4th of July picnic, and we were probably some of the first people on the planet to hear that record. We were listening to Butch's mixes. The first song we hear was "Teen Spirit," and the first thing through my mind was, "Wow, Kurt's ripped off ‘More Than a Feeling' by Boston." The second thing through my mind was, "Oh, by the way, Butch has ripped off my fucking guitar sound." So I think, in my mind, it was like, "Okay, I'm going to create a guitar sound that no one can follow!"

so much gobbledygook in that interview, weird how little actual tech talk there is for Tape Op

buncha rich dudes sitting around talking about their "concepts" and "approaches" blech

but they created a guitar sound no one could follow unless they use a distortion and chorus pedal

haha being a tape op interview I would expect them to go into what exact model of distortion and chorus pedals, what compressors and amps and pre-amps and mics were used etc. but maybe they just didn't want to reveal that shit or something.

I don't think the guitar sound on Smells Like Teen Spirit sounds much like Gish at all either tho so what do I know

here's a much more in depth geek shit q&a w/ butch vig and his assistant engineer about the SD sessions, worth a read if you're looking for tech shit https://www.gearslutz.com/board/q-butch-vig/398145-1993-smashing-pumpkins-siamese-dream-2.html

lol I like how that totally contradicts Jimmy/Billy within a few posts

(ie using a click to track Mayonnaise for example)

that's the only contradiction i can find, and no drummer wants to admit they had to use a click...

using a click isn't necessarily an indication that a drummer can't keep steady time (pretty clearly JC can - dude is a monster). sometimes drummers are asked to use clicks just because it keeps everything on an exactly steady beat, so that overdubs/electronics/sequencers can be added later with a minimum of fuss

^^^ was trying to think of how to say that

clicks have no bearing on a drummer's capabilities and pros know this

vig was telling me that he got Grohl to play to a click on, I think, Lithium and that Grohl cried that night and that it broke his heart

obviously. still not surprised jimmy/billy would fib and say they never used a click on SD. grohl has a good bit about this in some Nevermind doc about how he was forced to use a click on Lithium after dozens of aborted takes and how mortifying it was despite reassurance from everyone around him

ah xp

hahahaha. i should add vig couldn't have been more voluminous in his praise for grohl, both as a drummer and as a dude.

They could be very solid live. (I saw them in '96 and traded way too many bootleg tapes online from '95 to '99.) James did what he had to do on stage, and did it well. D'Arcy was....there. She wasn't the greatest, but I never really cared. Plus, they were droll and funny and took Billy down a peg. He desperately, desperately needs some of that treatment these days.

By all accounts Larry Mullen Jr. has incredible time, but even U2 records with a click (usually just some looped percussion, which often makes it onto the final track, if you listen for it). It's mostly there for everyone else, everyone *but* the drummer. Overdub happy bands like the Pumpkins all must use clicks, at least to some extent, just to find where they are on the desk and make sure, when they punch in, that they're doing it as precisely as possible.

Plus, they were droll and funny and took Billy down a peg. He desperately, desperately needs some of that treatment these days.

Yeah there was a lot more open humor onstage even towards the end there.

This is a good Larry Mullen story from a while back, originally from The New Yorker:

Brian Eno told a story about U2 drummer, Larry Mullen. When he was producing All That You Can't Leave Behind, Eno gave Mullen a click track (computer generated beat) to play drums over, as a way of keeping everything in synch. Mullen swore the click track wasn't right, and refused to play over it. Eventually Eno adjusted it - but just to humour the drummer, as he knew it couldn't be at fault. Except he later found Mullen was right. The click was off - by six milliseconds!

"The thing is," said Eno, "when we were adjusting it I once had it two milliseconds to the wrong side of the beat, and he said, 'No, you've got to come back a bit.' Which I think is absolutely staggering."

Yeah, I think that's where I got it from. Again, if you have a good drummer (as does U2, as does SP, as does just about any good band) the click is for everyone else.

mullen pretty much has to use a click given how much timed delay stuff the edge uses all the time

i remember in It Might Get Loud, he turned his huge refridgerator sized efx unit on an off and you realize this whole tricky sounding part was just him plinking like 2 notes and the unit did the rest

loving that larry mullen story.