Smashing Pumpkins: Fresh Fruit or Rotten Veg?

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.)

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.)