Smashing Pumpkins: Fresh Fruit or Rotten Veg?

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.)

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...