(2:18 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

Smashing Pumpkins: An Homage (Autobiographical and Long)

[Upon posting this, I noticed a new post from Monica that was added shortly before this bloated and skipable tribute.]

Late have I loved thee, Smashing Pumpkins; late have I loved thee. I was not at your early club shows. I did not hear about Gish via word-of-mouth. I was in fact a poseur, an obnoxious high school kid first discovering the joys of “secular” music. I had heard “Today” on the radio several times and was impressed, but I had entered the “alternative” music scene on the cusp of the Mellon Collie era—and it was truly an era. Only Alanis Morrisette’s Jagged Little Pill could compete with the mind-blowing six radio songs off of Mellon Collie: “Bullet with Butterfly Wings,” “1979,” “Zero,” “Tonight, Tonight,” “Thirty-Three,” and “Muzzle.” I remember the news stories about the death of the touring keyboardist and the dismissal of drummer Jimmy Chamberlain—always the cornerstone of the group, despite Billy Corgan’s megalomania.

They were absolutely huge, the most dominant group of their period. They released a box set of five singles, with upward of 75 songs, and people actually bought it (among them, Mike Schaefer, who is actually a real person). They were the most prolific mainstream band by far. Why is it, then, that when people ask after the Most Important Rock Band of the nineties, they scratch their heads and then reluctantly venture to mention Metallica? Why isn’t the answer painfully obvious?

I listened to the radio obsessively, and I could probably reconstruct the playlist of 89X (a Canadian station, so they didn’t censor the swear words!) for the period 1994-1998 with startling accuracy. I listened through the static, not so much for the music itself, but to know that it was being played—to know it was there, to be able to talk about it, to be able to develop fine-tuned opinions about music that was, in retrospect, the golden era of rock radio but that was also, in retrospect, sell-out music. Adam Robinson would shake his head at the amount of deliberation that went into purchasing CDs back then. When one only has four CDs, adding another is a momentous act, a phenomenon parallel to Jared Sinclair’s logarithmic life-as-experienced thesis from his text-based days. Should I buy Mellon Collie? I had listened to it several times, even listened to it all the way through (a feat I would later replicate with Nine Inch Nails’ The Fragile, but that’s another tribute)—but there was so much utter shit on there, it seemed to me. I wanted every song to be a gem, just like on Live’s album Throwing Copper. (Mike Schaefer, who is a decisive personage in the formation of my music taste, during this period always a little way ahead of me, but not so far ahead as to be inaccessible—recently dug out that album and remarked that the reason we thought every song on that album was wonderful was likely because every song on that album was exactly the same. That accusation could never be leveled against Smashing Pumpkins.)

Listening to Mellon Collie with more mature ears, it now seems to be a very strong album, full of a compelling diversity of music—I wonder at my former hesitance. Siamese Dream remains my favorite, the background music for that fateful week home alone after my freshman year of college, a week of almost total solitude in which I read voraciously, started journaling (at the astounding rate of ten pages a day), a week in which something changed. Siamese Dream was there for that. I love every song on that album, each in its own way. Even the pathetic “Space Boy” holds a place in my heart—the necessary disappointment, the throw-away song without which a Smashing Pumpkins album would not be a Smashing Pumpkins album. On Mellon Collie, that spot is held by “We Only Come Out At Night,” which is the preface to the “experimental” section of the second disc, whose first half contains classic after classic.

Already in that “experimental” section, the seeds of destruction are sown. Adore is, undeniably, a disappointment. It is a fine album on its own terms, though obviously (being a Smashing Pumpkins album) too long, full of interesting and innovative songs that reward multiple listens, above all “Pug” and “Tear.” (Mike Schaefer would add “Appels + Oranjes,” but we’ve always been in stark disagreement on that point.) Adore provided the musical setting for my last summer in the house I grew up in—once I moved to Olivet, my parents would move to a brand new house in a new subdivision, a house without large, established trees in the yard, a house with central air-conditioning that never felt like home, because honestly, can you feel at home in a place where you can’t sweat? Just as the Smashing Pumpkins had lost something, so had I. A long-standing dating relationship had lost its charm, and my relationship to my parents, which had always been strained throughout that dating relationship and my religious “questioning,” was reaching a crisis point.

I was more than ready to go away, although my behavior soon prefigured the fatal error that doomed to Smashing Pumpkins to irrelevance—I tried to go back, acting out a rehash of my high school behaviors that turned me into a parody of myself. At first glance, MACHINA: The Machines of God, released a year later, seems to be the same thing. It brought back everything that was embarrassing about the Smashing Pumpkins—the pretentious artwork and “concepts,” the awkward titles, the self-indulgent sections where Billy Corgan would stupidly sing a capella, excessive length—ensuring that the album would only appeal to hardcore fans, the ones who had not already been alienated by Adore. Machina does include some genuinely good songs, particularly “Wound” and “Age of Innocence”—but the whole album feels artificial, overproduced even by the Smashing Pumpkins’ standards. At the same time that I “procured” Machina, I also “procured” Gish and Pisces Iscariot, and the contrast couldn’t be more stark. Listening to it out of order, I couldn’t help but think of Gish as an anticipation of Siamese Dream, but both albums contained some solid rock songs—“I Am One,” “Hello Kitty Kat,” etc. In their new stuff, however, they were just trying too hard.

Only during my sojourn in Oxford did I finally get a taste of the full majesty and sweep of the late Smashing Pumpkins—the full Aeroplane Flies High boxed set and the final, illegal internet-only release, Machina II: Friends and Enemies of Modern Music. Here were roughly fifty brand new songs (to me), and almost all of them were wonderful. At the same time that I marveled at the wealth of material, I also despaired over the thought process that relegated this material to b-sides. Had Machina II been condensed into an album of reasonable length, it would have been unstoppable. Had they resisted the self-indulgent box set, they could have had a solid follow-up album to Mellon Collie while they tried to pick up the pieces after losing their drummer. Perhaps the relative obscurity of the Smashing Pumpkins in the popular mind is due to those poor choices—the decisions to use the leverage of fame to attempt marketing moves that were not so much daring as stupid. They had taken a much more sustainable route than, say, Pearl Jam, building a faithful following over the course of two solid albums before exploding into an unavoidable band with their double-album. After achieving fame, they could have had at least two more solid albums, just with the material they had already recorded in the studio, three if they had (wisely) decided to condense Mellon Collie into a brilliant single album—they could have continued to dominate rock music well into the twenty-first century. Instead, they ceded their place in history to... Metallica.

Yet even with all the disappointment and embarrassment, the Smashing Pumpkins remain my first true musical love, and I remain grateful to them.

| permalink | Main Page