Smashing Pumpkins aren't from Seattle either.
Chicago.
There. Saved you the trouble.
I first heard them back in ’91 when Gish turned up at the store in Queens.
I remember the cover before I remember the music.
Then somebody put it on.
“I Am One.”
“Siva.”
“Rhinoceros.”
Okay.
Who the hell are these guys?
Billy Corgan and James Iha had this huge wall of guitars going on, but underneath all that fuzz there was something almost dreamy about it. Jimmy Chamberlin played drums like he'd wandered into the wrong band and decided to make everybody else keep up.
And D'arcy Wretzky's bass held the whole thing together.
They didn't sound like Seattle to me.
Still don't.
There was psychedelic stuff in there. Cheap Trick. Sabbath. Shoegaze. Arena rock. Whatever Billy had been listening to that week.
Mostly they sounded like Smashing Pumpkins.
Then Siamese Dream happened.
Jesus.
That record sounded enormous.
“Cherub Rock.”
“Quiet.”
“Today.”
“Hummer.”
“Mayonaise.”
“Silverfuck.”
I bought it immediately.
Butch Vig produced it, so naturally everybody found another reason to drag Seattle into the conversation.
By ’93 anything with distorted guitars was apparently grunge.
Fine.
Whatever sells magazines.
What I remember is putting headphones on at the store and hearing all those guitar tracks stacked on top of each other.
You could get lost in that record.
And then, because apparently Siamese Dream wasn't enough material for Billy Corgan, they put out Pisces Iscariot in ’94 and filled it with B-sides and leftovers that would've been some other band's best songs.
That's when I started paying closer attention to the singles.
Dangerous habit.
We'll get to those.
Then came Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness in ’95.
A double album.
Twenty-eight songs.
Of course it was.
Nobody was ever going to accuse Billy Corgan of thinking small.
I remember opening the CD for the first time and thinking:
This guy really expects me to listen to all of this.
Then I did.
A lot.
“Tonight, Tonight.”
“Zero.”
“Here Is No Why.”
“1979.”
“Bodies.”
“Thirty-Three.”
“Thru the Eyes of Ruby.”
“X.Y.U.”
Too much?
Probably.
That's also kind of the point.
For a while the Pumpkins seemed like the biggest alternative rock band in America.
Then everything went bad.
In July ’96, touring keyboard player Jonathan Melvoin died from a heroin overdose in New York.
Jimmy Chamberlin was there.
The band fired Jimmy afterward.
I remember reading about it and thinking how familiar the whole thing was starting to feel.
Another band.
Another overdose.
Another headline.
Enough.
The next record didn't sound anything like Mellon Collie.
Good.
Adore came out in ’98.
Drum machines. Piano. Electronics. Acoustic guitars. Half the people I knew seemed to hate it.
I didn't.
Took me a while, though.
“Ava Adore” was easy.
“Perfect” too.
The rest of the record took some work.
Now I probably play it more than I did when it came out.
Funny how that happens.
Jimmy eventually came back.
D'arcy left.
Melissa Auf der Maur came in.
Then Machina/The Machines of God arrived in 2000.
That record is a mess.
I mean that affectionately.
There's a really good album buried in there somewhere underneath the concept, the production and whatever the hell Billy was trying to explain in interviews.
“The Everlasting Gaze.”
“Stand Inside Your Love.”
“I of the Mourning.”
“This Time.”
I still like it.
Then came the really weird part.
They had another pile of songs.
Virgin didn't want to release them as another album.
So the band basically said fuck it and gave the thing away.
Machina II / The Friends & Enemies of Modern Music.
Twenty-five copies pressed.
Given to friends and people close to the band with instructions to copy it and put it on the Internet.
Now that I respect.
No, I don't have one of the twenty-five.
Calm down.
I have a CD-R.
So does half the planet.
Probably.
By then everybody knew the band was ending anyway.
They played their last show at the Metro in Chicago on December 2, 2000.
Same club where they'd played one of their first shows twelve years earlier.
That's a pretty good way to close the book.
Except Billy apparently doesn't know how to sit still.
He's got another band going now called Zwan.
Jimmy's playing with him again.
Paz Lenchantin from A Perfect Circle is in there.
Matt Sweeney too.
And David Pajo.
Yeah.
That David Pajo.
I've heard about some of the shows they've been playing.
Haven't seen them yet.
No record so far.
I'm curious.
That's all I can tell you in March 2002.
Looking back, I understand why Smashing Pumpkins ended up getting thrown into the same pile as all the Seattle bands.
Same years.
Same record stores.
Same magazines.
Some of the same producers.
A lot of the same kids buying the records.
But they weren't Seattle.
They didn't need to be.
They were this huge, ambitious, fucked-up Chicago band that wanted punk kids, metal kids, goth kids and kids listening to Cure records alone in their bedrooms all at the same time.
Sometimes it worked.
Sometimes it really didn't.
At least they went for it.
And I've got to admit something.
For all the shit people give Billy Corgan — and God knows he makes it easy sometimes — the guy wrote a ridiculous number of great songs.
I've got the singles to prove it.
