"Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness" by the Smashing Pumpkins

I'm hoping Santa Claus drops the vinyl set in my stocking this christmas

i dug out mellon collie last night. it's a rare example of a double album with very very few bad moments on it.

yup, the only replacements i would make are "The Boy" instead of "Love," and "Meladori Magpie," "Jupiter's Lament," or "My Blue Heaven" instead of "Take Me Down."

i like both those songs. i always loved the guitar sound on Love especially. And Take Me Down is slight, but nice and it has Iha singing on it.

billy could've kept the band together by promising iha 2 songs no questions asked on all future albums. then he'd be able to say he gave him a shot, and that iha wasn't really a "repressed talent" like he thought and people would stop jumping to the conclusion that billy was an asshole for not putting any shite songs on his records.

xp Is it confirmed that all the Pistachio Medley bits were pulled from full-length songs?

i don't think the seeds of resentment against Billy from fans or bandmates really has much at all to do w/ whether he let other people write SP songs (xp)

-not all the pastichio medley bits are full songs, many are likely culled from longer jams
-most of james' resentment was a result of being put down by billy continually

if he was trying to get his songs on the albums all the time maybe he deserved to be put down?

xxp But it is interesting how much of the popular disdain for Smashing Pumpkins has to with Billy Corgan as a person, and the dysfunctionality inherent in the Smashing Pumpkins narrative. There's really nothing sexy about their story at all. We have a fairly unattractive egomaniac with a penchant for publicly berating his enemies, two people who supposedly couldn't play their instruments very well, a junkie drummer. There's really not a good story in there, and there are certainly no heroes-- unsung or otherwise; it's all ugly.

poliopolice...otm?

oh come on, i can be right some of the time

apparently!

Obviously, it's hard to have the right opinions on subjective things 100% of the time.

I can't understand how the dysfunctional relationships between band members, or really any of what you cite beyond "Billy Corgan as a person," could breed popular disdain. "Man, Billy had to play D'Arcy's bass lines? She's just like Craig at the office. I hate Craig. I hate this band now."

xp I don't agree, I find their story to be very romantic and almost regal. abused, misunderstood boy escapes the suburbs to make transcendent, spiritual, and extraordinarily evocative rock music thru unwavering dedication, gumption, force of will, and ballsiness. he finds three bandmates who's sensibilities add up to something greater than billy alone could ever be, the friction and edginess of those personalities together made the band what it was. chamberlin was a hard partier but he was and still is one of the best rock drummers in the world. watch any live show from 92-96 and tell me james and d'arcy don't hold their own even against billy's guitar histrionics. so they come close to breaking up after SD - they keep it together long enough to make what amounts to a final statement and epitaph, Mellon Collie. it's their biggest hit yet, and eight months into a huge worldwide arena tour, they implode, jimmy's fired, touring keyboardist dies, they keep on but the last four years of the band, 96-2000, are a sustained death march into oblivion as billy becomes totally disenchanted by being in a fractured, non-existent band. they went from being a dysfunctional family to not communicating as anything but business partners. Adore and Machina are funereal, elegies to billy's mom, the band, and the sadness of hope lost and what almost was. it's a beautiful story to me from beginning to end.

xxp and i'm not saying i agree that billy was wrong to leave james' songs off the records, but it was certainly a cause of resentment from james

maybe it's his voice then

People hates Corgan because he was pretty arrogant and outspoken about shit. After the band's popularity started to wane, he seemed to become ... Even more curmudeonly.

That interview he did with Q Magazine circa MACHINA/The Machines Of God which resulted in Sharon Osbourne calling Billy "a baldy twat in a dress" springs to mind.

Typed up here:

http://forums.netphoria.org/showthread.php?t=6225

interviewer also sounds a bit dickish - "nice skirt" is not a very warm introduction

interviewer just asked a bunch of celebrity culture bullshit, when clearly Billy wanted to talk about the music. Interviewer didn't get the hint.

agreed. you gotta talk some astrology with billy before you sprinkle in the celebrity stuff.

My MCIS box showed up in today's mail, this thing is gorgeous.

apparently the mastering job on the vinyl reissue is shoddy, particularly on 'zero.' I do not know this from my own experience, however.

i have it, zero is a tad overcooked but otherwise the set sounds phenomenal

Brutal experience that really tainted my opinion on the band. The gig itself is the stuff of legend on account of how bad it was. Throughout the years I’ve met several others who were there that night and they’ve all felt the same.

Had forgotten the awfulness of this gig. The encore was a a noise-fest painful in its total shiteness.

this is where someone says we're now as far from "1979" as "1979" was from 1979.

Who is the “BT” credited on a few of the outtakes and rarities, e.g. Cherry (BT 2012 mix)? Google hasn’t been helpful.

Billy Torgan. No, it's Bjorn Thorsrud, who was an engineer they worked with a bunch.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bjorn_Thorsrud

I wish I could afford this reissue.

Bjorn Thorsgud?

despite all my rage i am still just a rat in a
CAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGE

fuiud

question: is this album Billy C's interpretation of the "the heart music, Echo and the Bunnymen," or is it a two-disc concept album composed in furious response to Kim Thayil? Or should we assume the latter is the "Iscariot" in Pisces Iscariot?

Adore is the Echo & the Bunnymen album obv.

Yeah, that's what's funny - that so clearly lives up to that mission, but it's delayed by one album, as if Billy suddenly had 40+ tracks of non-heart-music that he had to get off his chest.

Mellon Collie is a good album and some of the band's finest moments are on there, but like with every long album there can be some filler in places.

I much prefer Siamese Dream, which is one of my favourite albums of all time. Hell, I think I prefer Gish to Mellon Collie.

Still, Bullet With Butterfly Wings, Tonight Tonight, 1979, Jellybelly, Zero, XYU, Here Is No Why, Thru The Eyes Of Ruby, Where Boys Fear To Tread, Cupid De Locke and Love are wonderful.

Oh, and We Only Come Out At Night.

https://scontent-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash3/1185689_10151895694472328_1380969732_n.jpg

<3

“You are trying to use your intuition to guide you through this interview but, if I may say, it’s not guiding you very well. You’re not listening to what I’m saying. You are trying to look into my eyes to see my soul.” He sighs. “Well let me tell you, you won’t find it.”

http://forums.netphoria.org/showthread.php?t=6225

Yeah this interview is hilarious.

“Go ahead and ask me any thing you want,” he says, “but you won’t get it. I know what you’re after: the story behind the story. Which is a shame. Everyone has lost sight of the real story, which is the music itself. It’s like a train - music is the engine, but other people appear more interested in the other carriages.”

LOL

NEW MELLON COLLIE C-SIDE!! WOW!!! FUCK. full length "In the Arms of Sheep," featured for like 3 seconds in the pastichio medley
could there be more leaks???????sooon??????

https://vimeo.com/98218010

good song, has melody that ended up in "The Last Song."

Can't believe nearly eight years have gone by since I started this thread. Presumably the influence on the young bands of today has to be happening by now, right? Right?

i don't know about artists, but this album has influenced me to not listen to people who say that the smashing pumpkins aren't a good band. a narrow influence, to be sure, but still.

absolutely. mcis never gets old, and it's easily the best and most accomplished thing they did. the white album of the 90s

I for one love this album... as said upthread many years ago, one of the few double albums to justify its length. There's only like 2 or 3 clunkers on each disc; still a solid 20 or so songs.

I especially love the lullaby-esque denouement of the final side... We Only Come Out at Night, Beautiful, Lily, By Starlight, Farewell & Goodnight (intentionally or not, always reminds me of "Good Night" on the White Album).

always happy to be reminded that i will likely never hear this band again if i make wise choices. it's similar to remembering that i have some control over the events that might lead to me wanting or needing to induce vomiting.

btw they will pretty obviously become the Kansas or Styx of future Classic Rock, which is probably exactly what Billy Corgan always wanted.

did they ever cover "Take It On The Run" live?

btw they will pretty obviously become the Kansas or Styx of future Classic Rock, which is probably exactly what Billy Corgan always wanted.

more like Boston or Queen imo. Kansas and Styx is like....silverchair or something