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

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

RHCP is Queen, Lemonheads are Boston

I almost threw Boston in there. I feel like the Pumpkins' proggy "art" aspirations take them a little bit towards Styx territory, but clearly Billy had truck with Scholz's guitar landscapes and Delp's yearning dreaminess.

RHCP is Lynyrd Skynyrd but only because I really hesitate to make them the Eagles. Reliable good times, delivered on the road as needed - but not to the exclusion of heartfelt sensitive ballads.

really though i'm pretty sure billy was big fans of boston queen kansas AND styx!

which one the pumpkins best correlate with 90s wise hmmmmm idk

which one the pumpkins best correlate with 90s wise hmmmmm idk

ELO

Led Zep = Pearl Jam
Stones = RHCP
Beatles = Nirvana
Springsteen = Green Day
Pumpkins = Eagles

in terms of size/number of hits, not drawing any deep parallels or anything

the smashing pumpkins are not the eagles. fleetwood mac

i think SP is more like Led Zeppelin in terms of deep parallels.

yes

Cant hack Corgan but one of my favorite things about this band is the guitar tones....in terms of influence that has to be a 'thing'

Still a fantastic (and in light of their earlier catalogue) underrated album. Almost certainly my favourite - just the right balance of pomp and rawk. OK Computer two years before the fact and twice as long.

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).

― LimbsKing, Monday, July 7, 2014 10:51 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah this is one of my favourite stretches of the record.

20 years ago today: the first MCIS pajama show

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nccgtJ8DaY

Tonight, Tonight
In the Arms of Sleep*
Cupid de Locke
Thirty-three
Today
Lily (My One and Only)
Take Me Down
Beautiful
Rocket
Galapagos
========
Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (over PA)
Where Boys Fear to Tread
Zero
Fuck You
To Forgive
Bullet with Butterfly Wings
Thru the Eyes of Ruby
Porcelina of the Vast Oceans
Jellybelly
1979*
Disarm
X.Y.U. (Intro cut on master)
=========
We Only Come Out at Night*
Muzzle
=========
Geek U.S.A.
Cherub Rock

* - First Time Played

http://s3.amazonaws.com/production.mediajoint.prx.org/public/piece_images/421900/mcis3.jpg

Listening to this back to back for the first time in eternity tonight. And it still holds up, even after twenty years, which is baffling in itself. This album was p much the bane of my existence when I was 16/17 years old. Very formative.

Never mind Corgan having gone completely bonkers and insane after Adore, this is still the shit. Wondering if it has the status today that it really should have. Or did this sublime album kill the double concept rock album for good? No idea, but if this was the last, it was a helluva last pompous double rock album. Unique.

has the best flow of any double i've ever heard. 2 hours go by quick. i've burnt this album out so hard, these days i'll play XYU or Fuck You over anything else.

yeah we know, billy

Hard to wrap my head around this thread being as distant from the present as it was from me getting the album for Christmas. Aside from your basic "where did the time go?" feelings, it also seems like nothing whatsoever has changed in terms of the reputations of either the band, the album, or Billy Pumpkin himself. I should give it one of my infrequent full listens and see if it sounds any different to me.

As I recall, my mom bought this for me to cheer me up after my first orthodontic appointment. So yeah, it's very much connected with teenage misery for me.

Nice gift! That guitar solo on Zero reminds me of a dentist drill

"... but remember what I said about flossing, and no more chewing those charcoal teeth!"

Dr. Corgan: "I'll pull your crooked teeth. You'll be perfect just like me."

"Okay... now rinse... okay. Shake out those loose teeth and we'll take a look at that bumblebee mouth."

and in the eyes of the jackal i say you may need to have your wisdom teeth removed soon

And she gnaws, and she gnaws, and she gnaws

All I think when I listen to it now is, "Wow, Courtney Love really did a number on you, didn't she Billy?"

Seriously, I think she broke him.

On the original vinyl release, all the songs about Courtney are on the same side (Midnight):

Where Boys Fear to Tread
Zero
Fuck You
Love
XYU

lmao get wrecked bill

just wanted to second brad from another pumpkins thread that "Galapagos" is a perfect song and I've never encountered any other like it, so emotionally specific yet elusive

maybe my favorite jimmy drum track other than “porcelain” also. so subtle and tasteful and extremely complicated

er. “porcelina”*

porcelina, another perfect song

There's many songs on which Jimmy's playing blows me away - he's a huge reason I took to this band in the first place. It's hard to pick just one. 'Galapagos' or 'Porcelina...' wouldn't be the first to spring to mind, though.

Jellybelly, too. that's the one that consistently blows me away, really everyone's playing on it, the most 'pumpkins as paramilitary assault group' of all the heavy songs on MCIS. can't find the interview, can't remember if it was 90s or recent, but Jimmy said that he only got the drum part right once on Jellybelly, and that's the take that's on the record.

the choruses in porcelina are crazy drum-wise. i guess a favorite of mine that’s a more obvious exhibit of jimmy’s abilities is “geek usa”

'Jellybelly' absolutely cooks! It's easy to paint Jimmy as a particular type of drummer, but really he uses a wide range of approaches throughout the record.

He would have been great on Adore, I think.

but adore would’ve been a totally different record

I'm not so sure, since portions of Mellon Collie were near enough pointing the way to Adore - songs like 'Stumbleine' pointed the way to 'To Sheila', 'In the Arms of Sleep' to 'Once Upon a Time', '1979' to the more metronomic stuff such as 'Ava Adore' and 'Pug'... Jimmy could be very light and jazzy, which would have suited the tracks. In the case of 'To Sheila', he wouldn't have needed to play at all.

ok but... most of the reason that record was written the way it was is bc of what happened with jimmy and also billy’s mom dying. it would’ve been different had either of those things not happened. also i think the end of mellon collie might be more tranquil than the rest of the record but it doesn’t really sound like adore at all

i also don’t think 1979 -> ava adore is a straight line

enjoy your ideas though

Doesn't make sense to think about 'Adore' with Jimmy, precisely for the reasons Brad mentions.

i'm listening to Galapogos for the first time in years now and you're right. It sounds as good as ever. Better, even

before Jimmy was fired they had already planned to make a drastic change for the fourth record. this interview is from December 1995, at 14:50 Billy talks about how they've considered "just making records," doing very minimal touring, press, etc. Around this time he also said that songs like "1979" (and later on, "Eye") pointed the way to the future of the band. Of course that wasn't the case because as Brad said, you can't imagine Adore without Jimmy OD'ing, or Billy's mom dying, or him getting a divorce, or the increasingly fractured and acrimonious relationship between Billy & James/D'arcy.

I think one of the more overlooked and immensely sad aspects of Billy's personality is that he's pathologically incapable of living in the present. again, this interview was recorded two months after Mellon Collie was released, they're one of the biggest bands in the world, they've won, they climbed whatever mountain they thought might be insurmountable before Siamese Dream. The record debuted at #1, and as Billy said in that Joe Rogan interview, when his manager gave him the news, Billy replied earnestly, "Is there a position higher?" All of the press leading up to the release of Mellon Collie is not triumphant at all: it's dour and sad and pessimistic and full of doom. Besides the whole "Rock is Dead" thing he'd been going on about since 1990, he recognized how precarious and volatile the band's relationship was and how it could all explode at any moment, which it did. I honestly find that really relatable unfortunately, being unable to enjoy the present because of some guaranteed miserable future. as unpleasant it is to be around and to sit through if you're not in the mood, it rings true for me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NhTBjk58mw

^^^ thanks for clarifying flappy, i didn’t know all of those details

I think the death of Billy's mother was a big driving force behind the record - but yes, they were planning on making a different record prior to the Jimmy situation and that's precisely what they did except without him. They were going to further explore some of the "newer" ideas that cropped up on Mellon Collie anyway, and Jimmy wouldn't have sounded out of place on that material.

Adore really isn't the drastic U-turn you lot are making it out to be - you can hear it coming a mile away if you're remotely familiar with what came before it.