Smashing Pumpkins on the Modern Rock Charts

after 68 takes, I am finally satisfied

This is awesome.

The Stanley Kubrick of alt rock

To make myself feel better, I march into a Ferrari dealer and pay cash on the barrel for a brand new 355, the first new car I have ever owned…to complete the charade, I buy 2 pairs of leather pants at the urging of my European girlfriend

I know his post is lightly self-mocking but, man, this guy was a rock cliché.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

1979 sucks assholes and i always switch the radio station when it comes on

tonight tonight >>>>>>>>>>>> 1979

in Hell I will be forced to read the rest of this dude's diary

I always thought 1979 was super overrated back when it was winning all these awards and getting played all the time. A few years after all that blew over, it kinda 'clicked' and I kinda see what chord it maybe struck, it's a good song, but it still seems a little too much like a bid for doing a Serious Generational Statement or whatever.

1979 was a pleasant song but I never felt it earned the accolades it got. I love the bridge a lot, but to me it's second-tier.

glad Cherub at least placed second!

how far back does Rick Rubin's love of lying on couches go

omg how did i miss that

sad :\ april 8 1994…

As is often the case after a show, we board the bus and hit the road, watching movies and eating bad food to pass the time…this drive is about 5+ hours, so the sun is just about to come up when the bus hisses to a stop…the damp breeze of the ocean rolls up onto me in my half-sleep, and I can spy the water just over the road, so I make a small mental note to come back around during the day and check out the beach…turning, I am a bit stunned to see that we are staying in some sort of motel nightmare, splashed down here on a whim in the 60’s as a heady mix of Jetson’s futurism mixed with hurricane reality…I ask no one in particular, “what the fuck is this place?”, but no one listens cause they have heard it all before and all they really want is a closed door with a bed behind it…my room stinks of mildew and is just big enough for that same sought after bed, but out goes the light, and I am fast asleep…

The phone rings way too early, jarring me out of a sweet, humid sleep…the window is open and the sun pours in as the ocean air sweeps through the room…it looks like a beautiful day…”Did you hear the news? He’s gone and killed himself”…my first twilight thought is that it can’t be true, because even I have been reported dead two separate times in the last year (driving down the road, my father had recently heard a report that I was dead, so it must be a rumor or a bad joke)…the t.v. in the room is one of those standard pieces of shit where you need a remote to turn it on, cause they hardwire the front controls off so you can’t jack the channels around to get the movies for free…I flip on CNN with the sound off, figuring if there’s any truth to it that they would have it…there is nothing on at this moment except a general news report, so it must just be a mistake…then I start to think that maybe they won’t care at all and that this might not be the source for information…about 20 seconds in they flash his picture…the talking head is talking away, and my stomach drops about 1,000 feet…I mumble to whoever is on the line for a minute or so, but I don’t remember what I said…they remind me that they are very glad I am still here…I put down the phone, and all is really quiet now…his picture is still up on the screen, frozen…it is one of those rare moments in life where the entire world seems to be stopped, waiting for the next breath…my mind races around to “where is she? I hope she is alright”…I sit on the edge of the bed and just stare at the screen…I cannot believe my eyes, it is just all so sad…I don’t pray, but I do now…I pull myself down to the floor, my back pressed up against the bed, the t.v. screen just a foot away from my eyes…I say a prayer for his soul, thanking him for all the good he has done…I pray a lot for his child, who is now without a father…and I start to cry and I don’t stop until there are no more tears to cry…

Didn't think he'd get that worked up over Nixon.

Nicky, thanks for sharing all this - somehow id never read it. I think when Billy was posting all this in the first place I just couldn't deal with it.

The post KC entries where Billy's comforting Courtney must be... Interesting

I know it only got one vote bt I suddenly got reminded of how Bullet felt like BC ws suddenly having to work to evoke teenage alienation type feelings rather than just having them

1979 is the one i hum the most, tonight is the most evocative of peak pumpkins for me, bullet and zero most try-hard, but of that era its gotta be muzzle, which sort of puts all the elements together.

I know it only got one vote bt I suddenly got reminded of how Bullet felt like BC ws suddenly having to work to evoke teenage alienation type feelings rather than just having them

totally, although to be fair it's an older song (music was written during SD sessions) and the hook supposedly came very quickly and naturally at the BBC in 1993 right before he recorded the "Landslide" cover.

both were big hits but 1979 really is one of those transcendent, timeless songs like 'Penny Lane' or OMC's 'How Bizarre' that will be in heavy rotation as long as there are humans on this earth…

oh my god last night i stayed up way too late re-reading a lot of his 1992 recollections, will post in a bit… so much gold …
lets just say he has intimacy issues

fall 1992

I hadn’t seen her since high school had ended…she was just 15 when we dated, if you could even call it that…I was a senior when I met her, and we hung out together for awhile and then it just kind of drifted away…we had never even kissed once, say beyond an awkward peck on the cheek here or there…when I would drop her off at her parents, there would always be this stilted silence of wondering, and I could never tell if I was supposed to make a move on her or that it was a deliberate attempt to drive home the simple fact that she just wasn’t that into me…she was, and still is, the quietest girl I have ever met in my whole life…she just doesn’t talk, at all!! Even when you ask her a direct question, she’ll just look at you with those sad eyes and no expression that tells you anything, and you can wait as long as you want but you probably won’t get what it is you’re looking for…even now, she is still very beautiful, a lioness with a fresh faced purity that will never fade…

She picks me up in her car, a nice one, the kind professionals drive, to go out for a bite to eat…we haven’t seen each other at all in about 7 years, totally losing touch after I graduated…I had thought of her a few times, because she was this untouched vision of my youth…she used to come and visit me at this stoner’s house where I lived after I got thrown out of home, just months before my graduation…she loved Duran Duran so much back in 1985 that she would cry real tears, sitting alone on her knees in front of the t.v. when they came on (the only real emotion I ever saw from her)…so we try to catch back up on the good old days, and I realize then she hasn’t really changed a bit…but things do change, however subtly, and I only know her as a child, not giving credit to the woman who sits before me…she really hasn’t aged one iota, and still doesn’t say too much, but when she does, reveals a keen, dry intellect…looking at her, if carefully caught, the innocence is gone, now replaced by a quiet knowing that no one can access…she doesn’t appear to be damaged, rather, events correlate simply for she is just on the normal trajectory many people are often on: childhood, graduate, college, graduate, good job, modern lifestyle, maybe a husband later…she always thought I was a bit strange anyway, so seeing me here, like this now, doesn’t dissuade or inflame that already held opinion that I am a lone ranger…I ask her about the way she used to act towards me…”did you even like me back then? I never even knew whether to kiss you?”…she confides in me indeed, she did like me, and missed me when I left our hometown…I tell her she should have told me all this then, but it doesn’t seem to matter now as we live in separate worlds…she found me because of the band’s success, somehow slipping a note or telling someone to tell me she was at a show…of course, I remembered her right away, so fixed was she as a part of my innocence, forever in my eyes an unrequited love…so this is how we re-connected…

After we eat, we have the normal conversation about where we should go, or what we should do next…it has been so long since we talked that neither of us wants the night to end just yet…she lives somewhere fairly close, but because she doesn’t know the neighborhood so well she says I should pick something for us to do…I say that I really don’t want to go out, that there isn’t anywhere that great to go anyway, especially this early in the evening…the bands space is right down the street, so it seems obvious, and I make her laugh when I tell her I am also living there…she doesn’t understand why I would want to live in a parking garage, assuming rightly so that with the kind of success I have been having that I would have a nice apartment or something…I try to explain to her the whys and wherefores of my mercurial, damaged psyche, but in some ways this enacts the old dynamic between us where I am trying to reach out to her and she only seems to get further away…

As we walk, I point out where I used to work, and betray some of the gossip of the neighborhood…I take her in and show her around, which isn’t that much to see but is an odd contrast to the successes I was just speaking of…there is nowhere to sit but the leather couch, so we both plop down and talk about life and our goals to come…all the kind of conversations you can have with someone who has known you long enough to have known you before you changed into whatever you changed yourself into, and because they are capable of drawing a line between the two points, can sense whether or not the real you is somehow involved…she was always a bit gloomier than I, so the vibe of the dingy space doesn’t really contrast against either of our personalities too much: she as the sorrowful working girl, me as the dark prince in his self-inspired dungeon…somehow, thru time and space and prior connection this all makes sense and the years melt away…

We run out of things to say and things get real quiet, but I don’t want her to leave…she doesn’t seem to be in a particular hurry to go anywhere anyway, so I take a chance and confess to her how confused I was by her when I was around her in younger years…how her silence made me insecure because there was nothing I could do to get her to connect with me, and how much I really did care for her…I tell her all of these things now with the confidence that nothing I am saying can hurt me, or would hurt her because it is all in the past…as I speak, I realize that there is a part of me that still seeks resolution, that still wants to make some sense that my feelings and emotions were real and not some teenage crush, and if she really felt me then thru her strange fog…it is one of those rare moments in life where one can go back into the past, and out of time relive what never occurred but still is inside you waiting…we are both back in that car 7 years ago, hanging on that second, wondering if I should kiss her…

I pull her close and we start to kiss passionately…it is very strange to suddenly kiss someone you have known for such a long time but have never touched, and never thought you would…the sensory memory of what it would be like if you ever did is very old, new data overwriting the teenage charge that lingers but is swiftly being destroyed each and every moment by a brand new thought…I am feeling an overwhelming mix of fluttering acceptance to this and adult style guilt…I bypass it, because I want her now, and there are no parents and schools and Duran Duran songs to get in my way…we are in this moment together, but she is as impassive sexually as she would be in the light of day…she responds more from a willingness to let me in than a need on her part to drag me to where she is…funnily, there is little to show in her eyes that a gear has shifted, or that we are entering a fiery territory that is forbidden…I undress her, touch her, feel the warmth of her body…it is as beautiful as I had wished it to be so long ago, and I feel like she remembers who I was distinctly, and this is her way of saying to me “everything is going to be alright”…that there was no need to worry then, and there is no need to worry now…we start to make love, which seems profane in this horrible bunker…her skin is a translucent white, cutely freckled as if painted on by a brush, seared by a cranky fluorescent tube above…we are awkwardly moving and reaching, trying to find each other in the middle of what feels like some old numbed madness…we tumble across the line into the space where you do not know each other…suddenly, she is some girl I barely know, and I am a stranger…I want to love her, to feel close to her, but the vulnerability and the brazen leap across space and time knocks this reality out of synch…the feeling between us intensifies, becoming less mystical and more blunt…finally, the mask cracks on her, she cries to me, and I see her revealed before me, her flesh and barren soul…I realize that more than anything this is what I always wanted from her, to see behind that mask…the sex has only been a means to that end, and I feel saddened that I have been so reckless to get there…without realizing it before, what we both wanted from each other was to be seen, and to be loved….she has made me wait for so long to find her, and maybe now this has just become our way of saying hello…or maybe goodbye… we see each other once more after this, the same dance repeated under the same light, and then she disappears…I don’t call her and she doesn’t find me, even though she knows where I am…

later on, fall 1992

After reaching a saturation point with new ideas, our primary focus now becomes trying to finish the songs we have in hand…once we go into this state of completion, there is a sort of moratorium ban placed on bringing in new ideas, the general intention being to sort out the best from the best in what we have and get on with the business of finalizing arrangements, lyrics, and tweaking each individual part…sadly, I have been avoiding the issue of finishing the lyrics for some time, choosing instead to hide behind the focus on arranging and re-arranging what were already head spinning configurations of numbers, key changes, breaks, and implied emotional nuances…writing music is easy for me, but it is a new form of truth that I wish to find in these lyrics that I am having the hardest time with…I don’t want to obscure what I am truly feeling in my heart (like I did on our first record), by covering up much of my real sentiments with vague psychedelic babble…putting off the lyrics also has an impact on the day to day songwriting, as we are essentially arranging to implied emotions that are not in reality supported by actual finished lines (by the time we go on to Atlanta, I only have about 25% of the lyrics written)…as we know that we will keep cutting arrangements up until the final hour of recording, this isn’t a big issue of concern…and most of the individual parts are close enough that they can be further developed in the studio…but the lack of a lyrical focus hangs over the album like a dull cloud…

Each remaining song is addressed moment by moment with a laundry list of problems, and we set about tackling each one to everyone’s satisfaction…a laundry list on a particular idea might go something like this: “the intro sucks, the 2nd verse is too long, the lift into the solo is weak, the last bit goes on a little too long, and do you think we should change keys just before the end?”…we don’t vote per se, but rather talk or play thru the suggestions that are tossed in the air, and everyone’s overall body language usually dictates when a concept is or isn’t working…the floor is always open to all possibilities, and we dive into each and every issue with an understanding that all details are important to the overall strength of the album…I choose not to linger or get bogged down for too long on any one idea, because there are so many songs, and therefore, by math, too many problems…the basic thinking goes ‘what you don’t get untangled today you will possibly find a solution for tomorrow’…the only visible downside to this way of working is everyone must remember each days changes as they happen, and also retain the previous days option, say, if the next time we play a new part and go, “oops, that isn’t working”, be able to recall the old change at will…

One last, almost finished idea that has been sitting fairly untouched for a long while is a song simply called “today”…the song is given this name not for any existential reason, but rather out of my laziness, because the first line of the song starts with the word “today”, and calling it that makes it easily recognizable to all (laziness also dictates the title is never changed)…I suggest trying to come up with an interesting intro, and all agree that the blunt start (with the band just blasting in at the top) is boring and obvious…as is often the case of a good intellectual concept, musical silence ensues, shoes are stared at, and all I get in response to my suggestion is the buzz of the amps…frustrated, I look down at my guitar, and without hesitation, place my left hand on the 11th fret, high up on the top two strings…the first thing I feel immediately clicks, a dumb schoolhouse take on “la-dee-dah, la-dee-dah”…I look up, and no one says much, but then again, no one says no…without comment, I play it again, and at the appointed moment, the band kicks in full power…problem solved in 60 seconds…“next!”…

The pecking order on influence to the songs usually falls in this order: Billy, Jimmy, James, D’arcy…although D’arcy contributes very little in the arranging department, she is the person I watch most while we work, because like a child, she is incapable of hiding or masking any displeasure, and it shows readily on her face…James general interest is directly proportionate to whether or not a song is “his”, and following that, whether or not he personally likes a particular tune…he is fully capable of offering a brilliant suggestion at any given moment, and then turning right around and looking completely bored as if there were a million places he would rather be than here…Jimmy stands as the auteur of our power, so great is his unconscious understanding of how to lift the songs to the highest heights…his suggestions tend to be more emotional as opposed to musical…he readily reads my mind, and I read his, and much of our work is eye to eye, soul to soul, and goes on mostly unseen by the other two…my role is one of floor leader and cheerleader, as most of the songs are mine…we have a general rule, which is: ‘your song, your call’…this means that whomever is the writer on a particular song has final call on any decision, including a veto on what other members might play part wise…if a song is a co-write, then both people share this vote/veto…songs like “soma” and “mayonnaise” are true musical collaborations, as I sort thru the issues, making sure the other writer (in this case James) is in full agreement on all aspects of the song, and it’s execution…

During the ‘Gish’ album touring in 1991, we had played a place in Houston called Emo’s…because it was Texas, and usually warm at night, they had a sort of out door patio for drinking…after our show, I spied this incredible looking girl who had long, dyed red hair and an exquisite doe-like face…she was with some guy, who she told me at the time was just her ‘friend’ (I later found out it was her boyfriend)…I tried to get her to hang out with me that night, but she begged off, and that was that, and we said our goodbyes…months later, she wrote a letter me thru our fan club, and we started talking on the phone here and there after that…as I was floating in space emotionally, and definitely on the rebound from the heartache of losing my longtime girlfriend, the idea came up that maybe I could come and visit her sometime…she wanted to know when I could fly down and see her…I said that this was difficult, as we were still in rehearsal, and as soon as we finished, were set to fly to Atlanta to start the record…however, the start date was yet for a couple more weeks, and as the band was pretty tired, I rationalized that a little trip would do me a lot of good…I asked the band if we could work just one more week (instead of the two), and then everyone would take a week off…this was met with great cheer, because everyone was fried from the intense sessions (not to mention the stress of Jimmy’s drug/disappearing issues)…it also seemed a good idea to get out of eyeshot from each other for awhile, if only for a brief moment…

She picks me up from the airport off a night flight, and she is as stunning as I remember her…we joke all the way to a little Mexican restaurant, where we proceeded to stuff our faces and get drunk on margaritas…she takes me home and right into her bed, and it all seems so warm and simple and fun…the next morning, I notice her taking some pills…I ask her what they are, and she says it’s some new pill on the market, “Prozac”…I had heard of Prozac, but only in the context that you didn’t take them if you wanted to get high…it was some sort of anti-depressant, and you would have to take them for two whole weeks before you would feel anything at all (which didn’t jive with our immediate buzz philosophy)…as we talked, I noticed she seemed a little different, but I wrote it off to her possibly having a hangover, as we had drunk a lot the night before and been up fairly late…we decide to go out to get some food, and the first thing she does is turn up some crap metal music really loud in her car, which irritates me because it is about 9am, and I just want to talk to her…when I do engage her, she strikes me as hostile, a totally different person than the one I had hung out with only hours before, or for that matter, gotten to know on the phone when I was still calling her from Chicago…she tries to pick a fight, so I just figure “whatever” and keep my mouth shut…as the days go by, she moves further and further away from me when we go to sleep, and talks to me less and less during the day, so by the 4th day I am feeling pretty strange…what makes this difficult is I have nowhere to go, because the band is not due to arrive in Atlanta for another 3-4 days…I decide the best option is just to try to stick it out, and figure maybe I can talk to her and smooth whatever is bothering her over…I pour my heart out, explaining to her that I like her, I don’t understand what is wrong, and if she wants me to leave, to just tell me and I’ll go…she become very soft, and apologizes, telling me that she has been stressed, it’s not my fault, and she will make it up to me that night by taking me to dinner…the entire effect of this placates me and I figure we are fine…we go out later and have a nice, if not uneventful time, and all seems well…nothing physical is going on between us, but that’s alright because I am more interested in peace than getting a piece of her at this point…the next day comes, and someone has thrown the Sybil switch again, because the monster is back…I cannot believe this is happening, and when she leaves that day to go to work, I seek out her roommate, who is a sweet person…I explain what is going on, and ask her what she thinks I should do…she makes excuses for her friend, but it is obvious to me that she thinks she is a psycho…reading the tea leaves, I pay the friend $20 to drive me to the airport, and I catch the next flight to Atlanta…I later heard from this girl by letter, asking me to give her a call…to my sorrow, I decline, never fully understanding what the deal was down there in Texas…when I arrive in Atlanta shell-shocked, lonely, and stressed, I realize I am really missing the comfort of my band…

i wonder if anyone will beat me to the punch on making a poll for the best bill quote from these. there are like a dozen or more entries left. heres the link: http://billycorgan.livejournal.com/tag/confessions

Don't know if I want to brave those journal entries. But this is on the mark:

I know it only got one vote bt I suddenly got reminded of how Bullet felt like BC ws suddenly having to work to evoke teenage alienation type feelings rather than just having them

But having Bullet as the lead single maybe gave them enough rock-cred that alt-fans wouldn't dismiss "1979" and "Tonight, Tonight." Maybe it's just that I was a jr. high kid at the time, but I feel like "1979" was too much of a departure to be a lead single. At least I know my dopey friends and I probably would have rejected it out of turn.

For not rocking hard enough, obviously

such bullshit that there's no journal entry about Kim Thayil hurting him deeply in his heart

lol

"1979" is great cause it hits that perfect mix of uplift & sadness. Plus nostalgia etc

I finally listened to Oceania and Monuments to an Elegy. You know, there are actually several good songs on there. The rest is just absolute total dross, but unlistenable in a way that the dross of MCIS wasn't. If Billy were more selective he could actually put out a pretty good record.

Have any of you fellow SP weirdos spent any time with these two albums?