[Ed. note: Now that the news is slow again, I am resuming this series of posts.]

Zwan
June 13, 2003
Pielachtal Festivalgelaende, St. Poelten, Austria

Lyric / Declarations of Faith / For Your Love / Honestly / El Sol / Jesus, I > God’s Gonna Set This World on Fire / Desire / Don’t Let Me Down [Beatles] / Settle Down / Endless Summer / Of a Broken Heart / Mary Star of the Sea

Zwan’s last concert was not a landmark event lasting 4 1/2 hours, and tickets were not resold for $1,000. This was because the fans did not know in advance that it was going to be the last show, that it took place as part of “Nuke Festival” in Austria, and that, uh, Zwan hadn’t sold many albums or much dented popular culture. It’s even doubtful whether band members knew this was it; their banter seems unconcerned.

That said, purely on a musico-aesthetic level (i.e., the joy I derive from hearing it), this happens to be my favorite recording of the band — yes, I’ll take it over any of the earliest shows, any of the few “Djali Zwan” gigs, or Mary Star of the Sea — and its factoidal significance as the last zhow gives me an extra excuse to slot it into the list. Like many Pumpkins tours, I find the Zwan world tour to be one on which the band was improving as it went along (but sure, there were off nights such as their final American show at the Aragon Ballroom). The pacing of Zwan’s sets on this tour was mostly determined by the placement of the excursions “Jesus, I” and “Mary Star of the Sea”; on this night the setlist happened to conform to my ideal, with “Jesus, I” playing the crushing-centerpiece role and “Mary Star of the Sea” closing.

“Lyric” was also my preferred opening song; the FM recording of the show is interesting in that it lacks bass frequencies for the first minute or so, but they happen to kick in at a perfect moment (as if “Lyric” ever needed help in lifting my spirits several levels). And to me it just goes on from there, with practically everything seeming just note-perfect, intense and flat blissful. If there’s a dull moment I think it’s the Beatles cover, but instead of lapsing into indifference the band grabs me right back with “Settle Down” and from there it’s on to the bitter end:

This performance of “Mary Star of the Sea”, the very last time Zwan ever did anything, is absolutely my favorite single track they recorded — and that is sort of a tough deal. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I still find myself missing Zwan from time to time. Jimmy has said that the new Smashing Pumpkins is the best band he’s ever been in, and on some dimensions I agree with him — but every band is unique, and I cannot imagine that either the Pumpkins or anyone else will soon produce anything quite like this.

The Smashing Pumpkins
June 15, 1996
Golden Gate Park, San Francisco

Bullet with Butterfly Wings / Zero / Tonight, Tonight / Fuck You / Silverfuck

Here we have the Pumpkins, freshly returned from a European tour to play a set at the Tibetan Freedom Concert for by far their largest American audience to date. The “Tonight, Tonight” single has just been released in the U.S.A., following “Zero”, which had followed “1979″, which had followed “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” in an eight-month period of alt-rock radio and MTV dominance. So, see the band at the height of their commercial success! And, uhm…watch the band first embrace and then reject this fame, ripping off three Mellon Collie singles before delivering literal and symbolic fuck-offs in succession to close their set?! A tour of American arenas would launch 10 days later, only to be aborted after two weeks with Jonathan Melvoin dead and Jimmy Chamberlin fired. They would finish out the tour with Matt Walker on drums, then they would go into the studio to create Adore, and VH-1 asks where they are now.

So, I view this show as both pivot point and unparalleled microcosm. Somehow it all goes down in 40 minutes, half of which is comprised of the shit-hot latest hits, and half of which is devoted to tom-tom drums, delay pedals and chunky riffs in the Infinite Sadness Tour reinvention of “Silverfuck”. You’ve gotta love all of it if you’re a fan and you’re at home with your headphones, but I’m not so sure if you’re a New Rock Alternative listener out in the hot sun. Thankfully, by now we are all in the former position.

The Smashing Pumpkins
Pisces Iscariot
released October 4, 1994

Soothe / Frail and Bedazzled / Plume / Whir / Blew Away / Pissant / Hello Kitty Kat / Obscured / Landslide [Nicks] / Starla / Blue / Girl Named Sandoz [Animals] / La Dolly Vita / Spaced

Buy it (amazon.com)

Open up the jewel case, then hold it up to the light and look at the back cover. It’z BIlly!!!112007

Oh, but that’s not the only surprise inside — try playing the CD, a cohesive collection of outtakes from Gish and Siamese Dream! Nice. Pisces is I think much more accessible than Gish; it is more adventurous and fun than either of its parent albums. On these and other bases I declare Pisces Iscariot, an inanimate object, to possess a big heart.

This little non-album starts with the longing “Soothe”. It pivots on the relentlessly awesome awesomely relentless “Hello Kitty Kat”. It should exhaust itself during “Starla”, that 11-minute she with the seven-minute guitar solo, a song I can’t seem to declare overrated despite her legions of very sincere fanboys. But even thereafter, drug-love cover “Girl Named Sandoz” delivers the stuff as rollicking counterpoint to the famed and fine “Landslide”.

The Smashing Pumpkins
Gish
released May 28, 1991

I Am One / Siva / Rhinoceros / Bury Me / Crush / Suffer / Snail / Tristessa / Window Paine / Daydream / I’m Going Crazy

Buy it (amazon.com)

The series gets tougher now, as I must begin discussing the hopelessly over-discussed.

Well, Gish rocks, and it makes the list because it sounds cool. For instance, “I Am One” is one of my very favorite Pumpkins songs, a perfect album-opener because it grabs you from the first moment, because it starts with drums, then adds bass, guitar one, guitar two, vocal. And as…wait, is he taunting the rest of the band with that lyric?

I am one as you are three / Try to find a messiah in your trinity / Yeah, good luck with that / James, D’Arcy, and Jimmy / Your city to burn

Ahem. As the proceedings unfold, there is time for air-guitar and headbanging (e.g., “Siva”), drug-addled reflection (”Suffer”), and some cross-breeds (”Snail”) — and it’s all done in 40 tidy minutes. Gish is a blueprint for the sound of alternative rock, weird and conventional in equal measure. It hits that sweet spot more precisely than anything the band had done in the years leading up to its release, and they knew it. It’s not a coincidence that this was their first music to see wide release.

It is with less enthusiasm that I report Gish also to be a blueprint for the lyrical obscurantism of alternative rock. Billy knew that too, or at least he knows it now. From a 2005 interview, here’s the songwriter screaming his pre-Siamese Dream days from fourteen years away:

Billy Corgan: I think I kind of approached music with this sort of, like, weird thing where I kinda set myself up where I could kinda be myself but not really. I kinda had a backdoor out. So if you criticized me, I kinda had my defenses working. And the problem is that some people seize on that as inauthenticity, which is understandable. So that’s painful because it’s not that you’re being inauthentic…there’s a difference between being a poseur and being someone who’s so emotionally challenged they’re kind of just doing their best to show you what they’ve got.

Pitchfo*k: Oh, totally.

(Can I just leave it here? No? Blah.)

Maybe indie-music bloggers still like Gish a lot (they do, don’t they?) precisely because Billy didn’t know what he was writing about. For my taste, there was a lot of music to come later that sounded about as good but that was also hitched to touching expression, or to a thought-provoking concept or conflict.

Billy Corgan and the Fellowship of Broken Toys
July 28, 2005
The Marquee, Sydney

To Love Somebody [Bee Gees] / DIA / Now (and Then) / TheCameraEye / I’m a King Bee [Moore] / A100 / Walking Shade / Pretty, Pretty Star / Dig [Strawberry] / Bit 5 / Mina Loy (M.O.H.) / I’m Ready / Prairie Song / White Lights / Friends as Lovers, Lovers as Friends / For Your Love / Riverview / Sittin’ on Top of the World [trad’l] / Johanna [Stooges] / It’s a Long Way to the Top [AC/DC] / Of a Broken Heart / You Were Mine

Listen (ozphoria.com)

Maybe more than any other concert recording — though certainly not more than, say, any interview or documentary — this one gives a real sense of who Billy Corgan is as a person. “This is not an uptight rock-and-roll deal,” he says at the outset, and what ensues is indeed loose and interactive. The crowd consists primarily of adoring fans (as their unreserved singing on Zwan song “Of a Broken Heart” attests), and the appreciative dynamic frees Corgan to take chances musically and personally. He tells funny stories and drops some genuinely hilarious one-liners (”If you’ve been insulted by me, you’ve been insulted by…brilliance”), even developing a couple of running gags over the course of the evening.

This back-and-forth banter is so fun that the musical performance is almost secondary, but it does serve to complement and not detract from the…the word intimacy is overused, but here it’s warranted. This is an entirely acoustic show in which, without a great deal of preparation, Corgan takes on not only the main setlist from his current tour (to which his band had been applying high technology) but also a number of songs he had not performed in months or even years; many of the songs are delivered solo, while some have light support from the backing band. The result is a set of unique and casual performances disturbed by an uncharacteristic number of mistakes. I like the acoustic “DIA” quite a bit, and “Bit 5″ appealingly (to me!) swipes the chords from Bob Seger’s “Still the Same”. Covers of “I’m a King Bee” and “Sittin’ on Top of the World” double as serious man-swagger and winking play-blues. The biggest surprise may be that “Of a Broken Heart”, called in to serve as ersatz hit single, comes off as a timeless classic.

The Smashing Pumpkins
The Aeroplane Flies High singles box set
released November 26, 1996

Buy it (amazon.com)

The most boring and common criticism of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness is that it was too long and would be better if it were only one dizzz… Oh, pardon me. Perhaps I missed the memo while growing up, but I was never taught that it is not possible for a small group of people within a year’s time to make more than 65 minutes of worthwhile music. And in this case, fact is that the Smashing Pumpkins recorded well over an hour of interesting, fun music during the Mellon Collie studio sessions. I’m truly sorry for you if your band can’t do that, but you’ll just have to deal with the fact that Corgan and friends did pull it off.

The final damning proof came in the form of this box set, which contains many — but, somehow, not all — of the songs that missed the cut for Mellon Collie. Even if you had been able to reduce that album to 65 worthy minutes, there is more than an hour of extra material to sort through on The Aeroplane Flies High.  The “1979″ single alone has three downcast pop numbers that I think measure up to most of what’s on Mellon Collie; the “Zero” single features three intimidating stompers, if you’re still into that whole pummeling rock music thing; the “Tonight, Tonight” single has four little songs all about as good as “Stumbleine”; the “Thirty-three” single features the box’s title track, which I’ll always take over “X. Y. U.”; and if you ever thought Mellon Collie could have used one sparkly cover song or two, the “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” single offers three or four competent options. Whew.

Long story short, I “joke” all the time about how Mellon Collie really should have been three discs, and CD-R technology does make it possible if you have the source material at hand…

The Smashing Pumpkins
May 14, 1998
Spielbudenplatz, Hamburg
(or a similar show)

To Sheila / Tear / Once Upon a Time / Crestfallen / Ava Adore …

… Daphne Descends / Let Me Give the World to You / Tonight, Tonight / Bullet with Butterfly Wings / Shame / 1979 / Thru the Eyes of Ruby / Transmission [Joy Division]

The Smashing Pumpkins played fewer concerts in support of Adore than for any of their other albums, but this still included stops on five continents. After a one-off warmup gig supporting Cheap Trick in Chicago, the band made its way to Hamburg for the first full-band headlining show.

With Jimmy still in time out, the band’s ability to rock was greatly reduced, and they wisely tamped down the sound. Billy and James turned down the gain and put their delay pedals in storage, upping the reverb instead. Mike Garson was brought in and set loose on keys and science. Kenny Aronoff and multiple ancillary percussionists were hired to bang drums and things, but the tempo was kept in check and syncopation was reduced. The result was a live sound that in hindsight appears more in step with 2008 than it was with 1998: more chamber-pop than electronica, more Neon Bible than OK Computer.

As the tour went on, I feel the band stretched out too far, with the talents of Garson being particularly indulged. That makes the Adore tours unusual in Pumpkins history to me; usually I feel the band gets tighter and more powerful as it goes, with the last shows on an album being my favorites, but here I like the first show the best. “Tear” hasn’t yet been ripped in half by a crazy piano solo; instead, it’s a disciplined electric-guitar epic punctuated by a memorable climactic lead from James. “Let Me Give the World to You” practically brings the show to a standstill, for once seeming worthy of the hyperbolic praise it received from Rolling Stone. Among the rejiggered Mellon Collie hits, “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” is notably reimagined as comic relief, yielding ten minutes of silly joy, while “1979″ is the one song in the set allowed to break free of tempo constraints, hurtling ahead much like a tire down a hillside.

The Smashing Pumpkins
Still Becoming Apart

Hope / Blissed and Gone / Apathy’s Last Kiss / Mayonaise / Eye

This five-track bonus disc given out with some copies of Machina is the shortest recording to make my list. It does so because it captures three of Billy’s most successful really-ditch-the-formula tracks, none of which features a particularly notable contribution from Jimmy Chamberlin:

• The stately and reflective “Blissed and Gone” was apparently too non-opaque for Adore. A quirky sonic background prevents the song from feeling overly sentimental, and Corgan delivers a detail-attentive and subtlely dynamic drum program, adding in vocal samples and piano.
• “Apathy’s Last Kiss” could only have been released on a seven-inch in the early days of “alternative rock”, and so it was. Several weird layers and effects take the circularity out of a basic acoustic track, resulting in…something…that’s insistently claustrophobic.
• As the Pumpkins’ first post-Mellon Collie studio work to be released, “Eye” was a shocker. Not only are there no guitars, and not only was it waaaay electronic…it was kinda sexy, which was not what many people expected as the next thing from that ZERO shirt dude. My landlord’s wife came by once while this was playing and I about dove for the volume control. (To turn it down, you damned fappers.)

The other tracks, “Hope” and an acoustic “Mayonaise”, are fine.

The Smashing Pumpkins
“Lost ‘94 Tapes” (Vieuphoria DVD)

Quiet / Snail / Siva / I Am One / Geek U.S.A. / Soma / Hummer / Silverfuck

Buy it somewhere (google.com)

I used to hold what may be a common belief about the band’s shows from 1994: that they were playing before huge crowds (especially on Lollapalooza) but didn’t yet have the faintest idea how to satisfy huge crowds, “and so the shows sucked.” But after seeing these “lost” recordings (first released in 2002), I laugh at myself for ever having thought that the time between Siamese Dream and Mellon Collie could be a low point in Pumpkin history. Yes, the band’s M.O. here seems to be to forget they’re playing for a big audience, but if you can wriggle into their bubble there is some giddy craziness to enjoy.

I do not know which shows these performances come from, and I don’t even know if they’re from Lollapalooza, but it wouldn’t surprise me; there is an intensity that suggests competition afoot. The few shots that take in some of the crowd aren’t too helpful in show identification (has anyone figured it out?). They only reveal that, per usual, some attendees really liked the band’s performance.

Artistically, I think what we see here is the Pumpkins’ 1991-1994 neo-psychedelic period reaching its furthest possible endpoint. I can almost see Billy thinking, “Where is there to go with ‘Snail’ after this? How could we ever top this electric-cello-augmented ‘Soma’ while remaining in this same mode of performance and style?” I also see some of the Mellon Collie Pumpkins peeking out from their shell on a texture-first “I Am One” and, yes, in the noodly “Hummer” coda that features a helpful “Porcelina” chyron.

The Smashing Pumpkins
SOMA, San Diego
January 31, 1996
(or a similar show)

Tonight, Tonight / In the Arms of Sleep / Cupid de Locke / Thirty-three / Today / Soma / Take Me Down / Beautiful / Rhinoceros / Rocket / Disarm / Where Boys Fear to Tread / Zero / Fuck You / Love / To Forgive / Bullet with Butterfly Wings / Thru the Eyes of Ruby / Porcelina of the Vast Oceans / 1979 / Geek U.S.A. / Cherub Rock / Lily / X. Y. U. / Jellybelly / Silverfuck / Farewell and Goodnight

Listen or download (archive.org)

In early 1996, the band played a series of two-set club shows designed to showcase the just-released Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness in all its variety; the first sets were acoustic, the second sets electric. As if the band wouldn’t feel self-conscious enough playing the sentimental and cheeky Mellon Collie material for its young, cynical audience, they chose to play the already-exposed softer material while wearing pajamas and the knew-your-angst heavier material in over-the-top rock costume. This is the Pumpkins close to their most daring and simultaneously close to their commercial peak, as Mellon Collie and its accompanying antics would eventually cost them the hipsters but immediately win for them the mallrats. Whether or not either demo was interpreting correctly the messages Corgan was sending, densely populated was the shore on which his bottles washed up. I am having fun writing these sentences.

The self-consciousness is particularly palpable before a hipster-dominated crowd on this night, and the band plays up the cheek and irony in its new material until an odd moment after “Beautiful”. Billy picks up a card tossed on the stage and begins to read it aloud in a bemused voice, but then finds himself backed into the unusual position of having to honor a fan request after realizing too late that the card was written in memory of a deceased fan. “That’s so sad,” he says helplessly, before coaxing the band into “Rhinoceros”. The tone of the set turns on a dime, with two passionate numbers from Siamese Dream following to close it out. The electric set is all business until “1979″ loosens things up again. I even find “X. Y. U.” to be sneakily enjoyable. The final encore gives an early look at the delay-pedal madness explored throughout the year on “Silverfuck”.

The Smashing Pumpkins
Machina II/The Friends and Enemies of Modern Music
released September 5, 2000

2LP: Glass’ Theme / Cash Car Star / Dross / Real Love / Go / Let Me Give the World to You / Innosence / Home / Blue Skies Bring Tears / White Spyder / In My Body / If There Is a God / Le Deux Machina / Here’s to the Atom Bomb

3×10″: Slow Dawn / Vanity / Saturnine / Glass’ Theme // Soul Power [James Brown] / Cash Car Star / Lucky 13 / Speed Kills // If There Is a God / Try, Try, Try / Heavy Metal Machine

Listen (smashingpumpkins.com)

Even seven years later, I still rate this as an “album” of outtakes. I’m not a big Metallica fan and I’m not a big Radiohead fan, but natural comparison points for Machina II are the former’s Reload and the latter’s Amnesiac — both of which I feel work better as albums than does this one. So is Machina II an important compendium of songs? I do think it has some notable tracks, but…let’s just say that there are four Pumpkins compilations yet to come as I count down to Billy’s most essential recording.

One sense in which Machina II does feel like an album is in its consistency of tempo: most selections on the 2LP rush past in a compressed blur. The band’s tightness is apparent and impressive, yet they hardly seem human. This of course is a deliberate stylistic choice, and one that is in keeping with the concept of Machina. However, the most central elements and necessary messages were plucked for Machina/The Machines of God; what’s left here amounts to coloring. Place these 25 tracks around the 15 tracks from the original Machina and you have an overwhelming statement; when that core is missing, the periphery alone can seem like a set of character sketches and mood pieces.

The band wisely tapped long-player standouts “Home”, “In My Body”, and “Let Me Give the World to You” for live workouts on the 2007 tour; just as wisely, they slowed the tempo of “Home”. Particularly sweet from the three ten-inches is a garage-rocking remake of “Soul Power” that tops my list of Pumpkins songs that should have gone to radio; anyone else think this one would have gotten a little more airplay than did “Try, Try, Try”? For context- and concept-free relistening value, I say the slower version of “Cash Car Star” and the piano take on “If There Is a God” trump their 2LP incarnations. The EP featuring “Slow Dawn”, “Vanity”, and “Saturnine” throws a bone to fans sonically stuck on 1995.

Zwan
The Roxy Theatre, West Hollywood, California
November 21, 2001
(or another show from earlier that week)

Chrysanthemum / Never Give Up / El Sol / The Empty Sea / Glorious / How Things Are Supposed to Be (inst.) > Cast a Stone / Don’t Let Me Down [Beatles] / Jesus, I / The Shining Path / What Have They Done to Me? / Sorrow / My Life and Times / Of a Broken Heart

Download in SHN format (archive.org)

Not long after the disintegration of Zwan, Billy Corgan came to the conclusion that — to put it gently — the band had not been worth a try. As the Wikipedia entry describes it:

[Corgan] also stated that he can no longer listen to Mary Star of the Sea, because to him it sounds like “thousands of lies upon lies upon lies.”

Today the lead singer and principal songwriter of Zwan has formed another band, he no longer performs any Zwan music in concert, and it seems generally that very few people look back on Zwan with fondness or much respect. Furthermore, only three of the songs on the recording in question even made the cut for Mary Star of the Sea. Somehow I still think that this — one of the very first Zwan concerts, the last in the band’s very brief first tour — is an item that should be heard by the somewhat devoted. Why?

A lot of it is that, as a live band, Zwan conveyed no emotion so much as…wait for it…exuberance. This is not something that the Corgan dabbler (either in listening or in rock-crit reading) would associate with him, but it was consistently present for most of Zwan’s tenure and it is shot through the entirety of this show. Opener “Chrysanthemum” is probably among my ten favorite Corgan tunes of all time, a let-it-all-go anthem (pun intended, BC?) that seems here to sweep up both crowd and band in a burst of propulsive joy. The following five tracks are only slightly less invigorating, with the Matt Sweeney co-write “Glorious” taking the laurel for most immediately ingratiating slice of pop-rock (ever?). Downtempo tracks dominate the second half of the set, highlighted by a remarkable guitar solo on “The Shining Path”.

Billy’s new songs were also notable for the straightforwardness of his lyrics. After the true Pumpkins were obliterated in the ritual sacrifice of Machina, Zwan comes across as a rebirth that might destroy cliché. Corgan’s tales are for everyone again, rather than for the few that had kept up with what had been an increasingly tortured narrative. “A flower’s still a flower crushed to dust inside my hand” is the memorable realization of “Chrysanthemum”; “Never Give Up” is one accessible my-love-is-forever pledge; on another, “Cast a Stone”, Corgan tells his loved one that she (we?) can chuck the first free of fear. “Who says I shouldn’t be released from the last abuse?” he asks, and I find myself holding on to the rock.

The Smashing Pumpkins
St. Andrew’s Hall, Detroit
April 10, 1999
(or another show from the two-week “Arising!” tour)

I Am One …

… Zero / Pug / La Dolly Vita / Glass’ Theme / The Imploding Voice / Dross / Speed Kills / Blue Skies Bring Tears / Stand Inside Your Love / Glass and the Ghost Children / Wound / Cash Car Star / Ava Adore / Today / Muzzle / Soma / Home / If There Is a God / With Every Light / Geek U.S.A.

The “Arising!” tour of April 1999 was the only reunion tour of the original four Pumpkins, with Jimmy Chamberlin reclaiming his throne behind Billy, James, and D’Arcy. Jimmy’s return found the band putting on “a real rock show” that found D’Arcy “actually sweating, for a change” (her words!). Jimmy, long the strong, silent type, mustered only this pronouncement:

Thank you, everybody. It’s good to be back. Detroit Rock City.

As a trial run for songs that would be recorded for Machina, the Arising! tour is no less interesting than the Adore demos. Machina ended up being (all together now) a complex art-rock album, but these concerts in packed venues go light on the art part. New crowd-rockin’ tunes “Glass’ Theme”, “Dross”, and “Cash Car Star” would all be left off the record. Superarty Machina tracks “Blue Skies Bring Tears” and “Glass and the Ghost Children” are more accessible here, with the latter’s second half sounding like a simpler, muted retread of “Porcelina of the Vast Oceans”. Even the Adore tracks “Ava Adore” and “Pug” are muscled up with power drumming and distorted guitar.

The band may not have chosen to rock out all over the Machina LP, but it only takes about 30 seconds of this show to reveal the band’s total confidence in its ability to blow apart a small club. Almost three years after their last show with Jimmy and over a year removed from having attempted anything that might be classified as hard rock, I cannot hear any evidence of hesitancy or doubt in any aspect of the band’s performance — and this is striking to me. A good one-sentence biography of the Pumpkins might be “American geeks become a heavy metal machine,” and while there certainly is no One Moment at which that happened, this show does put the point across.

The Smashing Pumpkins
demos for Adore, and, uh, Batman and Robin: Music from and Inspired by the Motion Picture
1997

For Martha (inst.) / Chewing Gum / The Tale of Dusty and Pistol Pete / Annie-Dog / Once in a While / Do You Close Your Eyes / My Mistake / Blissed and Gone / The End Is the Beginning Is the End / The Beginning Is the End Is the Beginning

Download in MP3 format (thepumpkins.net)

Adore ended up being a big production, not the collection of casual, downcast piano pop pointed to by these demos. Throughout this recording, Billy’s vocals are…the best word I can come up with is meek, but that’s not to be negative. “For Martha” had yet to acquire its over-the-top electric guitar solo, let alone vocals; this instrumental is graceful and understated relative to the album track. “The Tale of Dusty and Pistol Pete” and “Annie-Dog” are the only other songs here that survived the cut for Adore. These songs are overtly fashioned as stories of other people’s lives, while the five songs that missed the cut all feel more personal; I tend to believe that is no coincidence:

Rolling Stone: If you had Adore to do all over again, is there anything you would do differently?
Billy Corgan: I would have gone further with the vision of the record. I would have made it more opaque, more dense, more hard to reach.

“Chewing Gum” and “Do You Close Your Eyes” are the only songs that have never seen commercial release, possibly owing to their definite (though somewhat charming) lyrical awkwardness. “Blissed and Gone” is fragile, but more confidently executed. These simple and organic tracks seem to represent a momentary reaction against the often complex art-rock of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness; in the end, though, Adore too would be a complex art-rock album.

The two “Batman” demos show Billy getting his feet further under electronic water; the tracks sound cheap but the songs themselves are not incompetent. (As The End Is the Beginning Is the End is not among my 25 Most Essential Recordings, I will mention here that I revisited the single recently and, considering I never liked it much, was shocked that it hadn’t aged terribly.)

The Smashing Pumpkins
AOL Sessions, recorded in Beverly Hills, California
live in-studio, September 14, 2007

Superchrist / Doomsday Clock / That’s the Way / Tonight, Tonight / Tarantula / Heavy Metal Machine > On the Road Again [Canned Heat]

Listen…well, watch, really (aol.com)

The band recorded a mini-set live in a dark studio for AOL, which released free video of the performances. The sound and mix are generally outstanding, so much so that the lossy compression does not greatly diminish the album-like listening experience. Nowhere else are the post-Zeitgeist metal composition “Superchrist” and the band’s 2007 merger of “Heavy Metal Machine” with Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” (lyrics from spfc.org) documented in such high fidelity, and as a result this recording may be the closest that new Pumpkins Jeff Schroeder, Ginger Reyes, and Lisa Harriton have come to playing on canonical (whatever that would mean) studio material.

The fine details of Jimmy’s drumming on “Superchrist”, often lost in the rush of a concert, are more than obvious here, as are some keyboard tones. “Doomsday Clock” comes on strong with boiling guitar sounds, and it benefits greatly from a few extra BPM relative to the rendition on Zeitgeist. The mix on “That’s the Way” brings out the song’s nifty bassline. Billy’s showoffy guitar licks during “Tarantula” are oddly buried in many places (pedal problems?), but Jeff’s strong leads on “Heavy Metal Machine” are prominent.

As there is no light show and no crowd to interact with, the band looks a bit awkward as they lay down these great tracks, so much so that I personally find the video to detract from the quality of the consumption experience. You might want to turn the monitor off; alternately, there are audio rips of this set floating around the ‘nets, but as the recording is propietary they will not be found on archive.org anytime soon.

The Smashing Pumpkins are finished touring for now and it is coming down to end-of-semester crunch time in graduate school, so not only is there not a lot of fresh band-related content, but I don’t have a lot of time to troll the Internetz for inspiration. Hence I have planned out a series of 25 posts on the topic of “most essential Billy Corgan recordings”, i.e., albums, bootlegs, compilations, etc., that I think are particularly worth hearing. I should be able to pontificate on these without doing too much additional research, and everyone loves tearing apart lists, so this will hopefully be easy and fun. Questions you may or may not have:

What’s an “essential” recording? Whether I like to listen to a recording is one element in essentiality, for sure, but I think quality is trumped by the importance of a recording to the development of an understanding of an artist and his career. I selected and placed items in the list primarily on the basis of my answer to this question: “How well can a person understand what Billy Corgan is about, or where he is coming from, or why he is/the Pumpkins are culturally important, if s/he has not heard this recording?”

Is this meant to be the essential-recordings list to end all such lists? No…it’s meant to represent what I think is important to have heard as we sit here at the end of 2007 and look forward. I would imagine that 10 years from now several items on the list may not still be that essential. Furthermore, even out of what exists today, I haven’t heard everything there is to hear; I will probably overlook some items. And then, absolutely, my choices are subjective and are influenced heavily by my views and preferences.

Okay…in my next post I will start counting down from #25!