In the final chapter of our Adore discussion, we take a look at the tour and what Jimmy’s impact would have been if he were involved in the record. 

Listen to the whole show (36:30)

(download)(iTunes)

This week’s topics:

Panelists
-Chris, Jill, and Andrew

Topics
-Touring for Adore begins in Europe with a variety of new touring musicians.  Lisa Germano was slated to be one of them but was let go at the eleventh hour.  By listener request, we speculate as to why. (4:08)

-The Pumpkins donate $2.6 million to charity, play a free concert, and give the United States an intimate concert setting, but all Jill can talk about is how excited she was to meet the Barenaked Ladies. (11:27)

-What if Jimmy had never been fired?  We play alternative history and speculate on how the album would have changed. (6:30)

-Our listeners didn’t want to hear themselves talk on the podcast, but luckily a certain missing panelist sent in his contribution to the show.  Will he celebrate with us or be the dissenting opinion? (4:37)

Song of the Week
-For Martha August 4, 1998

There will most likely be no podcast next week, but check back in two weeks for discussion on all the news that we missed in my absence.

As I mentioned last week, this is part 2 of our 3-part celebration of the 10th anniversary of Adore.  This week we focus on the album, its singles, and its b-sides. 

Listen to the whole show (48:28)

(download)(iTunes)

This week’s topics:

Panelists
-Chris, Jill, and Andrew

Topics
-Our initial impressions on the Adore release.  We tell stories from our misspent youth. (10:33)

-Has history colored our opinions of the album any differently than the initial excitement of first listen? (6:59)

-The mainstream response to the Adore album was one of surprise and disinterest.  We spend some time talking about why.  Plus, I compare Billy to another Bill: coach Belichick of the New England Patriots. (10:12)

-Another listener-posed question this week: could the Pumpkins have selected better singles from the album that would have spurred record sales? Plus, Jill leads a semi-charmed life. (7:50)

-Finally, we take a look at every hardcore fan’s favorite part of every album: the b-sides.  Were there any that should have made it onto the album? (5:05)

Song of the Week
-Let Me Give the World to You May 19, 1998

Tune in next week for the third and final chapter.

Billy Corgan, writing yesterday on the anniversary of the Adore release (emphases his):

i lived that album quite deeply, and maybe that’s why I still can’t listen to it…and I can no longer blame anyone if they don’t either…it’s one of ‘those’, an ‘other’, something apart…and the pun of the title, crude as it is, serves quite simply:

Q: “when is a door not a door?”

A: “when it is a jar”

…see, bad joke…

Q: “when is an album not an album?

A: “when it is a-dore…”

This has got me hoping for an Adore-related revelation every 10 years. Maybe the song title “Tear” is really pronounced like the tear that you cry, or perhaps there is actually some extremely tiny print on the Blank Page that says “This is a blank page.”

Read the rest of Billy’s remarks here.

While it may be more meaningful to mark this date in 2015 (17 years to forget all the hurt and pain?), today is the tenth anniversary of the American release of Adore. Back then, as far as I or anyone I’ve asked can remember, there were no significant early leaks of the studio material…thus making June 2, 1998, legitimately one of the most anticipated and ultimately confusing days in Pumpkins history.

In my opinion, James Iha’s advance non-explanation is still hard to top:

It’s sort of half-organic, half-electronic. But really it’s sort of hard to say what it is.

This week begins our 3-part series of podcasts about Adore in celebration of the 10th anniversary of the album’s release.  I will be unavailable to record new episodes for the next few weeks, so rather than go dark for a month we recorded an extra-long show and divided it up chronologically.  In part 1 this week, we discuss the buildup to Adore and the recording process.  In part 2 we discuss the album and its b-sides, and in part 3 three we give our thoughts on the Adore tour.   

Listen to the whole show (40:15)

(download)(iTunes)

This week’s topics:

Panelists
-Chris, Jill, and Andrew

Topics
-The pre-Adore buildup, were we fooled by the electronica rumors or excited by the live acoustic songs from the Tibet House and Bridge School Benefits? (8:14)

-We take a closer look at the Viper Room show from January 15th, 1998 both from a musical perspective and the importance of this show to the bootleg trading community.  (8:50)

-Seemingly everyone in the music business recorded drum parts for Adore.  We talk about why the Pumpkins couldn’t pick a percussionist and stick with him.  (4:32)

-The band also had a hard time picking a producer, we discuss Billy’s debut as a Pumpkins album producer. (5:13)

-We take a moment to answer a listener-posed question: what happened to the Adore-era version of Let Me Give the World to You? (2:40)

-Finally, we tackle another listener suggestion and discuss James and D’Arcy’s contributions during this period of the band’s history. (3:42)

Song of the Week
-Behold! The Night Mare October 19, 1997

Check back next week for part 2, and as always keep those suggestions for future episodes coming.

Patrick S. Pemberton of the San Luis Obispo Tribune today includes “For Martha” on a Mother’s Day mixtape plan. Emphasis is mine:

Corgan, who has performed “For Martha” onstage with his musician father, has been known to break out in tears midway through the song, which asserts, “Someday I’ll follow you and see you on the other side.”

I have not known him to do that, nor do I remember hearing about it, but it’s not like I know everything. Has anyone ever witnessed this happening, or (much better) have hard evidence of it?

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
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.)

Among the band’s recent reinventions is what I call the “Siamese Dream Victory Lap Version” of “Shame”.  How or why did this song get moved to another album?  This quote from 2005 comes to mind…

The Onion:  With the exception of the time he was kicked out of Smashing Pumpkins, Jimmy Chamberlin has always been your drummer.  Is there a reason why he’s not playing with you now?

Billy Corgan:  The way we look at it is, me and him together, it’s Pumpkins.  We were the bulk of all the recording for the Pumpkins, except for Adore, and even trying to be in Zwan, it became almost like a farce, where other band members would be saying, “That sounds like the Pumpkins.”  And we’d be like “No shit.”  We were spending energy trying not to sound like we sound.  So we’ve kind of just come to the conclusion, if we’re going to work together, it’s Pumpkins.  Because that’s the sound.  When you hear us play together, that’s the sound.

Below:  Also, isn’t it “chemistry” every time guitarists stand facing each other? (YouTube)

User “newusedrecords” at mog.com writes:

There are great moments all through the album – sometimes songs themselves (“Pug” for instance), sometimes buried in the details of songs.  There seems to be a story here … but often that story is hard to find.  Trying to make it through the whole album proves to be a bit of a struggle.

But maybe this was the late nineties for a lot of people.  Musical taste was shifting away from rock music.  Electronic music failed to take over like some had anticipated.  Corgan’s attempt to mesh various genres reflects what many critics assumed would become the future of music, while the somber (almost bleak) tone reflects the disappointment coupled with the post-grunge era.

Not too far from what I’d write if I were forced to write about Adore…which could happen, if this blog lasts long enough.  :)