It’s becoming clear that digital sales for the hyped song reached nearly 100,000% of the prior week. 100,000%? Yes, an amazing 100,000%. More than 11,000 people downloaded the track on iTunes alone, irrespective of the more than 40,000 listens it got on the Pumpkins’ MySpace page since the movie launched. The song ranked as the most-listened Pumpkins tune on the Rhapsody music service and drastically climbed the charts at other Web 2.0 music licensing platforms like Napster and Last.fm.
There was lots to talk about this week despite the short time since the last podcast, so we went a bit long, and for the first time since episode 5 we had all four original members of the podcast on to give their opinions on what was a bizarre half-week of news.
Jill responds to our ticket price comments from last week and discusses her new gig at smashingpumpkins.com. Plus we get a sneak peek at some of her future articles. (10:02)
News
-We go Access Hollywood and discuss Courtney Love and her alleged blogging skills. (5:32)
-The August tour gets some new dates, and we discuss the slow rate of ticket sales. Plus, Jason hatches a plan to get my grandparents to the Boca Raton show, and Jill is unaware of the musical genius of Lifehouse. (6:09)
-The Beginning is the End is the Beginning shoots to the middle of the iTunes sales charts, was there ever a more unlikely “hit”? Plus, Jason, who runs a Smashing Pumpkins fan blog, calls Watchmen fans ”dorky”, and Andrew humbly recalls predicting the whole thing. (13:55)
In Depth Discussion: Where do the Pumpkins rank amongst their 1990’s peers?
-VH1 considered the Pumpkins worthy as a promotional tool for their top 100 songs of the 1990’s list, but not as musicians to be included. What was the most likely Smashing Pumpkins song to be included on the list and where would we place it? We have a few laughs and ponder the Pumpkins’ place in the 90’s. Plus, we once again groove to Third Eye Blind, Jill warms up her vocal chords, and Andrew reveals himself as the only hair metal fan on the panel. (26:16)
This Week in Pumpkins History
-The band plays an extended stay at the Fillmore. (1:17)
Song of the Week
-The End is the Beginning is the End, June 28th, 1997
Stay tuned after the credits for some outtakes from our discussion of 1990’s music.
I’ll conservatively estimate the average ticket price at $10;
And I’ll guess that a third of the tickets are going to people seeing it for the second or third time.
If most everyone is in their seats in time for the Watchmen trailer — and if that trailer is indeed on every Dark Knight reel across the country — that would put the admittedly cut-down Smashing Pumpkins track into the ears of 10 million Americans this weekend.
Could that many different people ever have heard lesser Pumpkins singles “Rocket”, “Thirty-three”, or “Tarantula” on the radio? Or consider that the band’s bestselling 1995 album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness hasn’t quite moved five million copies in the U.S., and that album tracks like “Jellybelly” and “Stumbleine” would be lucky to have been heard even once by each of its buyers (although perhaps siblings, two parents and several roommates could be counted for many of those), so…
Seriously, has “The Beginning Is the End Is the Beginning” just become one of the most-heard Billy Corgan songs of all time?!
Box office tracker Media By Numbers estimates today’s average movie prices at $7.08, which means “The Dark Knight” would have sold 21.94 million tickets.
If I still guess that one-third of the tickets go to repeat viewers, then the Watchmen trailer would need to be shown about 70% of the time to reconstitute the 10 million figure.
MTV.com has an interview today with Watchmen director Zack Snyder, asking him to explain how that movie’s trailer came to be soundtracked by the last song on the less-than-legendary 1997 disc Music from and Inspired by the “Batman & Robin” Motion Picture. Snyder says:
Smashing Pumpkins we picked for a couple reasons. For one, I felt like in mood, it was correct for what we were trying to do. We were trying to sort of get at the unwashed masses who don’t know anything about ‘Watchmen’ and find something provocative that makes you go, ‘What is that?’ … And then, also, I felt like the song itself spoke a little to the ‘Watchmen’ world. And then on the third hand … it will create controversy a little bit in the fanbase because they’re going to be like, ‘Wait, is that going to be in the movie? That ain’t 1985!’
Below: Watch the director speak. He so crazy! (MTV.com)
Because of “a copyright claim by Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.”, YouTube is takingthemdown as they appear in their multitudes — “them” being copies of the trailer to the much-anticipated flick Watchmen, which absolutely is scored in its entirety by the Smashing Pumpkins’ 1997 outtake “The Beginning Is the End Is the Beginning”.
The video clip above works at the moment I am making this post, but once if (!) it is taken down, try using this search looking at the comments on this post to find another one.
The trailer is cut to the Smashing Pumpkins’ “The Beginning is the End is the Beginning.” I hate the Smashing Pumpkins, and I hope they’re nowhere in the final film — they didn’t help the last superhero movie they were in (although it’s sort of deliciously meta for [director Zack] Snyder to use another version of the same song)…
Please no Billy Corgan in the final movie. I’m serious.
BONUS: If you are registered at the BlamoNet discussion board, you can also check out these photos - (1)(2)(3)(4)(5)(6) - of a prototype box that made it off the sketchpad, if not into mass production.
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 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…
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 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
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.
Color me impressed the band actually pulled out this song, long known as a fan favorite but so very rarely played. I especially enjoy the stunned commentary of “Oh my God” from I’m assuming filmer ZephZero33 from Netphoria.
Have to say, the contact high from “Set the Ray” would’ve made having to sit through the following ”United States” almost tolerable.
There was lots to talk about this week despite the short time since the last podcast, so we went a bit long, and for the first time since episode 5 we had all four original members of the podcast on to give their opinions on what was a bizarre half-week of news.
Apparently the 
The Smashing Pumpkins
The Smashing Pumpkins
The Smashing Pumpkins