Thanks to a partnership with Nxtbook Media, EQ Magazine’s October issue — including a massive profile of the Smashing Pumpkins — is available for viewing online. Writer Richard Thomas traces the band’s entire career (sans the interstitial Zwan/solo period), listing gear and recording techniques used in the studio from Gish through “Superchrist” and incorporating interviews with Billy Corgan, Jimmy Chamberlin, Butch Vig, Flood, Alan Moulder, Bjorn Thorsrud, and Roy Thomas Baker. Here’s but a tiny sample of the extensive historical material:

“Flood felt like the band he would see live wasn’t really captured on record,” says Corgan. “So a lot of Mellon Collie was tracked by the band at deafening volumes. I mean deafening. There was so much SPL [ed. wut?] in the room that it was physically uncomfortable. Your ears, your emotional resistance, would wear down.”

Flood also discovered that Corgan was a much better singer pitch-wise when he didn’t use headphones, so he switched Corgan up to a Shure SM58 and had him sing in front of open speakers.

There are essentially two pieces of forward-looking news, both found near the end of the dozen-plus-page exposition:

“I know the next record is going to be really psychedelic,” says Corgan. “I don’t think the Sabbath influence is going away anytime soon, but I’m thinking more late ’80s/early ’90s English shoegazer mixed with ’60s psychedelia and ’70s funk. I can hear it in my head, but that doesn’t mean it’ll ever get out of my head.”

What, no ’00s or ’50s influences? (And did he say, “funk”? Haha…) The other item:

[P]reparation [is ongoing] for the release of a Gish boxed set, which may include everything from demos and B-sides to revisited versions of old songs. The group also has archived performances of their first 40 shows, warts and all. As they have no label contract in place, the size of the boxed set is to be determined, which is good news for superfans, as Corgan is no stranger to releasing Herculean sets of material. The Pumpkins will also embark on a small-scale tour to support the release, which means Gish songs, Gish gear, and intimate Gish-sized venues. Need more message board fodder? [ed. blog fodder, actually plz] Corgan plans to give each and every Pumpkins album the same treatment. [ed. kthx]

JJB wrote last week about Wired’s mistaken interpretation for a new Smashing Pumpkins album; “Net Computer News,” which boasts more links than a Zelda convention, takes it a step further this week to announce the following:

In November, the Smashing Pumpkins will go to carry through show commemorative of the 20 years of the band in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and other cities not yet announced. Other dates related to the new album of the band, “Gish”, are waited for 2009.

Aw, man!  Sweet!  I hear it’s named after some screen actress from the ’20s?!
 
 
 
 
 

In praising Mission of Burma’s performance of a 25-year-old album at Pitchfo*k Music Festival last night, venerable Chicago Sun-Times music critic Jim DeRogatis drops two comparison points:

It’s easy to take shots at Pitchfork’s opening-night “Don’t Look Back” concept of bands performing one of their classic albums in its entirety and to dismiss it as a gimmick or cheap nostalgia. But as with everything else, it all depends on the music in question.

A long since gone-Hollywood Liz Phair performing “Exile in Guyville” or the reunited sorta-Smashing Pumpkins rendering “Gish” arguably are as sad as any state fair act. But a band like Mission of Burma is a different story: Its music was always far ahead of its time; it ended the first round of its career prematurely, in part because of guitarist Roger Miller’s tinnitus, and the new albums it has recorded since 2004 have been every bit as good as “Vs.” (1983), the subject of Friday’s retrospective.

The reformed Pumpkins haven’t actually yet performed Gish, but now many of DeRogatis’s Sun-Times readers (particularly those who know that Liz Phair recently did perform Exile in Guyville) are going to assume that they have. But hey, since he already knows it’s going to suck, no harm done!

This week’s show is abbreviated, as Andrew lost power midway through and the resulting segment couldn’t be edited into something that I would have been happy with releasing.  So for the first time, the HU podcast has an unreleased demo.  Think of it as our Signal to Noise.

Listen to the whole show (29:07)

(download)(iTunes)

This week’s topics:

Panelists
-Chris, Jason, and Andrew (until his power goes out)

News
-We get some details on a format for the first batch of early demos: a Gish/Pre-Gish box set in advance of a Gish-themed tour.  Plus, Jason gives the year 1990 some much-needed love. (9:06)

-The official websites welcomes a new writing staff.  Plus, Jill sells out and won’t give us an exclusive scoop on her article. (5:53)

This Week in Pumpkins History
-Two soundtracks featuring Smashing Pumpkins songs are released: Singles and Transformers.  Plus, I make another excuse to post the picture of Billy in his motion-capture suit. (5:00)

Song of the Week
-Drown, September 8, 1992

Next week is kind of up in the air due to some of our panelists having Independence Day plans.  I still plan on doing a podcast, but it will most likely be a shorter one once again and may even be solo.

It’s blogger-vs.-blogger today in the, um, blogosphere. In light of his smelly plans to revisit Smashing Pumpkins music from the late 1980s and early 1990s, what does Billy Corgan deserve? Google-indexed random bloggers D.A.N. (of soulofrocknroll.com) and boldensghost (a LiveJournalist!) couldn’t disagree more:

D.A.N.:

I have a ton of respect for Billy Corgan because he seems to really be in it for the love of the music, and for the fans, and that respect continues with the new upcoming releases scheduled for the band… First, there’s a new album planned for the up coming year… Second, they’re putting together a DVD detailing their residency at the Fillmore from this past year… AND if that all wasn’t enough… A planned Pre Gish/Gish box set has been announced… and a Gish Tour?!… I like when bands put out updated and expanded versions of their albums, or commemorative versions etc, because I think they’re great gifts to the fans. I like all the additional features, it’s like a behind the scenes look at what was going on whether it was demo takes, additional tracks or whatever.

boldensghost:

The oceans of insincerity keep getting deeper and deeper with Billy Corgan and his infinite EGO. Apparently he is doing a “Gish” box set, which frankly while being one of my top ten albums, I’m having a very hard time mustering up even a grunt of displeasure of that news. I’m curious but I don’t know if I’ll buy it, to tell you the truth. The thing that pisses me off about all of this is that I’ve heard that egotistical sack of puss talk about how he doesn’t care about the old stuff or the fans should just get over it. Now he’s putting out a “Gish” box set and he’s going to TOUR the album playing it in it’s entirety. Wow. F-You, Billy Corgan you piece of disingenious crap.

Macey Mackubin did not stick this on the shelf of a music retailer before photographing it (and she left off “Siva”!), thus making it easy for me to make the correct call.

A tour laminate from the Gish days has turned up on eBay:

The fine freaks at SPfreaks.com have found at least one of these before, but it is the only instance of a Gish-era backstage pass that they have in their illustrated database of Pumpkins-related items.

Reporter Elizabeth Murphy today gets used to push product in the (Penn State University) Daily Collegian. Emphasis is mine:

When searching for the word “Siva” in the Google search engine, Internet users are more likely to find a link to a YouTube video of The Smashing Pumpkins than information on the god that more than one billion Hindus worship worldwide.

Siva Vaidhyanathan, associate professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia, pointed this out in his speech, “The Googlization of Everything,” Friday morning to a near-capacity audience in the Foster Auditorium. The University Libraries Colloquia Committee sponsored Vaidhyanathan’s speech.

Vaidhyanathan displayed a screenshot of the results showing that The Smashing Pumpkin’s [sic] 1991 music video for “Siva” tops information Web sites on the Hindu god of the same name.

That’s right, the professor choosing this example has the first name “Siva”. And when I went to run the search he suggested, the first item that came up was neither Pumpkins- nor god-related — it was a listing of the professor’s own books!

Fact presumably not mentioned in his talk: a search on the more common god-name spelling, “Shiva”, yields nothing on the Pumpkins but plenty on the god.

I predict that Vaidhyanathan’s next written effort, Using Google to Sell Books That Criticize Google, will hit infomercials this fall.

First-string Chicago rock critics Greg Kot and Jim DeRogatis interviewed Butch Vig last week for their radio program “Sound Opinions”. Listening to this interview reveals two fundamental truths: (1) Vig somehow remains willing to take questions about Having Produced Two of the Greatest Records of the Early ’90s as Well as Sonic Youth, and (2) he still has a calm demeanor and an authoritative voice, both of which serve him well when dealing with volatile artist types and nerdy journos.

I’ve transcribed the portion of the interview — which is most of it — that is relevant to Vig’s work with the Smashing Pumpkins. This post will contain the first half of the interview, and I’ll post the remainder within the next day. I pick it up as Vig discusses the reasons that his Smart Studios began to attract independent rock bands in the late 1980s and early 1990s:

Butch Vig: I think one of the reasons that some of the records…I started to get a lot of work was because, you know, I’m a pop geek. I just love pop music and melodies, and I wanted things to sound good. I wanted to hear separation, you know, between the guitars and drums, and the vocals and the bass or whatever instrumentation they had. And so I think even those records were fast and kind of down and dirty, I think they sort of did have a vibe, and you could hear the hooks when there were hooks. I think that’s why I got a lot of work, really. And that’s why, I mean, it just sort of snowballed…that whole indie scene led to me, you know, working with…Billy Corgan heard those records, and that’s why he called me from the Pumpkins.

Jim DeRogatis: Corgan comes out there to do that Pumpkins record, and I guess that’s the real superstar…first act that put you on…first time you had a record on the Billboard charts.

BV: Yeah, and I mean, I loved working with Billy, because he’s very intense and very driven, but when we made Gish, that was the first album where we actually had time…I was like, “oh my God, we have like 30 days to make a record,” and we worked like 14 or 15 hours every day for those 30 days to, you know, just to try to make it sonically…take it to another level. And I really, really respected his work ethic and just his talent. You know, sometimes we’d butt heads, but more often than not I think we sort of got a lot of chemistry and were sort of on the same wavelength in terms of what we were trying to do with those records. I’m really proud of the work I did with the Pumpkins. I think those records still hold up really well.

Greg Kot: Yeah, that was a pretty amazing opening statement for that band. I remember talking to Corgan as soon as he got off that recording session, and Corgan was saying, like, “One by one, the band was dropping like flies, and the only guy who could stay up all night with me was that guy, that producer Butch.” [laughter] It sounded like you guys were going long, 36-hour stretches with no sleep and just working obsessively over this record. It almost sounded like you’d gone so far in that you almost didn’t know your way out at a certain point.

BV: Yeah. It’s funny when you say that, because I remember, at the end of Gish, we were struggling with the last mix — and you’re right, we hadn’t slept for like two days or something — and I remember Billy crawled under the console for maybe an hour and a half to get a little shuteye while I was trying to figure something out in the mix with the guitars or whatever. And it was a real bitch of a mix…I can’t remember which song it was now. At that point I remember it was like 6am, it was our last day in the studio. Billy and I were exhausted. We sort of looked at each other and I think we said something like, “You know, when you finish a record, it’s not like everyone jumps up in the air and high-fives and goes ‘Hooray!’” It sort of is the last man standing: “Okay, it’s time to go home.”

GK: One of the things with the Pumpkins, Butch, is that obviously it was a very volatile band. Four very distinct personalities. You mention Corgan and Jimmy Chamberlin the drummer, D’Arcy Wretzky on bass and James Iha on guitar. Four people who really didn’t belong in a band together, yet were in this band and had a chemistry, created a lot of issues in the studio, obviously with Gish and certainly exacerbated when you did Siamese Dream with them in ‘93, which was their huge breakthrough. But I mean, you’re not only a producer, but you had to be something of a psychologist and a coach to sort of get along, to have everybody getting along and getting on the same page. Was that the biggest challenge for you with that band, just sort of keeping the personalities together in the studio?

BV: Yeah, it really was. That was the record that I realized, a record producer is a psychologist, and that’s probably your job actually more than just worrying about the music. It was such a tentative time for the band. They had high hopes for what they wanted to do, and yet they were…the stress level was ready to break.

Above: Not how the Smashing Pumpkins are traversing Scandinavia.

Finnish fan and Netphoria poster “mrk” has the day’s cold rumor after being with the Pumpkins on the same Finnair flight from Stockholm to Helsinki; rather than read the inflight magazine, he wisely chose to chat up Billy Corgan. He reports:

BC told that they’re about to release some unreleased stuff, starting from pre-gish / gish era stuff and do a small tour of about 20 dates (us/europe combined) later in the year playing Gish-era type shows. And mentioned that they actually soundhecked those songs [Bury Me, Geek U.S.A., I Am One] yesterday. Asked them to play those in Helsinki tomorrow, but no chance he said, have to wait ;)

UPDATE:  mrk provides more detail here.

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.

Inspired by Andy’s post yesterday, I tried to find something to post Gish-related, but got sidetracked by my apple pie project.

So, today (when I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, of course), I ran across perfect blog fodder — some great post-gig pictures from 1992 that I thought I’d share from Flickr photog Graham Racher. I agree with reader Stace, though. I think I like the post-hair days best.

I hereby declare Thanksgiving Day 2007 Gish Day on Hipsters United.

Fun stuff all around. Awesome typography and wonderful hair (D’arcy’s anyhow).

“Have a Gish day!” –Josh Provost

Wikipedia is always being edited, and thus there is a good chance that any given error will eventually be discovered and corrected — that is, to be discovered and corrected on the Wikipedia website, wikipedia.org. However, since Wikipedia content can be copied freely, snapshots of Wikipedia entries are often taken and posted by third-party content providers. Therefore, any given Wikipedia error will likely continue to exist, somewhere on the Internet, indefinitely (and, obviously, long after it has been corrected on the Wikipedia website itself).

For example, this sentence once was part of the Wikipedia entry for the Smashing Pumpkins:

To give them indie credibility, Virgin matched the band with Sonic Youth producer Butch Vig and released their 1991 debut album Gish on Virgin subsidiary label Caroline Records.

The first part of this sentence seems to have been entirely made up, which probably explains why it is no longer part of the entry on Wikipedia’s site.* Vig says on Vieuphoria: “The first thing I worked with [Smashing Pumpkins] on was a Sub Pop single. Jonathan [Poneman] from Sub Pop called me up and said, ‘There’s this band from Chicago that is awesome and you’ve gotta work with them.’” Vig then produced the Pumpkins’ single “Tristessa”, which Sub Pop released in December 1990. Shortly thereafter, the Pumpkins signed with Caroline. Vig first produced Sonic Youth in March 1992.

However, you can still find the erroneous sentence today on a variety of third-party sites that copied the Wikipedia entry at that time. A lot of these sites are weird and spammy, but they do find their way into search results. My guess is that they still get read, and believed, fairly often.

*It doesn’t explain, however, how the sentence came to be there in the first place. That is not the subject of this post, but, generally speaking, “where does this stuff come from?” is one of the driving questions behind this blog…

One Ryan M. Powell has had a vision:  to videotape America while crossing it on foot to the imagined sound of Gish.  Okay, that last part wasn’t originally part of his “spectacular idea”, but it happened to him anyway, on the road to, Bend, I guess:

Gish has such a kick-ass one-two punch with I am one and Siva, so when I am one ended in my head, Siva began just as if I was hearing the actual CD.  It energized me even more.  Having almost the same tempo as I am one, it allowed me to keep walking at the same pace, which was a pretty natural walking pace even without the music.  Siva just rocks.

Disclaimer:  No, I am not Ryan M. Powell.