Part of this week’s podcast was obsolete before I even started editing it, as we recorded on Sunday before all the official announcements about the 20th anniversary tour.  However, we did touch on some of the early rumors as well as the If All Goes Wrong DVD features and everyone’s favorite cryptic multimedia mash-up: the Machina Mystery.

Listen to the whole show (1:08:24)

(download)(iTunes)

This week’s topics:

Panelists
-Chris, Jason, Jill, and Andrew

News
-The 20th anniversary tour rumors begin with two dates in Los Angeles.  Is the band playing smaller venues by choice or necessity? (5:45)

-Another since-confirmed rumor: Smashing Pumpkins join the Bridge School Benefit for a third time.  Will we hear an acoustic rendition of G.L.O.W.?  Plus, Andrew tells us how small children react to Marilyn Manson. (4:32)

-The features and setlist of If All Goes Wrong are released, and we’re generally stoked.  Are any of us in the Ghost Children featurette?  Jill expresses her love for The Crying Tree of Mercury. (16:36)

-Billy’s interview in EQ magazine is published online.  Is there a musical genre that the next Pumpkins album won’t be influenced by? (11:41)

In-Depth Discussion
-We take on the Machina Mystery and its reception by the public after the recent series of articles on sp.com on the topic.  Eerie parallels between Machina and Nine Inch Nails’ Year Zero abound. (21:38)

This Week in Pumpkins History
-The Pumpkins appear on Saturday Night Live and show off their acting chops. (3:22)

Song of the Week
-Age of Innocence, October 31st, 1999

One thing we didn’t have time to discuss during our talk of the Machina Mystery: If D’Arcy hadn’t quit and the band went through with the plan to be “in character” throughout the album’s release and tour, would the public’s reaction to the album have been any different?  Feel free to posit your theories in the comments.

SmashingPumpkins.com writer Supervajra, in a third piece on the Machina band-imitates-band concept, elicits this reminiscence from Billy Corgan:

When the re-formed band agreed to the concept in october of 1998 as a way to bring the band to a close, everyone agreed to “play their part’ all the way down the line. I never envisioned that D’arcy would leave in April of ‘99, and that subsequently the 3 of us would try to finish. This put a stress obviously on the full integrity of the project. Because it was connected to the band not only bringing the music to fruition fully, but also the public component of being in character. I ended up in a broken band with a half-ass enthusiasm towards finishing a project already started…

Being bullheaded I pushed on, underestimating the strain it put on me to try to finish something I was no longer sure of. The songs were all written TO the concept, so what could I do but try to finish. I almost abandoned the entire project half-way thru. It took every fibre of my being to just not quit then and there in the middle of it. Jimmy wasn’t in the best state and James was, well, being James. The only reason I finished it was because I wanted off what had by then become a horrible label. And before anyone cries sell out + $, know that if I had disbanded the group then I would have gotten all the $ on the record and or shelved it and done whatever I wanted to instead music wise. I was the only person who could be held to the deal. James and Jimmy would have walked away free as birds, not only of the group but the contract as well. It was the last record of the deal, and that played into how it all went down.

If that just isn’t enough Machina mystery for you, the Internets will soon yield up Nick Kushner’s “Machina, Alchemy & The Occult”, an “encyclopedic, novel-length mini-site currently in production”. Teaser material for the site can be seen here and here.

After the jump: Our speculative dramatization of an under-his-breath wisecrack that could have gotten James in trouble for, well, being James. [WARNING: Dramatization may be in LOLGATMOG form. I blame Jill…] (more…)

Brent DiCrescenzo — yes, the former Pitchfork Media contributor (more on Brent D. below) — gets the news in a phone interview with Billy Corgan for Time Out Chicago:

Corgan promises the Pumpkins will return to “Chicago proper” in November for the band’s 20th anniversary show; the only question, he says, is whether the venue will be the United Center or the Allstate Arena.

DiCrescenzo, best known to Pumpkins fans for his withering review of Machina, is apparently back in the world of music writing. (In 2004, DiCrescenzo wrote that he was quitting the profession at the end of his review of the Beastie Boys’ album To the 5 Boroughs, a piece that was later blasted by Pitchfork editors for…wait for it…making stuff up about Radiohead.) So, now what did he think of the not-really-reunited Smashing Pumpkins playing at a fucking casino?

[I]t’s a shame nitpickers avoided the Horseshoe for the sake of some mythical rock ideals; there’s no way those shows will sound as sweet as this one.

The Pumpkins have been practicing seven hours a day, Corgan says, and it shows: The band rips through material from each of its records, some B-sides and a cover of Pink Floyd’s early acid freak-out, “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun.” Unlike in his ’90s performances, Corgan exerts control over his voice; in fact, he sings better than ever. The group blends heavy-metal geek shredding with trippy goth shoegazing. After an insane, extended guitar duel, the band huddles up for a quiet acoustic set at the front of the stage. The Pumpkins always balanced the audacious with the intimate, which might have led to many listeners’ inability to understand Corgan’s intent. But that’s his point—to remain enigmatic. Before his biggest hit, “Today,” Corgan tells the audience, “This is for you, even though I don’t know who you are. But you don’t know me either.”

Wow, not even a snarky comment about how Billy singing “better than ever” must mean that he paid big bucks to have his “wax-paper septum” replaced! Looks like you can take the Pitchfork out of the boy.

Here is today’s article from our very own Media Militiawoman.

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.

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.

It’s rough being a fanboy when your favorite band often finds ways to redeem even the (few) songs that you never liked all that much and thus have been able to diss when others accuse you of unconditional band-love.

So it is with me and “The Crying Tree of Mercury”. To the album track I was indifferent, but of the released-on-MySpace studio piano version (3MB mp3) and the 2007 live acoustic performances I think frustratingly highly. Mr. Corgan dispenses with meter and trusts himself to make the song work in the moment, thus bringing to mind another of my favorite rock artists, Dave Doughman of Swearing at Motorists non-fame, who’s made quite a non-career for himself out of doing that all the time, as here (YouTube). Yeah, I never thought I’d have cause to make that comparison, but there it is.

And, please, I don’t even want to talk about how I sort of like the 2007 live version of “Glass and the Ghost Children”. Of course, as the age of this blog approaches infinity, odds are that I will. Sigh.

Below: “The Crying Tree of Mercury”, solo acoustic by BC, in Asheville (Google)

The master’s thesis of Adam Michael Ware (pdf) is, in this sense of the word, awesome. On page 33 (it’s a sign!), he characterizes the Machina story as containing an implicit explanation for/fictionalization of the Pumpkins’ post-Mellon Collie commercial decline:

To an audience he had last left as zero, full of angst and vitriol, GLASS and his message of “Real Love” constitute quite a punch in the gut.

Is that the truth that hurts, or am I just winded from reading this far? Nah, I only tease because I really love. Hopefully Ware will go for a doctorate and figure out how “Superchrist” fits into the tale.

There have been a lot of fan complaints about the mastering of the last few records that Billy has recorded. Fans have circulated a few pre-mastering tracks from Zwan’s Mary Star of the Sea, but there has not to my knowledge been an effort to circulate premasters of other recent albums. Given that complete premasters exist — and exist in the public sphere — for Machina, TheFutureEmbrace, and Zeitgeist, it is hard to understand why they are not commonly traded within the fan community. Is it that, public whining notwithstanding, no one really cares that much? Or is it simply that no one has thought to do such elementary waveform comparisons as the following? (more…)

One of the more memorable (not “controversial”) quotes from Billy is this one (sourced from the Jim Stapleton interview disc), on his philosophy for titling songs:

Say you write a song about a chandelier, and the chandelier gives off light, and the light is the color red, and red reminds you of the color you’re not supposed to wear around a bull. So you name the song “Cow”.

This got me to thinking, “How would the Pumpkins’ discography read if instead of using this approach, Billy had given the most obvious title possible to each of his songs?”

I’m not intending to go through the whole thing — though it would be fun if someone would (and comments are open!) — but here’s one to get us started: an obvious-titles tracklisting for Machina. You could certainly pick a different “obvious” title for a couple, but these are at least defensible options:

1. You Know I’m Not Dead
2. Between the Raindrops
3. Who Wouldn’t Be the One You Love?
4. Radio
5. You’re All a Part of Me Now
6. Try to Hold On
7. Heavy Metal Machine
8. Crashing Down
9. Everywhere You Are
10. I Want to Live
11. If You Wait
12. My Whole Life
13. Taking Over
14. Blue Skies Bring Tears
15. Desolation Yes, Hesitation No

Jillysp’s reaction to this was “it’s like backstreet boyz!” True enough, and I especially find the idea of retitling “Glass and the Ghost Children” in this fashion to be…hilarious.