Here’s a transcribed segment from “Inside the Zeitgeist” in which Corgan and Chamberlin hold it down for old-school tech.

Billy Corgan: The great irony of working at Kerry [Brown]’s is that he actually possesses the very same 24-track reel-to-reel machine that we used to record our Mellon Collie album. So, it’s almost like a bizarre sort of coincidence that we’re back using the same machine that we made our biggest album on, and we’ve kind of… It ended up being a sort of good-luck token, so we actually…when we went into the studio, we actually brought the machine with us. So some of Zeitgeist is recorded on the same Mellon Collie machine.

I have to say it’s really difficult to do analog recording these days because almost every studio has completely gone ProTools. (more…)

From the newly released “Inside the Zeitgeist” making-the-record documentary, here’s a transcribed segment in which producer Roy Thomas Baker marvels at the level of capital investment that goes into a Smashing Pumpkins record.

Baker: Masses and masses and masses of equipment. There’s walls and walls and walls of guitars. There was a 40-foot long table, which was about five-foot in depth, full of every conceivable guitar effect ever, ever made, dating back to when guitar effects started. These are…talking about old fuzzboxes from the ’70s and things like that. It was very funny…it never stopped coming in: “Wow, I found this Hammond organ on eBay,” and then next thing you know this brand-new Hammond organ would appear, that’s totally with not a scratch on it, that’s been in someone’s closet for 400 years.

This making-of-Zeitgeist documentary is available from Best Buy for $13.99; it will be packaged with a free CD copy of Zeitgeist that contains a previously unreleased bonus track entitled “Ma Belle”.

No, that’s not how it’s being marketed, but that is an economically equivalent way of describing the “re-release” of Zeitgeist. I don’t think anyone would have a problem with the band pricing a new standalone DVD documentary at $14; however, the offer of a $14 DVD/Zeitgeist combo ($10 if pre-ordered) has been met with some hysterically righteous denunciations. Two examples:

• Pitchfo*k Media has responded to this $14 DVD/CD offer by (again) trotting out an image of a 100-dollar bill with Billy Corgan’s picture superimposed upon it, referring to the band as “$mashing Pumpkin$”.
• The webzine Prefix headlines an article “Billy Corgan’s integrity R.I.P 2007″ and says anyone who wants this item would “probably better off writing a check for the same amount and sending it to P.O. Box Your Toilet”.

UPDATE: The “full length” DVD reportedly contains the 20-minute-long documentary as well as the promo videos for “Tarantula” and “That’s the Way”. That plus “Ma Belle” for $14? It’s a borderline call for me, but I won’t pretend to be deciding for everyone. Of course, I’m listening to “Ma Belle” right now for $0, so… :)

UPDATE: The in-store price is $10 through Friday.

Sarah Rodman has a snarkitorial in today’s Boston Globe that offers snappy suggestions to the reformed Van Halen on the eve of its show in that sportstastic town. Rodman weighs in on “a rash of reunions big and not so big” in 2007, being generally complimentary of our heroes but tossing in an attempt at fact-based reportage toward the end:

You have a new record, Crowded House? You want to play a handful of its best songs? Cool. You want to play almost all of it, Smashing Pumpkins? Not cool.

Facts being checkable these days, I looked up the setlist from the Crowded House show in Boston on August 5; from their 14-track 2007 album Time on Earth, the Oceanic popsters played eight songs that night. Meanwhile, during their recent three-night stand in Boston, the Pumpkins never played more than six songs off the 12-track Zeitgeist in one show.

The most pleasant surprise I had watching the Pumpkins in Philly was their performance of “Pomp and Circumstances”. The surprise was not that they played the song, but rather that I found its arrangement for live performance to be so beautiful; I’d not been struck so much by the track on Zeitgeist.

Decent video of the acoustic performance from the last night at Tower Theater has showed up, so I’ve posted it below. It’s not that this is the most perfect rendition possible; they were clearly still working on it…

Below: …but it’s the arrangement, people, the arrangement!! (YouTube)

In the first major competitive bid against iTunes, Amazon.com has recently debuted its own online mp3-buying portal here. And guess what. The Pumpkins are #9 on today’s top artist list!

… Right above Pavarotti and Wagner. Seriously? It seems like the mp3 market is reaching a new, DRM-free demographic that’s not obsessed with Rihanna’s damn umbrella. CNET posted a scathing usability article about the beta store and obviously it has quite a way to go to gain competitive edge against iTunes. But, if Amazon can provide lower prices, a consistently intuitive, multi-tenant user interface, then they will certainly enter this market as a stiff competitor. Plus, if they can manage to eliminate the 60 seconds of hard drive deep freeze my computer enters when it tries to load iTunes, I’m totally on board.

I can’t help but notice, however, that Feist’s single is at the top of the daily downloads chart — yes, that song from the iPod commercial. Ahh, sweet commercial irony.

Let’s just hope the Pumpkins stay up on the chart!

Netphoria.org poster Bullet1979 (hey, that was a seven-inch) first brought this rumour to the Internets last Tuesday, citing a friend in the retail industry:

[T]here will be a Best Buy exclusive re-release of Zeitgeist packaged with a Making-of-DVD that follows the 2 years of writing and recording Zeitgeist. It will also contain all songs recorded during the Zeitgesit [sic] recording sessions and it apparently comes in a box that “looks pretty sweet.”

This weekend, the rumour was verified (?) by HU’s favorite (?) reluctant (?) Pumpkins-tour follower, who claims both to have inquired as to its veracity with frontman Billy Corgan and to have received an affirmative response.

UPDATE: Netphoria user jjbjjbjjb (???) lectures on the economics of a bonus DVD.

UPDATE: Even more from this crazy jjbjjbjjb person.

Sebastian (at netphoria.org) helpfully points out that the opening of the New York Times archives for free browsing means free browsing of old Pumpkins-related articles in the New York Times. Writers in the Times have almost always had great respect for the Pumpkins, but I still went straight to the review of Siamese Dream to check my claim that every Billy Corgan album has received mixed reviews upon its release. Simon Reynolds had the unenviable task of weighing in on an album that, in the future, generally would be considered a classic:

This major-label debut by the Smashing Pumpkins recently shot straight onto the Billboard chart at No. 10, partially justifying the industry hype about the Chicago quartet being “the next Nirvana.” But fuzzed-up riffs and angst-wracked vocals are quite the norm these days, and Smashing Pumpkins lacks the zeitgeist-defining edge that made Nirvana’s breakthrough so thrilling and resonant.

The Pumpkins, by comparison, offer sound and fury that signifies…not a lot, really. The band’s inferno of acid rock and art-metal fuses influences old (Black Sabbath, Jimi Hendrix, “White Album” Beatles) and recent (Sonic Youth, Jane’s Addiction). Billy Corgan, the band’s singer and guitarist and overall esthetic shaper, may be hipper than Lenny Kravitz, but he’s just as much of a magpie.

With the string-swept “Disarm” and the Hendrix pyrotechnics of “Geek U.S.A.,” the Pumpkins aim for grandeur. But there’s something hollow about the immaculately sculpted bombast (co-produced, incidentally, by Butch Big [sic] of “Nevermind” fame.)

What jumps out (that is, besides the slick mention-Nevermind-but-omit-Gish-from- the-producer’s-resume tactic) is Reynolds’s claim that the Pumpkins failed to define the spirit of the times in 1993. The irony, of course, is that many reviewers of Zeitgeist directed a similar diss toward the band in 2007 while simultaneously implying that the claim might have been valid had the band made it around, oh, say, 1993. Witness Josh Love’s review for Stylus Magazine, which he opens by mocking the title of Zeitgeist before going on to say:

[T]he Pumpkins were…even Colossus-striding great for a time. Unfortunately, Billy’s scarcely made any adjustments since the turn of the century.

One wonders whether, had Mr. Love been a working music critic in 1993, he would have referred to Siamese Dream as the work of a band that was “Colossus-striding great”. I am guessing not.

Doing more justice to the XM “Artist Confidential” program with the Smashing Pumpkins, here is another transcribed segment of the interview. There is a decent amount of irreverence in this section, so use great caution and generosity as you read/interpret the printed text.

Billy Corgan: That [original version of “That’s the Way”] reminded us too much of Mellon Collie. So right there you have a contradiction of thought. On one level, we know that people want to hear that kind of feeling from us, because that’s what identifies some of our best work, and on the other hand, we’re saying, well, we don’t want to sound like that. So what do we do, you know what I mean? It’s not as simple as saying “reject the idea because it’s familiar.” (more…)

In an effort to do more justice than I did previously to a most entertaining and informative interview with the Smashing Pumpkins on XM’s “Artist Confidential”, I am going to transcribe some key quotes. Here is the first in what will be a brief, today-only series.

Lou Brutus: …let’s talk about the lyrical content of that record, because…I don’t think that you’d ever been overtly political before; I don’t know that you’re being overtly political now, but…and maybe I’m reading into the lyrics incorrectly, but there seems to be a lot more awareness of the world in these songs, or many of them anyway.

Billy Corgan: I feel I’m in an interesting position. (more…)

Billy Corgan and The Smashing Pumpkins perform and interact with intellect and swagger for a full house of fans in the XM Performance Theater. Hear a workshop style of their songs to a powerful Q&A session. The Smashing Pumpkins mesmerize in this edition of Artist Confidential.

The aforehyped program, recorded July 10 in Washington (full setlist from spfc.org) and surely edited down in the interim, has its premiere airing at 9pm Central on XM Ethel (ch. 47). Listen along (((free stream from AOL))) as we “live”-blog this occasion.

8:04pm: The XM Ethel DJ spins “That’s the Way” to warm up the listening audience. 56 minutes until mesmerization…

8:50pm: The DJ instructs listeners not to “pee [their] pants” but instead to use the “lavoratory” (ph; sic) during the 10 minutes until the show begins. Does everyone have to be gross these days?

8:57pm: DJ, who seems to prefer to say “Billy Corgan” rather than “Smashing Pumpkins”, chooses Nirvana’s “Pennyroyal Tea” as the last song before the program. Hey, if you have something to say, dude, just spit it.

9:01pm: Loooong packaged generic intro, then a Pumpkin-specific medley of studio tracks, several greatest hits and then several Zeitgeist tracks.

9:03pm: Zzzz…intro finally ends; your host, Lou Brutus, says “the only thing better in Chicago than Wrigley Field is the Smashing Pumpkins.” Crowd claps. Band launches into an acoustic “That’s the Way”.

9:08pm: “What kind of Smashing Pumpkins album are we going to make?” Billy said that he and Jimmy asked themselves in Scottsdale in late 2005. “The original feel of [”That’s the Way”] was something like…” Billy starts to play and asks Jimmy to join in with the “original beat”, and Jimmy does. “We love the idea of the song, but it reminds us too much of Mellon Collie.” Billy says they didn’t want to reject the idea, but to adapt it (as Flood might have suggested); coming up with a new rhythmic pattern on the guitar moved the song “from 1995 to 2005″.

9:12pm: “People have a rosy opinion of what we did, but it isn’t always the reality of what we did.”

9:13pm: Billy begins “For God and Country”…

9:17pm: …and the band finishes it. Re: “For God and Country”, Billy says it was a “last-second entry” for the recording sessions that was originally a “Civil War dirge”, like a “funerary, there-goes-our-country thing”. A cheap keyboard provided a disco beat that Jimmy and Billy incorporated into the final album version.

9:21pm: Billy on the thematic overtones of the record: “I feel I’m drowning in a bunch of [political] crap, and I don’t know what to do or say about it.”

9:22pm: Billy introduces “Neverlost”, which he says they created in their last moments together before breaking for Christmas vacation.

(no timestamp) A general comment: Billy sounds quite energized, even excited, while talking, and is quite funny. Sorry that isn’t coming across so much in what I’m getting down.

9:28pm: Jimmy, discussing Roy Thomas Baker, says the world formulates grandiose stories about people who have fallen out of the public eye; he and Billy found the stories about Roy to have been false, and further found in him a soulmate, someone who approaches art in the same way they do. “He wore us out with his energy and his willingness to go the extra mile.”

9:30pm: “Every performance on Zeitgeist is a live performance,” Jimmy says, with “no digital editing or click tracks at all.”

9:34pm: After an impassioned complaint about the state of the music business and its obsession with “short money”, an amused Billy exults in his ability to swear on satellite radio. “Fuck ‘em. Fuck ‘em with a song - ‘Backdoor Sally’ - ready? 1, 2…” “Bleeding the Orchid” ensues.

9:39pm: “Ironically, that song is about what we just talked about.”

9:40pm: Lou is (not the only one) curious to how “United States” is going to come across acoustically. “I personally have always been afraid of the shuffle,” Jimmy says. He and Billy kick into some shuffle-based “good-time boogie”. The beat for “United States” is, Billy says, a Pink Floyd-influenced modified shuffle beat.

9:45pm: The journey begins.

9:52pm: The journey ends rather anticlimactically.

9:53pm: Billy says to fans: “We’re committed to the band for good… The band is not going to go away as an emotional identity until we’re dead.” He cites Neil Young, whom he describes as an artist who is forever making music for “right now”, as a model for where the band wants to go - but he says it’s “uncharted territory” (as many of their peer bands are gone) and that fan support will be necessary for them to succeed.

9:56pm: “We thought we’d do one oldie.” Crowd claps, and “Today” starts.

10:00pm: “Thank you.” Roll credits with special thanks to caterer Red Hot and Blue. XM 47 resumes regular programming with Social Distortion’s “Bad Luck”, thus in my mind clinching passive-aggressive hater status for the nasty DJ.

The Daily Swarm has announced that Shepard Fairey (Zeitgeist artist and e-acquaintance of Hipsters United) has been commissioned to do new artwork for Led Zeppelin. The announcement was made September 7th at the QBN sessions in LA.

Most amusingly, The Daily Swarm posts faux artwork for the Zep:

This bad reworking of the Zeitgeist artwork reminds me of this article in the NYTimes earlier this week about art and its inherent knockoff risk (though the Times article focuses on fashion and last week’s “week o’ glory” in NYC). Wonder what Shepard thinks about this bastardization — or if it’s all in his mastermind plan to get us to OBEY GIANT. Shepard? :)

A week before Billy Corgan & Co. hold court in Montreal, local writer Mark LePage heralds their return in the pages of the Gazette. In an uncommonly confident dismissal of the band’s critics, LePage likens the Pumpkins to Led Zeppelin:

Zeitgeist entered the Billboard Top 200 at No. 2 and has fallen to No. 55 in its six-week lifetime - which indicates little or nothing. If it isn’t a high-school musical, a corporate countrycrat, a diva or hip-hop felon, it ain’t owning Billboard.

In fact, it may prove there’s good faith involved here. If there’s a problem with Zeitgeist, it’s not the passing of 1994, but 1979: It’s a pummelling album, with little room for the yin side of Corgan’s persona. Well, he’s on point in that sense: These are heavy times. And suppose he’d gone the other route? Had Corgan released an album full of Disarms and Tonight, Tonights, he would have been crucified for selling out to MTV and Wal-Mart.

So Corgan’s critics may say he’s lost his melodic curveball, but a charge of cynicism - or profiteering - won’t really stick. He could have unloaded a best-of package clogged with ballads and an entire disc’s worth of the B-sides the band flushed down the garburetor in the first place. (Which brings us to the Led Zeppelin principle: When asked, after the release of the Zep box set, why there weren’t more previously unreleased tracks on it, Page replied something like “There aren’t any.” If a riff was good, it was released. If not, they didn’t vault it to dupe future generations.) You don’t release the heaviest album of your career and frontload it with garish endtime titles (Doomsday Clock, Tarantula, Bleeding the Orchid) unless your real concern is not lucre, but legacy.

The Zep has gone in and out of fashion as well - critical fashion. They’ve never gone stale out there, where the hoi polloi pay for albums. And something tells me when the Pumpkins take the stage at Jean Drapeau Park, Chamberlin and Corgan will bring enough drum/guitar wallop to remind the crowd of the truth of this particular Zeit: When it comes to this, they attract critics, but no real competition.

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…)

In what I hope will be the last gaming-related post for a loooong time (unless they author a Final Fantasy soundtrack), there is more Pumpkins news. Tony Hawk’s new release for Xbox360 and PS3, “Tony Hawk’s Proving Ground,” features Zeitgeist’s Tarantula. The release date is October 9th, and versions for PS2 and the Wii are in development.

Oh, and MCA of the Beastie Boys is an unlockable character in the game, which I can admit is kind of cool.

Full songlist here, courtesy of Gaming Today. Game website here.

Geez, I feel like a dork.

No, there aren’t visible hairs sprouting from the dome; rather, the white shirt has been replaced with one of a color that’s arguably even more neutral.  Here he is…and oh yeah, Jimmy as well (though you have to wait until the 2:20 mark to see him)…performing “Zeitgeist” (the song) in Copenhagen on Tuesday night.

Below:  BC/JC get lost on this road - together! (YouTube)