Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, 30 Years Later

"Believe in me as I believe in you..."

Blessed and cursed and won, the Smashing Pumpkins reached the zenith with Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness.

(The) Smashing Pumpkins:

Billy Corgan: guitar, lead vocals, piano, keys, autoharp, string arrangement of “Tonight, Tonight”

James Iha: guitar, lead vocals on “Take Me Down,” vocals on “Farewell and Goodnight”

D’Arcy Wretzky: bass, vocals on “Beautiful” and “Farewell and Goodnight”

Jimmy Chamberlin: drums, vocals on “Farewell and Goodnight”

Greg Leisz, steel guitar

Chicago Symphony Orchestra: strings on “Tonight, Tonight”

Produced by Flood and Alan Moulder with Billy Corgan

art by John Craig

Maiden of the Stars

You know I love when album art and art history intersect. For those of you who do not know, my degree is in art history!

Billy Corgan was always fascinated by Victorian and Edwardian-era art. It comes with being a sixties and seventies freak; the art of that time was heavily inspired by art nouveau. Billy had a full notebook of concept sketches for the Mellon Collie packaging.

After a false start with another painter and axeing of a Their Satanic Majesties Request-inspired shoot, Billy parsed through artists’ portfolios until he found John Craig’s. John hadn’t heard of Smashing Pumpkins before this! Billy faxed John his sketches, from which he produced whimsical, surreal images of children in poppy fields a la The Wizard of Oz, birds in flying machines, and an Alice in Wonderland-style opium den for the CD booklet. (CDs! Ah, the nineties.) This was how John earned Billy’s trust to do the front cover. Billy “was really talking about a ship's maiden — you know, the ones carved into the front of old ships.” If you’ll see figureheads off their ships like these shots I took at the Mystic Seaport in Connecticut, they have this lean to follow the bow. It reminds me of religious icons of the Baroque era; with their similar “S-curve” lean.

pictured: 18th and 19th-century ship figureheads at the Mystic Seaport, Mystic, CT

Already, we have Baroque, eighteenth, nineteenth, and the early twentieth centuries going on. This naturally lends to a composite image, and the birth of Mellon Collie herself. The front cover cycled through several iterations, including a moon bursting through a paper backdrop and a familiar-looking maiden in a pink dress. The winning image was a cherub-faced woman dressed in Renaissance garb, sailing through the night sky on a golden star. She leans out of her flying machine, like a ship’s figurehead or the Baroque S-curve. She somehow invokes Da Vinci and Dora Maar all at once.

pictured: Dora Maar, Untitled (Fashion Photograph) [1936]

The winner was the face of Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s The Souvenir, spliced onto the body of Raphael’s Saint Catherine of Alexandria. The star came from a vintage whiskey ad.

pictured: Jean-Baptiste Greuze, The Souvenir (oil on canvas, c. 1789)

pictured: Raphael, Saint Catherine of Alexandria (oil on wood, c. 1509)

Martin Butler writing for the Spilled Pixels blog notes the Mellon Collie cover is “vaguely erotic to (him,) in a way that (he) can’t easily explain.” ...I can. Your mind fills in the blanks. If the star wasn’t there, what would be?

“With the Greuze, there was something very dreamy or ecstatic about her expression that certainly wasn't in the Raphael painting. And then the flow and color of the Raphael dress, just the way it's rippling and almost traveling. I guess it's those primary colors too. That's what happens – you don't know if it's going to work, but you put the body on the star and the head on the body and you just know it's right somehow.”

quoted from: Daoud Tyler-Ameed, “‘Mellon Collie’ Mystery Girl: The Story Behind An Iconic Album Cover.”NPR, 12/7/2012.

Voyage Across the Sky

(The) Smashing Pumpkins had the misfortune of coming up on the tail end of grunge, with their 1993 breakout LP, Siamese Dream. (It’s one of my favorite albums of all-time and one of the greatest albums of the nineties, if you ask me. Take my praise with a grain of salt, though: it was my very first favorite album.) With Siamese Dream, Smashing Pumpkins went from being accused of ripping off the past to accused of riding the coattails of Nirvana.

Brace yourselves: we will hear a lot from Billy Corgan in this piece. He’s the chattiest of the pumpkin patch by a mile. About the band being assumed grunge, he said, “...we were getting lumped in with people that could never have written a...‘Disarm’ or even a ‘Today,’ so I was like, ‘Fuck all this!’” On top of their mislabeling, the Pumpkins were unilaterally dealt that obscure punk insult of “selling out.” Steve Albini called them “pandering sluts playing fake stadium rock.” (Steve and I would’ve disagreed on so many things. What did he call Urge Overkill, wieners in suits? But we agree on not mincing words and getting pummeled for it.) In that all-timer of a Steve quote lies our first dilemma. You can’t really call Siamese Dream “grunge.” It’s too ornamental and esoteric for the label. The Pumpkins’ ambitions were always too big for the genre. But they’re not glossy enoughfor our understanding of “stadium rock” either.

1994 brought the end of a grueling thirteen-month album cycle, in the form of headlining Lollapalooza. The experience was totally exhausting...even if it is funny Pavement were bumped off the bill because a line in a song hurt Billy’s feelings. In the Chicago Tribune, D’Arcy Wretsky expressed immense pressure applied upon the band by Virgin Records and critics to go bigger and better. Simply, “If you don’t sell more than the last record, it means you’re going downhill.” Meanwhile, Billy struggled with the idea of rock god-dom touted to him since he was a kid, in wake of peer Kurt Cobain’s passing that April.

“Do I throw this in the garbage and try to pursue some kind of ideal that I can’t live up to, or accept what I am, which is a corny boy from fucking Chicago?”

quoted from: David Fricke, “Smashing Pumpkins: Disillusionment, Obsession, Confusion, Satisfaction.” Rolling Stone, 11/16/1995.

The Pumpkins’ creative lodestar was not only questioning their scope – James had just walked in an Anna Sui show – but their sound. The “grunge” thing was waning. The “soft-loud-soft-loud” thing had been completely co-opted by pop music. We see this about every ten years, right? The commodification of what was once the “underground.” In interview, Jimmy Chamberlin used descriptors like “product,” “consume,” and “ingest” to describe Smashing Pumpkins becoming a product over the course of the Siamese Dream album cycle. In the words of author Craig Schuftan,

“Chamberlin gave the impression that he’d come to see working in the SP as being not too dissimilar to working at Burger King, as though there was no essential difference between playing in a rock band and doing the kind of McJob people joined rock bands in order to avoid.”

quoted from: Craig Schuftan, Entertain Us: The Rise and Fall of Alternative Rock in the Nineties (2012.)

Grunge was also challenged by a broader pulling back from the confessional; a natural consequence of growing up. All the greats had either disbanded, were winding down, or were softening their edges. Even the kings of feedback, Sonic Youth, were quieting down. Billy himself was in his late twenties and married. He determined the next record would be the exclamation point at the end of this period of Smashing Pumpkins.

Dawn to Dusk

Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness was always meant to be a double album. Billy cites the White Album and The Wall many, many times. album, didn’t pan out. Virgin Records tried to talk Billy out of a double album, then tried to split it into 2 separate discs for release. He wouldn’t budge. This was a time in rock-and-roll history where double albums were no longer a symbol of greatness. No more Blonde on Blonde or Exile on Main St. Daydream Nation was the exception, not the rule. Nowadays we have Michael Jackson’s HIStory, or Guns ’n’ Roses’s Use Your Illusion. Both not exactly career highlights!

The Pumpkins operated under a similar frame of thought as the Clash making their own double-album effort, London Calling. If this was the last rock-and-roll album ever made, what would it sound like? Why not have a romp in “dinosaur-rock self-indulgence” to stick it to everyone? In interview with Guitar World, Billy and James cited Mick Taylor-era Rolling Stones, the Jefferson Airplane live album Bless Its Little Pointed Head, and...Pantera. James was a fan of Fleetwood Mac’sown double album Tusk as well. What a batch of influences! Overall, the band hoped to capture their live sound. To do this, they had to part company from Siamese Dream producer Butch Vig. “I think we'd become so close with Butch that it started to work to our disadvantage,” Billy admitted in that same Guitar World profile. Familiarity breeds contempt. Best to cut it off before the contempt sets in.

The group approached Flood first. James was a big fan, and Billy knew he’d be down for a double album. He worked with U2, he’s not afraid of maximalism! A project as big as this needed more man power. Enter Alan Moulder, who mixed Siamese Dream and engineered My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless. (Loveless bankrupted Creation Records, Siamese Dream went a quarter of a million dollars over budget, I’m sensing a pattern here…)

In March of 1995, the Pumpkins hunkered down at their rehearsal space in north Chicago. They recorded there,the Chicago Recording Company, and Village Recorder in LA through August of that year. Siamese Dreamproduction was not fun.

Hellish intersection of Billy’s control freak tendencies, therapy sessions, insistence on using analog technology gobbling up the timeline and budget. James and D’Arcy broke up, Billy’s own turbulent marriage which spoiler alert is about to end. All underscored by Jimmy in a peak of active addiction. Flood spearheaded a complete overhaul of recording process. Though lots of D’Arcy’s backing vocal tracks didn’t make the cut for Mellon Collie, her and James were a lot more involved in production. James even gets to sing lead on “Take Me Down!” This deliberate gesture was a response to rumors that Billy redid almost of their parts on Siamese Dream; a rumor that turned out to be true. He might’ve repeated the process, but given the format, “There were just too many songs for one person to do everything.”

At least he’s honest!

While Flood worked with Billy in one room, Alan recorded James and D’Arcy in the other. Jimmy was usually the first guy done; he’d cut his drum track in one or two takes, from which the rest of any composition would be built. The Pumpkins certainly embraced the double album excess: as many as sixty songs were in the running to be on Mellon Collie. That’s not even counting the Sadlands demos and tracks exclusive to the original vinyl release that wound up on the Aeroplane Flies High compilation!) But it was still missing...something. In the eleventh hour, Billy revisited a demo called “Strolling.” It wasn’t much more than the basic chord progression. But it was…something. The jams came out Stonesy, “and not in a good way,” Flood reworked it by way of sampling. Digital recording technology, people! Billy and Flood fleshed it out, and “Strolling” became the very last song written for the album: “1979.” This would prove to be Smashing Pumpkins’s greatest hit: peaking at number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart.

above: "1979" video (dir. Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, 1996)

Twilight to Starlight

Of all the groups I’ve featured on Vinyl Monday, I have the longest uninterrupted history with Smashing Pumpkins. They were my first favorite band, and Siamese Dream was my very first favorite album after I stole it from my dad’s CD collection when I was eleven.

Clocking in at a whopping 121 minutes – longer than The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, longer than The Wall, fifteen minutes and a whole disc longer than All Things Must Pass – I can confidently say Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness is the longest album I will ever cover on Vinyl Monday. That’s the digital music age for you! CDs just don’t have the same run time constraint as the vinyl age did.

This presents a unique challenge for me. If I follow my standard track-by-track format, this review will get repetitive. Instead, I’ll fleshing out major points with specific examples from the track listing, trying my best to at least mention every song. Then, I’ll be highlighting the greats’ explaining exactly why they’re great.

Starting with the drawbacks: Mellon Collie’s greatest flaw is in its creation. Across the board, this album’s dealbreaker is its length. If this were trimmed down? Holy shit, dude. It’d be one of the greatest albums of the nineties! You cut even one disc and it could’ve been better than Siamese Dream! Love, Where Boys Fear To Tread, Tales Of A Scorched Earth, Thru The Eyes of Ruby, Lily (My One and Only,) and By Starlight are the tracks I’d cut. They’re all tough cuts to make as I see all their individual merits! Ultimately. I feel most of them tread the same ground as other, better tracks on Mellon Collie. (We Only Come Out At Night is this album’s “Wild Honey Pie,” it’s goofy as hell and I’m keeping it.) But putting much of anything between “X.Y.U”. and “Farewell and Goodnight,” let alone four whole tracks, was a mistake. It feels long-winded for the sake of long-windedness and like a loss of momentum...which might be inevitable when you’re trying to pad out two/three/four(!) discs. Think the White Album, right? There can’t be four whole tracks between “Revolution 9” and “Goodnight.” We need that unease.

In his review for Rolling Stone, Jim DeRogatis identified Mellon Collie’s repetitive subject matter. Billy is “a romantic who believes in the redemptive power of love, but he’s also a cynic, having been constantly disappointed by those he loves.” It’s the flaw of the nineties, really. How many different ways can one man phrase angst? Still, there’s remarkably little filler considering how much material is on Mellon Collie. Never before and never since has an album of this scope been so fully-realized.

Here come my tougher gripes to solve. Where the hell is D’Arcy? Recognizing the contributions of the rest of Smashing Pumpkins versus the potent creative vision of Billy Corgan is an eternal frustration of being a Smashing Pumpkins fan. I somehow hear less of D’Arcy here than I do on Siamese Dream, and she’s hardly on Siamese Dream! There’s also the matter of Billy’s voice. I’ll admit, I struggled to listen to two uninterrupted hours of Billy Corgan. I was kissing the ground when he handed James the mic for Take Me Down!

Mellon Collie succeeds in five points – not unlike the five-pointed star on the cover.

References to rock-and-roll’s past.

Billy worships the sixties and seventies. You can tell he’s deeply knowledgable of the music of that era. Mellon Collie indulges in the kitschy and cute elements of these decades; note its use of the Mellotron from the title track. There are modernized baroque pop and psychedelic moments, like Cupid De Locke. David Browne for Entertainment Weekly said this song is an example of “overthink” and that “no rock song should ever use the words ‘hath’ and ‘ye.’” I say everyone’s allowed to be wrong sometimes. I love “Cupid”’s fairy-garden feel with its uber-maximalistic twinkling harp. I love the medieval revival, folksy, circular nature. I love its overly-flowery and stale language; like smelling your grandma’s perfume. It pokes fun at itself while taking pleasure in the spoils of beauty. It’s nymphs pulling a satyr into the brook in song.

pictured: William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Nymphs and Satyr (oil on canvas, 1873)

Always a group of extreme contrasts, Smashing Pumpkins also employ the downtuning of one of Billy’s favorite groups, Black Sabbath. (In the “666 Tapes,” we see him sneaking in a quick Sabbath jam.) This is highlighted on the rockers of the album, like “Jellybelly,” “Zero,” and Bodies. A rare earthy acoustic Led Zeppelin III or IV number can be found on In the Arms of Sleep – I believe that’s a zither hammered on the song. There are twin guitar assaults like Boston or Cheap Trick might do. Underrated favorite Here Is No Why taps into that grandiosity. It’s a rare moment in which I can contemplate Billy and James as a duo. The guitar tone captured on the Zero solo and overdubbing sounds gluttonous and diseased, shoutout to Alan Moulder for bringing that shoegazey noise into the Pumpkins fray.

And of course, there are Beatle-esque moments. Farewell and Goodnight plays out like the end of a stage show; a concept both the Beatles and Stones played with. Everyone, even Jimmy, steps to center stage to bid the audience...farewell and goodnight. I hear specific references in Mellon Collie’s title track. It gets to sounding a lot like Pink Floyd’s “Summer ’68,” and also bears resemblance to the piano coda of “Layla.” (It all comes back to Clapton eventually!!) Deja vu aside, this quaint three minutes transports you to a totally different place; where orchestra rock was king and rock-and-roll was allowed to dream big. It’s even reflected in the title. Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. Even the discs have subtitles. Totally prog.

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How this knowledge of the past is applied to the present.

Mellon Collie almost never feels like pastiche. This is from the influence of producer Flood. In David Wild’s essay for the 2012 box set liner notes, Billy tells a story of an early version of By Starlight that aired a lot more on the side of Pink Floyd. Upon hearing this, Flood goes, “What’s with all the seventies crap?” and stripped the whole thing back to our current understanding of the song. Love and “We Only Come Out At Night” are weird synth-pop moments; the former totally taken over by phaser to the point where it’s distracting. Beautiful is a much more palatable brand of Pumpkin synth; and an all-too-rare showcase of D’Arcy’s vocals on this album.

What more can be said about 1979? I contemplated skipping over this song entirely, as so many before me have masterfully dissected exactly what makes this song great. Then I remembered you people would come after me with pitchforks if I didn’t at least mention it! You know it, I know it. “1979” is bittersweet nostalgia bottled up into four-minutes-and-change. Sampling Billy’s voice and working it into the Fleetwood Mac-ian drum loop makes it endlessly replayable. It’s Can-meets-New Order-meets-Sonic Youth magic.

Smashing Pumpkins’s MVP, Jimmy Fucking Chamberlin.

His performance on Jellybelly is insane. The precision of the sixteenth notes in the first few measures and rolls into the feedback-laced guitar solo are unbelievably clean. It’s all played with one pedal and no click track? Fuck everything! In interview with Rick Beato, Jimmy described trying to capture “Jellybelly” as “like a car on ice skittering down the highway out of control...” Jimmy was somehow Smashing Pumpkins’s traction and lack thereof. James and Billy’s guitar parts are typically intensely melodic. Jimmy’s playing style was always able to anchor that.

Jimmy has such a breadth of skill, from urgent double-time clicks in “Tonight, Tonight,” his uncanny rigidity in “Zero,” and sheer simple perfection in “1979.” You don’t need to be Keith Moon all the time to be one of the greats. It’s how you inject a minimal beat with feeling that counts. Billy called Jimmy’s playing “cinematic,” I certainly hear that on Galapagos. It was maybe the closest the Pumpkins ever got to Floyd; cymbal washes and sparse playing allow it to grow and build.

This breadth lends itself to...

Mellon Collie’s dynamics.

You can hear it in the big hits, obviously: “1979” and Bullet With Butterfly Wings. I raise to you Porcelina of the Vast Oceans and “X.Y.U.” I see these two songs as the pillars on which the rest of Mellon Collie stands: they came from the same jam, and most acutely capture the album’s extremes. (Plus, my favorites off Siamese Dream are “Soma” and “Silverfuck,” so you really should’ve seen this coming.) “Porcelina” begins in silence, as guitar arpeggios suspended in lava, cymbal washes, and cut-up samples of Billy’s voice fade in. Guitar squeals float by like deep sea creatures; the Pumpkins were underrated masters of atmosphere. Everything slowly drifts together until the riff bursts out of the water like the clam shell Venus born from.

pictured: William-Adolphe Bouguereau, The Birth of Venus (oil on canvas, 1879)

The composition ebbs, with digitally-affected guitar and a hollow Floyd-ian drum sound as Billy sings, “On a distant shoreline, she waves her arms to me.” “Her name was Aphrodite and she rides a crimson shell.” It invokes tales of brave Ulysses, or maybe Odysseus. Whoever our Hellenistic hero is, he doesn’t seem to want to leave: “The dilly-dally of my bright-lit stay/The steam of my misfortunes has given me the power to be afraid.” He is frozen in awe. The song crests back into the sharp, gleaming trident’s point, falling back down to the slipstream with a churning, watery noise. Guitars howl through final movement as we sail away. The most “progressive” song on Mellon Collie, “Porcelina” is a thing of eternal beauty.

David Browne said the Pumpkins’s brand of “hard rock still sounds a little too fastidious, too marshmallow-gooey, to scare anyone.” Clearly he tapped out before X.Y.U.

Where “Porcelina” is the beautiful goddess Mellon Collie meets on her journey, “X.Y.U.” is the monster in the labyrinth. “X.Y.U.” is everything “Porcelina” is not. The band locks down on this terrible lurching riff. The composition ebbs and flows the same way, but it’s much more sinister. Between lurches, a flu-ridden Billy howls the story of a doomed innocent. Mellon Collie’s escapist paradise crumbles around us. “There is no going back, this wasn’t meant to last/This is hell on earth…” Over the course of the song and over top of the pummeling riff, Billy becomes a man possessed. He snarls on saliva like a rabid animal and a “motherfuck,” whatever that is. The great breakdown of the album comes as uneasy levitation, like “Silverfuck”’s. The story of Mary had a little lamb is perverted. This is the point in the horror movie where the girl on screen knows she’s in deep shit. In a moment of silence, she thinks she’s found a safe place to hide. Until the monster howls from right behind her,

“In the eyes of a jackal, I say kaaa-boom!”

I struggle to pick a highlight from Jimmy’s performance on “X.Y.U.,” he is the other head of this song’s monster. His rolls through the rave-up are nasty. But I will never forget how he breaks the song’s spine with once decisive, brutal crack

Writing

As you might have gathered from my previous work, I was a weird kid. Some might say a “spooky” kid. Definitely not well-adjusted. Throughout Mellon Collie, Billy questions himself, his ability to love, and unpacks his childhood. Something about the way he makes these observations, like a child wise beyond their years, captured me as a kid.

“I sensed my loss before I even learned to talk,

And I remember my birthdays, empty party afternoons won’t come back.”

Billy said Mellon Collie was for fourteen to twenty-four-year-olds, and accurately predicted it’d be “totally misunderstood by plus-30-year-old rock critics.” I’m twenty-six, therefore not all of Billy’s lines land with me. But hey. When you’re, like, fifteen, everything is the end of the world. You don’t know better yet. Mellon Collieexpresses that youthful bravado, the steel balls you need to make a triple album in 1995. There’s hedonism andnihilism, “nothing is important” and “God is empty just like me,” underscored by loneliness. When you’re young, you feel like you’re on an island. No one’s ever felt how you do. Stumbeline is probably the bestarticulations of this, with some of the best visuals in the lyrics.

On the other side, you have the embarrassing earnesty of Muzzle: “I fear that I am ordinary, just like everyone.”But hasn’t everyone felt like that at least once?

Mellon Collie bears a healthy dose of challenged romanticism. There’s equal parts rage and love: “Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage” versus “Believe in me as I believe in you.” In spite of the lyric “love is suicide,” there’s love all around. Why write a coming-of-age album in your late twenties? Billy felt he wasn’t articulate enough in the moment to express these feelings. It’s why teenagers generally don’t write literary masterpieces, right? Mellon Collie serves as a farewell to his youth, first and foremost. While title track was the “theme” of Mellon Collie, in Tonight, Tonight, we find its thesis statement:

“Time is never time at all,

You can never, ever leave without leaving a piece of youth.”

You lose something as you grow up, but oh is it such an adventure! It’s like Joni said, “Something’s lost, but something’s gained in living every day.” What does living every day mean to Billy? Rallying cries of, “Crucify the insincere.” Making things right, in accordance with young people’s spectacular sense of justice. There’s the kind of soul-crushing optimism that only comes with never having had to start over: “Life can change, you’re not stuck in vain.” “We’ll make things right, we’ll feel it all tonight.” And the continual begging to “Believe, believe in me,” Tied up in a great big starry-eyed bow as, “Believe in me as I believe in you.” Isn’t that all the hopeless romantic wants? All this is reflected in the rosy-cheeked music: tromping drums, bittersweet swells, the urgent double-time of hitting the road to go god-knows-where after splitting from the senior prom.

above: MTV Award-winning "Tonight, Tonight" music video (dir. Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, 1996)

Thirty-Three hints “Tonight, Tonight”’s chords, blessing it with sitar-like guitars.

“I turn my collar up and face the cold on my own

The earth laughs beneath my feet

And the blasphemy in my old jangly walk...”

What a brilliant way to articulate your other-ness. A canon event of your teenage years is quite feeling at home in your body yet. Think when you had that unfortunate growth spurt after your mom already bought all your school clothes, and she can’t afford more. You’re left walking around with sleeves that don’t hit your wrists and pants that show your dorky ankle socks. Lord knows I’ve been there!

What’s Mellon Collie’s connective tissue? Lack. “Emptiness is loneliness,” nowhere and nothing, an ode to no one, “I’m your zero.” Pretty ironic for a fucking something of a record! There’s a constant, emotional, mercurialback-and-forth. It’s Billy Corgan’s Gemini moon at work. There’s a track called Fuck You. Right after it there’s a track called “Love!”

“...if you're tormented, you're going to get some kind of weird deeper resonance in your music. But if you're really tormented, you're usually too overwhelmed to write a song about it. You don't really have the energy to be thinking about your music or your career when you fucking hate your life. I find it's best for songwriting when you're in a kind of middle spot.”

quoted from: Alan Di Perna, “Zero Worship.” Guitar World, 12/1995.

To Forgive, one of the most significant cuts on Mellon Collie, is about not yet having the capacity to forgive. “Ten times removed, I forget about where it all began.” Our narrator is “ten times removed” from the past, and spends a whole song trying to convince themselves in the chorus that “nothing is important,” when in reality they forget to forget.

Above all, Mellon Collie appreciates life the way only a young person can. My favorite line I heard in these multi-multi-hours is, “My life has been extraordinary, blessed and cursed and won.” If “Tonight, Tonight,” is the fourteen-year-old, “Muzzle” is the twenty-four-year-old; insecure about being “ordinary” even after having gone through this coming-of-age adventure, but taking comfort in knowing life is blessed and cursed and won.

Blessed, Cursed, Won

Ironically, Mellon Collie was peak of Smashing Pumpkins’s pop culture pull. It sold six million copies – twice as well as as Siamese Dream did in its first two years – and earned seven noms at the Grammys, including for Album Of The Year. Mellon Collie lost to Celine Dion...okay. It remains the band’s one and only number one album. The band appeared on The Simpsons. “Bullet With Butterfly Wings” was the theme song of Whale Wars, for some reason. That in and of itself was parodied by South Park. Scott Pilgrim wears a ZERO t-shirt.

But the album cycle was brought to an abrupt, tragic end on July 12^th, 1996. After a show in New York City, Jimmy and touring keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin overdosed on heroin. Jimmy survived. He awoke to find Jonathan had not.

I trust Billy when he says Smashing Pumpkins were in an impossible situation. Jimmy was “out of control,” but he’s one of the greatest living drummers and the secret ingredient to their most successful album. “...at what point do you get off the train? You’re not going to. It really didn’t stop until somebody died, you know?” After taking a break to mourn Jonathan, the Pumpkins completed their tour; with Dennis Flemion of the Frogs on keys. Jimmy was fired from the band so he could get the help he needed. From here, everything just fell apart. Billy’s mother died shortly after this, then him and his wife split up. Delusions of grandeur set in surrounding Adore, ones that were inevitably shattered. D’Arcy left the band, and Machina production smashed the pumpkin.

“It was amazing we were able to accomplish anything,” Billy said of the aftermath of Jonathan’s passing.

“There were a lot of great things, but fucking hell, man, it is like being in a burning building and standing there and watching it burn. I stood there for another four years and watched it burn all the way to the fucking ground...The morning Jonathan died, that was the end of the Smashing Pumpkins.”

quoted from: Phil Alexander, “Billy Corgan: The Mojo Interview.” Mojo, 2/2012.

I see Mellon Collie as Smashing Pumpkins’s extinction burst. Jimmy’s firing effectively ended the band’s golden age, but fucking hell, you’ve got to put human life over a band.

Mellon Collie was the end of rock-and-roll’s last golden age. In 1995, Billy predicted, “I think we're headed right to disco.” And he was right! European dance music exploded in popularity in the late nineties. Mellon Collie’s magnitude was out-of-step for alternative rock. Since Sonic Youth invented the nineties in the eighties, things were not “supposed to be” polished, glossy, pretty, or sprawling. Mellon Collie says “fuck you” and is all four. (But it’s worth noting even Sonic Youth indulged in a couple of those things in 1995, see “The Diamond Sea.”)

In the thirty years since Mellon Collie’s release, the recording industry of the time period I mostly cover has collapsed. There’s some pros. The gates record labels once held the keys to is being bust open by independent artists and the internet. But a rock-and-roll band being given producers who know how to record fucking drums for one, and the budget to spend ten months making a two-hour epic? We may never see that again. Anyone can put out music now. I truly love this about modern music. But there’s a reason Mellon Collie is the way it is.There was a team of people working behind the scenes, some damn good musicians, and a prolific writer with a vision – and truly unique, if grating – singing voice. For all these reasons, Mellon Collie might go down in rock-and-roll history as the last great double album. (Or, more accurately, one of very few triple albums.)

About completing an album, Billy said to Rolling Stone, “You go home, you listen to it. You get mad at God, you hate yourself, you eat a lot of ravioli and sleep a lot.” After completing a huge project that takes so much out of your spirit, capacity to create, and physical body, goddamnit, you do eat the ravioli. That shit tastes like botulism. But you didn’t care about that when you were a kid, did you?

In hindsight, Billy backpedaled on The Wall thing; rightfully so. “...jerks in the media still take me to task for saying that...What I meant was that we were trying to reach something expansive like Pink Floyd achieved...as opposed to making a double album like the White Album by the Beatles – which was basically a wider collection of songs by a group. Yes, those are crazy groups to ever compare yourself to but as they say, you have to aim high.” That reminded me of what Robert Fripp said about making Larks’ Tongues in Aspic: “an ignorance of limitations sometimes allows the young...to achieve impossible things!” The impossible is possible tonight.

I’ve used the term “zenith” a few times in past episodes. It comes from astronomy; the zenith is the highest point in the night sky. Given all the cosmic, astronomical ties this album bears, it feels truly appropriate to say that thirty years later, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness remains the star at the zenith.

Personal favorites: “Tonight, Tonight,” “Jellybelly,” “To Forgive,” “Cupid De Locke,” “Galapagos,” “Muzzle,” “Porcelina of the Vast Oceans,” “Thirty Three,” “1979,” “X.Y.U.”

– AD ☆

Watch the full episode above!

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