Gay4Grunge: The Smashing Pumpkins
The Smashing Pumpkins & I have a long history together. They were not only my first Grunge band, but I discovered them before I was even an avid music fanatic. As I stated in earlier articles, I didn't become an avid music listener until the summer of 1997 thanks to The Spice Girls. Exactly one summer before that in 1996 though is when I got my proper introduction to The Smashing Pumpkins. One day when a friend was over, he put on VH1 to watch music videos. It was then that I first heard Alanis Morrissette with You Learn & the first time I saw the music video for The Macarena. Now I had heard The Macarena before because that song became such a huge pop culture moment that it was hard to not hear it in passing during 1996. Most importantly though this was when I was introduced to The Smashing Pumpkins with Tonight, Tonight.
I was immediately taken with the music video for Tonight, Tonight, which was influenced by the silent film a Trip to the Moon. Tonight, Tonight had style for days from the Victorian era outfits & makeup to the stop motion animation & lushly painted backgrounds. There's no denying that the music video for Tonight, Tonight is a feast for the years and it deservedly swept the 1996 VMAS. That music video left a deep impression on me. In early 1997 my family actually visited Seattle for the first time and we met up with my uncle and cousins from my Dad’s side of the family, which was the first time I met them. I remember my cousin Annie had some CDs in her room and as I looked through them I saw a copy of The Smashing Pumpkins' Mellon Collie & the Infinite Sadness. I asked her if this album had the song where the Smashing Pumpkins are performing in space and she said yeah it's called Tonight, Tonight, which she proceeded to play for me.
Now just a couple months after that trip I became a dedicated pop music listener thanks to The Spice Girls and I was watching MTV every day at that point. It didn't take me long to see the Tonight, Tonight video again, which I tapped off TV to watch over and over again. Still Tonight, Tonight was old news by then and The Smashing Pumpkins had a brand-new song out that was on the soundtrack to Batman & Robin. Now for those who read my Batman articles on this blog or for those who follow me regularly on social media, you'll know that after music Batman is my biggest pop culture obsession. As a kid I grew up watching Batman: The Animated series on Fox Kids every day and I had the Burton movies on VHS along with Batman: Mask of the Phantasm & and Batman Forever. So I was hyped for the next Batman movie, especially because the little gay boy inside of me was ecstatic that Poison Ivy was finally going to be featured in a live action Batman movie, because she was of course my favorite villain thanks to the animated series.
I was also 11 at the time so I was the target audience for all the merchandise and tie-in media that came out around Batman & Robin. I remember buying the comic book adaptation, a Poison Ivy action figure, movie poster, taco bell tie in cups, coloring books, a special one-shot Poison Ivy comic, and more. So, when I was watching MTV one day and saw the new Smashing Pumpkins single and video, which was entitled The End of the Beginning of the End, I was all over it, because not only was the music video connected to Batman, but I also knew this band already thanks to Tonight, Tonight. I tapped the music video off TV as well and would watch it constantly, especially since it had clips to Batman & Robin throughout, which was like a sneak peek of the movie for me.
That summer as a family we all traveled to Las Vegas for the first time, which is still the only time I've been to Las Vegas. We stayed at Circus Circus and I remember they had a whole arcade boardwalk inside of games you could play for prizes, which included framed pictures of the characters from Batman & Robin, which we ended up winning all 3 of them eventually. Those framed pictures of Mr. Freeze, Poison Ivy and the Bat Family, stayed on my bedroom wall for years. We also went over to Caesar’s Palace one day, which had the Warner Brothers Store inside and with my summer money I bought the Batman & Robin soundtrack there. That is also the story of the first CD I ever bought! I had bought some cassette tapes in the past, including the Spice Girls, but this marked the beginning of my CD buying collection. Now I didn't have a discman yet and there was no CD player in the car so I had to wait until we got home in order to hear it.
Once I got home, I played the Batman & Robin soundtrack on my parent's 5 disc stereo system all the time and it's also how I was introduced to The Goo Goo Dolls, R.E.M. and Soul Coughing as well. I would play that CD when I was playing with my action figures, especially Batman and I brought that CD over to friend's houses to play as well. As I listened to radio and MTV more, I started hearing more and more by The Smashing Pumpkins including 1979, which was played all the time on one of our local radio stations in Monterey California called CD93, which played Adult Alternative music. Then I remember seeing part of an MTV Countdown for the best music videos of the 90s, which is where I first saw the music video for Bullet with Butterfly Wings. The video was also another eye grabbing experience that showcased a much harder side of the group compared to 1979 and Tonight, Tonight. Eventually at some point in 1998 I plopped down the money to buy Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, which cost 28 dollars because it was a double disc. I'll admit that back then I pretty much only listened to the singles off that album. It would take a few years before I dove head first into that double album as a whole.
In the fall of 1998, The Smashing Pumpkins were gearing up for the release of their next album Adore, which was highly anticipated coming off the heels of Mellon Collie & The Infinite Sadness, which had been a blockbuster success. I remember catching the world premiere on MTV for Ava Adore and it was another spectacular music video that saw a very goth vampiric Billy Corgan walk through tons of different movie sets for different genres of films. It was a visual feast that proved when it came to making music videos, The Smashing Pumpkins really were in a class all their own. I of course tapped it off MTV and watched it constantly for the rest of the year.
As we got deeper into fall the second music video came out for Perfect, which acted like a sequel to 1979. The reckless teens from the 1979 video were now college age and life became a lot harder for all of them all of a sudden. I really enjoyed the idea of a music video being a sequel to a previous video as if there was some shared universe for The Smashing Pumpkins. Like Ava Adore, I tapped the Perfect music video off MTV and watched it constantly. I never ended up buying Adore when it was out since I didn't usually commit to Alternative Rock albums as frequently as I did for albums by pop divas at the time. After 1998 ended things went quiet on the Smashing Pumpkins front and I also got sucked more into teen pop thanks to the breakthrough success of Britney Spears. So The Smashing Pumpkins were kind of out of sight out of mind for me throughout 1999.
As we entered the year 2000 and escaped the clutches of Y2K, MTV started promoting another round of Spankin' New Music week, which they used to do all the time back then. It was during this commercial that I saw that The Smashing Pumpkins were to perform on MTV and do an interview for their new album Machina. I never saw that interview or performance, but more importantly I didn't see any of the music videos from The Smashing Pumpkins on MTV at all that year. The first time I ended up seeing one of the music videos off Machina was when Vh1 was doing a countdown of some of the worst music videos of the year and they included the video for the second single, Stand Inside Your Love, on that list. By the time the year ended The Smashing Pumpkins announced they were breaking up and that was that.
What struck me at the time was just how indifferent MTV and the world of pop music were to The Smashing Pumpkins by that point. Just a few years prior The Smashing Pumpkins had been the kings of Alternative Rock and they were also MTV darlings. 4 years later though they were considered passé and uncool by the Nu-Metal brigade and TRL had no room for the Pumpkins either. This was an early lesson for me in the ways that artists are chewed up and spit out by a music machine that is ruthlessly fickle. In 1996 Tonight, Tonight swept the VMAS but in 2000 their music videos to Machina were only played in order to be mocked on Vh1 by a bunch of music critics and comedians. I knew that artists come and go in the music industry and I had already lived through many one hit wonders by 2000, but to witness a band of The Smashing Pumpkins' magnitude fall so quickly in public favor in real time was quite jarring for me in all honesty.
Still while the Smashing Pumpkins had slipped quietly into the night, it wouldn't be long before I came back round to them again. After getting into Stone Temple Pilots heavily in 2002 I started looking to get in more Grunge & 90s Alternative bands. Since I was already familiar with The Smashing Pumpkins to an extent, I started digging deeper into their catalogue. During the summer of 2002 I got my first job, busing tables at a restaurant at the Newport Marriott. What that meant was I finally had disposable income so I started buying more music as a result, which included the Smashing Pumpkins Greatest Hits and a DVD collection of all their music videos. That greatest hits CD was really the first time I sat down and listened to their earlier music before Mellon Collie & The Infinite Sadness. The two songs that really jumped out for me were Cherub Rock and Today, which were both from their 1993 breakthrough album Siamese Dream. That album was the one that turned The Smashing Pumpkins into Alternative Rock royalty and I was now beginning to get a better sense of the group's arc, overall sound & progression by that point.
The DVD meanwhile got a lot of plays at the end of the high school for me. I would put that one on in the mornings as I got ready for school and just watch a couple of music videos. You have to remember by that point MTV had cut back on playing a lot of music videos and I also wasn't enamored with most of the music videos that were being played by 2002. Yet, I loved music videos so I still needed a fix at the time and that Smashing Pumpkins DVD got a lot of play as a result.
I also started making the timeline mixtapes, which were my attempt to cover 90s Alternative in chronological order from 1990 through the present. I wound up making 3 separate series of mixtapes over the course of two years. The Smashing Pumpkins had a lot of songs on those timeline tapes of course and the reason I'm bringing that up is because after I went to college, I left all those tapes behind in the car. The radio stopped working in one of the cars and we didn't have a CD player in that car either so my mom was dependent on cassette tapes in order to hear any music in that car. As a result, my mom started playing my timeline mixtapes for 90s Alternative and that's how she became a big fan of Closer by Nine Inch Nails and Bullet with Butterfly Wings by The Smashing Pumpkins, which was kind of a surprise to me. Nonetheless my obsession with Grunge and 90s Alternative would eventually influence all my family members in some form or another so it wasn't shocking, but it was still a pleasant surprise.
Before I went to college though I started digging deep into Mellon Collie & The Infinite Sadness and soon enough I started picking out all sorts of gems from Bodies to Thru the Eyes of Ruby to Jellybelly and more. Mellon Collie eventually became one of those double albums where I wouldn't necessarily listen to it all in one sitting, but I would keep sampling parts of it and getting into a few songs at a time. This is also where I realized how much more diverse and eclectic The Smashing Pumpkins were compared to most of their peers outside of possibly Stone Temple Pilots, but even then, Billy Corgan seemed to have even greater ambitions than all his peers.
Unlike most of the Grungers, Billy never hid his desire to be the biggest rock band in the world. Billy not only welcomed success, but craved it which in the 90s, especially for Grunge and Alternative Rock, was the biggest sin one could commit. Sure, you could still have huge commercial success and keep your integrity and credibility intact like Nirvana or Pearl Jam, but you couldn't admit that you wanted it either. Even Stone Temple Pilots had to tread carefully at first with what they said as well, which still didn't stop the press from attacking them anyway. Yet, right from the start Billy wanted to be famous and 1993's Siamese Dream brought him that success, which led to him being able to indulge on the 28-track double CD follow-up with Mellon Collie, which was incredibly risky on both a commercial and critical level. The fact that he pulled it all off was honestly a minor miracle.
Speaking of Siamese Dream I also picked up that album on CD towards the end of my senior year of high school and I loved it as well, especially for the deep cuts I had never heard before such as Quiet, Hummer and Mayonnaise. Siamese Dream and Mellon Collie both quickly became two of my favorite albums of all time and my Pumpkins fandom was now in overdrive. In the fall of 2004, I went to College in Ithaca New York and I remember during my first semester freshman year I picked up The Smashing Pumpkins 1994 rarities album Pisces Iscariot at a local music store downtown. As college progressed, I made my way through all the other Smashing Pumpkins albums and I hosted my own 90s Alternative Radio show where I played The Smashing Pumpkins a lot. Most of the girls I met who had an interest in 90s Alternative either liked the Pumpkins already or liked them more after they met me.
Now during the 00s Billy Corgan did a few different projects including the band Zwan and his first solo album. I eventually heard these albums, but I was not too taken with either album if I'm being honest. My interest levels perked up though once I heard the Smashing Pumpkins were reuniting for a new album. That news only turned out to be half right as only Jimmy Chamberlin and Billy Corgan returned to the fold initially while James and Darcy sat it out. Still, I was pretty excited for new material from The Smashing Pumpkins until I heard the first single Tarantula. It was clear that Tarantula was released as the first single, because it had a specific goal in mind. That goal was to prove to people that not only were The Smashing Pumpkins back, but that they had also returned to their hard rock roots of the early to mid-90s, which should have worked on me but alas it didn't. I found Tarantula to be a big boring rock song with no discernible melody whatsoever and nothing too interesting happening instrumentally either due to the song's over compressed production drowning everything out.
Once the album dropped my fears were not alleviated as most of the album was like Tarantula, meaning it was a big boring mess. The only 2 songs that appealed to me were the ones that went a bit quieter such as Bleeding the Orchid and That's The Way My Love is. Those two songs at least had a recognizable melody and some interesting things happening in the production unlike all the other songs, which all sounded like Tarantula knockoffs. The album was also called Zeitgeist and featured pictures of Paris Hilton inside, proving yet again how much Billy craved rock stardom and celebrity except now it was coming across as more desperate and callous than it ever had before.
Honestly that entire album really put a dent in my Pumpkins fandom. I still loved the 90s classics of course and I always will, but I became less dedicated to following everything the Pumpkins released after 2007. I did listen to 2012's Oceania and thought it was OK and I listened to 2014's Monuments to An Elegy and I thought it was boring. I even listened to some of the tracks off the group's botched attempt at a 44-track concept album called Teargarden. It wasn't terrible, but I honestly can't remember any of it either. The group's last two albums, 2018's Shiny & Oh So Bright and 2020's Cyr, had a song or two I liked such as Silvery Sometimes (Ghosts), but overall they didn't make much of an impression on me either.
Still, I'm not here to bury the Pumpkins, because I do legitimately love them even if their post 90s material just doesn't do it for me. So, let's talk about the positive and the biggest one I can think of right now is that The Smashing Pumpkins have remained a thrilling live act that I unfortunately have not seen. Yet, many of my friends have seen The Smashing Pumpkins live over the last few years and they were all very impressed. Many of these friends were not big into The Smashing Pumpkins initially, but that all changed after they saw The Pumpkins live. After seeing The Smashing Pumpkins live many of my friends became much bigger fans, which proves The Smashing Pumpkins can still bring when they are on stage. The Smashing Pumpkins are definitely on my own personal bucket list to see live at some point so hopefully I do go see them live before it's too late.
I'm always going to have a place in my big gay heart for The Smashing Pumpkins even if I'm not invested in their post 90s material, because that 90s material is both great and timeless. When The Smashing Pumpkins were at their peak, no one could touch them in all honesty. Their reign over the Alternative Nation may have been short lived, but it was thrilling nonetheless. Next week I will be going more into depth with the music of The Smashing Pumpkins when I countdown my top 20 songs by them.
