Smashing Pumpkins Reminiscence
Today’s “music” isn’t music. That’s what I was thinking today when I needed to find some of my “old” stuff to load for my run and came across a band I hadn’t listened to in a while. It brought back a flood of memories from the early 90s and sent me off into some enjoyable nostalgia.
This story will begin at the end. On December, 2, 2000, the Smashing Pumpkins played their final live show in Chicago, Illinois. It’s hard to believe we are coming up on the 15th anniversary of their break-up. It seems just like yesterday that they helped me bridge the gap between my former life as a naive kid who just wanted to go to school and play sports — the two things that gave me my self-identity — and whatever I was going to do with my adult life afterward. I discovered the Pumpkins during a period of my life when I, like many 23 year-old males, was trying to find my way to a life beyond making good grades and being a jock. They helped in ways too numerous to describe. But I guess part of their appeal was they tapped into a sort of angst that is difficult for me to describe. In doing so, I felt like their sound and lyrics spoke meaning to what I was feeling and provided a type of catharsis.
How did I arrive at my own personal collision with the Smashing Pumpkins? That requires a bit of background to explain how I arrived at that intersection. I must confess that I was rock and roll guy, and in the 1980s when I was coming of age that meant hair bands. Oh yes, I was that kid who rocked out to bands like Whitesnake, Scorpions, Def Leppard, Ratt, Bon Jovi, and Dokken. But near the end of that decade, things started to slip with the hair bands and their guitar-laden anthems. As most of those bands started to run out of material and fizzle, they were replaced by one-hit wonder hair bands like Warrant, Winger, and Skid Row. It wasn’t very pretty. I was still milking this scene for the meager songs they were producing when the 90s came around. In fact, it was so bad that I had turned back the clock to the early 80s and started listening to my old Rush stuff from Moving Pictures and Signals on road trips to my college football and baseball games. Rush provided my warm-up music for games.
But by the spring of 1991, I was graduated and getting ready to start law school. That was August of 1991. I wasn’t listening to much interesting music at the time and I was searching and waiting for something new. Then one night in late August in the athletic dorm at Arkansas, where I was living as an RA while attending law school, I got a call from a buddy to come upstars to his room. “What is it?” I asked. “Dude you just need to get up here right now and listen to this.” (These were the days before i-Tunes and the instant downloading of music; you either heard something first on the radio or you went and purchased a compact disc.) So I went up there to see what the fuss was about. I walked into the room and said, “What?” Somebody hit the play button and my ears heard this:
I was astonished. I kind of stood there for a while as we all just let the songs play out. Songs like In Bloom, Come As You Are, Lithium, Polly, Drain You, and On a Plain all took hold of me like nothing ever had before. I had never heard anybody sing like Kurt Cobain. Krist Novoselic played his bass guitar with the strings tuned so low and loose it almost sounded like a bass violin. And drummer Dave Grohl had this cadence nobody could imitate; it sounded self-taught and improvised.
Then about two weeks later, I got another call to come upstairs. What was it this time? “These guys are different than Nirvana but check this out.” Someobody hit the play button, and this time I heard this for the first time:
As with Nevermind, we let the songs play out, instant classics like Alive, Even Flow, Black, and Jeremy cut to the core. In some ways, Pearl Jam spoke to that surprising and inexplicable angst of my young adulthood like not even Nirvana had. The opening cut, Once, was an anthem that set the tone for everything that followed:
“I admit it, what’s to say
I’ll relive it, without pain
Backstreet lover on the side of the road
I got a bomb in my temple that is gonna explode
I got a .16 gauge buried under my clothes, I play
Once upon a time I could control myself.
Once upon a time I could lose myself.”
In the span of August to September, 1991, when Nevermind and Ten were released, Pearl Jam and Nirvana had turned rock music upside down. The hair bands were dead at that moment, never to return. This new sound was nothing like anyone had heard before. Both bands, especially Nirvana, had these strange new techniques, like starting and stopping and getting loud, then quiet, then loud again throughout the songs. It was new, inventive, and delightful; little pregnant pauses, interspersed with screams and whispers in the lyrics.
After Kurt Cobain passed away in 1994 and Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl went on the start the Foo Fighters, Grohl would continue to hone and experiment with these devices until he perfected them with Foo Fighters. Just listen to most any Foo Fighters song and wait for the quick start/stops and the quiet and soft music followed or preceded by the loud and driving. By the way, Nevermind was produced by the legendary Butch Vig, who also went on to produce numerous Foo Fighters albums. But that’s another story.
So leader Billy Corgan and his mates in Smashing Pumpkins were at the right place and the right time when they took what Nirvana and Pearl Jam started to an even different place. In the early 90s, the Pumpkins got onto the front side of the same wave that had been building since Nirvana and Pearl Jam came out of nowhere and shook the music scene. Though they had formed in Chicago in 1988 and released their first album, Gish, in 1991 with producer Butch Vig (are you picking up on the commonalities between Nirvana and the Pumpkins yet?) to minor success, it wasn’t until the release of Siamese Dream during my watershed summer of 1993 that the Pumpkins exploded onto the alternative scene and put themselves into the public consciousness. The album opened with Cherub Rock, and contained the classics Today and Disarm.
I had heard Nirvana, Pearl Jam and emulators start a song and immediately grab you by the throat and get you jumping, but I had never heard anything that blew the roof off a place quite like the startup of Cherub Rock:
Perhaps the coolest thing about Cherub Rock is the relatively simple chord progression, which starts with an easy E major/D major/A major repetition during the verses, and then changes to D major/A major/C major/G major for the chorus, then repeats the same verse and chorus progressions over and over again. But Corgan manages to make it all sound radically complex.
It is followed on Siamese Dream by Today, a song that sounds upbeat, but masks a dark core. It alternates between sections of quiet, soft verses and loud choruses backed with layered and distorted guitar riffs, a continuation of the techniques employed by Nirvana and later refined and further developed by Dave Grohl in the Foo Fighters.
As with Cherub Rock, it’s a simple progression of D major/A major/G major during the verses and E minor/G major/B major for the chorus. But again the overladen layers of guitars give it a rich and deep feel.
And then comes the most poignant song on the album, Disarm, a controversial song when it was released due to confusion over Corgan’s lyrics, but which Corgan has described as simply being about his strained relationship with his parents. Disarm is one of Smashing Pumpkins most highly regarded songs and one which Billy Corgan himself considered important personally.
Disarm follows another simple, but emotionally powerful set of chords, E minor/C major/G major for the introduction and verse, and switching to C major/E minor/D major for the chorus. Listen closely as the bass guitar joins the second verse, and feel the hair on your neck raise up a bit. The final stanza follows a D Major/E minor/C major progression.
After the commercial success of Siamese Dream, the Smashing Pumpkins followed it up with an even bigger success, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, which earned the band seven Grammy nominations in 1997. It contained another one of my favorite songs, 1979, which was about Corgan coming of age at 12 in the title year. Like Corgan, I also turned 12 in 1979, and every time I hear that song it takes me back to what I was doing at that time in my life.
“Shakedown 1979
Cool kids never have the time
On a live wire right up off the street
You and I should meet”
“June bug skipping like a stone
With the headlights pointed at the dawn
We were sure we’d never see an end to it all”
“We don’t even care as restless as we are
We feel the pull in the land of a thousand guilts
And poured cement, lamented and assured
To the lights and towns below”
“Faster than the speed of sound
Faster than we thought we’d go
Beneath the sound of hope”
“The street heats the urgency of now
As you see there’s no one around”
And perhaps that’s it. Am I just foolish to think that since Billy Corgan and I were born in the same year that we experienced the world in similar ways? All I know is the Smashing Pumpkins opened a whole new world of music to me at a time in my life where I needed something like music to help me get through and figure out what I wanted to become. Their music and his lyrics spoke to me. And when I now look back on that period when they briefly shot across the musical sky during the 90s, I smile; I put on Cherub Rock when my kids are not watching, and I am transported back to that time in the early 90s when music was constantly new and real.
